That is a significant intervention on their part and welcome, I would suspect Paul Dacre and Viscount Rothermere are aware of your work and are very concerned about what Tucker is doing.
Their Satanic Majesties Request - 1967 album by the Rolling Stones and now a much more accurate descriptor for the standard operating procedure of the Globalist parasites intent on destroying nation states, Western civilization and life on planet earth in general.
I'm convinced our civilization began its death rattle when Ed Sullivan had the Stones as guests on his program, in 1965. Sullivan doesn't look too thrilled to be doing it. He reminds me of a shopkeeper to whom a made man has said, "Nice little place here. It'd be a shame if something happened to it."
I would say that once no-fault divorce was institutionalized, once it became more common to hate on America without saying anything about the good aspects of it, etc. is when this happened.
The globalist parasites are the same class that Marxists used to refer to as the international imperialist bourgeoisie. That's not a validation of Marxism as a method, school of thought, or political platform, but it is a caution to those who think we can break the grip of the globalist parasites by promoting capitalism. Its going to take some form of socialism.
Capitalism rewards hard work. Socialism penalizes hard work. It is as simple as that. Capitalism, tethered to a welfare state for the weak, is the best system.
Capitalism easily corrupts into "Them who Has Gets" and "He Who Has the Gold Makes the Rules". We are way past the point in our country where that has happened.
Channeling Margaret Thatcher is weak sauce. She didn't know what socialism is or who is living on other people's money, but she was very pleased with herself, like little Jack Horner pulling a plum out of a pie with his thumb. Socialism is not a canon that Has Been Tried or Has Not Been Tried. Its a general notion that if we are going to have large economies of scale, rather than small craft industry and family farms, we need ways to insure that everyone benefits, not just the tiny minority who own the large scale enterprises as their own private property while thousands produce the goods.
Re: but when he says the Democratic Socialists of America are actually Communists, that’s not one of them.
Maher is wrong. These guys are Socialists, and not even very thorough ones as I have not heard that they plan on nationalizing corporations (If I wrong someone point that out to me please). But really-- where's the Communism? In what way are they following Lenin, Mao or even Tito? I see a lot of performative Leftwingery twanging the usual Wokeist strings (which the actual Communists would have hated and utterly suppressed). I see them embracing some loony tunes ideas which do not code Left or Right. And that's about it.
Why oh why can the Right never get over the Cold War? It's starting to sound as silly as if serious American political figures were fretting about the Redcoats coming in the 1850s when much more serious threats were in the offing. And yes, you've got much bigger problems on the horizon than these pisqueaks-- or the groypers. It shouldn't require unusual talents to see such dangers
Trump already started this “project” with buying stakes in various corporations. From Claude:
• Semiconductors/AI supply chain — the flagship deal is a 9.9% stake in Intel worth $42 billion . This week the administration added six more chipmakers plus GlobalFoundries, and is eyeing stakes in seven AI-supply-chain companies: GlobalFoundries, Kepler, Multibeam Corporation, Extropic, Thintronics, Obsidia Semiconductors, and Aeluma .
• Critical minerals/rare earths — including $400 million into rare-earth miner MP Materials , plus stakes in Lithium Americas, Trilogy Metals, and USA Rare Earth (an 8% to 16% stake ).
• Steel — a “golden share” in U.S. Steel, retained as a condition of its sale to Japan’s Nippon Steel .
• Quantum computing — including a new IBM venture funded in exchange for equity .
• Defense/aerospace — L3Harris (Pentagon investing $1 billion in its rocket motor business) and xLight (a $150 million equity stake in exchange for federal incentives)
Not really sure how any socialist regime would get more involved in private capital than this!
Sweden, Norway, and Finland do not have socialism, which is "characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership".
Establish public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries to ensure democratic control and accountability to the people. Enact aggressive wealth taxes on the richest individuals and corporations to spend on public goods and infrastructure.
Next:
Workers must lead our democratic transition to a green future. Pass a federal jobs guarantee. Implement massive investment in sustainable, publicly owned energy and transit infrastructure. Phase out the use of fossil fuels. Reclaim and repair our earth's resources for all.
Next:
Housing is a human right. Build new, publicly-owned social housing, strictly regulate investment properties, establish universal rent control, and guarantee right to counsel for all tenants.
Sounds like socialism .
Now as for communism, if we mean Marxist- Leninism, it doesn’t seem dominant but it is striking that a number of people involved with DSA like Piker seem remarkably fond of communist dictatorships.
Re: Establish public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries to ensure democratic control and accountability to the people.
Thank you! That definitely sounds Socialist as the term is generally understood.
Re: Now as for communism, if we mean Marxist- Leninism, it doesn’t seem dominant
What else does Communist mean? Note I am using the capitalized version to differentiate it from all sorts of other things, like the early Christians holding all things in common.
As for being fond of this or that dictatorship, I don't think that's is definitive. All sorts of politicians have been palsy-walsy with assorted of dictators including some pretty nasty ones. That definitely calls their judgment into question, but I don't think it tars them with the same ideology. It's probably a general temptation that most leaders have to handle, well or badly, to admire rulers who can get things done without the Rule of Law or those pesky voters getting in the way.
You're splitting hairs again, Jon. When someone says they "want to seize the means of production" and "abolish private property"... that's a commie. It may not be a Lenin / Stalin / Cold War commie, but it's still communism.
Exactly. Any party that wants to have government control of production is a party that wants control over consumption as well, by definition. Thats what the dingbats and dummies among these kids don’t understand. As for JonF’s hairsplitting, I don’t get it. I don’t understand his purpose. The cognitive payoff seems to be zero.
The stakes are—are we going to backflip into totalitarianism or not? Because if we do, that’s it. No more free discussions like these and no more of an awful lot of stuff most of us value.
I doubt that. This is a test. The dingbat thinks they’ll work. And they probably will, in his eyes. They won’t carry much and they’ll drain taxpayer funds, but they’ll persist.
Once these people get in power, then the communist aspect will come out. Because not everyone will agree with these proposals. Dissension will not be allowed by the new "enlightened" rulers.
Nope, Socialists-- as John Keller has helpfully noted above. The whole Marxist-Leninist thing is deader than Elvis. How is this not blindingly obvious?
I wish that were so! It isn’t. Piker for example lamented the fall of the Soviet Union and praised Mao.Does that make him a Marxist- Leninist? Well not necessarily but it sure suggests a certain leaning.
I recall when Bernie Sanders was a serious candidate for president in 2016. Someone (maybe on NR) dug up a whole lot of dirt on him and his past statements and actions being oh-so-supportive of several Communist states, including even the USSR. Was Bernie a Communist?
No Bernie was not a communist. That’s completely irrelevant to what’s been brought up here. The topic , I think was , is DSA communist oriented? There is some evidence for that . I referred to it . I also talked about Hassan Pikers recent ( typically) distasteful comments. The DSA has dramatically changed in the last few years. Sanders is a product of the old NYC Jewish Left. I think as a young man he was never a communist but it’s my impression that he was anti anti communist unlike the mainstream American Socialist Party or the people who became known as Schachtmanites . ( In interned at The Tammiment Library ). Now Bernie moved up to Vermont and became involved with the Liberty Union Party. He’s never really been a Democrat and he’s not a member of DSA.Now as a politician Sanders actually has downplayed socialism. Now that he sees an ascendant DSA he may shift gears. Who knows? He’s old and it doesn’t much matter .
In 2016, I remember Sanders being supportive of gun rights and opposed to illegal immigration - issues which are certainly popular in rural Vermont. It was Hillary Clinton's people who criticized him for having supporters that were too white, etc. In 2020, he changed and embraced all the views of the other Democrats.
WATCH THE MAHER CLIP. He quotes Communist material explicitly said by their own leadership. Last week I read something, wish I could remember where, by an older Democratic Socialist who left the party because in his view, it was abandoning democratic socialism for identity-politics communism. I'll try to find the quote.
Maher clearly wouldn't know a communist if he tripped over one in broad daylight. "Watch the Maher clip" is not a citation to an expert, but deferring to off the cuff sloppy thinking. I once read Adam Ulam's "The Bolsheviks" and the official "History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union" prepared under Stalin's direct supervision, to compare the two. Both works had a bias, Ulam's was of course more thoroughly researched and footnoted, but from reading either or both, it would be obvious that Maher has no idea what the word "communist" means.
Marxism-Leninism was an obvious failure by the mid-1920's, but to this day, it still survives in Cuba. The DSA platform is clearly Marxist-Leninist, dead as it may be, to say nothing of in American universities.
Marxist in the vaguest way possible -- I doubt anyone who contributed to it has read "Das Kapital," or even the Communist Manifesto. Leninist? Don't make me laugh.
Communism survives wherever it survives by force. Does anyone in Cuba want communism any more? Only the cabal at the top. Everyone else starves and lives in periodic blackouts.
Officially, there are only five communist countries. China and Vietnam are authoritarian countries operating under state capitalist principles. North Korea is a Kim family totalitarian enterprise. Laos is an appendage of Vietnam. Cuba is an incompetently run Communist Party operation run by a small white elite running a black-majority country.
You can be effectively Communist without being Leninist. Gramsci's "hegemony" was still totalitarian, for instance, even if it wasn't "Communist" in the Russian sense.
Disagreeing with your first sentence. Communism (as opposed to Marxism a more broad generic terms) IS Marxism-Leninism, though yes, of course, Mao and Tito gave it their own spins-- but built on Lenin's foundations still. IMO, this is nothing more than an attempt to revive the skeleton of the old Red Scare to unite and distract a Right that is growing disenchanted with Trump's failures. If people were saying just "Marxism:" I would not disagree, because yes this is Marxist in foundation-- but not Leninist.
So it wasn’t Marx who wrote “The Communist Manifesto” then, but actually Lenin? 😋
You’re arguing for No True Scotsman here, IMO. If the ideology calls itself “Communist”, I’d consider taking it at its word. It feels like you just sympathize with the DSA and are trying to gaslight everyone else over fine distinctions between various forms of radical authoritarian leftism. Whether they’re “Communists” or just “Socialists” they’re bad news. Might as well use the more pejorative term because frankly just calling them socialists sells their radicalism short. But then I suspect you know that.
No, there is a historical basis for the distinction. After the 1848 revolutions, the term "communist" fell out of use, with "social-democrat" being the predominant name for more or less Marxist parties that had generally adopted on electoral and trade union strategy, since "to the barricades" was an obvious failure. They were caught by surprise when Lenin began calling his party "Communist" -- a step he took only after seizing power. From about 1919 on, "Communist" has referred to those who adhered to Lenin's methodology, and employed his party apparatus. Lenin was actually the one to invoke the "No True Scotsman" paradigm against all his rivals. I consider Donald Trump to be bad news, but I don't call him a communist. I consider the current crop of "democratic socialists" bad news, not because they are communists, but because they are infatuated with issues of non-class origin and don't know how to administer an economy in the interest of anyone, including the working class.
You missed the word "effectively" in that sentence. As your comment demonstrates, there is a lot of overlap between the groups represented by these various terms, and not all of it is clearly delineated.
This means what-IMO, this is nothing more than an attempt to revive the skeleton of the old Red Scare to unite and distract a Right that is growing disenchanted with Trump's failures. If people were saying just "Marxism:" I would not disagree, because yes this is Marxist in foundation-- but not Leninist.
By definition, to be Communist is to be Leninist. Its hard to say if Gramsci was a communist, although he tried to think he was. Even if Leninist, he was not Marxist, and his hegemony might qualify as fascist. Chiang Kai-Shek was a Leninist. He was trained in Moscow, organized the Kuo Min Tang by Leninist methods, but, chose to turn on the Communist Party and align with foreign capitalist nations. His party remains Leninist in structure to the day he died. Knowing this helped me to understand why Steve Bannon described himself as a Leninist.
The terms socialist, communist and social democrat were almost interchangeable until the Bolshevik revolution. With that an international movement came into being that explicitly called itself communist to distinguish itself from the existing parties that called themselves socialist or social democrat. Communist Parties were created in imitation of the Bolsheviks, they normally claimed to be Marxist- Leninist. Had Rosa Luxemburg not been killed another Communist strain , not explicitly Leninist might have developed. Gramsci was a member of the Italian Communist Party and a Leninist in good standing.He developed a strategy that was different from Lenin that’s not deemed opposed to Lenin. My old copy of The Prison Notebooks was published by International Press as is my copy of What is to be done?
The very fact that self-described democratic socialist candidates running for office openly say "I do not support the national DSA platform, and the national DSA has not endorsed my campaign" tells you these are not communists. A communist would not dare run for office without the approval of the Central Committee, and would not deviate one jot from the Party Line. If they did, and it were not feasible to imprison or kill them, they would be summarily expelled, and all party members forbidden to socialize with them, or even acknowledge them in passing on the street.
Rod if someone says "Miami is in Hawaii" or kangaroos are native to Argentina I do not need to listen to their whole discourse to know they are wrong. See also: Category error.
And I am actually quite gobsmacked that anyone (I don't mean you here) would drag the rotted husk of the Red Scare back onto the political stage at this late date. Talk about :"They learned nothing and forgot nothing". Can we please, please, please stop wallowing in the past.?
By the way I would not vote for one of these folks, but I am not unhappy that just maybe they are putting some fear into the hearts of billionaires. Nemesis and the Three Ghosts of Christmas seem to be swamped with work, and even Karma is too busy these days.
Is "the Maher clip" now the new Talisman of Truth? The man has no idea what a communist is. Therefore, Bill Maher repeating a thousand times "these are communists" means nothing.
Do you know about Mamdani's bid to criminalize home ownership (it's hyperbole, Jon) in the five boroughs? Besides printing a spreadsheet of homeowners whose property is above a certain value, he's also demanding proof of selected homeowners that the property is their primary residence or face penalties. You know Alex Berenson, the science writer? His mother got a letter from the Pavel Morozov of Morningside Heights demanding such proof in three weeks or a penalty of $50,000 would be levied. She's 81, and three weeks ago was coughing up blood. She needs this? This morning another letter went out giving everybody until Sept. 16 to comply. The baseness and cruelty of this proceeding stamps it as communist, there I said it.
Base and cruel yes. Communist, no. If I received such a letter, I would write back and demand to know the statutory authority to levy such a fine. I could do that and not be hauled off to a camp in the Adirondacks. Of course an 81 year old woman who has been coughing up blood would be hard put to do so.
Charlie, this is an own goal. No, there is no camp in the Adirondacks--yet. But you could be forced to hire a lawyer and go through terrible trouble. That's what I mean by soft state terror. I stand by my words.
And yet you liked my comment, so we must have some common ground. I admit that I have a lifetime of experience doing administrative advocacy for others, and therefore can go toe-to-toe with any bureaucracy myself without hiring a lawyer. I do find it wearying -- I shouldn't have to fight the utility company twice a year, fight the regulatory commission that isn't doing its job protecting me from the utility company every other year, track down the CFO of the medical conglomerate to complain about an invalid billing, after finding that the customer service staff have no authority to change anything, point out to the cashier in the supermarket that the machine rang up full price instead of marked-down price, etc. But it particularly caught my eye that an administrative agency is summarily imposing a fine for non-compliance. One thing left-wingers and right-wingers each and all complain about is remote bureaucracies doing there own thing without a pretense to due process or legal foundation. No doubt communist bureaucracies do this too, but so does the ICE. Its not communist, its totalitarian and authoritarian, and that is something conservatives, liberals, communists, even some species of libertarians can be guilty of. (Yes, non-communist socialists too -- the way Kibbutzim took children away from their parents, e.g.)
Depends on who you ask. But when it comes to the IRS, the big boys will always cite the horrors inflicted on the little guys as the reason the IRS should be defunded so they don't audit the big guys who are getting away with murder. The solution is for the IRS to be more focused, and to check twice before drawing a conclusion.
Jon, as I'm sure you know, Communists view Socialism as a stepping stone to full blown Communism. From the Marxist.org website (which claims the following as coming from "Political Economy - A Textbook issued by the Economics Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R"):
"Communist society passes through two phases of development: the lower phase known as Socialism, and the higher phase known as Communism. In the first stage, communist society cannot as yet be free from the traditions and traces of capitalism, from whose womb it has emerged. Only the further development of socialism on the basis which it has itself created can lead to the second and higher phase of communist society. Consequently socialism and communism are two stages of maturity of the new communist form of society."
DSA are commies-lite. And will gladly work to get to full-blown Communism. No thank you.
Re: Communist society passes through two phases of development: the lower phase known as Socialism, and the higher phase known as Communism.
Their ideologues are as disconnected from reality as Donald Trump is. There was no "Socialist" phase for real world Communist states. Those which did not have Communist foisted on them by the Red Army stepped straight some form of tyranny, or maybe foreign rule, to full blown Communist governance.
If you know that, you should also know that a Communist Party running what they pass off as a "dictatorship of the proletariat" is socialism, in communist theory. Passing through a period of socialism is, in theory going to lead to "the withering away of the state" -- essentially total freedom and no government to speak of, and that is what they mean by the Communist stage of society. Thus, "democratic socialism" is entirely inconsistent with communist theory, since to fails to be sufficiently ruthless and therefore will fail to achieve true freedom. The failure of the state to ever wither away is one of the most fundamental flaws in communist practice.
I'm trying to figure out why I'm not dismissing the Cold War as much as I did 10 years ago.... I guess I'm wrong headed and need to get over it, but, something's getting to me and I don't like it, but, I can't dismiss it either. Maybe it's just the military brat in me.
China is our stronger long term rival, but Russia represents a greater near term danger. I'm not sure how that compares to the Cold War where China, initially a loose cannon and a radical state, became a covert ally.
Yeah, I’ve got nothing there…I need to work on my gut reactions which come more from a USSR standpoint. Including my classical ballet background where escaping the Soviets was bigger than escaping the Chinese at the time.
Not being American, I don't have this horror of "socialism". When I was a child, the Labour Party was usually in power, and identified as "socialist". I'm not celebrating the Labour Party of those days, but it wasn't the horror that Americans see as "socialist".
If someone actually supports armed Marxist revolution, or something like that, then, OK, I'm solidly against that, but "socialism" just seems to me to be part of the spectrum of tolerable political ideologies, along with conservatism, etc.
I'm far more hostile to the social liberalism of the Democrats than to any supposed socialism. However, I can't see that the Republicans oppose that to any effective degree; they're all in for surrogacy, for example.
Anachronism or not, it would be fascinating to watch the Queers for Palestine contingent face off against Mao's fanatical Red Guards in a Peking stadium...
That might be fun, but Mao's Red Guards were dispersed in he 1970s, about the same time that his hand-picked successors were arrested and castigated as "The Gang of Four." The Red Guards were called into being by a sitting head of state and sustained by state funds. They had more in common with the Jan 6, 2021 beer hall putsch than they had with 1960s American student protesters. The Americans who worshiped their imagery had no idea of course.
Rod, not to give you another dark thing to dwell on, but have you ever heard of the podcast: New Orleans Unsolved? It’s actually difficult to believe. My jaw drops almost every episode. The narrator/researcher is an obsessive, a master of niggling details, annoying questions, random connections, and persistent stubbornness. Given that it’s in your stomping grounds and roughly the time period, you may want to at least know about it. The story is far from over. And I’m struggling to identify what I will take away from it. Right now, as a mom and teacher, just a fierce commitment to protecting children.
If there's one point I always try to make about modern Left politics it's that no one is in charge—no leaders or leadership, no reigning institutions, no thinkers or public intellectuals. What's in charge is THE DOCTRINE.
The Doctrine is installed in the seminaries we call universities (and now even primary and secondary schools) and everyone from bureaucrats to activists to professors, politicians and even CEOs (down to buffoonish celebs, streamers and influencers) are all first and foremost loyal to the Doctrine and know that their careers and social lives exist only at its permission and one wrong word against it might bring a social and career death penalty. (Look at people like Seth Moulton or Scott Weiner, both loyal libs who sinned against the Doctrine and then suddenly needed police protection.)
But the Doctrine is also crowd-sourced, rigid yet amorphous enough to change if the urgencies of the moment and its news cycle demand it, and is easily hijacked by various opportunists and entrepreneurs. Thus the political herd keeps one leery eye on the Doctrine at all times, knows not to get too close or rouse it, and can only oppose it once a critical mass forms and there's safety in numbers. (Maybe the best example here is "Defund the Police": the idea/slogan has never been completely jettisoned or renounced, it was just moved from front row to back row and surrounded by a protective guard of media allies who work to either bury it or "contextualize" it. Thus the Doctrine remains intact, no one needed to risk their neck opposing it, it's just taken a vacation for now.)
But the Doctrine might be most useful as a weapon to destroy your enemies, "raise awareness" (of yourself), and make you one of the leaders of a supposedly righteous radical cause—and these tools will always be seized by the most unscrupulous people who will also strike terror into the hearts of the average person who has more to lose and prefers to go along to get along.
The DSA and its "Anti-Zionists" have simply captured Left morality and have the Dems by the balls for now. No Dems can oppose them because they have achieved a hostile takeover of the Doctrine and all Dems know that no matter, the Doctrine must not be sinned against—or else serious penalties await.
No Dems will stand up against the DSA etc until they can do so while not directly challenging the Doctrine and when they can get a coordinated herd of political and media allies to stand together. Tyrants can be cruel, but so can ideologies, especially when they're sacralized and weaponized.
Excellent but never underestimate the Dems ability to co-opt those inDoctrinated with payoffs and offers of status & influence. See AOC, who went from socialist agitator with a fake economics degree to Democrat shill for Nancy Pelosi.
Doctrine is never in charge. It just lies on people's minds. The lack of leaders or leadership that can command obedience is the ultimate evidence that these are not communists. Alas, those who wish to critique them will have to do so on substance, not handy convenient labeling.
Correct. The Doctrine/Narrative - whatever you want to call it - reigns supreme. It's always bizarre to me how everyone on the Left parrots all the same talking points.
Western liberals (for lack of a better term) have undergone a full ideological capture, which most of them don't even realize, as they were gradually conditioned by their devices and by their social circles, where everyone they know thinks exactly the same (or else!). They've essentially been born again in a new faith and all its dogma, but live sealed inside epistemic echo chambers where their beliefs are invisible like water is to fish.
This is probably one of the most unmentioned aspects of the social media age (as mentioning it is also taboo and also it's slightly embarrassing to admit) and explains everything from just about every Western liberal leader from Germany to Canada to California having identical beliefs to a place like Scotland with few black people having BLM marches to the fact that every Western university has more or less the same curriculum.
Our global media and technology have created a global ideology that's now a class marker, litmus test, social signal and credential that separates globalist liberals from nationalists and other conservatives. The Doctrine is part of the mass homogenization of modern life and what holds all these different people in different countries together, who aspire to be (and maybe are) the world's first global ruling class. It's form is just as important as its content.
Exactly. It's bizarre to see European countries parrot the words of American SJWs such as Black Lives Matter when those countries don't even have black people. In contrast, people on the Right have more complexity and even diversity to their beliefs.
Hi Rod, Correction for you: Hong is running in WI and Tim Walz is MN gov. We unfortunately just moved to WI from Boston only to see this nonsense from Hong. She has recently denounced her defund police stance and other radical ones but a quick look at her site shows she's still a looney. God protect us.
Rod, I think you’re spot on. I agree with you on where we are today in the world. There’s not a political solution at this point, it’s a spiritual problem. God has been forgotten. I have begun to tell people I think a hard winter is on the way Thank you for the extra post. Your writing helps me tell others. I find sending links is mostly a waste of time. You must be in close relationships. It’s almost impossible to persuade someone who are caught up in the algorithms of their preferred sources of information. Not much nuance today and that’s a problem.
Let’s not go down the despair path.
“You can either despair at the darkness, or light a little candle beneath it”(words from another substack I read today.)
I just prayed for you Jon. I think a famous man who spent
time in the Soviet Union Gulag and wrote a book about it said something similar.
I apologize if you’re irked more now but hopefully you can figure out how not get triggered so easily.
Perhaps one problem today is the amount of time spent scrubbing the comment list on substack early Sunday morning. How the heck did we do life before the Internet and cell phone?
If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible what was the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men had forgotten God; that is why all this has happened.'
I understand and I’m thankful for that. I believe you haven’t forgotten God. The stats Rod often shares with us here about the people not going to church tells the sorry of the “we” but not the “you” Jon. Look at the historical data trends on church attendance. Have a nice day and may your worshiping of God today be pleasing to Him.
The strength or weakness of a society depends more on the level of its spiritual life than on its level of industrialization. Neither a market economy nor even general abundance constitutes the crowning achievement of human life. If a nation's spiritual energies have been exhausted, it will not be saved from collapse by the most perfect government structure or by any industrial development. A tree with a rotten core cannot stand.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Thank you Jon for your comment. I would not have revisited some of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn quotes. This one above ties in nicely with Rod’s post.
I owe you a longer response. I was catching my breath at the gym when I made my last one. (I also got drenched coming home-- we're having one of those famous Florida downpours and even just running twenty yards +*/to my car left me as wet as if I had just jumped in Tampa Bay.)
First thank you for the prayers.
I may have mistaken your meaning above, thinking it was along the lines of "God will punish us". After all, even in Genesis we see that God was willing to spare Sodom for just five righteous men. On the one hand I agree that we would be better off if the spiritual played a great role in our lives (I speak generally of course). On the other hand "useful" public religion tends to be shallow and is liable for corruption with worldly things.
Solzhenitsyn was a great writer who suffered terribly-- but suffering does not automatically confer sanctity or sagacity. Sometimes it just leaves one damaged. In his case he fell in with awfully unsavory types after the fall of Communism.
Do not mistake me for a Pollyanna who thinks all is well and we have only minor problems. Elsewhere in these comments this morning I have foreboded terrible things.
I don't plan to vote for her in the primary, I may vote for the maverick Republican who is running a quixotic campaign against the favorite, Tom Tiffany. But she's not going to be a train wreck. She showed in the debate she is erudite, confident, down to earth, speaks softly and clearly, and had some appeal.
Excellent piece. Thanks for your insight and especially for the references. I will surely add them to my library.
The spiritual problem underlying the radicals is the result of the Marxist “long march”through the institutions resulting in much envy and no gratitude. You say the folks are having a hard time: rising prices etc. but I see 300 pound women in my waiting room who are told they live in a “food desert” but are on their cell phones (a much later model than the one I carry) with painted 2” fingernails (hard to do much manual labor sporting those) and tattoos galore. We hear AOC (cute and talented but not so bright) complain that it is not right that in America we can have billionaires while people in Alabama are hungry. Really, cutie? Mr Mamdani won the race for mayor but talks like he has never had a real job, or any job for that matter and wants folks to have free stuff. Geez.
Thanks for all your effort. I anxiously await Weimar America. I pray for your strength.
The "Long march through the institutions" is not Marxist at all. It substitutes sterile bureaucratic squabbling over terrain for the more arduous work of building working class organization. Those who advocated and accepted it should know better -- the institutions determine what the individuals staffing them can achieve, not the other way around.
I once knew a rather old communist who remarked that the ends only justify the means when the means actually get you to the ends desired. Trying to employ liberal means does not deliver Marxist ends... it merely makes would-be Marxists into de facto liberals.
“The institutions determine what the individuals staffing them can achieve” what? The “institution” is the individuals staffing it. The long march involves rising to the top in the institution. Look at higher ed
Rod, if you've ever proposed a solution for the grievances of young people, I don't remember them. You condemn their investigation and attraction into radical political theories of the left or right, but never commit to formally stating what are alternative solutions to upending (or burning down) the current political order with either an extreme leftist or rightist system that would meet your sense of propriety.
Yes, yes, everyone needs Jesus. You do understand how that starts to sound like a cop out after the thousandth repetition, especially in a post- Christian world? Telling the Groyper he needs Jesus when he's focused on the fact that he can't afford to move out of parent's house is just not helpful. He's not thinking about Jesus when he can't afford to put a full tank of gasoline in his car. You don't want him to blame the Jews but you don't offer an alternative.
It's the same with immigration. You were on X this weekend, posting that "make a fire with your oak door" quote from The Camp of the Saints in response to the invasion of Spain by Moroccan hordes. It's the most blatant and obvious failure of a European government to protect their citizens, but all of Europe, including your beloved Hungary now, is guilty of it and have been for decades. The time for organized violence against migrants is long past. If the state won't exercise the monopoly on violence that it's supposed to have to protect the citizens, the citizens are going to have to do it themselves, if they still have the gumption to do it.
Except, of course, we're primarily talking about White people having to reclaim said gumption and enough pride in themselves and their culture to adopt violence to protect it and, gosh golly gee, that starts to sound a lot like eeeeeeeevil White Nationalism.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: this ends in blood. It always ends in blood. But you can't or won't countenance that. You see the problem pretty clearly most of the time. But you won't let yourself consider the harshest solutions.
I never did. But I'm familiar with James Baldwin's 1965 essay asserting "It is no longer important to be white, thank God, and soon it will no longer be important to be black." He referred to "those who continue to choose to think of themselves as white," and I realized, all I have to do is stop thinking of myself that way.
The problem with that Charlie is that even if you stop thinking of yourself as white, there are others who will continue to think of you as white. There is a lot of hatred against white people now. It will end in violence of some kind.
You would be amazed how it ties such people up in knots when I simply walk away from the artificial identity, adding "ain't nobody white except lepers and albinos." Sometimes I point out that the "black" identity is a figment of white supremacy, since nobody in Africa called themselves "black" until someone showed up from Europe and TOLD them they were "black." We have to start somewhere.
Why fret about what others think of you? That is only something you should do if you really are up to no good. I learned before I graduated high school that you do not let verbal bullies do their thing-- tell the gossips and slanderers to kiss your derriere and go about your business. Just shut them out. Being told "I don't give a [bleep] what you think" is exactly what such people need to hear.
I'm Southern, seventy four, and seem to remember that somewhere in cyberspace, someone did call me a racist. It was a pleasure for me to respond to the nitwit by telling him/her/it that I didn't read about segregation, or see a movie about it, I remember it.
I'm waiting for someone to tell me that I am white and was therefore unaffected by it, to which I will reply that the life of Christ, the code of morals and manners and devotions which constitute much of the inner life of a Christian, was already weighing heavily on me when I was still a child. I will be met with bafflement and muteness.
If someone tells you that you are white, tell them you have taken James Baldwin's advice, and stopped choosing to think of yourself as white." They may tell you that you can't do that. But just let them try to stop you.
Thank you. This has also been my biggest problem with Rod over the last few years.
However, to throw the question back, what do you suggest? Are you willing to propose a post-liberal alternative to the Enlightenment?
Since I think it's only fair, I'll step up first...
I believe liberal democracy was created to solve the problem of warring, confessional, European monarchs in the 17th century and has reached its logical endpoint. My preference for America is for a return to federalism and real state independence but that would require repealing the 14th amendment (which seems unlikely) and a willingness to tolerate radical political differences across states (which the Left likely can not.) The most likely outcome is an illiberal President who uses the imperial power of the office and an economic emergency (a Liz Truss style debt crisis or an extended govt shutdown) to sideline Congress and rule by degree. If that person is a Lenin (ideological leftist), I will oppose him. If he is a Hitler (racist), I will oppose him. If he is a Franco, I would support him.
I too would support a Franco or a Pinochet. And, like you, I wish that the United States "woulda coulda shoulda" return to a true Federalism that existed before the Civil War, but that's not on offer.
Ultimately I have been a Dissolutionist around here since Rod had his column at The Anerican Comservative. The idea of splitting the current United States into five or six separate nations is an even harder thing for people to wrap their heads around than accepting the rise and installation of a Franco.
As for immediate improvements for the lives of the disaffected youth, mass deportations of both illegal immigrants and non- citizen resident aliens along with severe visa restrictions and a near- total and indefinite immigration halt would do a lot for job prospects and lower the cost of housing. Yes, there would be some severe disruption in the short to medium term as Big Ag, Big Hospitality, and Big Construction lost their pools of immigrant not- quite- slave labor, but it would be worth it long- term.
Making student loan debt dischargeable in bankruptcy would help as well. Frankly, the list of left- wing and right- wing interventions in the economy I would be willing to embrace is long and diverse and neither political party is willing to embrace it.
I don't actually think you have to split America. You just have to return to the original vision of federalism, a union of states that have common interests but may differ radically internally. Now that I think about it, America in 1789 bore a striking similarity to the structure of the Treaty of Westphalia.
However, I agree that this is even less likely than a Franco-type figure, especially considering our financial situation. Both assets and debts are always a problem in divorces (be they familial or national) but ask any divorce lawyer which is harder.
Re: I wish that the United States "woulda coulda shoulda" return to a true Federalism that existed before the Civil War
Meh, That was unworkable, as witness how it ended. I'd go with the Teddie Roosevelt era when we got serious about cleaning up our act, though I'd leave out the bully among nations foreign policy.
To add to what you would put, if smaller houses would be built, they would be more affordable for people. College should only be for careers like doctors and lawyers that require years of school. Most everyone else should be able to get by with a high school degree or some level of apprenticeship. I would get rid of no-fault divorce and stop pandering to every minute group that is only a small percentage of the population and yet wants to be the majority. I could go but these are just a few ideas.
I don't care about no fault divorce when people have no kids or their kids are adults already. But when there are minor kids in the mix their welfare is paramount. Adults are always free to make their own beds-- but not to drag their young children into them too.
Here I part company with Dukeboy. I thought he wanted to offer a political solution clearly distinct from the moribund Two Major Parties that Rod has failed to offer, as do the decripit democratic socialists, who are far too close to the Democratic Party. Under no circumstances would I support a Franco or a Pinochet. Nor would I return to the unstable federalism predating the Civil War. I would firmly reassert the full scope of the Constitution we have, reorganize the cabinet departments to focus on actual needs of the American population, and assemble all the historians still living who I relied on to get a grasp on American history to develop a common curriculum affirming what our common nation emerged from (yes that included slavery and Jim Crow). I'm not going to write a manifesto in a Comm Box, but there is plenty of room to reaffirm America in a manner seventy percent or more, crossing racial and ethnic and regional lines, can agree on.
I'm a First Amendment purist. We don't need a shared god. We do need a renewed commitment that it is not within the purview of the civil government to give any seal of approval to any religious faith, and that everyone is free to build their own relationship with God, subject to no government direction or interference. There are matters subject to the civil law, and we can agree on those without having a shared canon.
You still have to bring people together. To do that, people have to have pride in their country and think it's worth improving. There has to be a shared language and a shared culture even if not everyone has the same religion.
That's not as hard as you might think. We get the political parties out of the way for a short stretch, we can rediscover what we actually do have in common. If black soldiers can volunteer for both world wars in the teeth of Jim Crow, we can have shared pride in our country. Watch James Capra's "The Negro Soldier."
The way to fix things within the Constitution is a return to Federalism. Get rid of much of the government as it now exists and let the state do as they want. If that way isn't met, a dictator of some kind might be the only way to fix things. What will have to be done is to try and create a singular culture that people can get behind where they are proud of their country, speak one language and have similar beliefs. I have no doubt that if there is massive violence in the future, this method will be the one that is adopted to prevent further bloodshed.
Even the Constitution put strict limits on the states in some ways: they could not conduct their own economic policy in defiance of the Federal government or other states. They could not have their own foreign policy. They were required to give "full faith and credit" to the legal acts of other states. They were required to obey any legitimate Federal law. They must have a "republican" form of government-- no monarchs, aristocracies, theocracies or tyrannies, And since the Civil War proved the needed for somewhat stricter standards in some vital matters, civil rights laws (including the voter franchise) at the Federal level must be recognized by all states.
Rod seems to not want to not offend the Left or want to roll back 60 years of liberal gains, while crying about "jew haters" or "white nationalists", and pumping up Fuentes. Same old problem for the NRO types, playing "don't go fight back".
I would rather "burn it all down" than listen to more soft bemoaning of anyone taking notice what the destruction of our country and the withdrawal of opportunities for the young. I get the ideas of the accelerationists, who are tired of weak solutions.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to oppose mass migration.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to note the role of jewish individuals or organizations in pushing and funding mass migration.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to favor mass deportation.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to oppose funding Israel.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to oppose the Greater Israel project.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to note the problems created by the porn industry, nor noting the roles of jews creating and profiting from it.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to note three United States was a Christian nation from its founding, with only a few hundred jews in the country back then.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to discuss crime rates and the ethnicity of criminals, especially violent criminals.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to oppose Christian zionism and call it a heresy.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to note that jews have rejected Christ for 2 thousand years.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to modem judaism is largely a post-Christ creation, which grew in opposition to Christianity.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to say "Christ is king".
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to note the role of jews in the last 60 years of leftism in America and the West.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to note the role of jews in the communist revolution in Russia, and the huge role of jews in the mass murder of Russians in the Soviet Union.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to the role of jews in Hollywood, and leading the charge for moral destruction of American.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to oppose Israeli efforts in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to oppose globalism.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to oppose dual citizenship.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to oppose Neocons.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to oppose wars, such as against Iran.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to call out Mossad and its links to Epstein.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to call out AIPAC and the outsized roll of jewish donors.
I could make this list 5 times longer. Either we talk openly about the issues and start fighting back or we can burn it all down, because it isn't worth saving.
The more pundits use "demon names" such as "racist" and "antisemite", which have no very little power over younger people, the more they misunderstand the young Right and isolate themselves away, making themselves irrelevant.
For someone who is skeptical of the flourishing of Jew hatred you certainly seem to have little but Jews, Jews, Jews on your mind.
They should make a special Alphabet cereal for anti - Semites. It would have a couple dozen of each letter, but as for the letters themselves, there would be only four: "w," "s," "j," "e". A guy like you could plays JEWS JEWS JEWS with it until everything got too soggy.
Inasmuch as you invoke Christianity, I suggest that you read Romans 9 - 11, paying special attention to chapter 11, because it looks very much as if The Lord has a Greater Israel eventually in mind for the people which rejected Him.
Rod is obsessed with antisemitism. I care about God, America, my family and truth. Noticing truths is refusing to live by lies.
Mr. Lime, are there any untrue statements in my list, or are they just uncomfortable things you would rather pretend didn't exist because they bother you and make you consider things you don't want to think about? I suspect it is the later, because denial is much easier than facing truths.
I liked Rod more when he was preaching, "Live not by lies", rather than carrying water for would be gatekeepers.
What you do not understand is that the Jews you dislike are not your enemies because they're Jews, but because they're secular Jews. All Christians should want the salvation of Jews, but in the meantime, the things you don't like about them would be strongly mitigated the more religious they became within their Judaism.
But you have the obsessed quality of the true anti - Semite, and I don't know that there is anything I could say which would change your mind. But be aware that as your animus strengthens, logically, it will find its rest only in an Auschwitz or a Buchenwald.
Projection is pathetic. Where did I say I dislike jews? You appear to be hate filled, calling others names. You have animus, and are projecting that on others. Repent of your blindness and projection.
I don't dislike jews. I don't worship jews either. They are who they are, and do not deserve special staus. And I am clear-eyed as to the role that some jews have in pushing leftism and anti-Americanism.
Jews rejected prophet after prophet, prior to rejecting Christ. And after rejecting Christ, they created a religion directly anti Christ.
They are blind and hostile to Christ and they will only be redeemed by Christ himself, when Christ comes. It appears you are also blind in others ways.
You can't accept that people can look objectively at something and not be full of hatred. Truth is truth, and some truths are painful and difficult to address.
Try to accept difficult truths, even against your own positions. You have shown no ability to do so, so I don't expect you to suddenly gain insight.
And stop projecting on others. Stick to objective truths. It will improve your life.
the role of jewish individuals or organizations in pushing and funding mass migration.
the roles of jews creating and profiting from it. (porn or anything else -- faux lefties like to pretend that Jews ran the slave trade, which I have rebutted at great length)
United States was a Christian nation from its founding
the role of jews in the last 60 years of leftism in America and the West. (The communists I used to associate with were mostly raised Roman Catholic, and defended politically doctrinaire approaches by comparing it to the role of doctrine in the Church)
the huge role of jews in the mass murder of Russians in the Soviet Union. (I did not list your similar remark about the role of Jews in the revolution -- Solzhenitsyn discussed that, as well as the way the party turned on a large part of its Jewish constituency afterward. Stalin proposed even before the revolution that Jews tended to be Mensheviks, so it might be good to have a pogrom in the party)
Much of the rest of your list consists of statements of personal opinion, which don't invoke the second coming of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, just that your opinion per se isn't anti-Jewish. On many topics, it isn't, including mass migration, wars, the global elite, etc. On some points, I even agree, such as opposing globalism, dual citizenship, neocons, among others. We agree in part and disagree in part on immigration, but to oppose immigration is not, per se, anti-Jewish. American Jews tend to be native born citizens at this point.
When you post a blizzard of unsubstantiated opinions, interspersed with tautological statements that are palpably false, you may feel good about venting your spleen, but you are not persuasive, and leave yourself open to being called on some falsehoods, which might even be characterized as lies.
Charlie, you want to deny truths and call it lies. Lies come from the devil, truth from God. And just because you don't like the truths, does not make them lies.
But you often challenge Jon for being the most obtuse poster here, so it isn't surprising.
Some Jews espouse an obnoxious politics. So what? So too do some people of British descent in our country-- do we hate all Anglo-Americans for that reason? Just say No to Group Think.
I agree on most of this. The other thing I would add is that there also has to be a positive to go with the negative. Not only must what is wrong and destructive be condemned but there have to be good things to convince people that it's worth it to care about the nation. People will care if they are able to get married and have a family and have a good job that pays for things. They have to know that they won't have to worry about crime.
Re: Telling the Groyper he needs Jesus when he's focused on the fact that he can't afford to move out of parent's house is just not helpful.
Maybe some of those guys should get their act together, quit smoking pot, quit the video games and the porn, exercise away the spare rounds and, gasp, educate themselves in useful things (No, I am not saying "Go to college"). Oh, and quit throwing themselves pity parties. I do know young guys who are making it-- not easily and no they are not rich, but they do have lives, even girlfriends.
Re: this ends in blood.
Alas, it's much worse than that. It ends first in fire and then in ice. But not today.
Good grief, Jon. I know that it gets under your skin when I do this, but that right there is some pure, uncut Boomerism.
Are there young men (and women) who still live with their parents because they have no ambition and just smoke dope and play video games? Of course. Does that caricature apply to every or even a majority of the youth that still live at home? Absolutely not.
You don't have kids and you absolutely don't appreciate how screwed up the job and housing situation is for them post Covid. I'll use a very personal example.
My daughter graduated from a second- tier state university in May with a bachelor's degree in early childhood education and (only) five figures of student loan debt. She starts her first "real" full-time job with benefits and a 401K later this week. She will make a little over $3000 a month before taxes to start.
A one- bedroom apartment in the city where her new job is $800 a month for a (barely) decent place to $1600 a month for a place where her retired cop father would have no qualms at all about her living there. (It's in Lexington, so I absolutely know what's good and what's bad.)
The math doesn't math, so she'll still be living at home and commuting roughly 35 minutes each way to her new job. Her car is the 2016 Honda Civic I bought her senior year of high school, which is in very good shape and gets about the best gas mileage you can hope for in a non- hybrid car. $4 a gallon gas is still going to hurt.
My point is my kid has done everything she was "supposed" to do. College took a bit longer due to a couple of major changes and a pause to figure out what she really wanted to do that was stretched into two years partially due to Covid nonsense. She worked the entire time she was out of college and then part- time once she went back until she had to quit doing that while she did student- teaching her last semester.
She doesn't smoke weed, drink very much, or party. She does play video games, but so does her dad. She will still be living at home for the foreseeable future, even though she's got a leg- up on her peers in terms of family support. There will be wage increases and room for advancement at the place she's starting work. Maybe in a couple of years she can afford $1200+ a month for rent.
There are a lot of kids who don't have the advantages in family support that my kid has and I honestly don't see how they can make it on their own the way I did. Telling them that they should live in lousy neighborhood or have three roommates is just going to make them shut down when a lousy apartment still costs them $600 or more per person and they're only making $15 an hour. Telling them all to bootstrap themselves is Boomer nonsense given that starting wages have not kept anything close to what inflation has done to the cost of living over the last six years.
As always, I remind you I am early GenX- Reaganomics, MTV, Space Invaders, big hair, cocaine.i am well aware of inflation and the messed up job market- everyone is affected by that. Try being 50 something and job hunting. This isn't a Old vs Young issue. It isn't a culture war issue. It's straight up a classic struggle, working class vs owning class, issue.
I wish I could like this more. You hit the nail on the head. I'm nearly 37 and had to live with my parents for a few years after college because I didn't make enough to afford a place. Once I did, I moved out. I had to move back in with them for 6 months a few years ago and then moved out again and have been completely on my own for years now. It's hard though. Rent is expensive, car notes are expensive and houses are out of reach of many younger people. Your daughter is lucky to have a dad who loves and cares about her. Unfortunately, some kids don't have good parents to help them.
It does end in blood. Some of the problems of today will be solved in the future. But they will be solved after millions are dead. I don't care for either party. The Democrats made it clear that they hate me by embracing so much insanity. Too many Republicans care about nothing about tax cuts for the rich and supporting Israel at the drop of a hat. Younger people are frustrated and are listening to other people. Those who are older surprisingly don't seem to get why.
Rod, this is an issue of spiritual warfare. I would encourage you to read Dr. Gregory Boyd's book, God at War, published in 1997. Although it is 30 years old it speaks so clearly to this issue of spiritual warfare no one who reads this book will be able to deny the reality of the spiritual warfare driving us towards anarchy and rebellion.
Great stuff, Rod...though I continue to disagree with you about the urgency of the threat from the Woke Right or Groypers or whatever name you want to put on them.
Yes, some of their ideas are way off-base but they have not captured entire institutions or an entire political party. They don't have power. They don't have a leader who's going to give them power. They're a sideshow.
The threat is on the other side of the spectrum where a poisonous ideology has in fact come to dominate entire institutions, an entire political party, and the prevailing culture.
They have power and they're about to get more of it. And if you thought the recent government of the senile puppet they put in the White House was bad, well, stand by. It's going to get worse...and soon.
That's why I balk at pinning the word "Left" on them, much less "Communist." Those labels are from the last war. They are obsolete in our own day. Meaningless even.
Call them modern-day Jacobins, which is a lot more accurate. I mean, granted, as Solzhenitsyn argued, the Jacobins were the ideological and spiritual forefathers of the totalitarian Communism of the 20th century.
But the enemy now is not "Communism." Rather, this is a war between Good and Evil, Life and Death, Being and Emptiness, Michael and Lucifer. It's a story that has played out since the dawn of time (and before time).
We're just witnesses to and participants in the latest chapter...and unfortunately, as much as I like the guy, JD Vance is not going to save the day no matter what he says or which supposed villain he disavows.
When a Disney executive talks about her nine-year-old "trans" daughter, one has to marvel at the absolute political & social cachet these people wield. And yet, despite the very real damage done to children, the trans agenda is ultimately a boutique issue affecting a sliver of the population while detracting from more pressing stuff. So let's oppose puberty blockers for children with all our might but let grown men in dresses enjoy their kink. Perhaps if we ignore them, they'll return to the closet or the over-21 cabaret clubs where they belong.
Paul, the trans phenomenon and the fact that support for it is a core plank in the Evil Party's platform is one reason...there are plenty of others...why I balk at terms like "Left" and "Communist" as accurate labels.
Trans has nothing to do with "Communism." Rather it has to do with an ideology at war with God and the age-old Christian moral code. Moreover, the supposed ascendance of the DSA is beside the point.
Who cares if they want to take over some grocery stores in New York. That's not the issue. The Democratic Party from which they hail holds to the same core ideology as the DSA. These are peas in the same pod.
We're going to wake up one morning to find them back in power. Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens will still be blathering as background noise and the conservatives who made the mistake of believing some podcasting malcontents to be an enemy as dangerous as the Dem-Media machine will be staring down the latter's gun barrels.
The notion that the "Woke Right" has any capability to actually seize power in this country is akin to the idea that native European populations are on the cusp of rising up in the streets to fight the corrupt elites who rule over them. It's a nice academic discussion that gets some people worked up but has no basis in reality.
Agreed. None of these Groypers or whatever have any political power. In contrast, members of the DSA are winning elections and when the Democrats get back in power, many of them will be position to do great damage to this country.
Unfortunately, the genie isn't going back in the bottle. As you correctly stated, this is an issue that affects a small sliver (0.5 percent last I heard) of the population. The fact that it's a national issue is the height of absurdity. But it's not going away. What needs to happen is that transing the kids need to be made illegal and grown men dressing like women in public should be ridiculed and made to feel unwelcome if there are kids around.
That reminds me when I used to read the Jacobin magazine online just for some balance with all the other publications I read. You are correct about calling them that. Ultimately, it doesn't matter what they are called. I know people who lived through communism and came to America and found success. These DSA people remind them of what they left behind.
AS THE BEST BIBLE TEACHER SELF -TAUGHT I EVER SAT UNDER, A BRETHREN LADY WHO OPENNED HER KING JAMES AND SPOKE FOR TWO HOURS, WEAVING A THREAD FROM BEGINNING TO END WITHOUT BENEFIT OF A SINGLE NOTE, HER COMMENTS SCATTERED THOUGHOUT. MANY I RECALL SOME FIFTY YEARS LATER. SHE WAS A FUNKY LITTLE LADY WHOSE APPERANCE BROUGHT NO SECOND GLANCES. ALL THIS TO SAY, ONE OF MY MOST REMEMBERED QUOTES AND I THINK IT APPLIES TO TUCKER AND MANY OTHERS......ONLY GOD KNOWS DECEIVED BRETHREN FROM THE FALSE. GOTTA SAY THIS GIVES ME HOPE. PS. FOR THOSE WHO FIND MY CAPS ANNOYING MY EYES ARE WEAK. SOME DAYS I HAVE TO COMMENT IN CAPS. OTHERWISE, I COULD NOT DO IT. I REALIZED ONLY HALFWAY THROUGH THIS HOW ANNYING THIS WAS TO SOME OF YOUR READERS. PLEASE BEAR WITH ME. I WILL TRY TO SKIP THE CAPS NEXT TIME AROUND. EYES WILLING.
Rod is the Daily Mail a new writing gig? I saw the article this morning…I was like hey I know that guy.
It was a one-off. They reached out to me.
They’ll do it again! Nice work!
That is a significant intervention on their part and welcome, I would suspect Paul Dacre and Viscount Rothermere are aware of your work and are very concerned about what Tucker is doing.
They will commision you again.
It's padlocked by a paywall for me.
Me,too
God bless you for your work, Rod. I pray it will save us from ourselves.
Their Satanic Majesties Request - 1967 album by the Rolling Stones and now a much more accurate descriptor for the standard operating procedure of the Globalist parasites intent on destroying nation states, Western civilization and life on planet earth in general.
I'm convinced our civilization began its death rattle when Ed Sullivan had the Stones as guests on his program, in 1965. Sullivan doesn't look too thrilled to be doing it. He reminds me of a shopkeeper to whom a made man has said, "Nice little place here. It'd be a shame if something happened to it."
Our civilization began its death rattle when Martin Dies convened the House Un-American Committee.
I would say that once no-fault divorce was institutionalized, once it became more common to hate on America without saying anything about the good aspects of it, etc. is when this happened.
I think the pill for birth control can be added to the list.
The globalist parasites are the same class that Marxists used to refer to as the international imperialist bourgeoisie. That's not a validation of Marxism as a method, school of thought, or political platform, but it is a caution to those who think we can break the grip of the globalist parasites by promoting capitalism. Its going to take some form of socialism.
Where is socialism successful? Sooner or later it always runs out of other people's money.
Capitalism rewards hard work. Socialism penalizes hard work. It is as simple as that. Capitalism, tethered to a welfare state for the weak, is the best system.
Capitalism rewards hard work if your hard work accumulates capital. Capitalism does no reward those living paycheck to paycheck, for the most part.
Capitalism also cannot see past the next quarterly report.
Capitalism easily corrupts into "Them who Has Gets" and "He Who Has the Gold Makes the Rules". We are way past the point in our country where that has happened.
Jon, I'm not working for some lazy bastard.
Channeling Margaret Thatcher is weak sauce. She didn't know what socialism is or who is living on other people's money, but she was very pleased with herself, like little Jack Horner pulling a plum out of a pie with his thumb. Socialism is not a canon that Has Been Tried or Has Not Been Tried. Its a general notion that if we are going to have large economies of scale, rather than small craft industry and family farms, we need ways to insure that everyone benefits, not just the tiny minority who own the large scale enterprises as their own private property while thousands produce the goods.
See you at the Citadel!
" pleased to meet you, hope you get my name but what's puzzling you is the nature of my game" that, sadly, still seems to puzzle most of us.
Re: but when he says the Democratic Socialists of America are actually Communists, that’s not one of them.
Maher is wrong. These guys are Socialists, and not even very thorough ones as I have not heard that they plan on nationalizing corporations (If I wrong someone point that out to me please). But really-- where's the Communism? In what way are they following Lenin, Mao or even Tito? I see a lot of performative Leftwingery twanging the usual Wokeist strings (which the actual Communists would have hated and utterly suppressed). I see them embracing some loony tunes ideas which do not code Left or Right. And that's about it.
Why oh why can the Right never get over the Cold War? It's starting to sound as silly as if serious American political figures were fretting about the Redcoats coming in the 1850s when much more serious threats were in the offing. And yes, you've got much bigger problems on the horizon than these pisqueaks-- or the groypers. It shouldn't require unusual talents to see such dangers
From the DSA Program:
Establish public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries to ensure democratic control and accountability to the people.
https://program.dsausa.org/#demand-economic-democracy
John Keller got here first, but thank you also.
Trump already started this “project” with buying stakes in various corporations. From Claude:
• Semiconductors/AI supply chain — the flagship deal is a 9.9% stake in Intel worth $42 billion . This week the administration added six more chipmakers plus GlobalFoundries, and is eyeing stakes in seven AI-supply-chain companies: GlobalFoundries, Kepler, Multibeam Corporation, Extropic, Thintronics, Obsidia Semiconductors, and Aeluma .
• Critical minerals/rare earths — including $400 million into rare-earth miner MP Materials , plus stakes in Lithium Americas, Trilogy Metals, and USA Rare Earth (an 8% to 16% stake ).
• Steel — a “golden share” in U.S. Steel, retained as a condition of its sale to Japan’s Nippon Steel .
• Quantum computing — including a new IBM venture funded in exchange for equity .
• Defense/aerospace — L3Harris (Pentagon investing $1 billion in its rocket motor business) and xLight (a $150 million equity stake in exchange for federal incentives)
Not really sure how any socialist regime would get more involved in private capital than this!
Then you have no clue what socialism really is. This would just be the tiniest tip of the iceberg under true socialism.
Real socialism, like the type found in Sweden, Norway, Finland? Or scary scary dictatorship socialism?
Sweden, Norway, and Finland do not have socialism, which is "characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism
Here’s a rather key passage in the DSA platform:
Establish public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries to ensure democratic control and accountability to the people. Enact aggressive wealth taxes on the richest individuals and corporations to spend on public goods and infrastructure.
Next:
Workers must lead our democratic transition to a green future. Pass a federal jobs guarantee. Implement massive investment in sustainable, publicly owned energy and transit infrastructure. Phase out the use of fossil fuels. Reclaim and repair our earth's resources for all.
Next:
Housing is a human right. Build new, publicly-owned social housing, strictly regulate investment properties, establish universal rent control, and guarantee right to counsel for all tenants.
Sounds like socialism .
Now as for communism, if we mean Marxist- Leninism, it doesn’t seem dominant but it is striking that a number of people involved with DSA like Piker seem remarkably fond of communist dictatorships.
Re: Establish public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries to ensure democratic control and accountability to the people.
Thank you! That definitely sounds Socialist as the term is generally understood.
Re: Now as for communism, if we mean Marxist- Leninism, it doesn’t seem dominant
What else does Communist mean? Note I am using the capitalized version to differentiate it from all sorts of other things, like the early Christians holding all things in common.
As for being fond of this or that dictatorship, I don't think that's is definitive. All sorts of politicians have been palsy-walsy with assorted of dictators including some pretty nasty ones. That definitely calls their judgment into question, but I don't think it tars them with the same ideology. It's probably a general temptation that most leaders have to handle, well or badly, to admire rulers who can get things done without the Rule of Law or those pesky voters getting in the way.
You're splitting hairs again, Jon. When someone says they "want to seize the means of production" and "abolish private property"... that's a commie. It may not be a Lenin / Stalin / Cold War commie, but it's still communism.
Exactly. Any party that wants to have government control of production is a party that wants control over consumption as well, by definition. Thats what the dingbats and dummies among these kids don’t understand. As for JonF’s hairsplitting, I don’t get it. I don’t understand his purpose. The cognitive payoff seems to be zero.
The stakes are—are we going to backflip into totalitarianism or not? Because if we do, that’s it. No more free discussions like these and no more of an awful lot of stuff most of us value.
With the establishment of government-run grocery stores, Mamdani seems content with being the middle man.
I doubt that. This is a test. The dingbat thinks they’ll work. And they probably will, in his eyes. They won’t carry much and they’ll drain taxpayer funds, but they’ll persist.
Once these people get in power, then the communist aspect will come out. Because not everyone will agree with these proposals. Dissension will not be allowed by the new "enlightened" rulers.
Just go to the DSA website and read their platform. It's perfectly clear -- and it has cartoons! Yes, they are Communists.
Nope, Socialists-- as John Keller has helpfully noted above. The whole Marxist-Leninist thing is deader than Elvis. How is this not blindingly obvious?
Kelleher.
You be the one to catch that for I think obvious reasons!🇮🇪
I wish that were so! It isn’t. Piker for example lamented the fall of the Soviet Union and praised Mao.Does that make him a Marxist- Leninist? Well not necessarily but it sure suggests a certain leaning.
And you might want to look at this :https://communistcaucus.com/
And this:
https://www.google.com/url?q=https://redstarcaucus.org/communists-belong-in-dsa/&sa=U&sqi=2&ved=2ahUKEwjavs6vooCWAxVQkYkEHTOVPHwQFnoECCIQAQ&zccpm=epi&usg=AOvVaw0zNiJbEuEg9rizkePMrGOP
And this:https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.marxistunity.com/&sa=U&ved=2ahUKEwiIgYOQo4CWAxUfkYkEHd9tNRIQFnoECBEQAQ&zccpm=epi&usg=AOvVaw394DAGuveq1TGO2yk4P0PH
I recall when Bernie Sanders was a serious candidate for president in 2016. Someone (maybe on NR) dug up a whole lot of dirt on him and his past statements and actions being oh-so-supportive of several Communist states, including even the USSR. Was Bernie a Communist?
No Bernie was not a communist. That’s completely irrelevant to what’s been brought up here. The topic , I think was , is DSA communist oriented? There is some evidence for that . I referred to it . I also talked about Hassan Pikers recent ( typically) distasteful comments. The DSA has dramatically changed in the last few years. Sanders is a product of the old NYC Jewish Left. I think as a young man he was never a communist but it’s my impression that he was anti anti communist unlike the mainstream American Socialist Party or the people who became known as Schachtmanites . ( In interned at The Tammiment Library ). Now Bernie moved up to Vermont and became involved with the Liberty Union Party. He’s never really been a Democrat and he’s not a member of DSA.Now as a politician Sanders actually has downplayed socialism. Now that he sees an ascendant DSA he may shift gears. Who knows? He’s old and it doesn’t much matter .
I bet Sanders' parents voted for Henry Wallace in 1948.
In 2016, I remember Sanders being supportive of gun rights and opposed to illegal immigration - issues which are certainly popular in rural Vermont. It was Hillary Clinton's people who criticized him for having supporters that were too white, etc. In 2020, he changed and embraced all the views of the other Democrats.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBKqJHOC0JY
WATCH THE MAHER CLIP. He quotes Communist material explicitly said by their own leadership. Last week I read something, wish I could remember where, by an older Democratic Socialist who left the party because in his view, it was abandoning democratic socialism for identity-politics communism. I'll try to find the quote.
Well I know Maurice Isserman left in 2023.
He sees what he wants to see and doesn't see what he doesn't want to see. You must realize this by now.
Maher? Clearly that is correct.
I'm thinking that JonF fits the description much better.
Maher clearly wouldn't know a communist if he tripped over one in broad daylight. "Watch the Maher clip" is not a citation to an expert, but deferring to off the cuff sloppy thinking. I once read Adam Ulam's "The Bolsheviks" and the official "History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union" prepared under Stalin's direct supervision, to compare the two. Both works had a bias, Ulam's was of course more thoroughly researched and footnoted, but from reading either or both, it would be obvious that Maher has no idea what the word "communist" means.
Marxism-Leninism was an obvious failure by the mid-1920's, but to this day, it still survives in Cuba. The DSA platform is clearly Marxist-Leninist, dead as it may be, to say nothing of in American universities.
Marxist in the vaguest way possible -- I doubt anyone who contributed to it has read "Das Kapital," or even the Communist Manifesto. Leninist? Don't make me laugh.
Communism survives wherever it survives by force. Does anyone in Cuba want communism any more? Only the cabal at the top. Everyone else starves and lives in periodic blackouts.
Officially, there are only five communist countries. China and Vietnam are authoritarian countries operating under state capitalist principles. North Korea is a Kim family totalitarian enterprise. Laos is an appendage of Vietnam. Cuba is an incompetently run Communist Party operation run by a small white elite running a black-majority country.
You can be effectively Communist without being Leninist. Gramsci's "hegemony" was still totalitarian, for instance, even if it wasn't "Communist" in the Russian sense.
Disagreeing with your first sentence. Communism (as opposed to Marxism a more broad generic terms) IS Marxism-Leninism, though yes, of course, Mao and Tito gave it their own spins-- but built on Lenin's foundations still. IMO, this is nothing more than an attempt to revive the skeleton of the old Red Scare to unite and distract a Right that is growing disenchanted with Trump's failures. If people were saying just "Marxism:" I would not disagree, because yes this is Marxist in foundation-- but not Leninist.
So it wasn’t Marx who wrote “The Communist Manifesto” then, but actually Lenin? 😋
You’re arguing for No True Scotsman here, IMO. If the ideology calls itself “Communist”, I’d consider taking it at its word. It feels like you just sympathize with the DSA and are trying to gaslight everyone else over fine distinctions between various forms of radical authoritarian leftism. Whether they’re “Communists” or just “Socialists” they’re bad news. Might as well use the more pejorative term because frankly just calling them socialists sells their radicalism short. But then I suspect you know that.
No, there is a historical basis for the distinction. After the 1848 revolutions, the term "communist" fell out of use, with "social-democrat" being the predominant name for more or less Marxist parties that had generally adopted on electoral and trade union strategy, since "to the barricades" was an obvious failure. They were caught by surprise when Lenin began calling his party "Communist" -- a step he took only after seizing power. From about 1919 on, "Communist" has referred to those who adhered to Lenin's methodology, and employed his party apparatus. Lenin was actually the one to invoke the "No True Scotsman" paradigm against all his rivals. I consider Donald Trump to be bad news, but I don't call him a communist. I consider the current crop of "democratic socialists" bad news, not because they are communists, but because they are infatuated with issues of non-class origin and don't know how to administer an economy in the interest of anyone, including the working class.
You missed the word "effectively" in that sentence. As your comment demonstrates, there is a lot of overlap between the groups represented by these various terms, and not all of it is clearly delineated.
This means what-IMO, this is nothing more than an attempt to revive the skeleton of the old Red Scare to unite and distract a Right that is growing disenchanted with Trump's failures. If people were saying just "Marxism:" I would not disagree, because yes this is Marxist in foundation-- but not Leninist.
By definition, to be Communist is to be Leninist. Its hard to say if Gramsci was a communist, although he tried to think he was. Even if Leninist, he was not Marxist, and his hegemony might qualify as fascist. Chiang Kai-Shek was a Leninist. He was trained in Moscow, organized the Kuo Min Tang by Leninist methods, but, chose to turn on the Communist Party and align with foreign capitalist nations. His party remains Leninist in structure to the day he died. Knowing this helped me to understand why Steve Bannon described himself as a Leninist.
See my reply to JonF.
I did. You are employing the Humpty-Dumpty fallacy. "When I use a word, it means exactly what I choose it to mean."
The terms socialist, communist and social democrat were almost interchangeable until the Bolshevik revolution. With that an international movement came into being that explicitly called itself communist to distinguish itself from the existing parties that called themselves socialist or social democrat. Communist Parties were created in imitation of the Bolsheviks, they normally claimed to be Marxist- Leninist. Had Rosa Luxemburg not been killed another Communist strain , not explicitly Leninist might have developed. Gramsci was a member of the Italian Communist Party and a Leninist in good standing.He developed a strategy that was different from Lenin that’s not deemed opposed to Lenin. My old copy of The Prison Notebooks was published by International Press as is my copy of What is to be done?
Yes, this was my point. The terminology isn't as cut and dried as we'd like to think sometimes.
The very fact that self-described democratic socialist candidates running for office openly say "I do not support the national DSA platform, and the national DSA has not endorsed my campaign" tells you these are not communists. A communist would not dare run for office without the approval of the Central Committee, and would not deviate one jot from the Party Line. If they did, and it were not feasible to imprison or kill them, they would be summarily expelled, and all party members forbidden to socialize with them, or even acknowledge them in passing on the street.
Did you even watch the Maher clip? No, you didn't, or you wouldn't have written this.
Rod if someone says "Miami is in Hawaii" or kangaroos are native to Argentina I do not need to listen to their whole discourse to know they are wrong. See also: Category error.
And I am actually quite gobsmacked that anyone (I don't mean you here) would drag the rotted husk of the Red Scare back onto the political stage at this late date. Talk about :"They learned nothing and forgot nothing". Can we please, please, please stop wallowing in the past.?
By the way I would not vote for one of these folks, but I am not unhappy that just maybe they are putting some fear into the hearts of billionaires. Nemesis and the Three Ghosts of Christmas seem to be swamped with work, and even Karma is too busy these days.
I have to admit I’m unclear as to what your point is.
Is "the Maher clip" now the new Talisman of Truth? The man has no idea what a communist is. Therefore, Bill Maher repeating a thousand times "these are communists" means nothing.
Do you know about Mamdani's bid to criminalize home ownership (it's hyperbole, Jon) in the five boroughs? Besides printing a spreadsheet of homeowners whose property is above a certain value, he's also demanding proof of selected homeowners that the property is their primary residence or face penalties. You know Alex Berenson, the science writer? His mother got a letter from the Pavel Morozov of Morningside Heights demanding such proof in three weeks or a penalty of $50,000 would be levied. She's 81, and three weeks ago was coughing up blood. She needs this? This morning another letter went out giving everybody until Sept. 16 to comply. The baseness and cruelty of this proceeding stamps it as communist, there I said it.
Pavel Morozov? Sounds like a loanshark from Zelensky's inner circle.
To me it sounds like someone from Fiddler on the Roof.
I admit I can't recall who he is, although I know most of the names of Russian revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries.
He's the little darling who turned his parents in for hoarding during the Famine.
Has a nice house in Marine Park. Can arrange a meeting at his favorite place in Brighton Beach.
And bring backup....
Base and cruel yes. Communist, no. If I received such a letter, I would write back and demand to know the statutory authority to levy such a fine. I could do that and not be hauled off to a camp in the Adirondacks. Of course an 81 year old woman who has been coughing up blood would be hard put to do so.
Charlie, this is an own goal. No, there is no camp in the Adirondacks--yet. But you could be forced to hire a lawyer and go through terrible trouble. That's what I mean by soft state terror. I stand by my words.
And yet you liked my comment, so we must have some common ground. I admit that I have a lifetime of experience doing administrative advocacy for others, and therefore can go toe-to-toe with any bureaucracy myself without hiring a lawyer. I do find it wearying -- I shouldn't have to fight the utility company twice a year, fight the regulatory commission that isn't doing its job protecting me from the utility company every other year, track down the CFO of the medical conglomerate to complain about an invalid billing, after finding that the customer service staff have no authority to change anything, point out to the cashier in the supermarket that the machine rang up full price instead of marked-down price, etc. But it particularly caught my eye that an administrative agency is summarily imposing a fine for non-compliance. One thing left-wingers and right-wingers each and all complain about is remote bureaucracies doing there own thing without a pretense to due process or legal foundation. No doubt communist bureaucracies do this too, but so does the ICE. Its not communist, its totalitarian and authoritarian, and that is something conservatives, liberals, communists, even some species of libertarians can be guilty of. (Yes, non-communist socialists too -- the way Kibbutzim took children away from their parents, e.g.)
The name Pavel Morozov was familiar but I couldn’t remember why. Looked it up. Horrifying.
Even the IRS isn't that evil.
Depends on who you ask. But when it comes to the IRS, the big boys will always cite the horrors inflicted on the little guys as the reason the IRS should be defunded so they don't audit the big guys who are getting away with murder. The solution is for the IRS to be more focused, and to check twice before drawing a conclusion.
Jon, as I'm sure you know, Communists view Socialism as a stepping stone to full blown Communism. From the Marxist.org website (which claims the following as coming from "Political Economy - A Textbook issued by the Economics Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R"):
"Communist society passes through two phases of development: the lower phase known as Socialism, and the higher phase known as Communism. In the first stage, communist society cannot as yet be free from the traditions and traces of capitalism, from whose womb it has emerged. Only the further development of socialism on the basis which it has itself created can lead to the second and higher phase of communist society. Consequently socialism and communism are two stages of maturity of the new communist form of society."
DSA are commies-lite. And will gladly work to get to full-blown Communism. No thank you.
Here's the direct link if you feel the need to check my work: https://www.marxists.org/subject/economy/authors/pe/pe-ch40.htm
Re: Communist society passes through two phases of development: the lower phase known as Socialism, and the higher phase known as Communism.
Their ideologues are as disconnected from reality as Donald Trump is. There was no "Socialist" phase for real world Communist states. Those which did not have Communist foisted on them by the Red Army stepped straight some form of tyranny, or maybe foreign rule, to full blown Communist governance.
If you know that, you should also know that a Communist Party running what they pass off as a "dictatorship of the proletariat" is socialism, in communist theory. Passing through a period of socialism is, in theory going to lead to "the withering away of the state" -- essentially total freedom and no government to speak of, and that is what they mean by the Communist stage of society. Thus, "democratic socialism" is entirely inconsistent with communist theory, since to fails to be sufficiently ruthless and therefore will fail to achieve true freedom. The failure of the state to ever wither away is one of the most fundamental flaws in communist practice.
Socialism is worse than communism as it can actually happen.
I'm trying to figure out why I'm not dismissing the Cold War as much as I did 10 years ago.... I guess I'm wrong headed and need to get over it, but, something's getting to me and I don't like it, but, I can't dismiss it either. Maybe it's just the military brat in me.
China is our stronger long term rival, but Russia represents a greater near term danger. I'm not sure how that compares to the Cold War where China, initially a loose cannon and a radical state, became a covert ally.
Yeah, I’ve got nothing there…I need to work on my gut reactions which come more from a USSR standpoint. Including my classical ballet background where escaping the Soviets was bigger than escaping the Chinese at the time.
Not being American, I don't have this horror of "socialism". When I was a child, the Labour Party was usually in power, and identified as "socialist". I'm not celebrating the Labour Party of those days, but it wasn't the horror that Americans see as "socialist".
If someone actually supports armed Marxist revolution, or something like that, then, OK, I'm solidly against that, but "socialism" just seems to me to be part of the spectrum of tolerable political ideologies, along with conservatism, etc.
I'm far more hostile to the social liberalism of the Democrats than to any supposed socialism. However, I can't see that the Republicans oppose that to any effective degree; they're all in for surrogacy, for example.
Anachronism or not, it would be fascinating to watch the Queers for Palestine contingent face off against Mao's fanatical Red Guards in a Peking stadium...
That might be fun, but Mao's Red Guards were dispersed in he 1970s, about the same time that his hand-picked successors were arrested and castigated as "The Gang of Four." The Red Guards were called into being by a sitting head of state and sustained by state funds. They had more in common with the Jan 6, 2021 beer hall putsch than they had with 1960s American student protesters. The Americans who worshiped their imagery had no idea of course.
Rod, not to give you another dark thing to dwell on, but have you ever heard of the podcast: New Orleans Unsolved? It’s actually difficult to believe. My jaw drops almost every episode. The narrator/researcher is an obsessive, a master of niggling details, annoying questions, random connections, and persistent stubbornness. Given that it’s in your stomping grounds and roughly the time period, you may want to at least know about it. The story is far from over. And I’m struggling to identify what I will take away from it. Right now, as a mom and teacher, just a fierce commitment to protecting children.
No, I didn't know about it. I'll look into it -- thanks.
If there's one point I always try to make about modern Left politics it's that no one is in charge—no leaders or leadership, no reigning institutions, no thinkers or public intellectuals. What's in charge is THE DOCTRINE.
The Doctrine is installed in the seminaries we call universities (and now even primary and secondary schools) and everyone from bureaucrats to activists to professors, politicians and even CEOs (down to buffoonish celebs, streamers and influencers) are all first and foremost loyal to the Doctrine and know that their careers and social lives exist only at its permission and one wrong word against it might bring a social and career death penalty. (Look at people like Seth Moulton or Scott Weiner, both loyal libs who sinned against the Doctrine and then suddenly needed police protection.)
But the Doctrine is also crowd-sourced, rigid yet amorphous enough to change if the urgencies of the moment and its news cycle demand it, and is easily hijacked by various opportunists and entrepreneurs. Thus the political herd keeps one leery eye on the Doctrine at all times, knows not to get too close or rouse it, and can only oppose it once a critical mass forms and there's safety in numbers. (Maybe the best example here is "Defund the Police": the idea/slogan has never been completely jettisoned or renounced, it was just moved from front row to back row and surrounded by a protective guard of media allies who work to either bury it or "contextualize" it. Thus the Doctrine remains intact, no one needed to risk their neck opposing it, it's just taken a vacation for now.)
But the Doctrine might be most useful as a weapon to destroy your enemies, "raise awareness" (of yourself), and make you one of the leaders of a supposedly righteous radical cause—and these tools will always be seized by the most unscrupulous people who will also strike terror into the hearts of the average person who has more to lose and prefers to go along to get along.
The DSA and its "Anti-Zionists" have simply captured Left morality and have the Dems by the balls for now. No Dems can oppose them because they have achieved a hostile takeover of the Doctrine and all Dems know that no matter, the Doctrine must not be sinned against—or else serious penalties await.
No Dems will stand up against the DSA etc until they can do so while not directly challenging the Doctrine and when they can get a coordinated herd of political and media allies to stand together. Tyrants can be cruel, but so can ideologies, especially when they're sacralized and weaponized.
The Fabian Society? Winston Marshall interview at https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xwJouc2ViF0&pp=ugUHEgVlbi1HQtIHCQmjCwGHKiGM7w%3D%3D
Excellent but never underestimate the Dems ability to co-opt those inDoctrinated with payoffs and offers of status & influence. See AOC, who went from socialist agitator with a fake economics degree to Democrat shill for Nancy Pelosi.
To be sure -- which makes them anything by socialist.
Doctrine is never in charge. It just lies on people's minds. The lack of leaders or leadership that can command obedience is the ultimate evidence that these are not communists. Alas, those who wish to critique them will have to do so on substance, not handy convenient labeling.
Correct. The Doctrine/Narrative - whatever you want to call it - reigns supreme. It's always bizarre to me how everyone on the Left parrots all the same talking points.
Western liberals (for lack of a better term) have undergone a full ideological capture, which most of them don't even realize, as they were gradually conditioned by their devices and by their social circles, where everyone they know thinks exactly the same (or else!). They've essentially been born again in a new faith and all its dogma, but live sealed inside epistemic echo chambers where their beliefs are invisible like water is to fish.
This is probably one of the most unmentioned aspects of the social media age (as mentioning it is also taboo and also it's slightly embarrassing to admit) and explains everything from just about every Western liberal leader from Germany to Canada to California having identical beliefs to a place like Scotland with few black people having BLM marches to the fact that every Western university has more or less the same curriculum.
Our global media and technology have created a global ideology that's now a class marker, litmus test, social signal and credential that separates globalist liberals from nationalists and other conservatives. The Doctrine is part of the mass homogenization of modern life and what holds all these different people in different countries together, who aspire to be (and maybe are) the world's first global ruling class. It's form is just as important as its content.
Exactly. It's bizarre to see European countries parrot the words of American SJWs such as Black Lives Matter when those countries don't even have black people. In contrast, people on the Right have more complexity and even diversity to their beliefs.
Hi Rod, Correction for you: Hong is running in WI and Tim Walz is MN gov. We unfortunately just moved to WI from Boston only to see this nonsense from Hong. She has recently denounced her defund police stance and other radical ones but a quick look at her site shows she's still a looney. God protect us.
Oh, shoot, right, how did I make that mistake? Thanks for the correction.
get some sleep.
I missed that you were confused. I thought you were merely comparing neighboring states.
Tony Evers, definitely a Democrat is current governor of Wisconsin.
You are right. What you are doing is important and necessary.
Your writing is a gift. Keep up the mission.
Rod, I think you’re spot on. I agree with you on where we are today in the world. There’s not a political solution at this point, it’s a spiritual problem. God has been forgotten. I have begun to tell people I think a hard winter is on the way Thank you for the extra post. Your writing helps me tell others. I find sending links is mostly a waste of time. You must be in close relationships. It’s almost impossible to persuade someone who are caught up in the algorithms of their preferred sources of information. Not much nuance today and that’s a problem.
Let’s not go down the despair path.
“You can either despair at the darkness, or light a little candle beneath it”(words from another substack I read today.)
Re: God has been forgotten.
This sort of claim always irks me. Millions of us go to church regularly and are mindful of God in our lives.
I just prayed for you Jon. I think a famous man who spent
time in the Soviet Union Gulag and wrote a book about it said something similar.
I apologize if you’re irked more now but hopefully you can figure out how not get triggered so easily.
Perhaps one problem today is the amount of time spent scrubbing the comment list on substack early Sunday morning. How the heck did we do life before the Internet and cell phone?
If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible what was the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men had forgotten God; that is why all this has happened.'
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Men have not forgotten God. In a couple hours I will be in church, which is proof that God is still worshiped and glorified
I understand and I’m thankful for that. I believe you haven’t forgotten God. The stats Rod often shares with us here about the people not going to church tells the sorry of the “we” but not the “you” Jon. Look at the historical data trends on church attendance. Have a nice day and may your worshiping of God today be pleasing to Him.
The strength or weakness of a society depends more on the level of its spiritual life than on its level of industrialization. Neither a market economy nor even general abundance constitutes the crowning achievement of human life. If a nation's spiritual energies have been exhausted, it will not be saved from collapse by the most perfect government structure or by any industrial development. A tree with a rotten core cannot stand.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Thank you Jon for your comment. I would not have revisited some of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn quotes. This one above ties in nicely with Rod’s post.
I owe you a longer response. I was catching my breath at the gym when I made my last one. (I also got drenched coming home-- we're having one of those famous Florida downpours and even just running twenty yards +*/to my car left me as wet as if I had just jumped in Tampa Bay.)
First thank you for the prayers.
I may have mistaken your meaning above, thinking it was along the lines of "God will punish us". After all, even in Genesis we see that God was willing to spare Sodom for just five righteous men. On the one hand I agree that we would be better off if the spiritual played a great role in our lives (I speak generally of course). On the other hand "useful" public religion tends to be shallow and is liable for corruption with worldly things.
Solzhenitsyn was a great writer who suffered terribly-- but suffering does not automatically confer sanctity or sagacity. Sometimes it just leaves one damaged. In his case he fell in with awfully unsavory types after the fall of Communism.
Do not mistake me for a Pollyanna who thinks all is well and we have only minor problems. Elsewhere in these comments this morning I have foreboded terrible things.
The gym!! Good for you!!! Thank you for making time.
Francesca Hong, huh?
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2026/08/train-wreck-in-wisconsin.php
I don't plan to vote for her in the primary, I may vote for the maverick Republican who is running a quixotic campaign against the favorite, Tom Tiffany. But she's not going to be a train wreck. She showed in the debate she is erudite, confident, down to earth, speaks softly and clearly, and had some appeal.
Excellent piece. Thanks for your insight and especially for the references. I will surely add them to my library.
The spiritual problem underlying the radicals is the result of the Marxist “long march”through the institutions resulting in much envy and no gratitude. You say the folks are having a hard time: rising prices etc. but I see 300 pound women in my waiting room who are told they live in a “food desert” but are on their cell phones (a much later model than the one I carry) with painted 2” fingernails (hard to do much manual labor sporting those) and tattoos galore. We hear AOC (cute and talented but not so bright) complain that it is not right that in America we can have billionaires while people in Alabama are hungry. Really, cutie? Mr Mamdani won the race for mayor but talks like he has never had a real job, or any job for that matter and wants folks to have free stuff. Geez.
Thanks for all your effort. I anxiously await Weimar America. I pray for your strength.
The "Long march through the institutions" is not Marxist at all. It substitutes sterile bureaucratic squabbling over terrain for the more arduous work of building working class organization. Those who advocated and accepted it should know better -- the institutions determine what the individuals staffing them can achieve, not the other way around.
~~The "Long march through the institutions" is not Marxist at all.~~
Overstatement. Rightly or wrongly, it attempted to achieve Marxist ends by "liberal" means.
I once knew a rather old communist who remarked that the ends only justify the means when the means actually get you to the ends desired. Trying to employ liberal means does not deliver Marxist ends... it merely makes would-be Marxists into de facto liberals.
Perhaps, but the point still holds, which is why I specified "rightly or wrongly."
It's an overstatement to say that the Long March isn't Marxist at all.
“The institutions determine what the individuals staffing them can achieve” what? The “institution” is the individuals staffing it. The long march involves rising to the top in the institution. Look at higher ed
Rod, if you've ever proposed a solution for the grievances of young people, I don't remember them. You condemn their investigation and attraction into radical political theories of the left or right, but never commit to formally stating what are alternative solutions to upending (or burning down) the current political order with either an extreme leftist or rightist system that would meet your sense of propriety.
Yes, yes, everyone needs Jesus. You do understand how that starts to sound like a cop out after the thousandth repetition, especially in a post- Christian world? Telling the Groyper he needs Jesus when he's focused on the fact that he can't afford to move out of parent's house is just not helpful. He's not thinking about Jesus when he can't afford to put a full tank of gasoline in his car. You don't want him to blame the Jews but you don't offer an alternative.
It's the same with immigration. You were on X this weekend, posting that "make a fire with your oak door" quote from The Camp of the Saints in response to the invasion of Spain by Moroccan hordes. It's the most blatant and obvious failure of a European government to protect their citizens, but all of Europe, including your beloved Hungary now, is guilty of it and have been for decades. The time for organized violence against migrants is long past. If the state won't exercise the monopoly on violence that it's supposed to have to protect the citizens, the citizens are going to have to do it themselves, if they still have the gumption to do it.
Except, of course, we're primarily talking about White people having to reclaim said gumption and enough pride in themselves and their culture to adopt violence to protect it and, gosh golly gee, that starts to sound a lot like eeeeeeeevil White Nationalism.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: this ends in blood. It always ends in blood. But you can't or won't countenance that. You see the problem pretty clearly most of the time. But you won't let yourself consider the harshest solutions.
most "conservatives" over the age of 50 are still self conscious about being called a racist/sexist/whatver-ist
Your criticism is correct except that, at my age of 66, I don't give a hoot about being called a racist/sexist.
I never did. But I'm familiar with James Baldwin's 1965 essay asserting "It is no longer important to be white, thank God, and soon it will no longer be important to be black." He referred to "those who continue to choose to think of themselves as white," and I realized, all I have to do is stop thinking of myself that way.
The problem with that Charlie is that even if you stop thinking of yourself as white, there are others who will continue to think of you as white. There is a lot of hatred against white people now. It will end in violence of some kind.
You would be amazed how it ties such people up in knots when I simply walk away from the artificial identity, adding "ain't nobody white except lepers and albinos." Sometimes I point out that the "black" identity is a figment of white supremacy, since nobody in Africa called themselves "black" until someone showed up from Europe and TOLD them they were "black." We have to start somewhere.
Why fret about what others think of you? That is only something you should do if you really are up to no good. I learned before I graduated high school that you do not let verbal bullies do their thing-- tell the gossips and slanderers to kiss your derriere and go about your business. Just shut them out. Being told "I don't give a [bleep] what you think" is exactly what such people need to hear.
I'm Southern, seventy four, and seem to remember that somewhere in cyberspace, someone did call me a racist. It was a pleasure for me to respond to the nitwit by telling him/her/it that I didn't read about segregation, or see a movie about it, I remember it.
I'm waiting for someone to tell me that I am white and was therefore unaffected by it, to which I will reply that the life of Christ, the code of morals and manners and devotions which constitute much of the inner life of a Christian, was already weighing heavily on me when I was still a child. I will be met with bafflement and muteness.
If someone tells you that you are white, tell them you have taken James Baldwin's advice, and stopped choosing to think of yourself as white." They may tell you that you can't do that. But just let them try to stop you.
Thank you. This has also been my biggest problem with Rod over the last few years.
However, to throw the question back, what do you suggest? Are you willing to propose a post-liberal alternative to the Enlightenment?
Since I think it's only fair, I'll step up first...
I believe liberal democracy was created to solve the problem of warring, confessional, European monarchs in the 17th century and has reached its logical endpoint. My preference for America is for a return to federalism and real state independence but that would require repealing the 14th amendment (which seems unlikely) and a willingness to tolerate radical political differences across states (which the Left likely can not.) The most likely outcome is an illiberal President who uses the imperial power of the office and an economic emergency (a Liz Truss style debt crisis or an extended govt shutdown) to sideline Congress and rule by degree. If that person is a Lenin (ideological leftist), I will oppose him. If he is a Hitler (racist), I will oppose him. If he is a Franco, I would support him.
I too would support a Franco or a Pinochet. And, like you, I wish that the United States "woulda coulda shoulda" return to a true Federalism that existed before the Civil War, but that's not on offer.
Ultimately I have been a Dissolutionist around here since Rod had his column at The Anerican Comservative. The idea of splitting the current United States into five or six separate nations is an even harder thing for people to wrap their heads around than accepting the rise and installation of a Franco.
As for immediate improvements for the lives of the disaffected youth, mass deportations of both illegal immigrants and non- citizen resident aliens along with severe visa restrictions and a near- total and indefinite immigration halt would do a lot for job prospects and lower the cost of housing. Yes, there would be some severe disruption in the short to medium term as Big Ag, Big Hospitality, and Big Construction lost their pools of immigrant not- quite- slave labor, but it would be worth it long- term.
Making student loan debt dischargeable in bankruptcy would help as well. Frankly, the list of left- wing and right- wing interventions in the economy I would be willing to embrace is long and diverse and neither political party is willing to embrace it.
Dukeboy, how could dissolution work, inasmuch as we all live together now? Who would go where and take what?
I can more easily imagine a thousand or more little republics or tyrannies within the country.
I don't actually think you have to split America. You just have to return to the original vision of federalism, a union of states that have common interests but may differ radically internally. Now that I think about it, America in 1789 bore a striking similarity to the structure of the Treaty of Westphalia.
However, I agree that this is even less likely than a Franco-type figure, especially considering our financial situation. Both assets and debts are always a problem in divorces (be they familial or national) but ask any divorce lawyer which is harder.
Re: I wish that the United States "woulda coulda shoulda" return to a true Federalism that existed before the Civil War
Meh, That was unworkable, as witness how it ended. I'd go with the Teddie Roosevelt era when we got serious about cleaning up our act, though I'd leave out the bully among nations foreign policy.
To add to what you would put, if smaller houses would be built, they would be more affordable for people. College should only be for careers like doctors and lawyers that require years of school. Most everyone else should be able to get by with a high school degree or some level of apprenticeship. I would get rid of no-fault divorce and stop pandering to every minute group that is only a small percentage of the population and yet wants to be the majority. I could go but these are just a few ideas.
I don't care about no fault divorce when people have no kids or their kids are adults already. But when there are minor kids in the mix their welfare is paramount. Adults are always free to make their own beds-- but not to drag their young children into them too.
Here I part company with Dukeboy. I thought he wanted to offer a political solution clearly distinct from the moribund Two Major Parties that Rod has failed to offer, as do the decripit democratic socialists, who are far too close to the Democratic Party. Under no circumstances would I support a Franco or a Pinochet. Nor would I return to the unstable federalism predating the Civil War. I would firmly reassert the full scope of the Constitution we have, reorganize the cabinet departments to focus on actual needs of the American population, and assemble all the historians still living who I relied on to get a grasp on American history to develop a common curriculum affirming what our common nation emerged from (yes that included slavery and Jim Crow). I'm not going to write a manifesto in a Comm Box, but there is plenty of room to reaffirm America in a manner seventy percent or more, crossing racial and ethnic and regional lines, can agree on.
When you figure out how to recreate a common moral framework and culture w/o a shared god, let me know.
(I'm not trying to be flippant. I'd sign onto that in a heartbeat. But I think that's even less likely than a Franco or federalist solution.)
I'm a First Amendment purist. We don't need a shared god. We do need a renewed commitment that it is not within the purview of the civil government to give any seal of approval to any religious faith, and that everyone is free to build their own relationship with God, subject to no government direction or interference. There are matters subject to the civil law, and we can agree on those without having a shared canon.
You still have to bring people together. To do that, people have to have pride in their country and think it's worth improving. There has to be a shared language and a shared culture even if not everyone has the same religion.
That's not as hard as you might think. We get the political parties out of the way for a short stretch, we can rediscover what we actually do have in common. If black soldiers can volunteer for both world wars in the teeth of Jim Crow, we can have shared pride in our country. Watch James Capra's "The Negro Soldier."
Libertarianism is insufficient to ground any society.
The way to fix things within the Constitution is a return to Federalism. Get rid of much of the government as it now exists and let the state do as they want. If that way isn't met, a dictator of some kind might be the only way to fix things. What will have to be done is to try and create a singular culture that people can get behind where they are proud of their country, speak one language and have similar beliefs. I have no doubt that if there is massive violence in the future, this method will be the one that is adopted to prevent further bloodshed.
Even the Constitution put strict limits on the states in some ways: they could not conduct their own economic policy in defiance of the Federal government or other states. They could not have their own foreign policy. They were required to give "full faith and credit" to the legal acts of other states. They were required to obey any legitimate Federal law. They must have a "republican" form of government-- no monarchs, aristocracies, theocracies or tyrannies, And since the Civil War proved the needed for somewhat stricter standards in some vital matters, civil rights laws (including the voter franchise) at the Federal level must be recognized by all states.
It ends in blood.
Rod seems to not want to not offend the Left or want to roll back 60 years of liberal gains, while crying about "jew haters" or "white nationalists", and pumping up Fuentes. Same old problem for the NRO types, playing "don't go fight back".
I would rather "burn it all down" than listen to more soft bemoaning of anyone taking notice what the destruction of our country and the withdrawal of opportunities for the young. I get the ideas of the accelerationists, who are tired of weak solutions.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to oppose mass migration.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to note the role of jewish individuals or organizations in pushing and funding mass migration.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to favor mass deportation.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to oppose funding Israel.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to oppose the Greater Israel project.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to note the problems created by the porn industry, nor noting the roles of jews creating and profiting from it.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to note three United States was a Christian nation from its founding, with only a few hundred jews in the country back then.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to discuss crime rates and the ethnicity of criminals, especially violent criminals.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to oppose Christian zionism and call it a heresy.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to note that jews have rejected Christ for 2 thousand years.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to modem judaism is largely a post-Christ creation, which grew in opposition to Christianity.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to say "Christ is king".
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to note the role of jews in the last 60 years of leftism in America and the West.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to note the role of jews in the communist revolution in Russia, and the huge role of jews in the mass murder of Russians in the Soviet Union.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to the role of jews in Hollywood, and leading the charge for moral destruction of American.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to oppose Israeli efforts in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to oppose globalism.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to oppose dual citizenship.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to oppose Neocons.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to oppose wars, such as against Iran.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to call out Mossad and its links to Epstein.
It is isn't "white nationalist" or "jew hating" to call out AIPAC and the outsized roll of jewish donors.
I could make this list 5 times longer. Either we talk openly about the issues and start fighting back or we can burn it all down, because it isn't worth saving.
The more pundits use "demon names" such as "racist" and "antisemite", which have no very little power over younger people, the more they misunderstand the young Right and isolate themselves away, making themselves irrelevant.
For someone who is skeptical of the flourishing of Jew hatred you certainly seem to have little but Jews, Jews, Jews on your mind.
They should make a special Alphabet cereal for anti - Semites. It would have a couple dozen of each letter, but as for the letters themselves, there would be only four: "w," "s," "j," "e". A guy like you could plays JEWS JEWS JEWS with it until everything got too soggy.
Inasmuch as you invoke Christianity, I suggest that you read Romans 9 - 11, paying special attention to chapter 11, because it looks very much as if The Lord has a Greater Israel eventually in mind for the people which rejected Him.
Exactly!
Rod is obsessed with antisemitism. I care about God, America, my family and truth. Noticing truths is refusing to live by lies.
Mr. Lime, are there any untrue statements in my list, or are they just uncomfortable things you would rather pretend didn't exist because they bother you and make you consider things you don't want to think about? I suspect it is the later, because denial is much easier than facing truths.
I liked Rod more when he was preaching, "Live not by lies", rather than carrying water for would be gatekeepers.
What you do not understand is that the Jews you dislike are not your enemies because they're Jews, but because they're secular Jews. All Christians should want the salvation of Jews, but in the meantime, the things you don't like about them would be strongly mitigated the more religious they became within their Judaism.
But you have the obsessed quality of the true anti - Semite, and I don't know that there is anything I could say which would change your mind. But be aware that as your animus strengthens, logically, it will find its rest only in an Auschwitz or a Buchenwald.
Projection is pathetic. Where did I say I dislike jews? You appear to be hate filled, calling others names. You have animus, and are projecting that on others. Repent of your blindness and projection.
I don't dislike jews. I don't worship jews either. They are who they are, and do not deserve special staus. And I am clear-eyed as to the role that some jews have in pushing leftism and anti-Americanism.
Jews rejected prophet after prophet, prior to rejecting Christ. And after rejecting Christ, they created a religion directly anti Christ.
They are blind and hostile to Christ and they will only be redeemed by Christ himself, when Christ comes. It appears you are also blind in others ways.
You can't accept that people can look objectively at something and not be full of hatred. Truth is truth, and some truths are painful and difficult to address.
Try to accept difficult truths, even against your own positions. You have shown no ability to do so, so I don't expect you to suddenly gain insight.
And stop projecting on others. Stick to objective truths. It will improve your life.
You're obsessed with them, and it's not because you love them.
Setting aside issues with the modern state of Israel, those hate the Jews are on a very, very, VERY dark road that leads down to Hell.
Maybe not, but telling a series of lies all focused on Jews and then denying that it is "Jew hating" lacks credibility.
What lies, Charlie? Point out a single one. You can't, so you lie about truth.
the role of jewish individuals or organizations in pushing and funding mass migration.
the roles of jews creating and profiting from it. (porn or anything else -- faux lefties like to pretend that Jews ran the slave trade, which I have rebutted at great length)
United States was a Christian nation from its founding
the role of jews in the last 60 years of leftism in America and the West. (The communists I used to associate with were mostly raised Roman Catholic, and defended politically doctrinaire approaches by comparing it to the role of doctrine in the Church)
the huge role of jews in the mass murder of Russians in the Soviet Union. (I did not list your similar remark about the role of Jews in the revolution -- Solzhenitsyn discussed that, as well as the way the party turned on a large part of its Jewish constituency afterward. Stalin proposed even before the revolution that Jews tended to be Mensheviks, so it might be good to have a pogrom in the party)
Much of the rest of your list consists of statements of personal opinion, which don't invoke the second coming of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, just that your opinion per se isn't anti-Jewish. On many topics, it isn't, including mass migration, wars, the global elite, etc. On some points, I even agree, such as opposing globalism, dual citizenship, neocons, among others. We agree in part and disagree in part on immigration, but to oppose immigration is not, per se, anti-Jewish. American Jews tend to be native born citizens at this point.
When you post a blizzard of unsubstantiated opinions, interspersed with tautological statements that are palpably false, you may feel good about venting your spleen, but you are not persuasive, and leave yourself open to being called on some falsehoods, which might even be characterized as lies.
Charlie, you want to deny truths and call it lies. Lies come from the devil, truth from God. And just because you don't like the truths, does not make them lies.
But you often challenge Jon for being the most obtuse poster here, so it isn't surprising.
Some Jews espouse an obnoxious politics. So what? So too do some people of British descent in our country-- do we hate all Anglo-Americans for that reason? Just say No to Group Think.
Quite a “little list” you got there, Pete.
I agree on most of this. The other thing I would add is that there also has to be a positive to go with the negative. Not only must what is wrong and destructive be condemned but there have to be good things to convince people that it's worth it to care about the nation. People will care if they are able to get married and have a family and have a good job that pays for things. They have to know that they won't have to worry about crime.
Re: Telling the Groyper he needs Jesus when he's focused on the fact that he can't afford to move out of parent's house is just not helpful.
Maybe some of those guys should get their act together, quit smoking pot, quit the video games and the porn, exercise away the spare rounds and, gasp, educate themselves in useful things (No, I am not saying "Go to college"). Oh, and quit throwing themselves pity parties. I do know young guys who are making it-- not easily and no they are not rich, but they do have lives, even girlfriends.
Re: this ends in blood.
Alas, it's much worse than that. It ends first in fire and then in ice. But not today.
Good grief, Jon. I know that it gets under your skin when I do this, but that right there is some pure, uncut Boomerism.
Are there young men (and women) who still live with their parents because they have no ambition and just smoke dope and play video games? Of course. Does that caricature apply to every or even a majority of the youth that still live at home? Absolutely not.
You don't have kids and you absolutely don't appreciate how screwed up the job and housing situation is for them post Covid. I'll use a very personal example.
My daughter graduated from a second- tier state university in May with a bachelor's degree in early childhood education and (only) five figures of student loan debt. She starts her first "real" full-time job with benefits and a 401K later this week. She will make a little over $3000 a month before taxes to start.
A one- bedroom apartment in the city where her new job is $800 a month for a (barely) decent place to $1600 a month for a place where her retired cop father would have no qualms at all about her living there. (It's in Lexington, so I absolutely know what's good and what's bad.)
The math doesn't math, so she'll still be living at home and commuting roughly 35 minutes each way to her new job. Her car is the 2016 Honda Civic I bought her senior year of high school, which is in very good shape and gets about the best gas mileage you can hope for in a non- hybrid car. $4 a gallon gas is still going to hurt.
My point is my kid has done everything she was "supposed" to do. College took a bit longer due to a couple of major changes and a pause to figure out what she really wanted to do that was stretched into two years partially due to Covid nonsense. She worked the entire time she was out of college and then part- time once she went back until she had to quit doing that while she did student- teaching her last semester.
She doesn't smoke weed, drink very much, or party. She does play video games, but so does her dad. She will still be living at home for the foreseeable future, even though she's got a leg- up on her peers in terms of family support. There will be wage increases and room for advancement at the place she's starting work. Maybe in a couple of years she can afford $1200+ a month for rent.
There are a lot of kids who don't have the advantages in family support that my kid has and I honestly don't see how they can make it on their own the way I did. Telling them that they should live in lousy neighborhood or have three roommates is just going to make them shut down when a lousy apartment still costs them $600 or more per person and they're only making $15 an hour. Telling them all to bootstrap themselves is Boomer nonsense given that starting wages have not kept anything close to what inflation has done to the cost of living over the last six years.
As always, I remind you I am early GenX- Reaganomics, MTV, Space Invaders, big hair, cocaine.i am well aware of inflation and the messed up job market- everyone is affected by that. Try being 50 something and job hunting. This isn't a Old vs Young issue. It isn't a culture war issue. It's straight up a classic struggle, working class vs owning class, issue.
I wish I could like this more. You hit the nail on the head. I'm nearly 37 and had to live with my parents for a few years after college because I didn't make enough to afford a place. Once I did, I moved out. I had to move back in with them for 6 months a few years ago and then moved out again and have been completely on my own for years now. It's hard though. Rent is expensive, car notes are expensive and houses are out of reach of many younger people. Your daughter is lucky to have a dad who loves and cares about her. Unfortunately, some kids don't have good parents to help them.
It does end in blood. Some of the problems of today will be solved in the future. But they will be solved after millions are dead. I don't care for either party. The Democrats made it clear that they hate me by embracing so much insanity. Too many Republicans care about nothing about tax cuts for the rich and supporting Israel at the drop of a hat. Younger people are frustrated and are listening to other people. Those who are older surprisingly don't seem to get why.
Rod, this is an issue of spiritual warfare. I would encourage you to read Dr. Gregory Boyd's book, God at War, published in 1997. Although it is 30 years old it speaks so clearly to this issue of spiritual warfare no one who reads this book will be able to deny the reality of the spiritual warfare driving us towards anarchy and rebellion.
John Bishop: Yes, Boyd's God at War is an impressive book and one Rod should look up.
Boyd's sermon series, The Myth of a Christian Nation is excellent.
Great stuff, Rod...though I continue to disagree with you about the urgency of the threat from the Woke Right or Groypers or whatever name you want to put on them.
Yes, some of their ideas are way off-base but they have not captured entire institutions or an entire political party. They don't have power. They don't have a leader who's going to give them power. They're a sideshow.
The threat is on the other side of the spectrum where a poisonous ideology has in fact come to dominate entire institutions, an entire political party, and the prevailing culture.
They have power and they're about to get more of it. And if you thought the recent government of the senile puppet they put in the White House was bad, well, stand by. It's going to get worse...and soon.
That's why I balk at pinning the word "Left" on them, much less "Communist." Those labels are from the last war. They are obsolete in our own day. Meaningless even.
Call them modern-day Jacobins, which is a lot more accurate. I mean, granted, as Solzhenitsyn argued, the Jacobins were the ideological and spiritual forefathers of the totalitarian Communism of the 20th century.
But the enemy now is not "Communism." Rather, this is a war between Good and Evil, Life and Death, Being and Emptiness, Michael and Lucifer. It's a story that has played out since the dawn of time (and before time).
We're just witnesses to and participants in the latest chapter...and unfortunately, as much as I like the guy, JD Vance is not going to save the day no matter what he says or which supposed villain he disavows.
Re: Call them modern-day Jacobins, which is a lot more accurate.
IMO, that actually hits closer to the mark.
You're correct, but the only people who know who the Jacobins are are readers of the eponymous magazine. And they're proud of it.
When a Disney executive talks about her nine-year-old "trans" daughter, one has to marvel at the absolute political & social cachet these people wield. And yet, despite the very real damage done to children, the trans agenda is ultimately a boutique issue affecting a sliver of the population while detracting from more pressing stuff. So let's oppose puberty blockers for children with all our might but let grown men in dresses enjoy their kink. Perhaps if we ignore them, they'll return to the closet or the over-21 cabaret clubs where they belong.
Paul, the trans phenomenon and the fact that support for it is a core plank in the Evil Party's platform is one reason...there are plenty of others...why I balk at terms like "Left" and "Communist" as accurate labels.
Trans has nothing to do with "Communism." Rather it has to do with an ideology at war with God and the age-old Christian moral code. Moreover, the supposed ascendance of the DSA is beside the point.
Who cares if they want to take over some grocery stores in New York. That's not the issue. The Democratic Party from which they hail holds to the same core ideology as the DSA. These are peas in the same pod.
We're going to wake up one morning to find them back in power. Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens will still be blathering as background noise and the conservatives who made the mistake of believing some podcasting malcontents to be an enemy as dangerous as the Dem-Media machine will be staring down the latter's gun barrels.
The notion that the "Woke Right" has any capability to actually seize power in this country is akin to the idea that native European populations are on the cusp of rising up in the streets to fight the corrupt elites who rule over them. It's a nice academic discussion that gets some people worked up but has no basis in reality.
Agreed. None of these Groypers or whatever have any political power. In contrast, members of the DSA are winning elections and when the Democrats get back in power, many of them will be position to do great damage to this country.
Unfortunately, the genie isn't going back in the bottle. As you correctly stated, this is an issue that affects a small sliver (0.5 percent last I heard) of the population. The fact that it's a national issue is the height of absurdity. But it's not going away. What needs to happen is that transing the kids need to be made illegal and grown men dressing like women in public should be ridiculed and made to feel unwelcome if there are kids around.
That reminds me when I used to read the Jacobin magazine online just for some balance with all the other publications I read. You are correct about calling them that. Ultimately, it doesn't matter what they are called. I know people who lived through communism and came to America and found success. These DSA people remind them of what they left behind.
AS THE BEST BIBLE TEACHER SELF -TAUGHT I EVER SAT UNDER, A BRETHREN LADY WHO OPENNED HER KING JAMES AND SPOKE FOR TWO HOURS, WEAVING A THREAD FROM BEGINNING TO END WITHOUT BENEFIT OF A SINGLE NOTE, HER COMMENTS SCATTERED THOUGHOUT. MANY I RECALL SOME FIFTY YEARS LATER. SHE WAS A FUNKY LITTLE LADY WHOSE APPERANCE BROUGHT NO SECOND GLANCES. ALL THIS TO SAY, ONE OF MY MOST REMEMBERED QUOTES AND I THINK IT APPLIES TO TUCKER AND MANY OTHERS......ONLY GOD KNOWS DECEIVED BRETHREN FROM THE FALSE. GOTTA SAY THIS GIVES ME HOPE. PS. FOR THOSE WHO FIND MY CAPS ANNOYING MY EYES ARE WEAK. SOME DAYS I HAVE TO COMMENT IN CAPS. OTHERWISE, I COULD NOT DO IT. I REALIZED ONLY HALFWAY THROUGH THIS HOW ANNYING THIS WAS TO SOME OF YOUR READERS. PLEASE BEAR WITH ME. I WILL TRY TO SKIP THE CAPS NEXT TIME AROUND. EYES WILLING.
This community would never be annoyed over such things, please continue to comment however you are able!