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Brett Alan Williams's Blog, page 4
May 2, 2022
May 2, 2022: Descent of the West? Part 2, Patrick J. Deneen’s verdict: Western Civilization Has Failed Because the Left and Right Succeeded
As James Davison Hunter remarks in the Foreword to Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, “In the young twenty-first century, liberal democracy, that system which marries majority rule to individual rights, has entered a crisis of legitimacy… Deneen’s is a radical critique, arguing that [classical] liberalism needs not reform but retirement. The problem is not that liberalism has been hijacked but that its elevation of individual autonomy was wrong from the start…” Or should that be, “the eventual sanctification of individual autonomy was the wrong outcome”?
Deneen’s idea can be simplified with an analogy where our social system—that product of Enlightenment philosophy—is a grinder of grain, and we are the grains. Gears in this machine thrash the natural health and goodness of those grains into bits and pieces of what was. While these bits are labeled “Whole Grains,” they are nothing of the sort. Instead of healthy wholeness, they’ve been converted to a substance little different from raw sugar, that source of (social) sugar highs and sugar crashes. While the bits that pile beneath this machine look to be in close proximity to one another, they’re severed from their natural attachments, living in isolation with only the appearance of connectedness. But in exchange, these bits acquire the freedom to be manipulated into all sorts of new and wonderous contortions, like pizza crust or breadsticks or lonely nonconformists. Curiously, the gears of this machine run on an odd fuel called “borderlessness.” Stranger than it sounds, it’s both a motive force that pushes gears forward with intent and direction, and an attractive force that draws the gears toward where they imagine they can be. Borderlessness is a powerful fuel sold by people of two stripes. One side advertises its utility in the grinder for the grain’s emancipation from things like national boundaries and gender, while the other side promotes its use in removing safety limits on guns and strip mines. The gears inside this grinder are of two kinds: the state and the market. The state and the market are just gears, they don’t know they’re smashing the healthy wholeness of grains, they just do. And by doing, they create a low-grade toxin for all who consume it, resulting in any number of ailments, from obesity and heart disease to diabetes and the death of Western civilization. Marketers give this process of converting grain's natural nature a happy name; they call it “Liberty.”
Per Deneen, “[Classical] liberalism created the conditions and the tools for assent of its own worst nightmare, yet it lacks the self-knowledge for its own culpability.” It failed because it succeeded, a success measured by its achievement of the opposite of its promise. Liberalism—that underlying philosophy of America’s Founders—is sinking after 250-years, not because something went wrong, but because, like our food industry built on whole-grain paste, it worked so impossibly well. And what worked so well dissolved the foundation that supported itself, as high-glycemic foods created the most lethally obese population on earth.
“By ancient and Christian understandings,” writes Deneen, “…self-rule was achieved only with difficulty requiring extensive habituation with virtue, particularly self-command and self-discipline over base but insistent appetites—the achievement of liberty required constraints on individual choice.” A condition achieved less by laws than by norms as custom, which Thomas Aquinas considered superior law. But the grinding philosophy of liberalism made liberty its opposite: “the greatest possible freedom from external constraints, including customary norms.” Where the only limitations come from “inferior laws” necessarily constructed by the state to maintain order on unfettered individuals. Liberalism obliterates custom and its norms.
That’s the philosophical and psychological effect of the system, but mechanically, procedurally, how does the grinder do what Deneen says it does?
The first gear: the state. “Liberalism rests upon a vicious and reinforcing cycle,” says Deneen, “in which state expansion secures the end of individual [barriers to liberty], in turn requiring further state expansion…”
The second gear: the market. “Sovereignty of individual choice in an economy requires demolition of artificial boundaries to a marketplace. The market—once a defined and limited space within the city—must ultimately become borderless.”
The fuel: borderlessness. It’s “the arbitrariness of almost every border [where] any differentiation, distinction, boundary, and delineation…come under suspicion as arbitrarily limiting individual freedom of choice.” Be they barriers to spending, barriers to expression, barriers imposed by nature, they “must increasingly be erased under the logic of liberalism.”
These all work together. “The logic of liberalism thus demands near-limitless expansion of both state and market,” Deneen writes. “A massive state architecture and a globalized economy, both created in the name of the liberation of the individual, combine to leave the individual powerless and overwhelmed by the very structures that were called into being in the name of freedom.” As the market grows, the state grows to manage it with “a felt loss of liberty.” As Plato noted, while liberty and license grow with behavior ever more released from social norms—which are, after all, obstacles to free choice—the state must swell to maintain order. Thus managing “a society without shared norms, practices, or beliefs…replacing all nonliberal forms of support for human flourishing…hollowing any deeply held sense of a shared future or fate among the citizenry.” Remember the once-lauded “American melting pot”? An idea that made aspirants greater by their unity, now exchanged for “identity”—segregation as sovereignty.
All this can be hard to see. Unlike the plainly authoritarian regimes of fascism and communism, “liberalism is less visibly ideological and only surreptitiously remakes the world in its image,” says Deneen, “liberalism is more insidious: it pretends to neutrality, claiming no preference and denying any intention of shaping the souls under its rule. It ingratiates by invitation to the easy liberties, diversions, and attractions of freedom, pleasure, and wealth. It makes itself invisible, much as a computer’s operating system goes largely unseen—until it crashes.” But ideologies eventually fail, “because as falsehoods become more evident, the gap grows between what the ideology claims and the lived experience of human beings under its domain… Either it enforces conformity to a lie it struggles to defend, or it collapses when the gap between claim and reality finally results in wholesale loss of belief among the populace.” Consider how Leninist-Marxist ideology worked out for the USSR. It took only seven decades, one lifetime, to fail.
As recognized by Hannah Arendt, Erich Fromm, and Robert Nisbet, the “signal feature of modern totalitarianism was that it arose and came to power through the discontents of people’s isolation and loneliness.” Three hundred million people in America, and according to the World Economic Forum, loneliness is an epidemic in this, one of the loneliest places on earth. A condition pressed for by liberalism of both Left and Right and they don’t know it, as we all now wonder how totalitarianism became so popular in America.
For social structures like thick communities of custom, tradition, and religion, today’s political Left sees these as oppressive of individual free expression. To liberal individualists, rules that service the community demand obedience—and they do, but this is not to be allowed because rules that demand obedience to individuals supersede those of community. Communities are to be opened for state inspection to assure no individual rights are violated, ensuring no coercion exists (although the Amish get away with it). Restraint—i.e., virtue—is an assault on Free Choice in worship of the Sacred Self with a minimum of attachments, expanding personal liberty, liberating moral judgment, disconnecting people from each other. Surprisingly, the Left then wonders why there’s little concern for the poor, why the rich want to keep all they can, why corporations would place profit above people and the planet. For liberals, communal belonging is a kind of weakness, needy, an insult to autonomy. Morality—that practice of ethical behaviors in a universe of more than one lone individual—is a matter of personal choosing.
On the Right, free choice is, among other things, manifested through consumerism. Conservatives seek unregulated laissez-faire markets for untrammeled consumption; Christian teachings of modesty and the rich man’s ban from heaven be damned. Religious prohibitions of covetous excess are impediments to profit. Markets will govern themselves the way they didn’t before Wall Street’s Great Recession. Ethics that stand in the way of eviscerating the environment or some other species for economic return is for “tree-huggers.” Markets must be protected by big government from poor, indigenous, or politically weak people in a say to their own lands if resources are discovered under it. Markets that relocate occupations overseas from the town they originated and were built from are simply engaged in “asset allocation” and “resource management” for “win-win, due diligence compactification across the enterprise eco-system.” (Huh?) Increased purchasing power of cheap goods is supposed to compensate for the export of high-paying manufacturing jobs. Profit is about the dollar, not the flag, except in China, and it’s certainly not about employees who provide return on investments and yet are expendable while investors somehow are not. Laws that allow corporate polluters to poison the very people that work for them—from coal miners with black lung to America’s Cancer Alley in Louisiana and Texas—are legislated by business-friendly conservative politicians. When it comes to cherished families and their values, try killing off a few—a regular occurrence—then see how their traditions stand up to it. Morality—that practice of ethical behaviors in a universe of more than one lone individual—is a matter for the rugged individual to judge.
While the New Right has garnered recent focus by their normalization of violence and immorality (remember the “Moral Majority”?), the Left and Right are on the same team. Both sides exercise all rights, no responsibilities, the alpha and omega of liberalism. The Founders did not give us a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities so the latter—comprised of duty and virtue in ample supply at the time—wasted away by the kryptonite of post-Enlightenment liberalism.
Notice that both Left and Right accused Deneen’s book “of promoting nostalgia for communities that limit mobility and individual liberty.” Indeed. True communities thrived on our sensitivities of connectedness, providing judgment and bearing, while state and market society thrive on our disconnectedness, providing liberation and perplexity. As political philosopher, Michael J. Sandel has it, “liberated and dispossessed.” Our replacement is the NASCAR “community,” the Facebook “community,” this afternoon’s mass murder “community.”
Deneen concludes, “To call for the cures of liberalism’s ills by applying more liberal measures is tantamount to throwing gas on a raging fire.” All this might cause us to “wonder whether America is…approaching the end of the natural cycle of corruption and decay that limits the lifespan of all human creations.”
And the solution?
He doesn’t say.
References:
Paragraph 1: “…autonomy was wrong from the start…” Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed, Yale University Press, 2018, pg. vii, viii. Hunter adds, “The symptoms of this ailment are easy to observe: an increasing skew in the distribution of wealth; decay in traditional institutions, from civic associations to labor unions to the family; a loss in trust of authority—political, religious, scientific, journalistic—and among citizens themselves…” pg. vii.
Paragraph 3: “…self-knowledge for its own culpability.” Ibid, pg. xvi; “…achievement of the opposite of its promise. Ibid, pg. 3, paraphrased.
Paragraph 4: “…constraints on individual choice.” Ibid, pg. xiii; “…including customary norms.” Ibid, pg. xiii.
Paragraph 6: “…in turn requiring further state expansion…” Ibid, pg. 62.
Paragraph 7: “…must ultimately become borderless.” Ibid, pg. xiv.
Paragraph 8: “…limiting individual freedom of choice.” Ibid, pg. xviii. “…the logic of liberalism.”: Ibid, pg. xviii. “…erased under the logic of liberalism.”
Paragraph 9: “in the name of freedom.” Ibid, pg. xii;“a felt loss of liberty.” Ibid, pg. xii. “…fate among the citizenry.” Ibid, pg. 62.
Paragraph 10: “…until it crashes.” Ibid, pg. pg. 5. “…belief among the populace.” Ibid, pg. 6.
Paragraph 11: “…isolation and loneliness.” Ibid, pg. 59. “…World Economic Forum…”: Kevin Loria, Most Americans are lonely, World Economic Forum, 3 May 2018. Amy Brannan, TOP 10 LONELIEST COUNTRIES IN THE WORLD, IMMIGroup, Aug 30, 2017.
Paragraph 15: “…mobility and individual liberty.” Deneen, pg. xxi. “liberated and dispossessed”: Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy, Belknap Press, 1998.
Paragraph 16: “…gas on a raging fire.” Ibid, pg. 4.
Until next time, Monday, July 4, 2022.
Deneen’s idea can be simplified with an analogy where our social system—that product of Enlightenment philosophy—is a grinder of grain, and we are the grains. Gears in this machine thrash the natural health and goodness of those grains into bits and pieces of what was. While these bits are labeled “Whole Grains,” they are nothing of the sort. Instead of healthy wholeness, they’ve been converted to a substance little different from raw sugar, that source of (social) sugar highs and sugar crashes. While the bits that pile beneath this machine look to be in close proximity to one another, they’re severed from their natural attachments, living in isolation with only the appearance of connectedness. But in exchange, these bits acquire the freedom to be manipulated into all sorts of new and wonderous contortions, like pizza crust or breadsticks or lonely nonconformists. Curiously, the gears of this machine run on an odd fuel called “borderlessness.” Stranger than it sounds, it’s both a motive force that pushes gears forward with intent and direction, and an attractive force that draws the gears toward where they imagine they can be. Borderlessness is a powerful fuel sold by people of two stripes. One side advertises its utility in the grinder for the grain’s emancipation from things like national boundaries and gender, while the other side promotes its use in removing safety limits on guns and strip mines. The gears inside this grinder are of two kinds: the state and the market. The state and the market are just gears, they don’t know they’re smashing the healthy wholeness of grains, they just do. And by doing, they create a low-grade toxin for all who consume it, resulting in any number of ailments, from obesity and heart disease to diabetes and the death of Western civilization. Marketers give this process of converting grain's natural nature a happy name; they call it “Liberty.”
Per Deneen, “[Classical] liberalism created the conditions and the tools for assent of its own worst nightmare, yet it lacks the self-knowledge for its own culpability.” It failed because it succeeded, a success measured by its achievement of the opposite of its promise. Liberalism—that underlying philosophy of America’s Founders—is sinking after 250-years, not because something went wrong, but because, like our food industry built on whole-grain paste, it worked so impossibly well. And what worked so well dissolved the foundation that supported itself, as high-glycemic foods created the most lethally obese population on earth.
“By ancient and Christian understandings,” writes Deneen, “…self-rule was achieved only with difficulty requiring extensive habituation with virtue, particularly self-command and self-discipline over base but insistent appetites—the achievement of liberty required constraints on individual choice.” A condition achieved less by laws than by norms as custom, which Thomas Aquinas considered superior law. But the grinding philosophy of liberalism made liberty its opposite: “the greatest possible freedom from external constraints, including customary norms.” Where the only limitations come from “inferior laws” necessarily constructed by the state to maintain order on unfettered individuals. Liberalism obliterates custom and its norms.
That’s the philosophical and psychological effect of the system, but mechanically, procedurally, how does the grinder do what Deneen says it does?
The first gear: the state. “Liberalism rests upon a vicious and reinforcing cycle,” says Deneen, “in which state expansion secures the end of individual [barriers to liberty], in turn requiring further state expansion…”
The second gear: the market. “Sovereignty of individual choice in an economy requires demolition of artificial boundaries to a marketplace. The market—once a defined and limited space within the city—must ultimately become borderless.”
The fuel: borderlessness. It’s “the arbitrariness of almost every border [where] any differentiation, distinction, boundary, and delineation…come under suspicion as arbitrarily limiting individual freedom of choice.” Be they barriers to spending, barriers to expression, barriers imposed by nature, they “must increasingly be erased under the logic of liberalism.”
These all work together. “The logic of liberalism thus demands near-limitless expansion of both state and market,” Deneen writes. “A massive state architecture and a globalized economy, both created in the name of the liberation of the individual, combine to leave the individual powerless and overwhelmed by the very structures that were called into being in the name of freedom.” As the market grows, the state grows to manage it with “a felt loss of liberty.” As Plato noted, while liberty and license grow with behavior ever more released from social norms—which are, after all, obstacles to free choice—the state must swell to maintain order. Thus managing “a society without shared norms, practices, or beliefs…replacing all nonliberal forms of support for human flourishing…hollowing any deeply held sense of a shared future or fate among the citizenry.” Remember the once-lauded “American melting pot”? An idea that made aspirants greater by their unity, now exchanged for “identity”—segregation as sovereignty.
All this can be hard to see. Unlike the plainly authoritarian regimes of fascism and communism, “liberalism is less visibly ideological and only surreptitiously remakes the world in its image,” says Deneen, “liberalism is more insidious: it pretends to neutrality, claiming no preference and denying any intention of shaping the souls under its rule. It ingratiates by invitation to the easy liberties, diversions, and attractions of freedom, pleasure, and wealth. It makes itself invisible, much as a computer’s operating system goes largely unseen—until it crashes.” But ideologies eventually fail, “because as falsehoods become more evident, the gap grows between what the ideology claims and the lived experience of human beings under its domain… Either it enforces conformity to a lie it struggles to defend, or it collapses when the gap between claim and reality finally results in wholesale loss of belief among the populace.” Consider how Leninist-Marxist ideology worked out for the USSR. It took only seven decades, one lifetime, to fail.
As recognized by Hannah Arendt, Erich Fromm, and Robert Nisbet, the “signal feature of modern totalitarianism was that it arose and came to power through the discontents of people’s isolation and loneliness.” Three hundred million people in America, and according to the World Economic Forum, loneliness is an epidemic in this, one of the loneliest places on earth. A condition pressed for by liberalism of both Left and Right and they don’t know it, as we all now wonder how totalitarianism became so popular in America.
For social structures like thick communities of custom, tradition, and religion, today’s political Left sees these as oppressive of individual free expression. To liberal individualists, rules that service the community demand obedience—and they do, but this is not to be allowed because rules that demand obedience to individuals supersede those of community. Communities are to be opened for state inspection to assure no individual rights are violated, ensuring no coercion exists (although the Amish get away with it). Restraint—i.e., virtue—is an assault on Free Choice in worship of the Sacred Self with a minimum of attachments, expanding personal liberty, liberating moral judgment, disconnecting people from each other. Surprisingly, the Left then wonders why there’s little concern for the poor, why the rich want to keep all they can, why corporations would place profit above people and the planet. For liberals, communal belonging is a kind of weakness, needy, an insult to autonomy. Morality—that practice of ethical behaviors in a universe of more than one lone individual—is a matter of personal choosing.
On the Right, free choice is, among other things, manifested through consumerism. Conservatives seek unregulated laissez-faire markets for untrammeled consumption; Christian teachings of modesty and the rich man’s ban from heaven be damned. Religious prohibitions of covetous excess are impediments to profit. Markets will govern themselves the way they didn’t before Wall Street’s Great Recession. Ethics that stand in the way of eviscerating the environment or some other species for economic return is for “tree-huggers.” Markets must be protected by big government from poor, indigenous, or politically weak people in a say to their own lands if resources are discovered under it. Markets that relocate occupations overseas from the town they originated and were built from are simply engaged in “asset allocation” and “resource management” for “win-win, due diligence compactification across the enterprise eco-system.” (Huh?) Increased purchasing power of cheap goods is supposed to compensate for the export of high-paying manufacturing jobs. Profit is about the dollar, not the flag, except in China, and it’s certainly not about employees who provide return on investments and yet are expendable while investors somehow are not. Laws that allow corporate polluters to poison the very people that work for them—from coal miners with black lung to America’s Cancer Alley in Louisiana and Texas—are legislated by business-friendly conservative politicians. When it comes to cherished families and their values, try killing off a few—a regular occurrence—then see how their traditions stand up to it. Morality—that practice of ethical behaviors in a universe of more than one lone individual—is a matter for the rugged individual to judge.
While the New Right has garnered recent focus by their normalization of violence and immorality (remember the “Moral Majority”?), the Left and Right are on the same team. Both sides exercise all rights, no responsibilities, the alpha and omega of liberalism. The Founders did not give us a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities so the latter—comprised of duty and virtue in ample supply at the time—wasted away by the kryptonite of post-Enlightenment liberalism.
Notice that both Left and Right accused Deneen’s book “of promoting nostalgia for communities that limit mobility and individual liberty.” Indeed. True communities thrived on our sensitivities of connectedness, providing judgment and bearing, while state and market society thrive on our disconnectedness, providing liberation and perplexity. As political philosopher, Michael J. Sandel has it, “liberated and dispossessed.” Our replacement is the NASCAR “community,” the Facebook “community,” this afternoon’s mass murder “community.”
Deneen concludes, “To call for the cures of liberalism’s ills by applying more liberal measures is tantamount to throwing gas on a raging fire.” All this might cause us to “wonder whether America is…approaching the end of the natural cycle of corruption and decay that limits the lifespan of all human creations.”
And the solution?
He doesn’t say.
References:
Paragraph 1: “…autonomy was wrong from the start…” Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed, Yale University Press, 2018, pg. vii, viii. Hunter adds, “The symptoms of this ailment are easy to observe: an increasing skew in the distribution of wealth; decay in traditional institutions, from civic associations to labor unions to the family; a loss in trust of authority—political, religious, scientific, journalistic—and among citizens themselves…” pg. vii.
Paragraph 3: “…self-knowledge for its own culpability.” Ibid, pg. xvi; “…achievement of the opposite of its promise. Ibid, pg. 3, paraphrased.
Paragraph 4: “…constraints on individual choice.” Ibid, pg. xiii; “…including customary norms.” Ibid, pg. xiii.
Paragraph 6: “…in turn requiring further state expansion…” Ibid, pg. 62.
Paragraph 7: “…must ultimately become borderless.” Ibid, pg. xiv.
Paragraph 8: “…limiting individual freedom of choice.” Ibid, pg. xviii. “…the logic of liberalism.”: Ibid, pg. xviii. “…erased under the logic of liberalism.”
Paragraph 9: “in the name of freedom.” Ibid, pg. xii;“a felt loss of liberty.” Ibid, pg. xii. “…fate among the citizenry.” Ibid, pg. 62.
Paragraph 10: “…until it crashes.” Ibid, pg. pg. 5. “…belief among the populace.” Ibid, pg. 6.
Paragraph 11: “…isolation and loneliness.” Ibid, pg. 59. “…World Economic Forum…”: Kevin Loria, Most Americans are lonely, World Economic Forum, 3 May 2018. Amy Brannan, TOP 10 LONELIEST COUNTRIES IN THE WORLD, IMMIGroup, Aug 30, 2017.
Paragraph 15: “…mobility and individual liberty.” Deneen, pg. xxi. “liberated and dispossessed”: Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy, Belknap Press, 1998.
Paragraph 16: “…gas on a raging fire.” Ibid, pg. 4.
Until next time, Monday, July 4, 2022.
March 7, 2022
March 7, 2022: Once Again, America is Asking, “Are Trump and His Party, Traitors?”
Just one week after Trump was staggered to find himself in office, on January 29, 2017, Republican Bush Administration State Department counselor Eliot Cohn wrote his prophetic acid bath blistering in The Atlantic. “Precisely because [Trump’s] problem is one of temperament and character, it will not get better. It will get worse as power intoxicates him… It will probably end in calamity. It will not be surprising if his term ends with impeachment… When you sell your soul to the Devil, he prefers to collect his purchase on the installment plan. To be associated with [Trump is] an exercise in moral self-destruction.”
So we’ve seen. From House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy cowering in a corner of the Capitol, by cell phone begging Trump to call off his jihadists, only to squat prostrate before Trump at Mara Largo two weeks later; to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell trying now desperately to shower off Trump’s orgasmic insurrection climax while, to the contrary, winking with a nod and a smile to Trump’s base, “Don’t resist. I liked it”; to what was once known as “conservative” FOX News—now popularly known as FOX RT—as it seeks to grow Russia’s coalition in the U.S. with broadcasts of Comrade Tucker Carlson’s nightly defense of the Kremlin. And with twice the viewership, as Tucker is also shown on state television in Moscow. As Carlson says , “Why shouldn’t I root for Russia? Which I am.”
Before we go further in this indictment, the word “treason” is being thrown about a lot in his country. How ‘bout a definition? Treason: “disloyalty or treachery to one’s own country or its government, giving aid or comfort to the enemy.” No small offense, almost universally around the world, the punishment for treason is a hanging or execution by a military firing squad.
So, who might America’s enemy be? One, in particular, has made the demise of America a top priority. This man doesn’t employ millions of bots and a 5000-man Troll Army to sucker gullible Americans into having fistfights in Texas because he loves us. He very much wants us to devour ourselves because—thanks in part to Ronald Reagan—he still cries at night over the implosion of his cherished USSR. A civilization that lasted a mere, trifling, pathetic seven decades; one lifetime and… poof. His name is Vlad, Russia’s Vladimir the Great as “conservative” Newsmax called him.
So, there’s that. But who might be “giving aid or comfort” to this enemy? Remember our Carnival Barker kneeling his abundance at Helsinki to lick Vladimer’s toe? Have we forgotten Trump’s secret meetings with Vlad, seizing the notes from a translator? Were we blinded with too much corruption to recall that Trump gave our bases in northern Syria to Vlad through an unannounced pullout and abandonment of the Kurds? Remember Trump’s foot-dragging of veto-proof sanctions against Russia? Could there have been a connection to Trump’s short-term National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s promise to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that Obama sanctions would be removed? Remember, way back, when Trump deleted anti-Russia, pro-Ukrainian language from the 2016 RNC plank? Was this portent of Trump’s halting of arms to Ukraine as part of his extortion pressure in 2018? (For those who believe Trump gave Ukraine, Javelin missiles, while Obama gave only “pillows and bed sheets,” click this reference for a laugh.) Was there any connection to Trump’s staff having 140+ meetings with Russians , their agents, or cutouts during his campaign? Why did Trump privately discuss destroying NATO and publicly call into question Article 5, that any attack on a NATO nation is an attack on the U.S.? Who could be the beneficiary of all this? Who gained when Trump gave Israeli secrets to Russians in the Oval Office?
As the list goes on and on, is there a discernable pattern here? Must the truth-telling side of our media persist in appearing reasonable when they say, “It’s curious,” “We wonder why,” “No one can understand”?
Really?
Have a regular listen with the investigative journalism of The Asset Podcast, where we find Russia’s grooming of Trump as a resource began with his loud and proud KGB meetings in 1987. Then validate their findings from reputable sources elsewhere. From what we’ve seen with our own eyes and countless documented examples, don’t we know the answer to the question posed above? Even if Trump acts—and so enthusiastically—as a hostage of blackmail in Vlad’s favor, is that not treason?
But what about the party? Has Lincoln’s GOP (Grand Old Party) become Trump’s GOPP (Grand Old Putin Party)? Is the whole Right-wing mess from Jewish-space-laser expert Marjorie Taylor Green to alleged child-sex-trafficker Matt Gaetz to conspiracy theorist Paul Gosar, whose five siblings made a TV commercial to announce their brother is nuts; are these people even capable of being traitors? Or are they simply, per conservative Reaganite Max Boot, “the Kremlin’s useful idiots”?
Let’s look at the party. During the House Intelligence Committee hearings concerning Trump’s attempted bribery of Ukrainian President Zelensky and subsequent cover-up, we witnessed former National Security Council Senior Director for European and Russian affairs, Dr. Fiona Hill, tutor the GOPP face-to-face. “Some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country,” Hill said, “and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did. This is a fictional narrative perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves… [Russia] deploys millions of dollars to weaponize our own false narratives to divide us against each other, degrade our institutions, and destroy the faith of the American people in our democracy… We are running out of time to stop them. [Don’t] promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests.” And what was the Republican response? They handed Hill their report claiming Ukraine was to blame for the 2016 U.S. election interference, not Russia—as though they knew what the CIA, NSA, FBI, and 14 other intel agencies did not.
On each day of the hearings, California House “Republican” ranking member Devin Nunez diverted from Russia with opening remarks that were a version of, “What is the full extent of Ukraine’s election meddling against the Trump campaign?” The answer was none. Nunez and his comrades were well aware of agency and Senate findings to the contrary. Nunez was later found to have been in Ukraine, secretly seeking conspiracy theories against Biden. Once revealed, he suddenly recalled his forgotten contacts with Giuliani co-conspirator and indicted Lev Parnas. But each day was another promotion of the Ukrainian conspiracy, part of Russian Ops explicitly traced to Vlad by U.S. intel and already briefed to Congress, including Nunez. Meanwhile, House “Republicans” Jim Jordan (OH), Mark Meadows (NC), Matt Gaetz (FL), Doug Collins, (GA), Mike Conaway, Louie Gohmert, and John Ratcliffe, all of Texas, promoted this or other Russian propaganda attached to Right-wing hot button issues like guns, Christianity, and abortion. Finally, Senator John Neely Kennedy of Louisiana chimed in with House comrades to assure it was Ukraine that fondled our elections, the next day he admitted it wasn’t, while the day after that it was Ukraine again. Wow. Liiiiiars. Soon after, “Republican” Senator Ted Cruz—whose father, according to Trump , assisted Lee Harvey Oswald in JFK’s assassination—joined the Russian Op. There’s an old saying that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Notice how the “Ukraine infiltrated our election” story became “China did.” No, it was Iran, then it was Venezuela… No, wait, QAnon said it was space aliens. Then it was Hillary again, after long ago it was Obama. None of their shit sticks. Yet they keep pitching it, undeterred by failure, the stench, and uproarious laughter. (Had they a memory, the New Right would laugh too.)
But why finger Ukraine for something Russia did to begin with? Would taking the blame off Vlad ease the pain of a man who murders people in other countries with Novichok? Could it have been that if Trump, his party, and propaganda machine convinced enough people that Vlad was the victim of Russia-bashing liberals, all Russian sanctions would vanish? Would that have affected Russia’s stumbling economy and Vlad’s power? Perhaps a bit like Trump’s removal of sanctions on Russian oligarchs that netted one of them hundreds of millions of dollars in a day. And if all this were to benefit America’s enemy, why would Trump’s party want to do that? Who gains when Congress welcomes Russian counter-intelligence operations as their own?
Hmm…
Recall, this is the same party for which the “Republican” Senate Majority Leader—whom House Speaker Nancy Pelosi addressed as Moscow Mitch McConnell—repeatedly blocked bills passed by the House that make collusion with foreign powers illegal.
More hmm…
While a sizable fraction of the rank-and-file naively swallows what the lie factories feed them, making it hard to blame them for more than extreme ignorance, 52% of their total claim to so love the Constitution they want it rescinded for authoritarian governance, clearing the way for Trump as dictator. This is the party that after Vlad invaded Ukraine, at their America First Political Action Conference, they chanted, “Putin! Putin! Putin!” And far from mere fringe, the party base that is CPAC doesn’t mind, as they idolize the leftovers of what Reagan called the “Evil Empire.”
By the time House Intelligence Committee hearings on Trump’s bribery commenced, the GOP that sanctioned Vlad was already dead. It took time for the GOP to become the GOPP, but it was surprisingly swift. As Max Boot wrote, what was once “the party of moral clarity” has “declared moral bankruptcy.” Cohn’s warning has come true. The Right-wing’s soul has been evacuated by the Devil that Cohn said they’d sell it to. While after seven of his closest minions became convicted felons, the Devil retains his freedom to spread lies. As Apostle John said, “He does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is the father of lies.” And still, the Devil has supporters—legions of them. Even after the Devil tried to overthrow the Constitution with an attack on the Capital that Al Qaeda hoped would do what their fourth plane didn’t. “Moral self-destruction” complete.
With Trump gushing over Vlad’s “genius” for invading Ukraine (genius, like Trump’s own, that’s proven to be embarrassingly stupid), with FOX RT on Russia’s side, with too much of the “Republican” Congress following Trump’s admiration of Vlad, is there really a question here?
Maybe it’s not that complicated. There’s an old saying in the American Midwest where I was born: If it walks like a traitor and quacks like a traitor, it’s probably a traitor.
All we need are the trial and its consequences. Imagine judgment in the affirmative and the consequences publicly televised for the world’s cathartic recovery. When it came time for Trump’s turn on the stage, as a game show host and World Wrestling Entertainment imp, he’d love the ratings. Finally, at long last, the whole world with every eyeball watching him, only him, just him. His inferiority disease might finally be quenched. For an instant.
References not linked to above:
Paragraph 3: Treason: “disloyalty or…” abbreviated from the American College Dictionary, 1979.
Until next time, Monday, May 2, 2022
So we’ve seen. From House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy cowering in a corner of the Capitol, by cell phone begging Trump to call off his jihadists, only to squat prostrate before Trump at Mara Largo two weeks later; to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell trying now desperately to shower off Trump’s orgasmic insurrection climax while, to the contrary, winking with a nod and a smile to Trump’s base, “Don’t resist. I liked it”; to what was once known as “conservative” FOX News—now popularly known as FOX RT—as it seeks to grow Russia’s coalition in the U.S. with broadcasts of Comrade Tucker Carlson’s nightly defense of the Kremlin. And with twice the viewership, as Tucker is also shown on state television in Moscow. As Carlson says , “Why shouldn’t I root for Russia? Which I am.”
Before we go further in this indictment, the word “treason” is being thrown about a lot in his country. How ‘bout a definition? Treason: “disloyalty or treachery to one’s own country or its government, giving aid or comfort to the enemy.” No small offense, almost universally around the world, the punishment for treason is a hanging or execution by a military firing squad.
So, who might America’s enemy be? One, in particular, has made the demise of America a top priority. This man doesn’t employ millions of bots and a 5000-man Troll Army to sucker gullible Americans into having fistfights in Texas because he loves us. He very much wants us to devour ourselves because—thanks in part to Ronald Reagan—he still cries at night over the implosion of his cherished USSR. A civilization that lasted a mere, trifling, pathetic seven decades; one lifetime and… poof. His name is Vlad, Russia’s Vladimir the Great as “conservative” Newsmax called him.
So, there’s that. But who might be “giving aid or comfort” to this enemy? Remember our Carnival Barker kneeling his abundance at Helsinki to lick Vladimer’s toe? Have we forgotten Trump’s secret meetings with Vlad, seizing the notes from a translator? Were we blinded with too much corruption to recall that Trump gave our bases in northern Syria to Vlad through an unannounced pullout and abandonment of the Kurds? Remember Trump’s foot-dragging of veto-proof sanctions against Russia? Could there have been a connection to Trump’s short-term National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s promise to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that Obama sanctions would be removed? Remember, way back, when Trump deleted anti-Russia, pro-Ukrainian language from the 2016 RNC plank? Was this portent of Trump’s halting of arms to Ukraine as part of his extortion pressure in 2018? (For those who believe Trump gave Ukraine, Javelin missiles, while Obama gave only “pillows and bed sheets,” click this reference for a laugh.) Was there any connection to Trump’s staff having 140+ meetings with Russians , their agents, or cutouts during his campaign? Why did Trump privately discuss destroying NATO and publicly call into question Article 5, that any attack on a NATO nation is an attack on the U.S.? Who could be the beneficiary of all this? Who gained when Trump gave Israeli secrets to Russians in the Oval Office?
As the list goes on and on, is there a discernable pattern here? Must the truth-telling side of our media persist in appearing reasonable when they say, “It’s curious,” “We wonder why,” “No one can understand”?
Really?
Have a regular listen with the investigative journalism of The Asset Podcast, where we find Russia’s grooming of Trump as a resource began with his loud and proud KGB meetings in 1987. Then validate their findings from reputable sources elsewhere. From what we’ve seen with our own eyes and countless documented examples, don’t we know the answer to the question posed above? Even if Trump acts—and so enthusiastically—as a hostage of blackmail in Vlad’s favor, is that not treason?
But what about the party? Has Lincoln’s GOP (Grand Old Party) become Trump’s GOPP (Grand Old Putin Party)? Is the whole Right-wing mess from Jewish-space-laser expert Marjorie Taylor Green to alleged child-sex-trafficker Matt Gaetz to conspiracy theorist Paul Gosar, whose five siblings made a TV commercial to announce their brother is nuts; are these people even capable of being traitors? Or are they simply, per conservative Reaganite Max Boot, “the Kremlin’s useful idiots”?
Let’s look at the party. During the House Intelligence Committee hearings concerning Trump’s attempted bribery of Ukrainian President Zelensky and subsequent cover-up, we witnessed former National Security Council Senior Director for European and Russian affairs, Dr. Fiona Hill, tutor the GOPP face-to-face. “Some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country,” Hill said, “and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did. This is a fictional narrative perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves… [Russia] deploys millions of dollars to weaponize our own false narratives to divide us against each other, degrade our institutions, and destroy the faith of the American people in our democracy… We are running out of time to stop them. [Don’t] promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests.” And what was the Republican response? They handed Hill their report claiming Ukraine was to blame for the 2016 U.S. election interference, not Russia—as though they knew what the CIA, NSA, FBI, and 14 other intel agencies did not.
On each day of the hearings, California House “Republican” ranking member Devin Nunez diverted from Russia with opening remarks that were a version of, “What is the full extent of Ukraine’s election meddling against the Trump campaign?” The answer was none. Nunez and his comrades were well aware of agency and Senate findings to the contrary. Nunez was later found to have been in Ukraine, secretly seeking conspiracy theories against Biden. Once revealed, he suddenly recalled his forgotten contacts with Giuliani co-conspirator and indicted Lev Parnas. But each day was another promotion of the Ukrainian conspiracy, part of Russian Ops explicitly traced to Vlad by U.S. intel and already briefed to Congress, including Nunez. Meanwhile, House “Republicans” Jim Jordan (OH), Mark Meadows (NC), Matt Gaetz (FL), Doug Collins, (GA), Mike Conaway, Louie Gohmert, and John Ratcliffe, all of Texas, promoted this or other Russian propaganda attached to Right-wing hot button issues like guns, Christianity, and abortion. Finally, Senator John Neely Kennedy of Louisiana chimed in with House comrades to assure it was Ukraine that fondled our elections, the next day he admitted it wasn’t, while the day after that it was Ukraine again. Wow. Liiiiiars. Soon after, “Republican” Senator Ted Cruz—whose father, according to Trump , assisted Lee Harvey Oswald in JFK’s assassination—joined the Russian Op. There’s an old saying that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Notice how the “Ukraine infiltrated our election” story became “China did.” No, it was Iran, then it was Venezuela… No, wait, QAnon said it was space aliens. Then it was Hillary again, after long ago it was Obama. None of their shit sticks. Yet they keep pitching it, undeterred by failure, the stench, and uproarious laughter. (Had they a memory, the New Right would laugh too.)
But why finger Ukraine for something Russia did to begin with? Would taking the blame off Vlad ease the pain of a man who murders people in other countries with Novichok? Could it have been that if Trump, his party, and propaganda machine convinced enough people that Vlad was the victim of Russia-bashing liberals, all Russian sanctions would vanish? Would that have affected Russia’s stumbling economy and Vlad’s power? Perhaps a bit like Trump’s removal of sanctions on Russian oligarchs that netted one of them hundreds of millions of dollars in a day. And if all this were to benefit America’s enemy, why would Trump’s party want to do that? Who gains when Congress welcomes Russian counter-intelligence operations as their own?
Hmm…
Recall, this is the same party for which the “Republican” Senate Majority Leader—whom House Speaker Nancy Pelosi addressed as Moscow Mitch McConnell—repeatedly blocked bills passed by the House that make collusion with foreign powers illegal.
More hmm…
While a sizable fraction of the rank-and-file naively swallows what the lie factories feed them, making it hard to blame them for more than extreme ignorance, 52% of their total claim to so love the Constitution they want it rescinded for authoritarian governance, clearing the way for Trump as dictator. This is the party that after Vlad invaded Ukraine, at their America First Political Action Conference, they chanted, “Putin! Putin! Putin!” And far from mere fringe, the party base that is CPAC doesn’t mind, as they idolize the leftovers of what Reagan called the “Evil Empire.”
By the time House Intelligence Committee hearings on Trump’s bribery commenced, the GOP that sanctioned Vlad was already dead. It took time for the GOP to become the GOPP, but it was surprisingly swift. As Max Boot wrote, what was once “the party of moral clarity” has “declared moral bankruptcy.” Cohn’s warning has come true. The Right-wing’s soul has been evacuated by the Devil that Cohn said they’d sell it to. While after seven of his closest minions became convicted felons, the Devil retains his freedom to spread lies. As Apostle John said, “He does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is the father of lies.” And still, the Devil has supporters—legions of them. Even after the Devil tried to overthrow the Constitution with an attack on the Capital that Al Qaeda hoped would do what their fourth plane didn’t. “Moral self-destruction” complete.
With Trump gushing over Vlad’s “genius” for invading Ukraine (genius, like Trump’s own, that’s proven to be embarrassingly stupid), with FOX RT on Russia’s side, with too much of the “Republican” Congress following Trump’s admiration of Vlad, is there really a question here?
Maybe it’s not that complicated. There’s an old saying in the American Midwest where I was born: If it walks like a traitor and quacks like a traitor, it’s probably a traitor.
All we need are the trial and its consequences. Imagine judgment in the affirmative and the consequences publicly televised for the world’s cathartic recovery. When it came time for Trump’s turn on the stage, as a game show host and World Wrestling Entertainment imp, he’d love the ratings. Finally, at long last, the whole world with every eyeball watching him, only him, just him. His inferiority disease might finally be quenched. For an instant.
References not linked to above:
Paragraph 3: Treason: “disloyalty or…” abbreviated from the American College Dictionary, 1979.
Until next time, Monday, May 2, 2022
February 26, 2022
A Letter to Ukraine: America’s Founding Father fought the world’s greatest military might, often without gunpowder; he triumphed, so can you
Ukraine:
The world is watching you with awe, admiration, and a strong sense of guilt. We see you thwart the Russian Army and shoot Russian jets from the sky as Putin targets civilians in apartment buildings the way he dropped barrel bombs on the people of Syria. All as ordinary Ukrainian citizens take up arms to defend the Homeland.
You have heard obscenities vomit forth from our National Loser, Donald Trump, and his bootlickers on FOX News, like Tucker Carlson, siding with Putin. But Trump is merely asking Vlad to help him again in the next election, thus keeping Trump out of prison, and to declare they’re still on the same team: “Please, Vladimir, keep that Golden Shower video hidden.” As for FOX, it’s FOX RT, and that’s Comrade Tucker, seen nightly on television in Moscow. Such is to be expected from Putin’s mouthpiece in America. The overwhelming majority of Americans support you with rallies across the country. The entire world, from Australia and New Zealand to South Korea and Japan, supports you.
Something like this happened in America 246 years ago. General George Washington’s ragtag army of volunteers had no training, no uniforms, often no shoes, food, guns, or gunpowder, and were repeatedly stricken with smallpox. Washington’s most significant achievements in 1776 were miraculous retreats to save what he had, to fight another day against civilization’s most powerful Army, its peerless Navy. The biggest economy on earth was sure to outgun and outlast a pathetic band of what British Generals called “sluggards, skulkers, and tavern patriots.” There were mistakes, miscalculations, blunders, stupidity, confident leadership, brilliance, grit, and luck. After repeated defeats, on the Eve of Christmas, 1776, Washington took his cadre of 2400 men across the Delaware River to achieve his first victory at Trenton, New Jersey. It was a small triumph but the first of many to come over a long and bloody war. Never should the David of America have defeated the Goliath of Great Britain. The same has been said of Ukraine against Russia.
Thanks to you, the fat man shirtless on his pony rode into a shit-storm. You are humiliating him. His own people are being arrested in the streets of Moscow by the thousands in protest against this war. Russian commercial aircraft are turning back home in flight, banned from the rest of Europe. Russian banks have been kicked out of SWIFT as Russian businesses ask customers to pay early before the money spigot dries up. More importantly, President Biden authorized $350 million more in weapons from U.S. stocks on Friday and called on Congress to spend $6.4 billion more.
Many of the troops you face are simply following orders, soldiers for Putin’s inferiority disease. Such are the tragedies of war. It’s them, or it’s you, your mother, your father, your wife, your son, your daughter. Fill the Kremlin with body bags.
Persist.
Endure.
Prevail!
The world is watching you with awe, admiration, and a strong sense of guilt. We see you thwart the Russian Army and shoot Russian jets from the sky as Putin targets civilians in apartment buildings the way he dropped barrel bombs on the people of Syria. All as ordinary Ukrainian citizens take up arms to defend the Homeland.
You have heard obscenities vomit forth from our National Loser, Donald Trump, and his bootlickers on FOX News, like Tucker Carlson, siding with Putin. But Trump is merely asking Vlad to help him again in the next election, thus keeping Trump out of prison, and to declare they’re still on the same team: “Please, Vladimir, keep that Golden Shower video hidden.” As for FOX, it’s FOX RT, and that’s Comrade Tucker, seen nightly on television in Moscow. Such is to be expected from Putin’s mouthpiece in America. The overwhelming majority of Americans support you with rallies across the country. The entire world, from Australia and New Zealand to South Korea and Japan, supports you.
Something like this happened in America 246 years ago. General George Washington’s ragtag army of volunteers had no training, no uniforms, often no shoes, food, guns, or gunpowder, and were repeatedly stricken with smallpox. Washington’s most significant achievements in 1776 were miraculous retreats to save what he had, to fight another day against civilization’s most powerful Army, its peerless Navy. The biggest economy on earth was sure to outgun and outlast a pathetic band of what British Generals called “sluggards, skulkers, and tavern patriots.” There were mistakes, miscalculations, blunders, stupidity, confident leadership, brilliance, grit, and luck. After repeated defeats, on the Eve of Christmas, 1776, Washington took his cadre of 2400 men across the Delaware River to achieve his first victory at Trenton, New Jersey. It was a small triumph but the first of many to come over a long and bloody war. Never should the David of America have defeated the Goliath of Great Britain. The same has been said of Ukraine against Russia.
Thanks to you, the fat man shirtless on his pony rode into a shit-storm. You are humiliating him. His own people are being arrested in the streets of Moscow by the thousands in protest against this war. Russian commercial aircraft are turning back home in flight, banned from the rest of Europe. Russian banks have been kicked out of SWIFT as Russian businesses ask customers to pay early before the money spigot dries up. More importantly, President Biden authorized $350 million more in weapons from U.S. stocks on Friday and called on Congress to spend $6.4 billion more.
Many of the troops you face are simply following orders, soldiers for Putin’s inferiority disease. Such are the tragedies of war. It’s them, or it’s you, your mother, your father, your wife, your son, your daughter. Fill the Kremlin with body bags.
Persist.
Endure.
Prevail!
January 3, 2022
January 3, 2022: Descent of the West? Part 1, A Preamble.
“The long democratic recession is deepening,” says Freedom House in their annual assessment of democracy’s global retreat. Of 195 nations, the U.S. ranks 61st. After 16-years of decline, 2020 was the worst as tyrannies ascended worldwide.
Patrick J. Deneen opens his book Why Liberalism Failed, with a quote from Barbara Tuchman, “When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down. Legend and story have always reflected this….” Deneen’s book is about classical liberalism employed by America’s Founders to invent a country. His thesis—addressed in future posts—is that liberalism was destined to crash by the social logic of its origin, the most brilliant philosophical movement in the record of our species.
Sociopolitical breakdowns referenced by Tuchman and Deneen are evident to anyone in the West today. Particularly America, as we lurch from one debacle, fiasco, or calamity to the next. The 2003 Iraq War bade by the Big Lie of Saddam’s WMDs having nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11; 2008’s Great Recession, begged for by the Big Lie of self-regulated laissez-faire markets; the 2021 terrorist attack on our Capitol and Constitution with continued assaults on the rule of law as coordination for the next coup and powered by the Big Lie of a stolen election. And just when we hoped a competent, mentally stable adult was at the helm: Biden’s inept Afghan-escape on the heels of The Afghanistan Papers showing 20-years of Vietnam War-like mismanagement, bungling, and lies. On historical timescales, these events are simultaneous. The gap between ideal and real is now cavernous.
Like the latest transient fad, “Why?” is all the rage. Except—outside Putin and American lie factories—this topic occupies serious thinkers like Deneen, George F. Will, Michael J. Sandel, Sam Harris, Timothy Snyder, Yuval Levin, and with the rise of China, it appears not so transient.
The Decline of the West is a longstanding refrain, the title of Oswald Spengler’s 1923 book. Like the Second Coming, it’s been going to happen any day now every handful of decades. Like repeated claims the Roman Republic was about to collapse until Cicero got it right.
Those ideals Tuchman refers to are idealizations we humans invent to avert similar disasters. They stabilize us by accommodating dramatic changes we impose on ourselves through that unstoppable knack for human innovation, technological and social, all amplified on a massively overpopulated planet. Innovation never disappoints in delivering unexpected benefits and undreamed-of punishment. No one can foresee what those will be. Innovations pile atop innovations in branching interaction trees of an interlaced n-dimensional space, where those dimensions are family, work, politics, religion, environment, economics, warfare. Our idealizations are another kind of innovation: what is a family, what the nation means, what is the “pursuit of happiness.” Some idealizations we convert into norms, institutions, and laws. They seek to patch what we broke with the last innovation or the x-innovations before that, leading to the tangled nest of unintended consequences we face in the present. Our ideals, our idealizations, are what Yuval Noah Harari labels as myths. As Harari writes in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, “Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have lived in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees, and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations, and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees, and lions depend on the grace of imagined entities like the United States and Google.”
Let’s call these imagined realities “social myths.” There are also religious myths and our burgeoning trade in conspiracy theories. While religious myths violate the laws of nature, they satisfy the laws of human nature; what Marcel Gauchet calls the illogical solution to our illogical condition: death. Conspiracy theories are myths more appropriately known as lies, so abnormally inane they challenge the notion our race could ever be “successful” in population dominance while simultaneously so ignorant and gullible. Currently, this last category of myth appears most efficacious as religious and social myths are tumbling for the adoration of deceit.
Per Harari, it is myth that bound the city, State, then Empire with imaginings of origins, belonging, and duties that fostered coordination between multitudes of utter strangers. Eventually, we would invent myths about other things that do not exist in nature, like democracy and capitalism built on more elemental myths we call freedom, rights, and “maximized utility of rational consumers.” So thoroughly can we embrace these stories that tangible outcomes follow from our sometimes brilliant, at others ridiculous, but always fertile imaginations.
And in that resides a problem. The dirty little secret is out—again. That realization made by every religion to ever exist: when people question their myths, they risk doubt. We invented these tales about democracy; we can uninvent them. And we have. Expanding that doubt is now an American industry aided by hostile foreign powers.
On January 6, 2021, just 32 years after Ronald Reagan’s “City on a Hill” and “Morning in America,” the world saw dozens of American myths collapse in a day. With 1/6 two decades after 9/11, Al Qaeda cheered the broadcasts coming from Capitol Hill, expecting the target of their fourth plane to be taken down by Trump’s jihadists. After an initial shock that Trump might launch a strike against China to rally America and somehow seize power, Chinese Communist Party leadership toasted their predictions of America’s vertical decline. And Vladimir Putin celebrated with his American assets in U.S. government and Right-wing media, the next step of their mission accomplished. On that day, Americans lost their myth of exceptionalism: “the belief that the United States is immune to tribalism and authoritarianism that plague other parts of the world.” We joined the ranks of Banana Republics as a coup planned and attempted by a setting executive uncoiled before our eyes. We all watched the gleeful rejection of the teachings of Christ by Christians; beating, injury, and murder or attempted murder of police by the “law and order party” who “back the blue;” mobs, some carrying a pocketbook Constitution, chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” for failure to exercise his nonexistent Constitutional power to overturn a record 81-million votes. All as Confederate flags from a defeated enemy nation were flown in the building under which George Washington set its cornerstone, the flagbearers shouting “1776! 1776! This is 1776, mother fuckers!” Traitors as “patriots;” assets of China and Russia who call themselves “conservatives.”
There’s an old Chinese adage, “Kill with a borrowed sword.” Why coordinate costly actions to destroy a nation when their own people can be used to do it themselves?
After the assault, with alacrity enabled by asocial media, New Right propaganda machinery, and post-truth GOPP operatives, myths were fabricated on the fly. The insurrection was nothing more than tourists blowing off some steam; it was Antifa; it never happened; it did happen, but it was an inside job staged by the FBI; insurrectionists were “hugging and kissing” the cops they hospitalized; the treasonous Ashli Babbitt is a martyr; the cops mauled by Trump’s troops were, according to FOX’s Laura Ingraham, poor actors; and according to FOX host Tucker Carlson’s “documentary,” it was both a heroic act by concerned citizens and instigated by the government, like 9/11, when it wasn’t Al Qaeda that brought down those towers. Any or all of these myths can be heard on the same day for whatever suits the moment, mood, and credulity of the audience; credulity without limit.
The very transience of these myths, embraced with the most pious devotion then swapped in an instant for another just as reverent, reinforces what we all sense. Myths, of any form—including those crafted with remarkable intellectual horsepower that once built and sustained America—are dead, or so close to terminal, we wonder if the Republic will survive another 11 months or 3 years when midterm and general elections arrive. With tenacious support of their robeless King of the Liars by “Christians,” to whom Apostille Paul said, “We no longer lie to one another, we only tell the truth,” it’s clear the myth of a “Christian Right” has also expired. With the New Right’s normalization of immorality, violence, and laws that allow some “Republican” State legislatures to flip elections if they lose the vote, the end feels near. All done in daylight under the Mein Kampfian fantasy of “Stop the Steal,” while Democrats stand by, baffled, feeble, and apparently incapacitated by their too-slight control of Congress.
When Trump torched the norms of the highest office in the land, he broadcast for all the world to see that even the pinnacle of America’s image—epitomized by once hallowed names like Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln—is akin to folklore. But for the amateurs, there are no consequences for violating laws, the Constitution, religion, because these are myths that maintain authority only if we believe them. Almost no one knew this. Such things were assumed to be real. Like ancient gods, they depended on the people for their existence, not the other way around. When people stopped believing in their gods, their gods vanished and so too their civilizations.
For creatures like us, reason coupled to morality, which together fabricated America’s myths, were not favored to win over savagery in the long run. When conservative William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan battled Republican parasites from the John Birch Society, Buckley said, “We’ve always had more crazies on our side.” How would Buckley and Reagan put all those cranks back in their cage with tens of millions now loose in the country? As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Events are in the saddle now, and they ride mankind.” And as Voltaire said of Trump 250-years before Trump was spawned, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
So we’ve seen.
From the books by authors noted above, could there be a glimmer of light that points out of our cave? Let’s find out. But before we grasp for such a light, we’re sure to wonder, is it a spark or an ember?
References
Paragraph 1: Freedom in the World 2021: Freedom in the World 2021, Freedom House.
Also, see Anne Appelbaum’s November 2021 Atlantic Monthly article, The Bad Guys Are Winning, cyber, advisors, and trade coordinated between the world’s autocracies have formed a new mafia against democratic governments. In the West, parties coordinate against each other. Anne Applebaum, THE BAD GUYS ARE WINNING, The Atlantic, November 15, 2021.
Paragraph 2: Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed Yale University Press, 2018, Frontmatter.
Paragraph 3: Suzanne Goldenberg, Bush: Saddam was not responsible for 9/11, The Guardian, Sep 11, 2006.
Bruce Riedel, 9/11 and Iraq: The making of a tragedy, Brookings, September 17, 2021.
Anne Field, What caused the Great Recession?, Business Insider, Jul 8, 2021.
ERIN COGHLAN, LISA MCCORKELL AND SARA HINKLEY, What Really Caused the Great Recession?, IRLE U.C. Berkely, SEPTEMBER 19, 2018.
Michael Waldman, Trump’s Big Lie Led to Insurrection, Brennan Center For Justice, January 12, 2021.
David Rothkopf, We Still Won’t Admit Why So Many People Believe the Big Lie: Six months after the insurrection it triggered, it’s clear that the stolen-election nonsense is just a drop in a tidal wave of bullshit., The Daily Beast, Jul. 06, 2021.
Deirdre Shesgreen, 'Egregiously mishandled' or inevitably 'messy'? What went wrong in US withdrawal from Afghanistan, USA TODAY, August 29, 2021.
Craig Whitlock, AT WAR WITH THE TRUTH, Washington Post, Dec. 9, 2019.
Paragraph 6: Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, VINTAGE, 2011, pg. 36.
Paragraph 7: Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, Princeton University Press, 1997.
Paragraph 10: Robin Wright, The World Shook as America Raged, The New Yorker, Jan. 8, 2021.
Isaac Stanley-Becker, Top general was so fearful Trump might spark war that he made secret calls to his Chinese counterpart, new book says, Washington Post, September 14, 2021.
Charles Maynes, As US Reels From Capitol Violence, Russia Enjoys the Show, Voice Of America, January 07, 2021.
Peter Beinart, Obama’s Idealists: American Power in Theory and Practice, Foreign Affairs, November/December 2919, pg. 162-169.
Paragraph 11: GOPP: Grand Old Putin Party, as differentiator from the old, dead GOP of Reagan, Eisenhower, and Lincoln.
Cameron Peters , The GOP whitewash of the Capitol attack shows the need for a January 6 commission /i>, VOX, May 16, 2021.
Jake Lahut, We watched Tucker Carlson's Jan. 6 documentary so you don't have to. Here's why its whitewash of the Capitol insurrection makes no sense, Business Insider, Nov 22, 2021.
Connor Perrett, Liz Cheney said she refuses to 'whitewash' the Capitol Riot, calling Republicans who do 'disgraceful and despicable', Business Insider, May 16, 2021.
Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’ release of texts from FOX hosts telling Trump to stop the insurrection, shows by their coverup which side FOX is on. They don’t call it FOX RT for nothing. Dartunorro Clark, Fox News hosts, Donald Trump Jr., asked Meadows to get Trump to call off rioters, NBC News, Dec. 13, 2021.
Paragraph 12: Ephesians 4:25.
Matt Vasilogambros, Republican Legislators Curb Authority of County, State Election Officials, PEW, July 28, 2021.
Paragraph 13: Caveats to the notion of myth: First, the notion of myth is broadened beyond Joseph Campbell’s definition to include the popular use of the term, as in the lies of conspiracy theories. Second, if the ancient Aristotelian notion of Natural Law were revived in terms of human nature and shown to be an emergent property of biology, serving the survival of the individual and thus the species, might then some categories of myths may be seen as objective aspects of that Natural Law, realities of human nature? i.e. as real as any other physical characteristic emergent from other physical characteristics, like the property of wetness from water, a molecule that feels dry until a critical threshold in number is reached.
Paragraph 14: Erick Trickey, Long before QAnon, Ronald Reagan and the GOP purged John Birch extremists from the party, Washington Post, January 15, 2021.
49,000,000 comes from 66% of 74,000,000 who voted for Trump and believe the election was stolen. Of FOX RT viewers, that’s 82%. Even more radical Right-wing media has a 97% conviction rate. Clearly, the dimmest people watch the stupidest programming. What a surprise. No wonder Putin is so successful here. PRRI Staff, The “Big Lie”: Most Republicans Believe the 2020 Election was Stolen, PRRI, 05.12.2021.
Until next time, the first Monday in March, the 7th, 2022.
Patrick J. Deneen opens his book Why Liberalism Failed, with a quote from Barbara Tuchman, “When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down. Legend and story have always reflected this….” Deneen’s book is about classical liberalism employed by America’s Founders to invent a country. His thesis—addressed in future posts—is that liberalism was destined to crash by the social logic of its origin, the most brilliant philosophical movement in the record of our species.
Sociopolitical breakdowns referenced by Tuchman and Deneen are evident to anyone in the West today. Particularly America, as we lurch from one debacle, fiasco, or calamity to the next. The 2003 Iraq War bade by the Big Lie of Saddam’s WMDs having nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11; 2008’s Great Recession, begged for by the Big Lie of self-regulated laissez-faire markets; the 2021 terrorist attack on our Capitol and Constitution with continued assaults on the rule of law as coordination for the next coup and powered by the Big Lie of a stolen election. And just when we hoped a competent, mentally stable adult was at the helm: Biden’s inept Afghan-escape on the heels of The Afghanistan Papers showing 20-years of Vietnam War-like mismanagement, bungling, and lies. On historical timescales, these events are simultaneous. The gap between ideal and real is now cavernous.
Like the latest transient fad, “Why?” is all the rage. Except—outside Putin and American lie factories—this topic occupies serious thinkers like Deneen, George F. Will, Michael J. Sandel, Sam Harris, Timothy Snyder, Yuval Levin, and with the rise of China, it appears not so transient.
The Decline of the West is a longstanding refrain, the title of Oswald Spengler’s 1923 book. Like the Second Coming, it’s been going to happen any day now every handful of decades. Like repeated claims the Roman Republic was about to collapse until Cicero got it right.
Those ideals Tuchman refers to are idealizations we humans invent to avert similar disasters. They stabilize us by accommodating dramatic changes we impose on ourselves through that unstoppable knack for human innovation, technological and social, all amplified on a massively overpopulated planet. Innovation never disappoints in delivering unexpected benefits and undreamed-of punishment. No one can foresee what those will be. Innovations pile atop innovations in branching interaction trees of an interlaced n-dimensional space, where those dimensions are family, work, politics, religion, environment, economics, warfare. Our idealizations are another kind of innovation: what is a family, what the nation means, what is the “pursuit of happiness.” Some idealizations we convert into norms, institutions, and laws. They seek to patch what we broke with the last innovation or the x-innovations before that, leading to the tangled nest of unintended consequences we face in the present. Our ideals, our idealizations, are what Yuval Noah Harari labels as myths. As Harari writes in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, “Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have lived in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees, and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations, and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees, and lions depend on the grace of imagined entities like the United States and Google.”
Let’s call these imagined realities “social myths.” There are also religious myths and our burgeoning trade in conspiracy theories. While religious myths violate the laws of nature, they satisfy the laws of human nature; what Marcel Gauchet calls the illogical solution to our illogical condition: death. Conspiracy theories are myths more appropriately known as lies, so abnormally inane they challenge the notion our race could ever be “successful” in population dominance while simultaneously so ignorant and gullible. Currently, this last category of myth appears most efficacious as religious and social myths are tumbling for the adoration of deceit.
Per Harari, it is myth that bound the city, State, then Empire with imaginings of origins, belonging, and duties that fostered coordination between multitudes of utter strangers. Eventually, we would invent myths about other things that do not exist in nature, like democracy and capitalism built on more elemental myths we call freedom, rights, and “maximized utility of rational consumers.” So thoroughly can we embrace these stories that tangible outcomes follow from our sometimes brilliant, at others ridiculous, but always fertile imaginations.
And in that resides a problem. The dirty little secret is out—again. That realization made by every religion to ever exist: when people question their myths, they risk doubt. We invented these tales about democracy; we can uninvent them. And we have. Expanding that doubt is now an American industry aided by hostile foreign powers.
On January 6, 2021, just 32 years after Ronald Reagan’s “City on a Hill” and “Morning in America,” the world saw dozens of American myths collapse in a day. With 1/6 two decades after 9/11, Al Qaeda cheered the broadcasts coming from Capitol Hill, expecting the target of their fourth plane to be taken down by Trump’s jihadists. After an initial shock that Trump might launch a strike against China to rally America and somehow seize power, Chinese Communist Party leadership toasted their predictions of America’s vertical decline. And Vladimir Putin celebrated with his American assets in U.S. government and Right-wing media, the next step of their mission accomplished. On that day, Americans lost their myth of exceptionalism: “the belief that the United States is immune to tribalism and authoritarianism that plague other parts of the world.” We joined the ranks of Banana Republics as a coup planned and attempted by a setting executive uncoiled before our eyes. We all watched the gleeful rejection of the teachings of Christ by Christians; beating, injury, and murder or attempted murder of police by the “law and order party” who “back the blue;” mobs, some carrying a pocketbook Constitution, chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” for failure to exercise his nonexistent Constitutional power to overturn a record 81-million votes. All as Confederate flags from a defeated enemy nation were flown in the building under which George Washington set its cornerstone, the flagbearers shouting “1776! 1776! This is 1776, mother fuckers!” Traitors as “patriots;” assets of China and Russia who call themselves “conservatives.”
There’s an old Chinese adage, “Kill with a borrowed sword.” Why coordinate costly actions to destroy a nation when their own people can be used to do it themselves?
After the assault, with alacrity enabled by asocial media, New Right propaganda machinery, and post-truth GOPP operatives, myths were fabricated on the fly. The insurrection was nothing more than tourists blowing off some steam; it was Antifa; it never happened; it did happen, but it was an inside job staged by the FBI; insurrectionists were “hugging and kissing” the cops they hospitalized; the treasonous Ashli Babbitt is a martyr; the cops mauled by Trump’s troops were, according to FOX’s Laura Ingraham, poor actors; and according to FOX host Tucker Carlson’s “documentary,” it was both a heroic act by concerned citizens and instigated by the government, like 9/11, when it wasn’t Al Qaeda that brought down those towers. Any or all of these myths can be heard on the same day for whatever suits the moment, mood, and credulity of the audience; credulity without limit.
The very transience of these myths, embraced with the most pious devotion then swapped in an instant for another just as reverent, reinforces what we all sense. Myths, of any form—including those crafted with remarkable intellectual horsepower that once built and sustained America—are dead, or so close to terminal, we wonder if the Republic will survive another 11 months or 3 years when midterm and general elections arrive. With tenacious support of their robeless King of the Liars by “Christians,” to whom Apostille Paul said, “We no longer lie to one another, we only tell the truth,” it’s clear the myth of a “Christian Right” has also expired. With the New Right’s normalization of immorality, violence, and laws that allow some “Republican” State legislatures to flip elections if they lose the vote, the end feels near. All done in daylight under the Mein Kampfian fantasy of “Stop the Steal,” while Democrats stand by, baffled, feeble, and apparently incapacitated by their too-slight control of Congress.
When Trump torched the norms of the highest office in the land, he broadcast for all the world to see that even the pinnacle of America’s image—epitomized by once hallowed names like Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln—is akin to folklore. But for the amateurs, there are no consequences for violating laws, the Constitution, religion, because these are myths that maintain authority only if we believe them. Almost no one knew this. Such things were assumed to be real. Like ancient gods, they depended on the people for their existence, not the other way around. When people stopped believing in their gods, their gods vanished and so too their civilizations.
For creatures like us, reason coupled to morality, which together fabricated America’s myths, were not favored to win over savagery in the long run. When conservative William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan battled Republican parasites from the John Birch Society, Buckley said, “We’ve always had more crazies on our side.” How would Buckley and Reagan put all those cranks back in their cage with tens of millions now loose in the country? As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Events are in the saddle now, and they ride mankind.” And as Voltaire said of Trump 250-years before Trump was spawned, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
So we’ve seen.
From the books by authors noted above, could there be a glimmer of light that points out of our cave? Let’s find out. But before we grasp for such a light, we’re sure to wonder, is it a spark or an ember?
References
Paragraph 1: Freedom in the World 2021: Freedom in the World 2021, Freedom House.
Also, see Anne Appelbaum’s November 2021 Atlantic Monthly article, The Bad Guys Are Winning, cyber, advisors, and trade coordinated between the world’s autocracies have formed a new mafia against democratic governments. In the West, parties coordinate against each other. Anne Applebaum, THE BAD GUYS ARE WINNING, The Atlantic, November 15, 2021.
Paragraph 2: Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed Yale University Press, 2018, Frontmatter.
Paragraph 3: Suzanne Goldenberg, Bush: Saddam was not responsible for 9/11, The Guardian, Sep 11, 2006.
Bruce Riedel, 9/11 and Iraq: The making of a tragedy, Brookings, September 17, 2021.
Anne Field, What caused the Great Recession?, Business Insider, Jul 8, 2021.
ERIN COGHLAN, LISA MCCORKELL AND SARA HINKLEY, What Really Caused the Great Recession?, IRLE U.C. Berkely, SEPTEMBER 19, 2018.
Michael Waldman, Trump’s Big Lie Led to Insurrection, Brennan Center For Justice, January 12, 2021.
David Rothkopf, We Still Won’t Admit Why So Many People Believe the Big Lie: Six months after the insurrection it triggered, it’s clear that the stolen-election nonsense is just a drop in a tidal wave of bullshit., The Daily Beast, Jul. 06, 2021.
Deirdre Shesgreen, 'Egregiously mishandled' or inevitably 'messy'? What went wrong in US withdrawal from Afghanistan, USA TODAY, August 29, 2021.
Craig Whitlock, AT WAR WITH THE TRUTH, Washington Post, Dec. 9, 2019.
Paragraph 6: Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, VINTAGE, 2011, pg. 36.
Paragraph 7: Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, Princeton University Press, 1997.
Paragraph 10: Robin Wright, The World Shook as America Raged, The New Yorker, Jan. 8, 2021.
Isaac Stanley-Becker, Top general was so fearful Trump might spark war that he made secret calls to his Chinese counterpart, new book says, Washington Post, September 14, 2021.
Charles Maynes, As US Reels From Capitol Violence, Russia Enjoys the Show, Voice Of America, January 07, 2021.
Peter Beinart, Obama’s Idealists: American Power in Theory and Practice, Foreign Affairs, November/December 2919, pg. 162-169.
Paragraph 11: GOPP: Grand Old Putin Party, as differentiator from the old, dead GOP of Reagan, Eisenhower, and Lincoln.
Cameron Peters , The GOP whitewash of the Capitol attack shows the need for a January 6 commission /i>, VOX, May 16, 2021.
Jake Lahut, We watched Tucker Carlson's Jan. 6 documentary so you don't have to. Here's why its whitewash of the Capitol insurrection makes no sense, Business Insider, Nov 22, 2021.
Connor Perrett, Liz Cheney said she refuses to 'whitewash' the Capitol Riot, calling Republicans who do 'disgraceful and despicable', Business Insider, May 16, 2021.
Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’ release of texts from FOX hosts telling Trump to stop the insurrection, shows by their coverup which side FOX is on. They don’t call it FOX RT for nothing. Dartunorro Clark, Fox News hosts, Donald Trump Jr., asked Meadows to get Trump to call off rioters, NBC News, Dec. 13, 2021.
Paragraph 12: Ephesians 4:25.
Matt Vasilogambros, Republican Legislators Curb Authority of County, State Election Officials, PEW, July 28, 2021.
Paragraph 13: Caveats to the notion of myth: First, the notion of myth is broadened beyond Joseph Campbell’s definition to include the popular use of the term, as in the lies of conspiracy theories. Second, if the ancient Aristotelian notion of Natural Law were revived in terms of human nature and shown to be an emergent property of biology, serving the survival of the individual and thus the species, might then some categories of myths may be seen as objective aspects of that Natural Law, realities of human nature? i.e. as real as any other physical characteristic emergent from other physical characteristics, like the property of wetness from water, a molecule that feels dry until a critical threshold in number is reached.
Paragraph 14: Erick Trickey, Long before QAnon, Ronald Reagan and the GOP purged John Birch extremists from the party, Washington Post, January 15, 2021.
49,000,000 comes from 66% of 74,000,000 who voted for Trump and believe the election was stolen. Of FOX RT viewers, that’s 82%. Even more radical Right-wing media has a 97% conviction rate. Clearly, the dimmest people watch the stupidest programming. What a surprise. No wonder Putin is so successful here. PRRI Staff, The “Big Lie”: Most Republicans Believe the 2020 Election was Stolen, PRRI, 05.12.2021.
Until next time, the first Monday in March, the 7th, 2022.
November 1, 2021
November 1, 2021: Humanity’s First Colossal Blunder
When it happened, it must have been a sunny day as it almost always was in that part of the world. That part of the world the famous University of Chicago archeologist James Henry Breasted (1865-1935) labeled the “Fertile Crescent.” A geographical crescent that arcs up from the Nile, through Israel, into Turkey, and down the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in modern-day Iraq. It was there, somewhere around 10,000 years ago, that a single person recognized something remarkable: seeds that grew near the plants they fell from could grow anywhere.
Hired by Breasted to be the Oriental Institute’s field director, Henri Frankfort (1897-1954) concluded that before civilization, the world was seen by “man as neither inanimate nor empty but redundant with life; life as individuality, in man, beast, plant, and in every phenomenon [from] the thunderclap, to the shadow, to the stone which suddenly hurt him when he stumbles.” The rock chose to hurt him on that fall. Just as often, the rock chose not to. Whatever individual will that made those seeds grow, it could will them to grow near the campsite for easy harvest. Tending the soil and waiting for spring forced an end to the wandering life as the campsite became a settlement. As population geneticist Spencer Wells tells it in Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization, ten millennia ago, “we made a conscious decision to change our relationship with nature.” We went from finding our food to creating it. “The first person to plant a seed in the Fertile Crescent 10,000 years ago,” says Wells, “set in motion events that were beyond his or her wildest imagination.” What had been a medley of people and the natural world took its first step to becoming the factory floor of an agri-planet. If not the first, that act was one of the first disenchantments of the world.
But wasn’t farming an improvement in hunter-gather lives? On the BBC, anthropologist James Suseman said, “The Juhoansi bushmen of the Kalahari Desert were famous as having been the people who torpedoed the idea that hunter-gathers lived lives that were nasty, brutish, and short. [They] sustained themselves well on the basis of about 15 hour’s effort in the food quest per week. Once those immediate needs for that day were met, people would take it easy and would hang out, tell jokes, tell stories, eat and relax… [With] farming, on the other hand, all work becomes future-focused. That means you have to focus on accumulating surpluses. So, you had these early agricultural religions where hard work becomes a virtue, idleness, and sloth a sin. Our obsession with wanting to do more comes from the risks of farming, and they’ve been baked into us ever since 10,000 years ago when people started experimenting with agriculture.”
With farming, humans did little but work: clearing fields, breaking ground, weeding other species, carrying water and lugging animal feces around with its stink to make wheat happy. “The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice, and potatoes,” writes Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. “These plants domesticated Homo sapiens…” With the increase in food supply, the population grew. Mothers could have a baby each year (ouch). “Babies were weaned at an earlier age—they could be fed on porridge and gruel. Extra hands were sorely needed in the fields. But the extra mouths quickly wiped-out food surpluses, so even more fields had to be planted. [How could they know] that feeding children more porridge and less breast milk would weaken their immune system, and that permanent settlements would be hotbeds for infectious diseases? [Dependent] on a single source of food, they exposed themselves even more to the depredations of drought.” Child mortality soared; settlements grew with possessions to be possessed by, inviting warfare; and all the while, evolving pathogens that could find a way to leap from newly domesticated four-legged creatures to those on two did just that.
And yet, hunter-gathers had been hunter-gathering for 60,000 years in our latest hominid version. Such a deep history of success made their descendants, the ancients, paranoid of change. Wasn’t this also true of hunter-gathers, and if life got harder, why do it? Because the Agricultural “Revolution” played out in very slow motion, says Harari. It took generations to transform close-knit communities of onetime wanderers into progressively overpopulated, disconnected, materialists. And while farming is hell for individuals, it’s great for the species. In a brilliant statement of what should be obvious, Harari writes, “The currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain, but copies of DNA. Just as the economic success of a company is measured by dollars in a bank, not how happy its employees are. This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.” Humans put themselves on a path to massification; massified by mass production, mass traffic, mass communication, mass waistlines, mass murders, and who wouldn’t want to be massified by asocial media turning their democracies upside down?
But those democracies would come later as one of many attempts to manage all those unstable humans that agriculture produced. And at the level of the individual, not very healthy humans at that. With agriculture, female life span dropped, not to be recovered for 9000 years. Male height struggled to recuperate for 7000 years. Skeletons spanning centuries show “People were not only dying younger,” writes Wells, “they were dying sicker.” As Harari puts it, “The Agricultural Revolution was history’s greatest fraud.”
According to philosopher-historian Marcel Gauchet and his spellbinding Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, a dramatic psychological change also occurred somewhere between the Agricultural Revolution and invention of the State. This new lifeway which would lead to cities, which led to states, which led to empires, “transformed everything that humans had held against themselves to maintain permanent identity with the past into a reversal of unrestrained action against everything around them,” writes Gauchet. "The old way submerged human order in nature’s order, feeling at one with nature, a co-belonging so strong any damage done required ritual compensation restoring the balance. Nature became opposed and possessed in a renunciation of this world in the name of the other.” With divinity exiled from nature, nature became de-sanctified, external to man.
See Genesis 9; written ca. 500 B.C during the Iron Age, well into empires, long past the ag-revolution but still a dominant lifeway, when Yahweh tells Noah: “Breed, multiply and fill the earth. Be the terror and the dread of all the animals on land and all the birds of heaven, of everything that moves on land and all the fish of the sea; they are placed in your hands. Every living thing will be yours to eat, no less than the foliage of the plants… Be fruitful then and multiply, teem over the earth and subdue it!” Compare this with the hunter-gatherer perspective expressed by Chief Seattle: “Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle. Every sandy shore. Every mist in the woods. Every meadow. Every humming insect. All are holy in the memory and experience of my people… Perfumed flowers are our sisters. The bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers… The earth does not belong to man. Man belongs to the earth.”
Not anymore. Agriculture—the creation of biodiversity deserts—has denuded more land space than the continents of Europe, South America, and North America, including Canada, the U.S., Mexico, and Greenland combined. According to a 2018 National Academy of Sciences report, humans have terminated 83 percent of all wild mammals, just 17 percent remains, largely due to agriculture. Add birds, amphibians, and reptiles, and over two-thirds have disappeared in just the 50-years since 1970. Export our harvesting practice to the oceans and we see marine populations in a cascade collapse worldwide. Anthropogenic mass has even surpassed the mass of all life on the planet, including that gargantuan sum marshaled by plant life (500 billion tons) with a staggering 1.2 trillion tons of manmade stuff. And all this before we tally the damage of manmade global warming where even earth’s poles are under assault. On that score, were it not for 93 percent of excess heat absorbed by the world’s oceans our average atmospheric temperature would be 122°F (50°C). Nature is now confused with too much alteration, too fast to evolve compensation. No wonder we live in the sixth great extinction. The last one happened 66 million years ago, thanks to mass volcanic eruptions preparing the way for an asteroid to finish off 76% of all life on earth.
But of course, neither agriculture, nor carbon dioxide jacked into the atmosphere for energy production would be globally ruinous if humans had not so overpopulated the planet. As so often, the problem is not one of kind, but of degree. We’re the asteroid, our numbers. And that problem started on a sunny day in the Fertile Crescent by just one person.
Who says one individual can’t change the world?
REFERNCES:
Paragraph 1: Agriculture was independently invented multiple times at between 7 and 10 different locations on earth. The Fertile Crescent was fertile for more than crops and animal husbandry; it’s also the region where writing, the wheel, the city, the temple, beer, and the sexagesimal number system with sixty seconds to each minute of a sixty-minute hour would later be invented. A land of fertile ideas, including state sponsored slaughter in coordinated warfare to steal those agricultural gains.
Paragraph 2: Henri Frankfort, H.A. Frankfort, John A. Wilson, Thorkild Jacobsen, Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Man, Pelican Books, 1971, pg. 14. Originally published as The Intellectual Adventures of Ancient Man, 1946.
Spencer Wells, Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization, Random House, 2010, pg. 16.
Ibid. pg. 24.
Paragraph 3: Daniel Susskind, The Compass, BBC podcast, June 2021.
Paragraph 4: Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Vintage, 2011, pg. 90.
Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Vintage, 2011, pg. 97.
Paragraph 5: Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Vintage, 2011, pg. 94.
Paragraph 6: Spencer Wells, Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization, Random House, 2010, pg. 23-24. Lifespans did not reach modern levels until public health of the late 19th century and early 20th.
Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Vintage, 2011, pg. 90-91.
Paragraph 7: Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, Princeton University Press, 1999. Gauchet’s focus is the advent of the state as a primary mover of social change. With the state built on and after the agricultural revolution, unraveling the unique contributions of each to our change in perspective is not addressed in his treatment. In his review of Gauchet’s work, Paul J. Fitzgerald S.J. finds “In this alienation of the sacred… the source of all dualistic religious and philosophical constructs, from Plato's theory of forms to the distinction between the mortal body and the immortal soul.” Paul J. Fitzgerald S.J., Book Review, Fairfield University, 1998.
Paragraph 8: Genesis 9:1-4, 9:7, The New Jerusalem Bible, Doubleday, 1985, pg. 26-27.
Joseph Campbell, Transformations of Myth Trough Time, Harper Perennial, 1999, pg. 28-29. To be sure, the two selections selected emphasize the point at the exclusion of tribal warfare between Native tribes, and “the Promised Land” perspective of the Israelites. Though it was a land “promised,” not so much “promising,” as were the abundant lands inhabited by Native Americans. Stern environments yield stern religions.
Paragraph 9: Hannah Ritchie, Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture, Our World in Data, November 11, 2019.
James Owen, Farming Claims Almost Half Earth’s Land, New Maps Show, National Geographic, December 8, 2005. In 1700, 7 percent of earth’s land space was occupied by crops and livestock. Today, that’s almost 50 percent of all habitable land.
Damian Carrington, Humans just 0.01% of all life but have destroyed 83% of wild mammals, The Guardian, 21 May 2018.
Living Planet Report, 2020, WWF. Available as PDF: Living Planet Report, 2020, WWF, 2020.
Catrin Einhorn, Shark Populations Are Crashing, With a ‘Very Small Window’ to Avert Disaster, The New York Times, Jan. 27, 2021.
More than 37,400 species are threatened with extinction, IUCN Red List.
Rasha Aridi, Human-Made Materials Now Weigh More Than All Life on Earth Combined, Smithsonian Magazine, December 11, 2020.
Brian Resnick and Javier Zarracina, All life on Earth, in one staggering chart, VOX, Aug 15, 2018.
Yinon M. Bar-On, Rob Phillips, Ron Milo, The biomass distribution on Earth, Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, June 19, 2018.
Zoë Schlanger, If oceans stopped absorbing heat from climate change, life on land would average 122°F, QUARTZ, November 29, 2017.
Laffoley & Baxter Ed, Explaining Ocean Warming, IUCN, 2016. A very big pdf report.
Until next time, January 3, 2022.
Hired by Breasted to be the Oriental Institute’s field director, Henri Frankfort (1897-1954) concluded that before civilization, the world was seen by “man as neither inanimate nor empty but redundant with life; life as individuality, in man, beast, plant, and in every phenomenon [from] the thunderclap, to the shadow, to the stone which suddenly hurt him when he stumbles.” The rock chose to hurt him on that fall. Just as often, the rock chose not to. Whatever individual will that made those seeds grow, it could will them to grow near the campsite for easy harvest. Tending the soil and waiting for spring forced an end to the wandering life as the campsite became a settlement. As population geneticist Spencer Wells tells it in Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization, ten millennia ago, “we made a conscious decision to change our relationship with nature.” We went from finding our food to creating it. “The first person to plant a seed in the Fertile Crescent 10,000 years ago,” says Wells, “set in motion events that were beyond his or her wildest imagination.” What had been a medley of people and the natural world took its first step to becoming the factory floor of an agri-planet. If not the first, that act was one of the first disenchantments of the world.
But wasn’t farming an improvement in hunter-gather lives? On the BBC, anthropologist James Suseman said, “The Juhoansi bushmen of the Kalahari Desert were famous as having been the people who torpedoed the idea that hunter-gathers lived lives that were nasty, brutish, and short. [They] sustained themselves well on the basis of about 15 hour’s effort in the food quest per week. Once those immediate needs for that day were met, people would take it easy and would hang out, tell jokes, tell stories, eat and relax… [With] farming, on the other hand, all work becomes future-focused. That means you have to focus on accumulating surpluses. So, you had these early agricultural religions where hard work becomes a virtue, idleness, and sloth a sin. Our obsession with wanting to do more comes from the risks of farming, and they’ve been baked into us ever since 10,000 years ago when people started experimenting with agriculture.”
With farming, humans did little but work: clearing fields, breaking ground, weeding other species, carrying water and lugging animal feces around with its stink to make wheat happy. “The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice, and potatoes,” writes Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. “These plants domesticated Homo sapiens…” With the increase in food supply, the population grew. Mothers could have a baby each year (ouch). “Babies were weaned at an earlier age—they could be fed on porridge and gruel. Extra hands were sorely needed in the fields. But the extra mouths quickly wiped-out food surpluses, so even more fields had to be planted. [How could they know] that feeding children more porridge and less breast milk would weaken their immune system, and that permanent settlements would be hotbeds for infectious diseases? [Dependent] on a single source of food, they exposed themselves even more to the depredations of drought.” Child mortality soared; settlements grew with possessions to be possessed by, inviting warfare; and all the while, evolving pathogens that could find a way to leap from newly domesticated four-legged creatures to those on two did just that.
And yet, hunter-gathers had been hunter-gathering for 60,000 years in our latest hominid version. Such a deep history of success made their descendants, the ancients, paranoid of change. Wasn’t this also true of hunter-gathers, and if life got harder, why do it? Because the Agricultural “Revolution” played out in very slow motion, says Harari. It took generations to transform close-knit communities of onetime wanderers into progressively overpopulated, disconnected, materialists. And while farming is hell for individuals, it’s great for the species. In a brilliant statement of what should be obvious, Harari writes, “The currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain, but copies of DNA. Just as the economic success of a company is measured by dollars in a bank, not how happy its employees are. This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.” Humans put themselves on a path to massification; massified by mass production, mass traffic, mass communication, mass waistlines, mass murders, and who wouldn’t want to be massified by asocial media turning their democracies upside down?
But those democracies would come later as one of many attempts to manage all those unstable humans that agriculture produced. And at the level of the individual, not very healthy humans at that. With agriculture, female life span dropped, not to be recovered for 9000 years. Male height struggled to recuperate for 7000 years. Skeletons spanning centuries show “People were not only dying younger,” writes Wells, “they were dying sicker.” As Harari puts it, “The Agricultural Revolution was history’s greatest fraud.”
According to philosopher-historian Marcel Gauchet and his spellbinding Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, a dramatic psychological change also occurred somewhere between the Agricultural Revolution and invention of the State. This new lifeway which would lead to cities, which led to states, which led to empires, “transformed everything that humans had held against themselves to maintain permanent identity with the past into a reversal of unrestrained action against everything around them,” writes Gauchet. "The old way submerged human order in nature’s order, feeling at one with nature, a co-belonging so strong any damage done required ritual compensation restoring the balance. Nature became opposed and possessed in a renunciation of this world in the name of the other.” With divinity exiled from nature, nature became de-sanctified, external to man.
See Genesis 9; written ca. 500 B.C during the Iron Age, well into empires, long past the ag-revolution but still a dominant lifeway, when Yahweh tells Noah: “Breed, multiply and fill the earth. Be the terror and the dread of all the animals on land and all the birds of heaven, of everything that moves on land and all the fish of the sea; they are placed in your hands. Every living thing will be yours to eat, no less than the foliage of the plants… Be fruitful then and multiply, teem over the earth and subdue it!” Compare this with the hunter-gatherer perspective expressed by Chief Seattle: “Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle. Every sandy shore. Every mist in the woods. Every meadow. Every humming insect. All are holy in the memory and experience of my people… Perfumed flowers are our sisters. The bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers… The earth does not belong to man. Man belongs to the earth.”
Not anymore. Agriculture—the creation of biodiversity deserts—has denuded more land space than the continents of Europe, South America, and North America, including Canada, the U.S., Mexico, and Greenland combined. According to a 2018 National Academy of Sciences report, humans have terminated 83 percent of all wild mammals, just 17 percent remains, largely due to agriculture. Add birds, amphibians, and reptiles, and over two-thirds have disappeared in just the 50-years since 1970. Export our harvesting practice to the oceans and we see marine populations in a cascade collapse worldwide. Anthropogenic mass has even surpassed the mass of all life on the planet, including that gargantuan sum marshaled by plant life (500 billion tons) with a staggering 1.2 trillion tons of manmade stuff. And all this before we tally the damage of manmade global warming where even earth’s poles are under assault. On that score, were it not for 93 percent of excess heat absorbed by the world’s oceans our average atmospheric temperature would be 122°F (50°C). Nature is now confused with too much alteration, too fast to evolve compensation. No wonder we live in the sixth great extinction. The last one happened 66 million years ago, thanks to mass volcanic eruptions preparing the way for an asteroid to finish off 76% of all life on earth.
But of course, neither agriculture, nor carbon dioxide jacked into the atmosphere for energy production would be globally ruinous if humans had not so overpopulated the planet. As so often, the problem is not one of kind, but of degree. We’re the asteroid, our numbers. And that problem started on a sunny day in the Fertile Crescent by just one person.
Who says one individual can’t change the world?
REFERNCES:
Paragraph 1: Agriculture was independently invented multiple times at between 7 and 10 different locations on earth. The Fertile Crescent was fertile for more than crops and animal husbandry; it’s also the region where writing, the wheel, the city, the temple, beer, and the sexagesimal number system with sixty seconds to each minute of a sixty-minute hour would later be invented. A land of fertile ideas, including state sponsored slaughter in coordinated warfare to steal those agricultural gains.
Paragraph 2: Henri Frankfort, H.A. Frankfort, John A. Wilson, Thorkild Jacobsen, Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Man, Pelican Books, 1971, pg. 14. Originally published as The Intellectual Adventures of Ancient Man, 1946.
Spencer Wells, Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization, Random House, 2010, pg. 16.
Ibid. pg. 24.
Paragraph 3: Daniel Susskind, The Compass, BBC podcast, June 2021.
Paragraph 4: Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Vintage, 2011, pg. 90.
Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Vintage, 2011, pg. 97.
Paragraph 5: Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Vintage, 2011, pg. 94.
Paragraph 6: Spencer Wells, Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization, Random House, 2010, pg. 23-24. Lifespans did not reach modern levels until public health of the late 19th century and early 20th.
Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Vintage, 2011, pg. 90-91.
Paragraph 7: Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, Princeton University Press, 1999. Gauchet’s focus is the advent of the state as a primary mover of social change. With the state built on and after the agricultural revolution, unraveling the unique contributions of each to our change in perspective is not addressed in his treatment. In his review of Gauchet’s work, Paul J. Fitzgerald S.J. finds “In this alienation of the sacred… the source of all dualistic religious and philosophical constructs, from Plato's theory of forms to the distinction between the mortal body and the immortal soul.” Paul J. Fitzgerald S.J., Book Review, Fairfield University, 1998.
Paragraph 8: Genesis 9:1-4, 9:7, The New Jerusalem Bible, Doubleday, 1985, pg. 26-27.
Joseph Campbell, Transformations of Myth Trough Time, Harper Perennial, 1999, pg. 28-29. To be sure, the two selections selected emphasize the point at the exclusion of tribal warfare between Native tribes, and “the Promised Land” perspective of the Israelites. Though it was a land “promised,” not so much “promising,” as were the abundant lands inhabited by Native Americans. Stern environments yield stern religions.
Paragraph 9: Hannah Ritchie, Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture, Our World in Data, November 11, 2019.
James Owen, Farming Claims Almost Half Earth’s Land, New Maps Show, National Geographic, December 8, 2005. In 1700, 7 percent of earth’s land space was occupied by crops and livestock. Today, that’s almost 50 percent of all habitable land.
Damian Carrington, Humans just 0.01% of all life but have destroyed 83% of wild mammals, The Guardian, 21 May 2018.
Living Planet Report, 2020, WWF. Available as PDF: Living Planet Report, 2020, WWF, 2020.
Catrin Einhorn, Shark Populations Are Crashing, With a ‘Very Small Window’ to Avert Disaster, The New York Times, Jan. 27, 2021.
More than 37,400 species are threatened with extinction, IUCN Red List.
Rasha Aridi, Human-Made Materials Now Weigh More Than All Life on Earth Combined, Smithsonian Magazine, December 11, 2020.
Brian Resnick and Javier Zarracina, All life on Earth, in one staggering chart, VOX, Aug 15, 2018.
Yinon M. Bar-On, Rob Phillips, Ron Milo, The biomass distribution on Earth, Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, June 19, 2018.
Zoë Schlanger, If oceans stopped absorbing heat from climate change, life on land would average 122°F, QUARTZ, November 29, 2017.
Laffoley & Baxter Ed, Explaining Ocean Warming, IUCN, 2016. A very big pdf report.
Until next time, January 3, 2022.
September 6, 2021
September 6, 2021: Liberty! Freedom! Covid! America’s Heroic Public Health War
From the surf, you could hear what sounded like the rip of paper from the weapon that most horrified Allied soldiers—the 25 rounds per second MG-42 machine gun. The U.S. Army called it “Hitler’s Buzzsaw,” and a long line of them peppered amphibious vehicles carrying troops about to land onshore. D-Day veteran Frank DeVita, scarcely 19 years old by June 6, 1944, recalled the scene after he was ordered to drop the ramp from his vehicle, “The first 7, 8, 9, 10 guys went down like you were cutting down wheat," he said. Others made land only to launch skyward on one of General Rommel’s 4-million freshly planted landmines—part of Hitler’s 2400 mile long “Atlantic Wall.” Snaked about 156,000 Allied warfighters the atmosphere crackled with the electric hiss of bullets, explosions surrounded them, and with so many having had their arm or leg sawed off by the MG-42 their screams joined as one continuous shriek. Those men had rights to self-preservation, yet they were there anyway with responsibilities they embraced to protect the homeland, what news anchor Tom Brokaw called the Greatest Generation.
Seventy-six years after losing 418,000 to WWII, we face another enemy that’s already killed 650,000 Americans. But there’s a new generation afoot. Facing not machine guns, not landmines, not having to gather one’s guts blown out on the sand, many Americans refuse to battle this menace by simply wearing a…cloth mask?
Really? Is this what Rand Paul and his Putin-schooled anti-maskers / anti-vaxxer “Republicans” are so upset about? All that “government intrusion”?
Actually, they have a point. The majority (82%) of these “Republicans” self-identify as Christians who “Love thy neighbor;” they don’t need government telling them what to do. Let the people decide. They should decide for themselves which side of the road to drive on or whether to stop at traffic lights—neither of which is in the Constitution. If they want to carry a gun on commercial aircraft, they’ve got Second Amendment rights.
And while clearly not the WWII generation, perhaps this new cohort is heroic in a different way. As new Covid variants evolve in the bodies of our fiercest patriots, they can sacrifice themselves for the Gamma, Epsilon, or Zeta variant that can never be stopped, thereby keeping “America First!” in deaths from the virus.
U.S.A.! U.S.A.!
We could export our bounty to the world, and planet earth could be relieved of so many nutty bipeds running amuck.
Such is the daring bravery and mental bulk of our New Right, those champions of liberty; those courageous defenders of rights without responsibilities; those lovers of our Constitution in pursuit of fascist tyranny—according to FOX’s Tucker Carlson, like dictator Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. These people are our last stand against the slippery slope of reason, truth, science, and morality.
As Chatal Desol claimed of we moderns, hardship makes a people. So does its absence, and that absence creates a petty populous.
Petty and pathetic. Our New Right mocks or assaults doctors and nurses who report the revival of Covid death counts thanks to its Delta variant. What is a dramatic undercount—perhaps by a factor of 2—is to the New Right an overcount, including people dead from heart attacks, car wrecks, and according to New Right religious leaders in the Church of QAnon, botched UFO abductions. All while Biden’s “do-gooder government intruders” provide local volunteers offering free vaccinations door-to-door. But for what? “Covid’s just another seasonal flu.” According to Georgia “Republican” Representative and not university history major Marjorie Taylor Green, those volunteers are Nazi Brown Shirts. At the Dallas 2021 GOPP CPAC meeting, North Carolina “Republican” Representative Madison Cawthorn said those volunteers might “take your guns and Bible!” While dead Rush Limbaugh’s replacements, Clay Travis and Buck Sexton announced their scientific assessment of mask effectiveness based on “the data”: “clearly, they don’t work.” (Correct. If you don’t use them, they don’t work.) Yet Limbaugh repeatedly preached, “Science is one of the four corners of deceit.” Is this a paradox? After their daily mask-dismissals, Clay and Buck personally promote a miracle cure for pain and aging at “Just $19.95!” “If somebody said it helped, wouldn’t you try it?” they ask.
The British love this kind of irony.
Then, like a superhero comic character, FOX NEWS reporter Peter Doocy swooped in to save America from the Great Mask Cover-up. After Biden spent 15-minutes explaining why masks were again needed, Doocy shouted at the departing President to ask why masks were needed.
Aaa… Let’ see… Because all those brave “patriots” reared a more lethal version?
Peter, you graduated from Villanova. Do they teach “if-then-else” logic there?
Why is the New Right so easily confused by such simple things?
Because it sells.
Limbaugh’s spawn have one god: money. Top dollar demands top ratings. Top ratings demand they rally the troops, boil the blood, keep them angry enough to shoot up pizza restaurants, build their pipe bombs, and destroy the Capitol their Al Qaeda brethren missed. This constant state of agitation is mirrored by the audience—gluing eyeballs—and covers for the fact that “Republicans” are no longer problem solvers. Trump’s perpetual bumbling was proof. Bumbling that is now an act of piety, its persistence required to cover for the impotent limpness of Donald J. Christ. And it’s well-practiced. We’re told Florida and Texas are “beacons of freedom” from mask mandates and those “hysterical loons” wearing them, while those state governors DeSantis and Abbott keep “America First!” in Covid deaths by making their states primo with the disease. Not only have they enlarged liberty but cemeteries as they dig more graves. And while states like Maine and Vermont, who followed expert guidelines, are doing just fine (what a surprise), Abbott called on them to help his hospital staff shortage. Demagogues like these expect that genuflecting to the creed will inspire Trumpers in the next election, regardless of how many people it kills.
This is the kind of knot that dogmas tie people into. It also makes it hard to keep the message straight. Fearing class-action lawsuits from families who lost loved ones to liars, FOX host Sean Hannity said, “Just like we’ve been saying [they have?], please take Covid seriously. I can’t say it enough. Enough have died.” But other “Republicans” protested—wait a minute, Hannity! With arousing adolescent defiance, Arkansas State Senator Gary Stubblefield enunciated his scientific illiteracy by choking down cattle dewormer as a Covid prophylactic. (Does this mean Covid’s not a hoax?) Fellow Arkansas State Senator Trent Garner declared he might reconsider masks if mortality hits Black Death rates of 30 percent. He prefers “dangerous freedom” to “comfortable safety.” Wannabe Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders vowed she’d take no steps recommended by health authorities to curb Covid if she’s elected—a stirring campaign slogan. And Arkansas U.S. Senator Tom Cotton exposed the awful truth that when it comes to public health authorities, “the only thing they’re gonna consider is what they think is in the best interest of public health.” (Arkansas. Hmm…)
Returning to the New Right’s problem-solving plan (if the Left’s for it, the Right’s against it), Hannity changed horses, “I never told anyone to get a vaccine!” Opposing public health is a more pious measure of cult-loyalty than “Stop the Steal,” which Sidney Powell, FOX, Newsmax, and OAN are running from now that they’ve racked up over $10 billion in Smartmatic and Dominion lawsuits for lying.
While in the background, in Nashville, Tennessee, “conservative” radio host, manmade global warming denier, and virus-scoffer Phil Valentine lay in a hospital with Covid, his wife pleading for prayers. Valentine’s brother said, “Having seen this up close and personal, I’d encourage ALL of you to put politics aside and get [the vaccine]. I don’t believe there’s a chip in the vaccine, and I don’t believe 5G is gonna trigger some sort of mass casualties or any of that stuff. The reason roughly half of the population hasn’t taken it is because they (formerly me) assumed we were being lied to for any number of nefarious reasons.”
Texas “Republican” Dickinson City Council member H. Scott Apley told promoters of the vaccine, “You are an absolute enemy of free people.” Fondly recalling the good old days of camisole cremations, he promoted “mask burning” parties. He’s now remembered for his GoFundMe page, raising money to put his Covid-infested body in his grave.
“Conservative” Florida radio host, science denier, and Trump supporter, Dick Farrel said inoculations are “promoted by people who lied all along about masks, where the virus came from, and the death toll.” Farrel joined H. Scott Apley and, yes, Phil Valentine beneath the sod as Covid victims—the prayers didn’t work.
As the ancient Greeks were fond of noting, there’s something poetic about the consequences of willful stupidity.
Isn’t it remarkable what issues these people choose to politicize? From manmade global warming decimating their rural voters in the American West, to Covid, now slaying unvaccinated Trumpers everywhere.
But Democrats should stop complaining about it. Of 18 states that voted Trump in 2020, 17 have the highest unvaccinated populations. While Biden slaughtered Trump in the popular ballot, the Electoral College decided Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin by less than 45,000 votes. By the next election cycle, New Right doctrine could easily kill off 100,000 or more unvaccinated “Republican” voters. Remember when not Dr. Jared Kushner told us Covid-19 was a blue state problem? Of course, the Delta variant also kills children who aren’t equipped to know their parents have been suckered by a cult. And New Right adults are just as incapable of distinguishing between truth and lies, tourism and insurrection, patriots and traitors—they voted for one, by definition, who bumbled his way through a failed government takeover.
As one Bush-2 aide remarked, the GOPP is an acronym, not for the Grand Old Putin Party, but the Grand Old Pandemic Party.
References:
Paragraph 1: Larry Decuers, The MG-42 Machine Gun, National WWII Museum, November 9, 2018. History Channel, 7 Surprising Facts About D-Day, JUN 4, 2020. History Channel, D-Day: Facts on the Epic 1944 Invasion That Changed the Course of WWII , JUN 4, 2020.
Paragraph 8: LIAM HOARE, Tucker Carlson’s Hungarian Rhapsody: Authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is everything American authoritarians wish Trump was, SLATE, AUG 05, 2021.
Paragraph 9: Chantal Desol, Icarus Fallen, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2010.
Paragraph 10: Sandi Doughton, COVID-19 death toll is more than double the official count, UW analysis suggests, Seattle Times, May 6, 2021.
Ian Thomsen, HAVE COVID-19 DEATHS BEEN UNDERCOUNTED? NEW REPORTS SAY ‘YES’ AND HERE’S WHY IT MATTERS, News At Northwestern, May 24, 2021.
Paul LeBlanc, Marjorie Taylor Greene compares Biden vaccine push to Nazi-era 'brown shirts' weeks after apologizing for Holocaust comments \, CNN, July 7, 2021.
Kelsey Vlamis, GOP Rep. Madison Cawthorn said offering vaccines door-to-door could lead to the government confiscating guns and bibles, Business Insider, Jul 10, 2021.
Rush Limbaugh, The Four Corners of Deceit : Prominent Liberal Social Psychologist Made It All Up, Rush Limbaugh .com, April 29, 2013.
Paragraph 12: Clara Hill, Fiery Biden hits out at Fox reporter who accused White House of flip-flopping on masks, The Independent, Friday 30 July.
Paragraph 17: Matthew Haag and Maya Salam, Gunman in ‘Pizzagate’ Shooting Is Sentenced to 4 Years in Prison, New York Times, June 22, 2017.
RICHARD GONZALES, Florida Man Who Mailed Bombs To Democrats, Media Gets 20 Years In Prison, NPR, August 5, 2019.
KIRBY WILSON AND DITI KOHLI, While DeSantis, others argue about masks, COVID-19 hits unvaccinated Floridians hard, Miami Herald, AUGUST 02, 2021.
ELI STOKOLS, JANET HOOK, Long warned against inciting violence, Trump does so with supporters’ Capitol siege, Los Angeles Times, JAN. 6, 2021.
Felicia Sonmez and Eva Ruth Moravec , It’s the height of hypocrisy’: After Texas Gov. Greg Abbott contracts covid-19, Democrats ramp up calls for mask mandates, The Washibngton Post, August 18, 2021.
Paige Winfield Cunningham, The Health 202: Vermont and Maine show it's possible to overcome the coronavirus , The Washington Post, August 4, 2021.
Filling in for dead Limbaugh, Clay and Buck are the sources of “Florida is a beacon of freedom” and those “hysterical loons” during one of their August 2021 broadcasts. On May 17, 2021, Clay and Buck railed against Biden’s desire for herd immunity by crossing that threshold with vaccines. Why the outrage? Trump had the same goal. Someone labeled it the equivalent of “murder.” It’s that double standard again. However, Trump sought herd immunity through widespread national infection by the live virus. Biden’s herd immunity saves lives, Trump’s bumbling to the same goal would cost approximately another 7M—that’s million—dead (~250M unvaxxed * 0.03 death rate). Conservative William F. Buckley used to tell a story about things like this: “It’s one thing to push little old ladies out of the way of oncoming trucks, and quite another to push little old ladies in the way of oncoming trucks. It doesn’t do to claim in both cases one is just pushing little old ladies around.” Limbaugh was such a better liar than what he left behind.
Paragraph 18: Bruce Y. Lee, Sean Hannity Tells FOX Viewers To Take Covid-19 Seriously, FORBES, Jul 20, 2021.
Max Brantley, Holy cow! A tale of herd immunity and COVID-19, Arkansas Times, July 31, 2021.
Max Brantley, Trent Garner says he’d consider lifting ban on mask mandates at 30 percent mortality rate, Arkansas Times, July 21, 2021.
Max Brantley, Sarah Sanders vows not to fight COVID-19, Arkansas Times, July 23, 2021.
Aarohi Sheth, Sen Tom Cotton Says Teachers' Facial Expressions Take Priority Over Public Health Interest, Yahoo! News, July 23, 2021.
Paragraph 19: Justin Baragona, Hannity Makes Vax Stance ‘Very Clear’: ‘I Never Told Anyone to Get a Vaccine!’, The Daily Beast, Jul. 22, 2021.
Grace Dean and Jacob Shamsian, From Mike Lindell to OAN, here's everyone Dominion and Smartmatic are suing over election conspiracy theories so far, Business Insider, Aug 14, 2021.
Paragraph 20: TANASIA KENNEY, Radio host skeptical of COVID vaccine in ‘grave condition’ with virus, family says, Charlotte Observer, AUGUST 17, 2021.
Traci Carl, Phil Valentine, a radio host who scoffed at Covid, then urged his followers to get vaccinated, dies, The New York Times, Aug. 21, 2021.
Paragraph 21: Justin Rohrlich, Texas GOP Official Mocked COVID Five Days Before He Died of Virus, The Daily Beast, Aug. 04, 2021.
Paragraph 22: Adela Suliman and Paulina Villegas, Conservative radio host and vaccine critic dies of covid-19 complications, The Washington Post, August 12, 2021.
Paragraph 25: Dante Chinni, Did Biden win by a little or a lot? The answer is ... yes., NBC News, Dec. 20, 2020.
Domenico Montanaro, There's A Stark Red-Blue Divide When It Comes To States' Vaccination Rates, NPR, June 9, 2021.
Zach Wolf, The full picture of Trump's attempted coup is only starting to emerge, CNN, August 6, 2021.
Paragraph 26: Mark McKinnon.
And some bonus GOPP sTupidity just for fun: Rebekah Riess and Dakin Andone, School mask debate in Tennessee grows heated as local board requires masks in elementary schools, CNN, August 12, 2021.
Aya Elamroussi, Some people in Missouri are getting vaccinated against Covid-19 in secret, doctor says. They fear backlash from loved ones who oppose the vaccines, CNN, July 29, 2021.
Becky Sullivan, U.S. COVID Deaths Are Rising Again. Experts Call It A 'Pandemic Of The Unvaccinated', NPR, July 16, 2021.
KATHERINE EBAN, How Jared Kushner’s Secret Testing Plan ‘Went Poof Into Thin Air’, Vanity Fair, JULY 30, 2020.
Until next time, November 1, 2021.
Seventy-six years after losing 418,000 to WWII, we face another enemy that’s already killed 650,000 Americans. But there’s a new generation afoot. Facing not machine guns, not landmines, not having to gather one’s guts blown out on the sand, many Americans refuse to battle this menace by simply wearing a…cloth mask?
Really? Is this what Rand Paul and his Putin-schooled anti-maskers / anti-vaxxer “Republicans” are so upset about? All that “government intrusion”?
Actually, they have a point. The majority (82%) of these “Republicans” self-identify as Christians who “Love thy neighbor;” they don’t need government telling them what to do. Let the people decide. They should decide for themselves which side of the road to drive on or whether to stop at traffic lights—neither of which is in the Constitution. If they want to carry a gun on commercial aircraft, they’ve got Second Amendment rights.
And while clearly not the WWII generation, perhaps this new cohort is heroic in a different way. As new Covid variants evolve in the bodies of our fiercest patriots, they can sacrifice themselves for the Gamma, Epsilon, or Zeta variant that can never be stopped, thereby keeping “America First!” in deaths from the virus.
U.S.A.! U.S.A.!
We could export our bounty to the world, and planet earth could be relieved of so many nutty bipeds running amuck.
Such is the daring bravery and mental bulk of our New Right, those champions of liberty; those courageous defenders of rights without responsibilities; those lovers of our Constitution in pursuit of fascist tyranny—according to FOX’s Tucker Carlson, like dictator Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. These people are our last stand against the slippery slope of reason, truth, science, and morality.
As Chatal Desol claimed of we moderns, hardship makes a people. So does its absence, and that absence creates a petty populous.
Petty and pathetic. Our New Right mocks or assaults doctors and nurses who report the revival of Covid death counts thanks to its Delta variant. What is a dramatic undercount—perhaps by a factor of 2—is to the New Right an overcount, including people dead from heart attacks, car wrecks, and according to New Right religious leaders in the Church of QAnon, botched UFO abductions. All while Biden’s “do-gooder government intruders” provide local volunteers offering free vaccinations door-to-door. But for what? “Covid’s just another seasonal flu.” According to Georgia “Republican” Representative and not university history major Marjorie Taylor Green, those volunteers are Nazi Brown Shirts. At the Dallas 2021 GOPP CPAC meeting, North Carolina “Republican” Representative Madison Cawthorn said those volunteers might “take your guns and Bible!” While dead Rush Limbaugh’s replacements, Clay Travis and Buck Sexton announced their scientific assessment of mask effectiveness based on “the data”: “clearly, they don’t work.” (Correct. If you don’t use them, they don’t work.) Yet Limbaugh repeatedly preached, “Science is one of the four corners of deceit.” Is this a paradox? After their daily mask-dismissals, Clay and Buck personally promote a miracle cure for pain and aging at “Just $19.95!” “If somebody said it helped, wouldn’t you try it?” they ask.
The British love this kind of irony.
Then, like a superhero comic character, FOX NEWS reporter Peter Doocy swooped in to save America from the Great Mask Cover-up. After Biden spent 15-minutes explaining why masks were again needed, Doocy shouted at the departing President to ask why masks were needed.
Aaa… Let’ see… Because all those brave “patriots” reared a more lethal version?
Peter, you graduated from Villanova. Do they teach “if-then-else” logic there?
Why is the New Right so easily confused by such simple things?
Because it sells.
Limbaugh’s spawn have one god: money. Top dollar demands top ratings. Top ratings demand they rally the troops, boil the blood, keep them angry enough to shoot up pizza restaurants, build their pipe bombs, and destroy the Capitol their Al Qaeda brethren missed. This constant state of agitation is mirrored by the audience—gluing eyeballs—and covers for the fact that “Republicans” are no longer problem solvers. Trump’s perpetual bumbling was proof. Bumbling that is now an act of piety, its persistence required to cover for the impotent limpness of Donald J. Christ. And it’s well-practiced. We’re told Florida and Texas are “beacons of freedom” from mask mandates and those “hysterical loons” wearing them, while those state governors DeSantis and Abbott keep “America First!” in Covid deaths by making their states primo with the disease. Not only have they enlarged liberty but cemeteries as they dig more graves. And while states like Maine and Vermont, who followed expert guidelines, are doing just fine (what a surprise), Abbott called on them to help his hospital staff shortage. Demagogues like these expect that genuflecting to the creed will inspire Trumpers in the next election, regardless of how many people it kills.
This is the kind of knot that dogmas tie people into. It also makes it hard to keep the message straight. Fearing class-action lawsuits from families who lost loved ones to liars, FOX host Sean Hannity said, “Just like we’ve been saying [they have?], please take Covid seriously. I can’t say it enough. Enough have died.” But other “Republicans” protested—wait a minute, Hannity! With arousing adolescent defiance, Arkansas State Senator Gary Stubblefield enunciated his scientific illiteracy by choking down cattle dewormer as a Covid prophylactic. (Does this mean Covid’s not a hoax?) Fellow Arkansas State Senator Trent Garner declared he might reconsider masks if mortality hits Black Death rates of 30 percent. He prefers “dangerous freedom” to “comfortable safety.” Wannabe Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders vowed she’d take no steps recommended by health authorities to curb Covid if she’s elected—a stirring campaign slogan. And Arkansas U.S. Senator Tom Cotton exposed the awful truth that when it comes to public health authorities, “the only thing they’re gonna consider is what they think is in the best interest of public health.” (Arkansas. Hmm…)
Returning to the New Right’s problem-solving plan (if the Left’s for it, the Right’s against it), Hannity changed horses, “I never told anyone to get a vaccine!” Opposing public health is a more pious measure of cult-loyalty than “Stop the Steal,” which Sidney Powell, FOX, Newsmax, and OAN are running from now that they’ve racked up over $10 billion in Smartmatic and Dominion lawsuits for lying.
While in the background, in Nashville, Tennessee, “conservative” radio host, manmade global warming denier, and virus-scoffer Phil Valentine lay in a hospital with Covid, his wife pleading for prayers. Valentine’s brother said, “Having seen this up close and personal, I’d encourage ALL of you to put politics aside and get [the vaccine]. I don’t believe there’s a chip in the vaccine, and I don’t believe 5G is gonna trigger some sort of mass casualties or any of that stuff. The reason roughly half of the population hasn’t taken it is because they (formerly me) assumed we were being lied to for any number of nefarious reasons.”
Texas “Republican” Dickinson City Council member H. Scott Apley told promoters of the vaccine, “You are an absolute enemy of free people.” Fondly recalling the good old days of camisole cremations, he promoted “mask burning” parties. He’s now remembered for his GoFundMe page, raising money to put his Covid-infested body in his grave.
“Conservative” Florida radio host, science denier, and Trump supporter, Dick Farrel said inoculations are “promoted by people who lied all along about masks, where the virus came from, and the death toll.” Farrel joined H. Scott Apley and, yes, Phil Valentine beneath the sod as Covid victims—the prayers didn’t work.
As the ancient Greeks were fond of noting, there’s something poetic about the consequences of willful stupidity.
Isn’t it remarkable what issues these people choose to politicize? From manmade global warming decimating their rural voters in the American West, to Covid, now slaying unvaccinated Trumpers everywhere.
But Democrats should stop complaining about it. Of 18 states that voted Trump in 2020, 17 have the highest unvaccinated populations. While Biden slaughtered Trump in the popular ballot, the Electoral College decided Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin by less than 45,000 votes. By the next election cycle, New Right doctrine could easily kill off 100,000 or more unvaccinated “Republican” voters. Remember when not Dr. Jared Kushner told us Covid-19 was a blue state problem? Of course, the Delta variant also kills children who aren’t equipped to know their parents have been suckered by a cult. And New Right adults are just as incapable of distinguishing between truth and lies, tourism and insurrection, patriots and traitors—they voted for one, by definition, who bumbled his way through a failed government takeover.
As one Bush-2 aide remarked, the GOPP is an acronym, not for the Grand Old Putin Party, but the Grand Old Pandemic Party.
References:
Paragraph 1: Larry Decuers, The MG-42 Machine Gun, National WWII Museum, November 9, 2018. History Channel, 7 Surprising Facts About D-Day, JUN 4, 2020. History Channel, D-Day: Facts on the Epic 1944 Invasion That Changed the Course of WWII , JUN 4, 2020.
Paragraph 8: LIAM HOARE, Tucker Carlson’s Hungarian Rhapsody: Authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is everything American authoritarians wish Trump was, SLATE, AUG 05, 2021.
Paragraph 9: Chantal Desol, Icarus Fallen, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2010.
Paragraph 10: Sandi Doughton, COVID-19 death toll is more than double the official count, UW analysis suggests, Seattle Times, May 6, 2021.
Ian Thomsen, HAVE COVID-19 DEATHS BEEN UNDERCOUNTED? NEW REPORTS SAY ‘YES’ AND HERE’S WHY IT MATTERS, News At Northwestern, May 24, 2021.
Paul LeBlanc, Marjorie Taylor Greene compares Biden vaccine push to Nazi-era 'brown shirts' weeks after apologizing for Holocaust comments \, CNN, July 7, 2021.
Kelsey Vlamis, GOP Rep. Madison Cawthorn said offering vaccines door-to-door could lead to the government confiscating guns and bibles, Business Insider, Jul 10, 2021.
Rush Limbaugh, The Four Corners of Deceit : Prominent Liberal Social Psychologist Made It All Up, Rush Limbaugh .com, April 29, 2013.
Paragraph 12: Clara Hill, Fiery Biden hits out at Fox reporter who accused White House of flip-flopping on masks, The Independent, Friday 30 July.
Paragraph 17: Matthew Haag and Maya Salam, Gunman in ‘Pizzagate’ Shooting Is Sentenced to 4 Years in Prison, New York Times, June 22, 2017.
RICHARD GONZALES, Florida Man Who Mailed Bombs To Democrats, Media Gets 20 Years In Prison, NPR, August 5, 2019.
KIRBY WILSON AND DITI KOHLI, While DeSantis, others argue about masks, COVID-19 hits unvaccinated Floridians hard, Miami Herald, AUGUST 02, 2021.
ELI STOKOLS, JANET HOOK, Long warned against inciting violence, Trump does so with supporters’ Capitol siege, Los Angeles Times, JAN. 6, 2021.
Felicia Sonmez and Eva Ruth Moravec , It’s the height of hypocrisy’: After Texas Gov. Greg Abbott contracts covid-19, Democrats ramp up calls for mask mandates, The Washibngton Post, August 18, 2021.
Paige Winfield Cunningham, The Health 202: Vermont and Maine show it's possible to overcome the coronavirus , The Washington Post, August 4, 2021.
Filling in for dead Limbaugh, Clay and Buck are the sources of “Florida is a beacon of freedom” and those “hysterical loons” during one of their August 2021 broadcasts. On May 17, 2021, Clay and Buck railed against Biden’s desire for herd immunity by crossing that threshold with vaccines. Why the outrage? Trump had the same goal. Someone labeled it the equivalent of “murder.” It’s that double standard again. However, Trump sought herd immunity through widespread national infection by the live virus. Biden’s herd immunity saves lives, Trump’s bumbling to the same goal would cost approximately another 7M—that’s million—dead (~250M unvaxxed * 0.03 death rate). Conservative William F. Buckley used to tell a story about things like this: “It’s one thing to push little old ladies out of the way of oncoming trucks, and quite another to push little old ladies in the way of oncoming trucks. It doesn’t do to claim in both cases one is just pushing little old ladies around.” Limbaugh was such a better liar than what he left behind.
Paragraph 18: Bruce Y. Lee, Sean Hannity Tells FOX Viewers To Take Covid-19 Seriously, FORBES, Jul 20, 2021.
Max Brantley, Holy cow! A tale of herd immunity and COVID-19, Arkansas Times, July 31, 2021.
Max Brantley, Trent Garner says he’d consider lifting ban on mask mandates at 30 percent mortality rate, Arkansas Times, July 21, 2021.
Max Brantley, Sarah Sanders vows not to fight COVID-19, Arkansas Times, July 23, 2021.
Aarohi Sheth, Sen Tom Cotton Says Teachers' Facial Expressions Take Priority Over Public Health Interest, Yahoo! News, July 23, 2021.
Paragraph 19: Justin Baragona, Hannity Makes Vax Stance ‘Very Clear’: ‘I Never Told Anyone to Get a Vaccine!’, The Daily Beast, Jul. 22, 2021.
Grace Dean and Jacob Shamsian, From Mike Lindell to OAN, here's everyone Dominion and Smartmatic are suing over election conspiracy theories so far, Business Insider, Aug 14, 2021.
Paragraph 20: TANASIA KENNEY, Radio host skeptical of COVID vaccine in ‘grave condition’ with virus, family says, Charlotte Observer, AUGUST 17, 2021.
Traci Carl, Phil Valentine, a radio host who scoffed at Covid, then urged his followers to get vaccinated, dies, The New York Times, Aug. 21, 2021.
Paragraph 21: Justin Rohrlich, Texas GOP Official Mocked COVID Five Days Before He Died of Virus, The Daily Beast, Aug. 04, 2021.
Paragraph 22: Adela Suliman and Paulina Villegas, Conservative radio host and vaccine critic dies of covid-19 complications, The Washington Post, August 12, 2021.
Paragraph 25: Dante Chinni, Did Biden win by a little or a lot? The answer is ... yes., NBC News, Dec. 20, 2020.
Domenico Montanaro, There's A Stark Red-Blue Divide When It Comes To States' Vaccination Rates, NPR, June 9, 2021.
Zach Wolf, The full picture of Trump's attempted coup is only starting to emerge, CNN, August 6, 2021.
Paragraph 26: Mark McKinnon.
And some bonus GOPP sTupidity just for fun: Rebekah Riess and Dakin Andone, School mask debate in Tennessee grows heated as local board requires masks in elementary schools, CNN, August 12, 2021.
Aya Elamroussi, Some people in Missouri are getting vaccinated against Covid-19 in secret, doctor says. They fear backlash from loved ones who oppose the vaccines, CNN, July 29, 2021.
Becky Sullivan, U.S. COVID Deaths Are Rising Again. Experts Call It A 'Pandemic Of The Unvaccinated', NPR, July 16, 2021.
KATHERINE EBAN, How Jared Kushner’s Secret Testing Plan ‘Went Poof Into Thin Air’, Vanity Fair, JULY 30, 2020.
Until next time, November 1, 2021.
July 5, 2021
July 5, 2021: Confronting the Constitution Part 7: Capitalism as Freedom or Justice?
Marc F. Plattner’s contribution to Confronting the Constitution presents an insightful look at the marriage of capitalism and republican governance. [1] His historical digging unearths nuance that makes a world of difference in conclusions otherwise uninformed. Central to his essay: is capitalism a matter of freedom or justice?
Plattner’s interest lies in “the influence of political economy on American opinion about broader questions and morality.” [2] A nation’s “economic system,” he writes, “has an enormous influence on the lives, habits, and views of its citizens.” [3] Knowing that any social system we construct then folds back to remake us, Plattner starts with Adam Smith (1723-1790), amalgamator of modern capitalism. Smith believed that getting the economic model right was essential to social stability in accordance with and subordinate to a pre-established moral terrain. A terrain of ethical behaviors and considerations in a real world of more than one lone individual in their quest for more than survival and prosperity. Smith was a professor of moral philosophy, not economics, at Glasgow University. His first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments underscores his priority. [4]
In keeping with this focus, Smith’s second book, The Wealth of Nations, is about more than economics. As one University of Tennessee reference has it, Smith’s Wealth is about political economy, “a much more expansive mixture of philosophy, political science, history, economics, anthropology, and sociology… Smith’s philosophy bears little resemblance to the libertarian caricature put forth by proponents of laissez-faire markets who describe humans solely as homo economicus. For Smith, the market is a mechanism of morality and social support.” [5] Plattner agrees. [6]
As did America’s Founders, Smith supported taxes as a requirement for order, and he promoted rational government regulations. The Constitution is, after all, a document of regulations. Freedom also has it limits. Restricting the “natural liberty of a few individuals, which might endanger the security of the whole society, are, and ought to be, restrained by the laws of all governments,” says Smith. He also never expected his system to be implemented in the extreme, an idea Smith wrote, “as absurd as to expect that an Oceana or Utopia should ever be established in [Great Britain].” [7]
Putting Smith’s view in context with ancients and contemporaries, Plattner finds, “The Laws of Plato contain detailed regulations [about society which] impose the strictest bounds on the pursuit of wealth, including narrow limits on the accumulation of property, the banning of gold and silver, and the forbidding of ‘vulgar’ commercial occupations. For riches are held to be incompatible with virtue and friendship among citizens.” [8] Which all has a familiar ring to it: “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get to heaven.” [9] Given he arrived 350 years after Plato in the same Hellenistic neighborhood, perhaps Jesus was a Platonist. Living at the same time as Smith, Rousseau (1712-1778) said, “ancient political thinkers incessantly talked about morals and virtue, those of our time talk only of commerce and money.” [10] But Smith sides with none of the above. For Smith, the political order should provide “the people with liberty and security [guaranteeing] enjoyment of the fruits of their labor… In a commercial society, people’s self-interested and ‘vulgar’ desire to ‘augment their fortune’ is alone sufficient to produce that industriousness, sobriety, and frugality Smith characterizes as ‘good conduct.’” [11] Thus reinforcing political stability, though in a manner in opposition to Plato and Jesus. In other words, private vice makes public virtue.
In the 1780s, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson read Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Jefferson called it the best book on the subject. (The constitutional debate was in 1787.) While Smith influenced their Lockean perspective, Smith diverged from John Locke (1632-1704). Smith conspicuously echoed Locke’s protocapitalist views on labor as a source of wealth, but he tended to side with David Hume (1711-1776) and Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) against Locke on his “state of nature” idea and “the natural rights of man.” Hume labeled the state of nature concept “‘mere philosophical fiction, which never had, and never could have any reality,’ and he never mentions men’s natural rights.” [12] Jeremy Bentham said natural rights were “nonsense on stilts.” [13] While Smith favored rights to life and liberty, he was less fond of property rights, possibly out of inclinations for monarchy.
Among Smith’s critics, we find John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), a fulcrum in Plattner’s essay. For Plattner, Mill divides the thought of Smith and particularly Locke. One branch elevated natural rights, the other the utility of societal wealth that benefits all. The latter became utilitarianism—the greatest happiness for the greatest number—a socialist thrust decades later. For this group, capitalism would no longer be judged in reference to a past state of pre-civilized poverty and insecurity (however fictional) but to a more enlightened future with a higher “standard of morality,” what Plattner views as a different standard of morality. [14]
Mill wrote that “distributive justice constitutes not in imitating but redressing the inequalities and wrongs of nature.” [15] Including human nature. Yet Alexander Hamilton said, “Inequality would exist as long as liberty existed, and it would unavoidably result from that very liberty itself.” [16] These “rewards accruing to greater ability” with one’s right to the fruits of their labor in their exercise of freedom is the just outcome that capitalism serves, according to Plattner, and his central emphasis. [17] Of course, both Hamilton and Plattner assume that reward is due to talent, not corruption. But with Mill’s life ending in the midst of robber barons, one wonders if he re-sighted the aim from moral origin to moral destination because of capitalist abuse. What good was capitalism’s promise of individual gain when a handful of men enslaved wage labor unrestrained “by the laws of all governments”?
“Once it was no longer believed that legislation must be guided by the requirements of civic virtue,” writes Plattner, “the unlimited pursuit of wealth is free to emerge…” [18] After hailing unlimited wealth while demoting virtue, it should be no surprise—though it seems one to Plattner—that over time, he finds a “radical divorce of freedom from justice” constituting a decisive departure from the Founders. [19] Hence, as Plattner tells it, appeals to “individual freedom, divorced from justice, are unlikely to prevail in the political arena against appeals to equality that emphatically claim to be on the side of justice.” [20]
Did the embrace of greed provide a wedge for the Left? Does the divorce of freedom from justice now bolster the Right?
Smith’s philosophy is a practical, individualist, materialist one, emphasizing stability of the whole through prosperity of the one; the individual. [21] Through accumulation, it’s meant to translate into prosperity—if only in political stability—for those many individuals composing the state. Explicit in some ways, implicit in others, it degrades obligations to community through the practice of virtue and virtue’s self-restraint on individual passion as preached by the Greeks and Jesus. Such Enlightenment ideas were a colossal reversal in the century’s old beliefs—notably Christian—about wealth, morality, and society. America’s Founders relegated selflessness for the endorsement of selfishness, believing as Smith did that it could be harnessed for the common good.
After some 250 years, how did it work?
Materially, in the long run, on the whole, no other system so far divined comes close to the products of selfish, individualist, capitalist society. East and West Berlin serve as a virtual lab experiment between competing economic models. On one side the prosperity of democratic-capitalist West Berlin. On the East, a razor-wire fence to keep people in. Marx’s “alienation” turned out to be “incentive.”
But are there flaws? Does Smith’s model assume infinite resources without knowing it assumes it? Does its viability falter should the planet be crowded by 10-times the number of humans today than the 800 million alive at Smith’s time? Does capitalism again invite assault when the average U.S. CEO salary is 320-times that of their workers? [22]
In practice, Smith’s philosophy came naturally to overshadow what Smith meant to foster: morality. “Economics is [now] entirely neutral between ends,” writes Plattner, “to the extent that it conforms to this, economics cannot be explicitly pro-capitalist or committed to the principles of [classical] liberalism… [it] has emancipated itself from any concern with moral and political ends.” [23] E.g. corporations are about money, not the flag. Corporations that dodge taxes in the nation they’re born from for lower rates in another is standard practice.
The selflessness of virtue is a community-referenced, self-imposed brake on passion, in contrast with external regulation. [24] True communities (Amish, Mennonite, orthodox Jews) exert pressure external to the individual to coerce behavior in conformance with community rules. But unlike imposition from far away strangers of a State, community pressure comes from those we know and are raised with. Laws from the State might seem like oppression, while from the community, like family values. But with human numbers now in the hundreds of millions composing pluralistic mega-societies, community ties were bound to dissolve, regardless of capitalism’s community-curbing effects; regulation had to come from somebody. A thousand years after the Sumerian invention of the city, king Ur-Nammu didn’t create the first extant law code ca. 2100 B.C. for nothing. Law made by faceless strangers became a necessity, especially for individualist societies like America with our absolutist attitudes of “all rights, no responsibilities.” So irresponsible that the mere inconvenience of wearing a cloth mask to combat a foreign invader killing hundreds of thousands of Americans would, by mental acrobatics of the most inane, become a violation of some new right. The WWII Generation we ain’t. To devalue selflessness by what became the sanctification of selfishness was to set not a static hierarchy but two trajectories, one up, the other down.
Smith did not intend this, but all great ideas commit suicide through excess.
[1] Alan Bloom Ed., Confronting the Constitution, AEI Press, 1990. At publication, Marc F. Plattner was the director of programs at the National Endowment for Democracy. Previously, he was a fellow in residence at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina; advisor on economic and social affair at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations; program officer of the Twentieth Century Fund; and managing editor of The Public Interest. He is the author of Rousseau’s State of Nature: An Interpretation of the Discourse in Inequality and the editor of Human Rights in Our Time.
[2] Ibid. pg. 315.
[3] Ibid. pg. 315.
[4] Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759, Uplifting Publications, 2009.
[5] Adam Smith (1723—1790), Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/smith/
and Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776.
[6] “Smith was not extreme or dogmatic in his advocacy of laissez faire as it is sometimes believed.” Bloom. pg. 320.
[7] Ibid. pg. 320-321.
[8] Ibid. pg. 319.
[9] Matthew 19:24.
[10] Bloom, pg. 319.
[11] Ibid. pg. 321.
[12] Bloom, pg. 325.
[13] Ibid. pg. 325.
[14] Ibid. pg. 329.
[15] Ibid. pg. 328.
[16] Founders Online, Constitutional Convention. Remarks on the Term of Office for Members of the Second Branch of the Legislature, [26 June 1787], National Archives.
[17] Ibid. pg. 331.
[18] Ibid. pg. 319. By the way, political “science” is not a science.
[19] Ibid. pg. 331. Note how this separation of freedom from justice dovetails with Jamal Greene’s book How Rights Went Wrong. In that book, Green makes the point that jury cases became thought of only in terms of rights, not justice or morality. But the Left established the courts as the preferable route to law in the 1960s with courts taking preference over slow, uncertain outcomes of Congress—as Greene in part argues, as does Walter Burns in Taking the Constitution Seriously. Since the Left usually argues there is no overarching morality common to all, appeals to justice and its moral foundation would be replaced by intellectual arguments of competing rights.
[20] Ibid. pg. 332.
[21] Smith’s argument is not entirely a material one, as that much sought after—and apparently quite temporary—political stability possesses a strong existential element. Americans now know what this means.
[22] Callie Holtermann, Are C.E.O.s Paid Too Much?, New York Times, May 11, 2021.
“According to the Economic Policy Institute. In 1989, that ratio was 61 to 1. From 1978 to 2019, compensation grew 14 percent for typical workers. It rose 1,167 percent for C.E.O.s.”
[23] Bloom. pg. 332-333. In agreement with Stephen A. Margil’s The Dismal Science: Why Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community, Harvard University Press, 2008.
[24] A community-based restraint is not meant to be confused with political correctness, though political correctness tries to imitate such a thing. I define political correctness as the oxymoronic claim that an overarching moral preference for select identity subgroups serves the common good and should be obeyed by everyone else, while simultaneously promoting the notion that there is no common good or overarching moral standard.
Until next time, Monday September 6, 2021.
Plattner’s interest lies in “the influence of political economy on American opinion about broader questions and morality.” [2] A nation’s “economic system,” he writes, “has an enormous influence on the lives, habits, and views of its citizens.” [3] Knowing that any social system we construct then folds back to remake us, Plattner starts with Adam Smith (1723-1790), amalgamator of modern capitalism. Smith believed that getting the economic model right was essential to social stability in accordance with and subordinate to a pre-established moral terrain. A terrain of ethical behaviors and considerations in a real world of more than one lone individual in their quest for more than survival and prosperity. Smith was a professor of moral philosophy, not economics, at Glasgow University. His first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments underscores his priority. [4]
In keeping with this focus, Smith’s second book, The Wealth of Nations, is about more than economics. As one University of Tennessee reference has it, Smith’s Wealth is about political economy, “a much more expansive mixture of philosophy, political science, history, economics, anthropology, and sociology… Smith’s philosophy bears little resemblance to the libertarian caricature put forth by proponents of laissez-faire markets who describe humans solely as homo economicus. For Smith, the market is a mechanism of morality and social support.” [5] Plattner agrees. [6]
As did America’s Founders, Smith supported taxes as a requirement for order, and he promoted rational government regulations. The Constitution is, after all, a document of regulations. Freedom also has it limits. Restricting the “natural liberty of a few individuals, which might endanger the security of the whole society, are, and ought to be, restrained by the laws of all governments,” says Smith. He also never expected his system to be implemented in the extreme, an idea Smith wrote, “as absurd as to expect that an Oceana or Utopia should ever be established in [Great Britain].” [7]
Putting Smith’s view in context with ancients and contemporaries, Plattner finds, “The Laws of Plato contain detailed regulations [about society which] impose the strictest bounds on the pursuit of wealth, including narrow limits on the accumulation of property, the banning of gold and silver, and the forbidding of ‘vulgar’ commercial occupations. For riches are held to be incompatible with virtue and friendship among citizens.” [8] Which all has a familiar ring to it: “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get to heaven.” [9] Given he arrived 350 years after Plato in the same Hellenistic neighborhood, perhaps Jesus was a Platonist. Living at the same time as Smith, Rousseau (1712-1778) said, “ancient political thinkers incessantly talked about morals and virtue, those of our time talk only of commerce and money.” [10] But Smith sides with none of the above. For Smith, the political order should provide “the people with liberty and security [guaranteeing] enjoyment of the fruits of their labor… In a commercial society, people’s self-interested and ‘vulgar’ desire to ‘augment their fortune’ is alone sufficient to produce that industriousness, sobriety, and frugality Smith characterizes as ‘good conduct.’” [11] Thus reinforcing political stability, though in a manner in opposition to Plato and Jesus. In other words, private vice makes public virtue.
In the 1780s, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson read Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Jefferson called it the best book on the subject. (The constitutional debate was in 1787.) While Smith influenced their Lockean perspective, Smith diverged from John Locke (1632-1704). Smith conspicuously echoed Locke’s protocapitalist views on labor as a source of wealth, but he tended to side with David Hume (1711-1776) and Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) against Locke on his “state of nature” idea and “the natural rights of man.” Hume labeled the state of nature concept “‘mere philosophical fiction, which never had, and never could have any reality,’ and he never mentions men’s natural rights.” [12] Jeremy Bentham said natural rights were “nonsense on stilts.” [13] While Smith favored rights to life and liberty, he was less fond of property rights, possibly out of inclinations for monarchy.
Among Smith’s critics, we find John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), a fulcrum in Plattner’s essay. For Plattner, Mill divides the thought of Smith and particularly Locke. One branch elevated natural rights, the other the utility of societal wealth that benefits all. The latter became utilitarianism—the greatest happiness for the greatest number—a socialist thrust decades later. For this group, capitalism would no longer be judged in reference to a past state of pre-civilized poverty and insecurity (however fictional) but to a more enlightened future with a higher “standard of morality,” what Plattner views as a different standard of morality. [14]
Mill wrote that “distributive justice constitutes not in imitating but redressing the inequalities and wrongs of nature.” [15] Including human nature. Yet Alexander Hamilton said, “Inequality would exist as long as liberty existed, and it would unavoidably result from that very liberty itself.” [16] These “rewards accruing to greater ability” with one’s right to the fruits of their labor in their exercise of freedom is the just outcome that capitalism serves, according to Plattner, and his central emphasis. [17] Of course, both Hamilton and Plattner assume that reward is due to talent, not corruption. But with Mill’s life ending in the midst of robber barons, one wonders if he re-sighted the aim from moral origin to moral destination because of capitalist abuse. What good was capitalism’s promise of individual gain when a handful of men enslaved wage labor unrestrained “by the laws of all governments”?
“Once it was no longer believed that legislation must be guided by the requirements of civic virtue,” writes Plattner, “the unlimited pursuit of wealth is free to emerge…” [18] After hailing unlimited wealth while demoting virtue, it should be no surprise—though it seems one to Plattner—that over time, he finds a “radical divorce of freedom from justice” constituting a decisive departure from the Founders. [19] Hence, as Plattner tells it, appeals to “individual freedom, divorced from justice, are unlikely to prevail in the political arena against appeals to equality that emphatically claim to be on the side of justice.” [20]
Did the embrace of greed provide a wedge for the Left? Does the divorce of freedom from justice now bolster the Right?
Smith’s philosophy is a practical, individualist, materialist one, emphasizing stability of the whole through prosperity of the one; the individual. [21] Through accumulation, it’s meant to translate into prosperity—if only in political stability—for those many individuals composing the state. Explicit in some ways, implicit in others, it degrades obligations to community through the practice of virtue and virtue’s self-restraint on individual passion as preached by the Greeks and Jesus. Such Enlightenment ideas were a colossal reversal in the century’s old beliefs—notably Christian—about wealth, morality, and society. America’s Founders relegated selflessness for the endorsement of selfishness, believing as Smith did that it could be harnessed for the common good.
After some 250 years, how did it work?
Materially, in the long run, on the whole, no other system so far divined comes close to the products of selfish, individualist, capitalist society. East and West Berlin serve as a virtual lab experiment between competing economic models. On one side the prosperity of democratic-capitalist West Berlin. On the East, a razor-wire fence to keep people in. Marx’s “alienation” turned out to be “incentive.”
But are there flaws? Does Smith’s model assume infinite resources without knowing it assumes it? Does its viability falter should the planet be crowded by 10-times the number of humans today than the 800 million alive at Smith’s time? Does capitalism again invite assault when the average U.S. CEO salary is 320-times that of their workers? [22]
In practice, Smith’s philosophy came naturally to overshadow what Smith meant to foster: morality. “Economics is [now] entirely neutral between ends,” writes Plattner, “to the extent that it conforms to this, economics cannot be explicitly pro-capitalist or committed to the principles of [classical] liberalism… [it] has emancipated itself from any concern with moral and political ends.” [23] E.g. corporations are about money, not the flag. Corporations that dodge taxes in the nation they’re born from for lower rates in another is standard practice.
The selflessness of virtue is a community-referenced, self-imposed brake on passion, in contrast with external regulation. [24] True communities (Amish, Mennonite, orthodox Jews) exert pressure external to the individual to coerce behavior in conformance with community rules. But unlike imposition from far away strangers of a State, community pressure comes from those we know and are raised with. Laws from the State might seem like oppression, while from the community, like family values. But with human numbers now in the hundreds of millions composing pluralistic mega-societies, community ties were bound to dissolve, regardless of capitalism’s community-curbing effects; regulation had to come from somebody. A thousand years after the Sumerian invention of the city, king Ur-Nammu didn’t create the first extant law code ca. 2100 B.C. for nothing. Law made by faceless strangers became a necessity, especially for individualist societies like America with our absolutist attitudes of “all rights, no responsibilities.” So irresponsible that the mere inconvenience of wearing a cloth mask to combat a foreign invader killing hundreds of thousands of Americans would, by mental acrobatics of the most inane, become a violation of some new right. The WWII Generation we ain’t. To devalue selflessness by what became the sanctification of selfishness was to set not a static hierarchy but two trajectories, one up, the other down.
Smith did not intend this, but all great ideas commit suicide through excess.
[1] Alan Bloom Ed., Confronting the Constitution, AEI Press, 1990. At publication, Marc F. Plattner was the director of programs at the National Endowment for Democracy. Previously, he was a fellow in residence at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina; advisor on economic and social affair at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations; program officer of the Twentieth Century Fund; and managing editor of The Public Interest. He is the author of Rousseau’s State of Nature: An Interpretation of the Discourse in Inequality and the editor of Human Rights in Our Time.
[2] Ibid. pg. 315.
[3] Ibid. pg. 315.
[4] Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759, Uplifting Publications, 2009.
[5] Adam Smith (1723—1790), Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/smith/
and Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776.
[6] “Smith was not extreme or dogmatic in his advocacy of laissez faire as it is sometimes believed.” Bloom. pg. 320.
[7] Ibid. pg. 320-321.
[8] Ibid. pg. 319.
[9] Matthew 19:24.
[10] Bloom, pg. 319.
[11] Ibid. pg. 321.
[12] Bloom, pg. 325.
[13] Ibid. pg. 325.
[14] Ibid. pg. 329.
[15] Ibid. pg. 328.
[16] Founders Online, Constitutional Convention. Remarks on the Term of Office for Members of the Second Branch of the Legislature, [26 June 1787], National Archives.
[17] Ibid. pg. 331.
[18] Ibid. pg. 319. By the way, political “science” is not a science.
[19] Ibid. pg. 331. Note how this separation of freedom from justice dovetails with Jamal Greene’s book How Rights Went Wrong. In that book, Green makes the point that jury cases became thought of only in terms of rights, not justice or morality. But the Left established the courts as the preferable route to law in the 1960s with courts taking preference over slow, uncertain outcomes of Congress—as Greene in part argues, as does Walter Burns in Taking the Constitution Seriously. Since the Left usually argues there is no overarching morality common to all, appeals to justice and its moral foundation would be replaced by intellectual arguments of competing rights.
[20] Ibid. pg. 332.
[21] Smith’s argument is not entirely a material one, as that much sought after—and apparently quite temporary—political stability possesses a strong existential element. Americans now know what this means.
[22] Callie Holtermann, Are C.E.O.s Paid Too Much?, New York Times, May 11, 2021.
“According to the Economic Policy Institute. In 1989, that ratio was 61 to 1. From 1978 to 2019, compensation grew 14 percent for typical workers. It rose 1,167 percent for C.E.O.s.”
[23] Bloom. pg. 332-333. In agreement with Stephen A. Margil’s The Dismal Science: Why Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community, Harvard University Press, 2008.
[24] A community-based restraint is not meant to be confused with political correctness, though political correctness tries to imitate such a thing. I define political correctness as the oxymoronic claim that an overarching moral preference for select identity subgroups serves the common good and should be obeyed by everyone else, while simultaneously promoting the notion that there is no common good or overarching moral standard.
Until next time, Monday September 6, 2021.
May 3, 2021
May 3, 2021: At the Center of the Universe, From the Middle of Nowhere. (And Anybody Can Go There.)
Nighttime.
Cool.
Clear skies above, bounded by a full circle of woodlands on the ground.
Cuddled by that forest, and beneath a giant metal ear to the sky lay the electronics shack, all part of one big radio. [1] I’d just come inside from looking at the crescent moon through an 8-inch Newtonian telescope 315 years after Newton invented it. The moon’s craters looked like they’d been blown open that instant. With no atmosphere or erosion there, it’s no wonder. Radial ejecta from impacts fanned out like spokes on a wheel. Mountainous walls rimming each basin looked like a naked range on earth. And with the sun at such steep angles, shadows were stark and crisp, cast from the blackest black to the brightest white.
When the moon was formed by a titanic collision some four-and-one-half billion years ago, it was much closer, appearing about 24-times larger in the sky, before it fell away to where it is now. Today, the moon is only a bit over a light second away as it recedes from earth at 1.5-inches per year. Practically speaking, by light speeds, what I saw on the moon happened that moment. But inside the shack, what I saw happened long ago. Actually, I couldn’t see it with my eyes because the message was sent via light my eyes cannot detect: radio waves. Like an echo from desperate times, that signal left its home as here on earth the god Ptah lost his hold on Memphis, cursing Egypt with a second dark age as its Middle Kingdom fell to Hyksos invaders. But the broadcast didn’t come from earth. It came from a place 3600 light years away—and thus 3600 years in the past—in that little-talked-about constellation Camelopardalis between the more talked about Cassiopeia and the Big Dipper. Recall, one lightyear is about 6 trillion miles (10T km). While light travels 186,000 miles per second (3e8 m/s), it still takes a lot of seconds to cross 3600 times 6 trillion miles. [2]
Inside the shack, one of the professors connected the received radio signal to a frequency downconverter, translating it to audio on a speaker. As fast as you can say, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap… is what it sounded like. Just right for the percussion musician Gerard Grisey to use in his Le Noir de l'Etoile, The Black Star. [3] Pulsed every seven-tenths of a second, what I heard was like some kind of code above a disagreeable hiss. But what did it mean and who made it? Was it a warning? A cry for help? Or simply, “Hello universe. Here I am. My name is Pulsar PSR B0329+54,” which, with proper translation, is what it said. [4] Since we on earth just happen to be on the line-of-sight with this pulsar’s strobing poles—from which it blasts the universe with unfathomable power—we get pulsed with its message like a lighthouse.
A pulsar is a leftover shard of a star that blew itself apart as a supernova—an exploding star bigger than the sun. The supernova that created this gyro occurred about the time Ardipithiecus ramidus split off from Ardipithiecus kadabba on what appears our ancestral line, and did so somewhere along the dividing tectonic plates of Africa’s Great Rift Valley 5-million years ago. Fortunately for us, the stellar calamity that created this pulsar was far away or kadabba would not have become ramidus; there’d be no life on earth.
Big stars—like this one used to be—live hard and die young. They burn the midnight oil for several hundred million years, but when enough is enough, they demolish themselves in milliseconds. They’re terribly obese, so when they fall, they fall really hard. So hard, they smash the countless positive-protons and negative-electrons that make up their atoms into neutral neutrons. Like a giant atomic nucleus 10-miles (17 km) across with more mass than our 800,000 mile (1.3M km) diameter sun. Hence another name for pulsar is neutron star. This compression is so dense a single teaspoon weighs a billion tons. And like a skater retracting her arms on the ice for a spin, with a teeny fraction of the radius it once had a neutron star spins at ferocious rates. In the time it takes earth to rotate once on its axis for a single day, PSR B0329+54 whips through 123,000 days, because each day is only seven-tenths of a second long.
As I leaned over the audio speaker, I tried to think of all that took place for me to hear what I heard. Though not far by galactic standards, this inconceivably distant object sears anything nearby with its blowtorch beacon to atomize any planet that might have been there. So much raw power, from my distance a minuscule measure of its greeting could still be heard. From scooping up that signal in the sky with a dish antenna to the rat’s nest of wires and electronics to my ears, it was amazing, but intangible. Who can conceive of a distance of 22e15 miles (36e15 km), or a ten-thousand-trillion-trillion-Watt strobe light? That’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Watts… Huh? Or even something as comparatively puny as the five million years since this pulsar was born?
I stood there trying to get my head around it. Gazing at stacks of electronics, it seemed remarkable that humans can even engineer such things to discover microscopic needles in truly cosmic haystacks. And with science, by experts employing reason and the rational workings of a 3-pound brain, we know what they are, when they were born, and how they’ll die.
When I walked back outside, Mister Newton’s invention had been repositioned to gather what he called corpuscles of light, this time from the constellation Coma Berenices. I peered into the eyepiece. From a wee spec of black space emerged a cascade of radiance that got focused—simply by the shape of my gelatinous eye—onto my retina. The retina is a kind of photodiode, converting light that travels well in air to electricity that travels well on optic nerves. From there, that current tunneled through my head and smacked the back of my brain so hard I could feel it. A call went out over the wires to make realizations, memories, and get excited. Right there in front of me was the Coma Cluster, 300 million light years away. The Hubble Telescope assayed it as an empire of over 22,000 galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of suns. Thanks to the Kepler spacecraft we now know most of them have planets. From this colossal kingdom I could see only a handful of states among the vastness of stellar desert. Hubble’s mirror is a much bigger eye, almost 8-feet in diameter, not an 8-inch Newtonian. But what I saw plugged me in. The spiral arms of Coma’s turbine galaxies were spun up just waiting for someone to close the switch, to make their connection, pumped up with wonder.
Having the Drake equation fresh in my head—a formula to estimate the number of intelligent species in the universe—I stared transfixed. Somewhere among the hundreds of billions of stars I could see was somebody in orbit on a planet looking up at their own empty night. From a wee spec of black in their dark sky was an eyeball looking back.
Mine.
Like those occasions at Notre Dame and a clean room in Pasadena, years in my future, it was “A religious experience without the religion. I felt dizzy. I stood in that spot for the longest time, afraid to move and miss something.” [5] Much further back in time, this communiqué was sent when my locale was on the equator as part of Pangea, that giant supercontinent where even dinosaurs hadn’t yet evolved. And right then, after 300 million years and all that’s happened since—from the rise of humans to discovery of the New World to my parents falling in love—I just happened to catch its message with a stiff punch in the head. In that moment I was staggered to exist; a biological organism comprised of the atoms those stars made and conscious of it, all from a forest in the middle of nowhere.
“Holy shhhhit,” I whispered.
It’s for moments like these that people do things like science and art. All the hours spent, all the solitary study, all the work in search of relations between what seem unrelated things to paint a worldview of connected inspiration. And it’s open to anybody. One needn’t be a scientist or an engineer or an artist to feel that epiphany.
Yes, the grind of American life is one in which for many each day is another lesson in submission. Yet there’s revelations to be had if we can turn away from what we made for what already exists but gets no press. That remarkable machine called chlorophyll in every cell of that plant on your desk; the disappearance of 4 million tons of matter every second inside that sun above your head—matter converted to light to power that chlorophyll; those forty-trillion-trillion hydrogen atoms in your hand, atoms created with the Big Bang that are 13.7 billion years old. And before you want to believe it, they’ll be part of somebody else. It’s all there, waiting to inspire. All one needs is a book, to read about it, ponder it, and plug in.
[1] Part of the NRAO (National Radio Astronomical Observatory) is the North Liberty Radio Observatory, part of the University of Iowa Physics and Astronomy department. More about the Very Long Baseline Array network can be found here .
[2] Sometimes the speed of light does cheat the speed limit. See, Brett Williams, Notre Dame and the Religious Experience in Science, on Goodreads, May 6, 2019.
[3] Gerard Grisey, Le Noir de l'Etoile, YouTube. Grisey opens with 0.7 sec percussion rep rate of Pulsar O329+54.
[4] Wikipedia, Pulsar O329+54.
[5] Williams, ref. 2.
Until next time: Monday, June 7, 2021.
Cool.
Clear skies above, bounded by a full circle of woodlands on the ground.
Cuddled by that forest, and beneath a giant metal ear to the sky lay the electronics shack, all part of one big radio. [1] I’d just come inside from looking at the crescent moon through an 8-inch Newtonian telescope 315 years after Newton invented it. The moon’s craters looked like they’d been blown open that instant. With no atmosphere or erosion there, it’s no wonder. Radial ejecta from impacts fanned out like spokes on a wheel. Mountainous walls rimming each basin looked like a naked range on earth. And with the sun at such steep angles, shadows were stark and crisp, cast from the blackest black to the brightest white.
When the moon was formed by a titanic collision some four-and-one-half billion years ago, it was much closer, appearing about 24-times larger in the sky, before it fell away to where it is now. Today, the moon is only a bit over a light second away as it recedes from earth at 1.5-inches per year. Practically speaking, by light speeds, what I saw on the moon happened that moment. But inside the shack, what I saw happened long ago. Actually, I couldn’t see it with my eyes because the message was sent via light my eyes cannot detect: radio waves. Like an echo from desperate times, that signal left its home as here on earth the god Ptah lost his hold on Memphis, cursing Egypt with a second dark age as its Middle Kingdom fell to Hyksos invaders. But the broadcast didn’t come from earth. It came from a place 3600 light years away—and thus 3600 years in the past—in that little-talked-about constellation Camelopardalis between the more talked about Cassiopeia and the Big Dipper. Recall, one lightyear is about 6 trillion miles (10T km). While light travels 186,000 miles per second (3e8 m/s), it still takes a lot of seconds to cross 3600 times 6 trillion miles. [2]
Inside the shack, one of the professors connected the received radio signal to a frequency downconverter, translating it to audio on a speaker. As fast as you can say, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap… is what it sounded like. Just right for the percussion musician Gerard Grisey to use in his Le Noir de l'Etoile, The Black Star. [3] Pulsed every seven-tenths of a second, what I heard was like some kind of code above a disagreeable hiss. But what did it mean and who made it? Was it a warning? A cry for help? Or simply, “Hello universe. Here I am. My name is Pulsar PSR B0329+54,” which, with proper translation, is what it said. [4] Since we on earth just happen to be on the line-of-sight with this pulsar’s strobing poles—from which it blasts the universe with unfathomable power—we get pulsed with its message like a lighthouse.
A pulsar is a leftover shard of a star that blew itself apart as a supernova—an exploding star bigger than the sun. The supernova that created this gyro occurred about the time Ardipithiecus ramidus split off from Ardipithiecus kadabba on what appears our ancestral line, and did so somewhere along the dividing tectonic plates of Africa’s Great Rift Valley 5-million years ago. Fortunately for us, the stellar calamity that created this pulsar was far away or kadabba would not have become ramidus; there’d be no life on earth.
Big stars—like this one used to be—live hard and die young. They burn the midnight oil for several hundred million years, but when enough is enough, they demolish themselves in milliseconds. They’re terribly obese, so when they fall, they fall really hard. So hard, they smash the countless positive-protons and negative-electrons that make up their atoms into neutral neutrons. Like a giant atomic nucleus 10-miles (17 km) across with more mass than our 800,000 mile (1.3M km) diameter sun. Hence another name for pulsar is neutron star. This compression is so dense a single teaspoon weighs a billion tons. And like a skater retracting her arms on the ice for a spin, with a teeny fraction of the radius it once had a neutron star spins at ferocious rates. In the time it takes earth to rotate once on its axis for a single day, PSR B0329+54 whips through 123,000 days, because each day is only seven-tenths of a second long.
As I leaned over the audio speaker, I tried to think of all that took place for me to hear what I heard. Though not far by galactic standards, this inconceivably distant object sears anything nearby with its blowtorch beacon to atomize any planet that might have been there. So much raw power, from my distance a minuscule measure of its greeting could still be heard. From scooping up that signal in the sky with a dish antenna to the rat’s nest of wires and electronics to my ears, it was amazing, but intangible. Who can conceive of a distance of 22e15 miles (36e15 km), or a ten-thousand-trillion-trillion-Watt strobe light? That’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Watts… Huh? Or even something as comparatively puny as the five million years since this pulsar was born?
I stood there trying to get my head around it. Gazing at stacks of electronics, it seemed remarkable that humans can even engineer such things to discover microscopic needles in truly cosmic haystacks. And with science, by experts employing reason and the rational workings of a 3-pound brain, we know what they are, when they were born, and how they’ll die.
When I walked back outside, Mister Newton’s invention had been repositioned to gather what he called corpuscles of light, this time from the constellation Coma Berenices. I peered into the eyepiece. From a wee spec of black space emerged a cascade of radiance that got focused—simply by the shape of my gelatinous eye—onto my retina. The retina is a kind of photodiode, converting light that travels well in air to electricity that travels well on optic nerves. From there, that current tunneled through my head and smacked the back of my brain so hard I could feel it. A call went out over the wires to make realizations, memories, and get excited. Right there in front of me was the Coma Cluster, 300 million light years away. The Hubble Telescope assayed it as an empire of over 22,000 galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of suns. Thanks to the Kepler spacecraft we now know most of them have planets. From this colossal kingdom I could see only a handful of states among the vastness of stellar desert. Hubble’s mirror is a much bigger eye, almost 8-feet in diameter, not an 8-inch Newtonian. But what I saw plugged me in. The spiral arms of Coma’s turbine galaxies were spun up just waiting for someone to close the switch, to make their connection, pumped up with wonder.
Having the Drake equation fresh in my head—a formula to estimate the number of intelligent species in the universe—I stared transfixed. Somewhere among the hundreds of billions of stars I could see was somebody in orbit on a planet looking up at their own empty night. From a wee spec of black in their dark sky was an eyeball looking back.
Mine.
Like those occasions at Notre Dame and a clean room in Pasadena, years in my future, it was “A religious experience without the religion. I felt dizzy. I stood in that spot for the longest time, afraid to move and miss something.” [5] Much further back in time, this communiqué was sent when my locale was on the equator as part of Pangea, that giant supercontinent where even dinosaurs hadn’t yet evolved. And right then, after 300 million years and all that’s happened since—from the rise of humans to discovery of the New World to my parents falling in love—I just happened to catch its message with a stiff punch in the head. In that moment I was staggered to exist; a biological organism comprised of the atoms those stars made and conscious of it, all from a forest in the middle of nowhere.
“Holy shhhhit,” I whispered.
It’s for moments like these that people do things like science and art. All the hours spent, all the solitary study, all the work in search of relations between what seem unrelated things to paint a worldview of connected inspiration. And it’s open to anybody. One needn’t be a scientist or an engineer or an artist to feel that epiphany.
Yes, the grind of American life is one in which for many each day is another lesson in submission. Yet there’s revelations to be had if we can turn away from what we made for what already exists but gets no press. That remarkable machine called chlorophyll in every cell of that plant on your desk; the disappearance of 4 million tons of matter every second inside that sun above your head—matter converted to light to power that chlorophyll; those forty-trillion-trillion hydrogen atoms in your hand, atoms created with the Big Bang that are 13.7 billion years old. And before you want to believe it, they’ll be part of somebody else. It’s all there, waiting to inspire. All one needs is a book, to read about it, ponder it, and plug in.
[1] Part of the NRAO (National Radio Astronomical Observatory) is the North Liberty Radio Observatory, part of the University of Iowa Physics and Astronomy department. More about the Very Long Baseline Array network can be found here .
[2] Sometimes the speed of light does cheat the speed limit. See, Brett Williams, Notre Dame and the Religious Experience in Science, on Goodreads, May 6, 2019.
[3] Gerard Grisey, Le Noir de l'Etoile, YouTube. Grisey opens with 0.7 sec percussion rep rate of Pulsar O329+54.
[4] Wikipedia, Pulsar O329+54.
[5] Williams, ref. 2.
Until next time: Monday, June 7, 2021.
March 1, 2021
March 1, 2021: Rush Limbaugh is dead. So are Joseph Goebbels and Al-Ghazali. The similarities don’t end there.
As a young Reaganite after Reagan was gone, I’d hurry down the stairs of the building I worked in. Outside, under that eternal Newport Beach, California sunshine, I’d trot to my car, turn on the radio, grab my lunch, and settle in for an hour of rousing provocation like none on radio before.
Or so I thought. [1]
There were three elements of personal ignorance yet to be illuminated in this experience. Little did I realize, what I was hearing was the seed of a massive social countermovement. Having been first duped as a child by Erich von Däniken's space aliens, I would later discover I was working on the second occasion of three in life. And finally, I'd not yet understood postmodernism either. Postmodern liberalism was the agenda I heard countered in that car. As Ferry and Renaut note in their French Philosophy of the Sixties, postmodernism is "a cult of paradox… accustoming their readers and listeners to the belief that incomprehensibility is a sign of greatness, and that the thinkers silence before incongruous demands for meaning is not proof of weakness but indication of endurance in the presence of the Unsayable." [2] Translation: inflated gobbledygook to hoodwink those who can be. Postmodernism bled into liberal American universities in the 1960s as a tool against a dominate, "Eurocentric," white male West, every bit as anti-science and anti-reason as Right-wing Creationists and Trump's Grand Old Putin Party. [3]
Notice this conclusion to reject reason emerged from a reasoned argument—an inherent self-contradiction and standard practice of the movement. Such thinking allows for the wildest of conclusions.
According to postmodernists, given that the West was built on Greek reason (which they consider a form of bigotry), recovered by the Renaissance, codified by Enlightenment, everything about the West was eventually indictable. The entire non-Western world was seen as a victim of the West, and there were plenty of reasons to justify such claims. From colonialism and slavery to opposition of women’s suffrage, reasons to oppose the Western Way were abundant for this forerunner of victim culture. Conveniently, this ignored the same iniquities in non-Western cultures and denied reason’s capacity for self-correction.
Before Marxism proved inane, postmodernism presented itself as another ally against the West. Upon colonizing American university humanities departments from those in France, including sociology, history, anthropology, literary criticism, cultural studies, it then created new ones like Women's Studies, White Studies, and feminist theory. [4] This is not to say all humanities at university are postmodern. Many possess rationalists seeking truth as best they’re able, and postmodernism could not survive, nor even enter university sciences and engineering where proven truth is required. Without the truth of nature as reasoned by science, no devices built to that nature could ever work; there would be no technology. [5]
Sixties intellectuals spun the new social doctrine which was to be free from the blasphemy of rational examination and beyond it, like a religion which so many of them scorned. Per Ferry and Renaut, postmoderns like Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan sought to create “a cult of paradox.” [6] With Foucault’s “there are no facts, only interpretation,” the way was opened to their core oxymoron, summarized as, “There is no truth and that’s the truth.” One presumes it applied to those who preached it, but it didn’t.
This practice would eventually be absorbed and fired back at postmodern liberals by postmodern “conservatives”—today’s populists. Nihilistic relativism born on the Left is now backbone of the Right for the political utility of lying expressed by Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” and Rudy Giuliani’s “Truth isn’t truth.” [7]
What I listened to in Newport was a response to sweeping irrationalism newly defined as “correct thinking” in concert with the birth of authoritarian political correctness. Correctness witnessed today by the Smith College fiasco. [8] Enlightenment liberalism employed by America’s Founders moved in reverse to create a new liberalism, the New Left. [9] Its counter-response was what became the New Right and a new industry, spearheaded by Rush Limbaugh. This industry grew to be today’s lie factories for radicalized “conservatism” with no association to traditional conservatism other than appropriation of the name.
Limbaugh exposed the Left’s countless absurdities: racist German shepherds; all boys are sexual proto predators; multiculturalism’s groundwork for tribalism through its replacement of America’s “melting pot” with “identity politics.” [10] To challenge such political nonsense was sacrilege to the Left and Rush relished exposing it with entertaining sound bites we harried Americans crave. His political incorrectness made it keenly satisfying.
But it wasn’t all he was doing. Laced with his revelations was another. I began to notice Limbaugh describe things in hostile terms which I’d personally witnessed with the opposite reaction. I heard him cherry-pick, truncate, and spin, discarding critical parts of a story that would reverse his allegations. I began talking out loud to my radio, asking questions to the bemusement of passersby. By the humblest of inquiries, it was alarming just how flimsy was Limbaugh’s rock-solid bombast. The full truth was an obstacle to winning his political arguments. [11]
Limbaugh’s master technique was to season lies with just enough truth to give his lies something to ride on, dependent on the fact that modernity overwhelms us with too much information we can’t track. His verbal knife flayed detail, nuance, and any need for lengthy attention spans. With relentless repetition, he put words in other’s mouths then told how wrong they were. A perpetual mind reader, he put thoughts, opinions, and schemes in other people’s minds—then told how wrong they were. He took the sins he practiced daily then pasted them to his adversaries. He exaggerated valid ideas to absurdity, then indicted the original idea with his ridiculous extension. He claimed to live in “Realville” but created a fake world in concert with the other fabricators he spawned. While bemoaning the Left’s victim culture, he chronically griped, We always play by the rules; they always take advantage of us; the elites never care about us, the little people, flyovers, hicks. With an absolutist’s emphasis on always, never, everybody, his grievance was easy to swallow. Not only did it require no thought, Limbaugh demanded it. “Don’t doubt me!” he’d say. And when he talked about his cat, the blustering fat man was charming.
While the Left offered ample targets, Limbaugh began to chase ever more trivial matters in a business that demands progressively shocking revelations of universal evil. Because LED light bulbs consume less energy, last longer, and add thus less atmospheric CO2, LEDs became a rallying cry against the “global warming hoax,” “invasions of our liberty,” more “big government control.” From just another appliance, to The Assault on America. He could have spun it differently: “American innovators, entrepreneurs, and capitalists solved another problem to create wealth, jobs, and greater GDP for a stronger USA.” We used to call this Yankee Ingenuity. The Old Right was all for it. For Limbaugh and his flock, everything became hopelessly politicized. [12]
Like the New Left’s reversal of Enlightenment reason, Limbaugh’s New Right would betray everything it once stood for: Reagan, Founders, Christ. [13] This coalescing of tribal safety on its way to a militant cult fully amalgamated with Trump’s rise, stretching Limbaugh’s skills. As Trump flip-flopped on paying porn stars for silence, Trump Tower Moscow, campaign meetings with Russian operatives, Limbaugh was forced to maintain a halo of infallibility for the New Right’s newest Savior.
Per historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, another once-dazzling mob orator was “history’s first master of the media Big Lie who created Hitler’s halo of infallibility,” Joseph Goebbels. [14] As Minister for Propaganda and Enlightenment, Goebbels vindicated Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which claimed the bigger the lie, the more likely it’s believed. For Trump, Limbaugh made this his career after first blasting Trump as a fake. Like Goebbels, Limbaugh, along with the New Right’s silo, “created the myth of the Führer… above the Party, blindly followed,” christened by evangelist Pat Robertson’s “mandate of heaven.” [15] Both Goebbels and Limbaugh employed arguments that appealed “to emotions and instincts, not intellect.” [16] And like Goebbels, Limbaugh “valued reality only as a means to its distortion.” [17]
Run-of-the-mill propaganda.
But Limbaugh had an added X-factor shared with another historical figure. That man’s X-factor was hostility to rational thought fueling his society’s philosophy, art, literature, economics, and science, such as it was in 1100 A.D. Islam. An entire civilization of varied nations ignited by rational inquiry, while in Europe, as physicist Steven Weinberg writes, “Charlemagne and his lords were dabbling in the art of writing their names.” [18]
As Pakistani physicist and historian Pervez Hoodbhoy elaborates, from civilization’s 12th-century beacon emerged one central figure to bring it all down: Al-Ghazali (1058-1111). [19] Like Limbaugh, like the postmodernists, Al-Ghazali set out to wreck the very thing that built his civilization, replaced with unwavering obedience to dogma. Why? Because rational thought was then, as it is now, a danger to religious orthodoxy, be it mainstream or a political cult. Critical thinking inherited from Greece and expanded by the Arabs made a growing number of Muslims hesitant about their Scriptures. Like Westerners who analyze the Bible critically, inconsistencies appear, self-contradictions, rank immorality, they ask questions, they doubt. So too, Islam. For Al-Ghazali, reason was to be exterminated to save the Koran and Al-Ghazali’s definition of right thinking. Islamic extremists “proclaimed a holy war against Rationalism,” writes Hoodbhoy, “against the upholders of reason and advocates of philosophy and science.” [20] And they won; one of history’s greatest civilizations collapsed. Admirers said Al-Ghazali “saved orthodoxy by depressing science.” [21]
Fast forward nine-hundred years to hear Rush Limbaugh broadcast that science and scientists are “One of the four corners of deceit!” [22] Done so over radio waves discovered by science, on electronics built by science, from a nation that once put men on the moon.
Isn’t it ironic that before Limbaugh died, he turned to science to save his life? But there are some things even science can’t fix, liars first among them. In a nation of so many, it’s a valued skill.
After years of barking at my radio, I was surprised to find how much I missed Limbaugh the day he died. The day I heard all those replays, from his beginnings as a conservative spinner to his demise as another Alex Jones conspiracy-pimp. Limbaugh fought the Left with emotion. He did not defeat them with ideas, and the Right followed to become the empty vessel it is.
Note how disparate sources are identical in their hostility to reason. From fundamentalists—be they Christian, Muslim, or postmodern atheists—to political cults like Stalinists, Nazis, Maoists, or Trumpers. From the Middle Ages to modernity; from America’s New Left to its New Right. And they think they’re different.
Like Al-Ghazali, Limbaugh’s war on rational thought led the way for a post-truth army against science, morality, and the reason democracies depend on. There may be no man more responsible for America’s current decline than Rush Limbaugh, 30-years before Trump, paving the foundation. Will what Limbaugh set in motion fail as Goebbels failed or succeed like Al-Ghazali?
[1] After Newport, I stumbled across another provocative radio personality as one of Limbaugh’s predecessors, but she made the blog title and body too long: Aimee Semple McPherson. She was a Pentecostal evangelist and founder of the Foursqaure Church. McPherson used the new invention of radio to redirect what had been masterful stagecraft in 1920s American theater. She had a massive national following, was one of the most influential women of her time, and was corrupted by money, power, and fame, dying early of an apparently accidental overdose. Limbaugh’s popularity, his talents in the new arena of talk-radio that he created, and his ultimate corruption look something like McPherson’s. Limbaugh crumpled paper near the microphone for effect when disposing of other’s ideas. He whispered, he shouted, he preached fire-and-brimstone doctrine. He was also, once-upon-a-time, a Reagan supporter, championed fiscal responsibility, opposed Russia’s murderous dictators, and said character in leadership was paramount while Bill Clinton was having his parts polished in the chair Lincoln sat. But for a serial adulterer, draft dodger, and 40-year money launderer for the Russians in the name of Donald Trump, all that changed. Limbaugh lived just long enough to see what he created lose along with Trump, but the perverse distortions with which he “reeducated” his tens of millions of “Dittoheads” lives on in their hypocrisy, most notably their claim to be both American patriots and Christians.
[2] Ferry and Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism, University of Massachusetts Press, 1990, pg. 12-14. More fully, Ferry and Renaut state, “a cult of paradox… accustoming their readers and listeners to the belief that incomprehensibility is a sign of greatness, and that the thinkers silence before incongruous demands for meaning was not proof of weakness but indication of endurance in the presence of the Unsayable.”
[3] While Ferry and Renaut emphasize “imperial colonialism and Nazism” pg. xxii-xv, others include WWI and the Great Depression. In addition to their rejection of reason, the postmodernists wanted to create a philosophy "which means nothing." pg. 5. Hmm...
[4] Examples are provided in Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History, Encounter Books, 2000. While not all of each department is dominated by postmodernists, for some like feminist theory (part of Women’s Studies) championed by UCLA’s Sandra Harding, there seems no interest in truth, only misandrist propaganda.
[5] Neither postmodernists science deniers, like UCLA’s feminist theorist Sandra Harding who drives a car and uses computers, nor the New Right’s science deniers like Limbaugh and the New Right’s liar’s silo have financial incentive to acknowledge the truth of science represented by its astounding success, it’s foundation in our national defense, its record-breaking Covid-19 vaccine, its building of the West, and their use of science every day.
[6] Ferry and Renaut, pg. 12-14.
[7] Alternative Facts, Wikipedia.
REBECCA MORIN and DAVID COHEN, Giuliani: ‘Truth isn’t truth’, POLITICO, 08/19/2018.
[8] For anyone who doubts the authoritarian nature of political correctness there are countless examples, but one recent display destroyed the lives of innocent working people at Smith College: Michael Powell, Inside a Battle Over Race, Class and Power at Smith College, New York Times, Feb. 24, 2021. Notice this negative assessment of an aspect of liberal political correctness comes from the “liberal” New York Times, something Limbaugh repeatedly asserted could never happen. An earlier example is chronicled by Alan Charles Kors & Harvey A. Silvergate, The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses, Harper Perennial, 1999.
[9] The New Left, Britannica. Some of this had already been paved by early 1900s progressives, like J. Allen Smith’s The Spirit of American Government in which he protested the Founder’s form of representative republican government because he wanted a direct democracy like the Greeks had when they lamented the poisoning of Socrates thanks to that form of order. Also early was Herbert Croly’s The Promise of American Life. However, none of these would have argued for expulsion of rational thought.
[10] Limbaugh was also not beyond finding the most fringe Left-wing stories online (or perhaps were not “Left” at all) and painting the Left with it as though it were a common feature.
[11] Of course, like 82% of “Republicans,” Limbaugh also claimed to be a Christian. Yet, long before Limbaugh lied for a living, Apostle Paul said, “We no longer lie to one another, we only tell the truth.” Ephesians 4:25.
[12] With age, death’s doorway, and his “Dittoheads” increased acceptance of lies, Limbaugh got weaker. After Trump’s January 6 jihadists stormed the Capitol, Limbaugh said on 1/18/21 that the forty Trump rallies before January 6 were all peaceful, yet the Democrats locked down D.C., and for what? Hmm… Because of January 6? Adding that the fence around the Capitol violated what he said is the Democrat’s opposition to walls, a nod to Trump’s border wall, “paid for by Mexico.” After Trump recommended injecting disinfectant into our veins to fight Covid and was excoriated for such abject stupidity, Limbaugh lambasted NYC Mayor Cuomo for having subway train cars disinfected as though the two were equivalent. Other examples of weakness include his complaint that the “drive-by media” will claim Biden inherited the Covid-19 crisis from Trump, not that it belongs to Biden himself. This was said after almost a year of Trump’s colossal ineptitude, erratic distortions, and 400,000 dead in the U.S. In his final weeks, Limbaugh saw the 200,000 flags ordered in rows at the Capitol Mall during the Biden inauguration, and saw in them a sign the U.S. had become China. That’s not merely weak, that’s asinine. More asinine than claiming the Left hid top stories he deemed threatening to them, when any and every Left and center media outlet in the country could he seen and heard covering these stories at the top of their broadcast. Limbaugh only got away with this because he knew his flock never tuned in to anything but he and the Right-wing silo.
[13] We all got to see Trump’s “Christians” parade a golden Donald in flip-flops as their Golden Calf at CPAC’s cult meeting and pep rally in Florida: Zack Beauchamp, This golden statue of Trump at CPAC is a perfect metaphor for the state of the GOP. Apparently CPAC attendees missed the part of the Bible about the Golden Calf., VOX, Feb 26, 2021.
Brett Williams, King Trump has no clothes. What a sight… Let the laughter begin!, on Goodreads, January 4, 2021.
Brett Williams, Charlie’s Exposé, Part 1: When America’s Right-Wing Became What it Most Despised, on Goodreads, November 2, 2020.
Brett Williams, America’s history lesson: Seven truths Trump taught the world, on Goodreads, September 7, 2020.
Brett Williams, Why my old Right-wing tribe betrayed everything it once stood for, on Goodreads, March 2, 2020.
Brett Williams, The Collapse of American Christianity, on Goodreads, January 18, 2020.
Brett Williams, America is asking, “Are Trump and his Party, traitors?”, on Goodreads, January 6, 2020.
Brett Williams, Our Dear (mafia) Leader, on Goodreads, December 24, 2019.
Brett Williams, The betrayal of Christ: global warming denial, on Goodreads, November 5, 2018.
[14] Hugh Trevor-Roper Ed., Final Entries 1945: The Diaries of Joseph Goebbels, AVON, 1979.
[15] Ibid. pg. pg. xix. And, Kim Bellware, Trump ‘in danger of losing the mandate of heaven’ over Syria decision, Pat Robertson warns, Washington Post, Oct. 8, 2019.
[16] Trevor-Roper. pg. xxiii.
[17] Ibid. pg. xxxix
[18] Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science, Penguin, 2016, pg. 104.
[19] Pervez Hoodbhoy, Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality, Zed, 1991. Hoodbhoy spells the name with an added “z:” Al-Ghazzali. In comparison to Limbaugh and the New Right’s hostility to universities, regardless of department or process, Hoodbhoy notes, “With time the attitudes against secular learning hardened. By the 12th century, the conservative anti-rationalists schools of thought had almost completely destroyed [rationalist] influence,” pg. 100.
[20] Ibid. pg. 99.
[21] Ibid. pg. 104.
[22] Rush Limbaugh Giuliani: ‘Truth isn’t truth’, Rush Limbaugh .com, April 29, 2013. Ironically, Rush also had a habit of quoting “scientific” evidence, which is whatever he designated as “real science,” while he was opposed to what he called “junk science.” His definition of junk science is revealed by an old joke: A modern artist is anybody who says they are, and modern art is anything they say it is. Ditto for Limbaugh, whatever served his creed. As scientifically illiterate as most of his followers, Limbaugh didn’t know science from a kumquat and was terrified of integers.
Until next time: May 3, 2021.
Or so I thought. [1]
There were three elements of personal ignorance yet to be illuminated in this experience. Little did I realize, what I was hearing was the seed of a massive social countermovement. Having been first duped as a child by Erich von Däniken's space aliens, I would later discover I was working on the second occasion of three in life. And finally, I'd not yet understood postmodernism either. Postmodern liberalism was the agenda I heard countered in that car. As Ferry and Renaut note in their French Philosophy of the Sixties, postmodernism is "a cult of paradox… accustoming their readers and listeners to the belief that incomprehensibility is a sign of greatness, and that the thinkers silence before incongruous demands for meaning is not proof of weakness but indication of endurance in the presence of the Unsayable." [2] Translation: inflated gobbledygook to hoodwink those who can be. Postmodernism bled into liberal American universities in the 1960s as a tool against a dominate, "Eurocentric," white male West, every bit as anti-science and anti-reason as Right-wing Creationists and Trump's Grand Old Putin Party. [3]
Notice this conclusion to reject reason emerged from a reasoned argument—an inherent self-contradiction and standard practice of the movement. Such thinking allows for the wildest of conclusions.
According to postmodernists, given that the West was built on Greek reason (which they consider a form of bigotry), recovered by the Renaissance, codified by Enlightenment, everything about the West was eventually indictable. The entire non-Western world was seen as a victim of the West, and there were plenty of reasons to justify such claims. From colonialism and slavery to opposition of women’s suffrage, reasons to oppose the Western Way were abundant for this forerunner of victim culture. Conveniently, this ignored the same iniquities in non-Western cultures and denied reason’s capacity for self-correction.
Before Marxism proved inane, postmodernism presented itself as another ally against the West. Upon colonizing American university humanities departments from those in France, including sociology, history, anthropology, literary criticism, cultural studies, it then created new ones like Women's Studies, White Studies, and feminist theory. [4] This is not to say all humanities at university are postmodern. Many possess rationalists seeking truth as best they’re able, and postmodernism could not survive, nor even enter university sciences and engineering where proven truth is required. Without the truth of nature as reasoned by science, no devices built to that nature could ever work; there would be no technology. [5]
Sixties intellectuals spun the new social doctrine which was to be free from the blasphemy of rational examination and beyond it, like a religion which so many of them scorned. Per Ferry and Renaut, postmoderns like Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan sought to create “a cult of paradox.” [6] With Foucault’s “there are no facts, only interpretation,” the way was opened to their core oxymoron, summarized as, “There is no truth and that’s the truth.” One presumes it applied to those who preached it, but it didn’t.
This practice would eventually be absorbed and fired back at postmodern liberals by postmodern “conservatives”—today’s populists. Nihilistic relativism born on the Left is now backbone of the Right for the political utility of lying expressed by Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” and Rudy Giuliani’s “Truth isn’t truth.” [7]
What I listened to in Newport was a response to sweeping irrationalism newly defined as “correct thinking” in concert with the birth of authoritarian political correctness. Correctness witnessed today by the Smith College fiasco. [8] Enlightenment liberalism employed by America’s Founders moved in reverse to create a new liberalism, the New Left. [9] Its counter-response was what became the New Right and a new industry, spearheaded by Rush Limbaugh. This industry grew to be today’s lie factories for radicalized “conservatism” with no association to traditional conservatism other than appropriation of the name.
Limbaugh exposed the Left’s countless absurdities: racist German shepherds; all boys are sexual proto predators; multiculturalism’s groundwork for tribalism through its replacement of America’s “melting pot” with “identity politics.” [10] To challenge such political nonsense was sacrilege to the Left and Rush relished exposing it with entertaining sound bites we harried Americans crave. His political incorrectness made it keenly satisfying.
But it wasn’t all he was doing. Laced with his revelations was another. I began to notice Limbaugh describe things in hostile terms which I’d personally witnessed with the opposite reaction. I heard him cherry-pick, truncate, and spin, discarding critical parts of a story that would reverse his allegations. I began talking out loud to my radio, asking questions to the bemusement of passersby. By the humblest of inquiries, it was alarming just how flimsy was Limbaugh’s rock-solid bombast. The full truth was an obstacle to winning his political arguments. [11]
Limbaugh’s master technique was to season lies with just enough truth to give his lies something to ride on, dependent on the fact that modernity overwhelms us with too much information we can’t track. His verbal knife flayed detail, nuance, and any need for lengthy attention spans. With relentless repetition, he put words in other’s mouths then told how wrong they were. A perpetual mind reader, he put thoughts, opinions, and schemes in other people’s minds—then told how wrong they were. He took the sins he practiced daily then pasted them to his adversaries. He exaggerated valid ideas to absurdity, then indicted the original idea with his ridiculous extension. He claimed to live in “Realville” but created a fake world in concert with the other fabricators he spawned. While bemoaning the Left’s victim culture, he chronically griped, We always play by the rules; they always take advantage of us; the elites never care about us, the little people, flyovers, hicks. With an absolutist’s emphasis on always, never, everybody, his grievance was easy to swallow. Not only did it require no thought, Limbaugh demanded it. “Don’t doubt me!” he’d say. And when he talked about his cat, the blustering fat man was charming.
While the Left offered ample targets, Limbaugh began to chase ever more trivial matters in a business that demands progressively shocking revelations of universal evil. Because LED light bulbs consume less energy, last longer, and add thus less atmospheric CO2, LEDs became a rallying cry against the “global warming hoax,” “invasions of our liberty,” more “big government control.” From just another appliance, to The Assault on America. He could have spun it differently: “American innovators, entrepreneurs, and capitalists solved another problem to create wealth, jobs, and greater GDP for a stronger USA.” We used to call this Yankee Ingenuity. The Old Right was all for it. For Limbaugh and his flock, everything became hopelessly politicized. [12]
Like the New Left’s reversal of Enlightenment reason, Limbaugh’s New Right would betray everything it once stood for: Reagan, Founders, Christ. [13] This coalescing of tribal safety on its way to a militant cult fully amalgamated with Trump’s rise, stretching Limbaugh’s skills. As Trump flip-flopped on paying porn stars for silence, Trump Tower Moscow, campaign meetings with Russian operatives, Limbaugh was forced to maintain a halo of infallibility for the New Right’s newest Savior.
Per historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, another once-dazzling mob orator was “history’s first master of the media Big Lie who created Hitler’s halo of infallibility,” Joseph Goebbels. [14] As Minister for Propaganda and Enlightenment, Goebbels vindicated Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which claimed the bigger the lie, the more likely it’s believed. For Trump, Limbaugh made this his career after first blasting Trump as a fake. Like Goebbels, Limbaugh, along with the New Right’s silo, “created the myth of the Führer… above the Party, blindly followed,” christened by evangelist Pat Robertson’s “mandate of heaven.” [15] Both Goebbels and Limbaugh employed arguments that appealed “to emotions and instincts, not intellect.” [16] And like Goebbels, Limbaugh “valued reality only as a means to its distortion.” [17]
Run-of-the-mill propaganda.
But Limbaugh had an added X-factor shared with another historical figure. That man’s X-factor was hostility to rational thought fueling his society’s philosophy, art, literature, economics, and science, such as it was in 1100 A.D. Islam. An entire civilization of varied nations ignited by rational inquiry, while in Europe, as physicist Steven Weinberg writes, “Charlemagne and his lords were dabbling in the art of writing their names.” [18]
As Pakistani physicist and historian Pervez Hoodbhoy elaborates, from civilization’s 12th-century beacon emerged one central figure to bring it all down: Al-Ghazali (1058-1111). [19] Like Limbaugh, like the postmodernists, Al-Ghazali set out to wreck the very thing that built his civilization, replaced with unwavering obedience to dogma. Why? Because rational thought was then, as it is now, a danger to religious orthodoxy, be it mainstream or a political cult. Critical thinking inherited from Greece and expanded by the Arabs made a growing number of Muslims hesitant about their Scriptures. Like Westerners who analyze the Bible critically, inconsistencies appear, self-contradictions, rank immorality, they ask questions, they doubt. So too, Islam. For Al-Ghazali, reason was to be exterminated to save the Koran and Al-Ghazali’s definition of right thinking. Islamic extremists “proclaimed a holy war against Rationalism,” writes Hoodbhoy, “against the upholders of reason and advocates of philosophy and science.” [20] And they won; one of history’s greatest civilizations collapsed. Admirers said Al-Ghazali “saved orthodoxy by depressing science.” [21]
Fast forward nine-hundred years to hear Rush Limbaugh broadcast that science and scientists are “One of the four corners of deceit!” [22] Done so over radio waves discovered by science, on electronics built by science, from a nation that once put men on the moon.
Isn’t it ironic that before Limbaugh died, he turned to science to save his life? But there are some things even science can’t fix, liars first among them. In a nation of so many, it’s a valued skill.
After years of barking at my radio, I was surprised to find how much I missed Limbaugh the day he died. The day I heard all those replays, from his beginnings as a conservative spinner to his demise as another Alex Jones conspiracy-pimp. Limbaugh fought the Left with emotion. He did not defeat them with ideas, and the Right followed to become the empty vessel it is.
Note how disparate sources are identical in their hostility to reason. From fundamentalists—be they Christian, Muslim, or postmodern atheists—to political cults like Stalinists, Nazis, Maoists, or Trumpers. From the Middle Ages to modernity; from America’s New Left to its New Right. And they think they’re different.
Like Al-Ghazali, Limbaugh’s war on rational thought led the way for a post-truth army against science, morality, and the reason democracies depend on. There may be no man more responsible for America’s current decline than Rush Limbaugh, 30-years before Trump, paving the foundation. Will what Limbaugh set in motion fail as Goebbels failed or succeed like Al-Ghazali?
[1] After Newport, I stumbled across another provocative radio personality as one of Limbaugh’s predecessors, but she made the blog title and body too long: Aimee Semple McPherson. She was a Pentecostal evangelist and founder of the Foursqaure Church. McPherson used the new invention of radio to redirect what had been masterful stagecraft in 1920s American theater. She had a massive national following, was one of the most influential women of her time, and was corrupted by money, power, and fame, dying early of an apparently accidental overdose. Limbaugh’s popularity, his talents in the new arena of talk-radio that he created, and his ultimate corruption look something like McPherson’s. Limbaugh crumpled paper near the microphone for effect when disposing of other’s ideas. He whispered, he shouted, he preached fire-and-brimstone doctrine. He was also, once-upon-a-time, a Reagan supporter, championed fiscal responsibility, opposed Russia’s murderous dictators, and said character in leadership was paramount while Bill Clinton was having his parts polished in the chair Lincoln sat. But for a serial adulterer, draft dodger, and 40-year money launderer for the Russians in the name of Donald Trump, all that changed. Limbaugh lived just long enough to see what he created lose along with Trump, but the perverse distortions with which he “reeducated” his tens of millions of “Dittoheads” lives on in their hypocrisy, most notably their claim to be both American patriots and Christians.
[2] Ferry and Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism, University of Massachusetts Press, 1990, pg. 12-14. More fully, Ferry and Renaut state, “a cult of paradox… accustoming their readers and listeners to the belief that incomprehensibility is a sign of greatness, and that the thinkers silence before incongruous demands for meaning was not proof of weakness but indication of endurance in the presence of the Unsayable.”
[3] While Ferry and Renaut emphasize “imperial colonialism and Nazism” pg. xxii-xv, others include WWI and the Great Depression. In addition to their rejection of reason, the postmodernists wanted to create a philosophy "which means nothing." pg. 5. Hmm...
[4] Examples are provided in Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History, Encounter Books, 2000. While not all of each department is dominated by postmodernists, for some like feminist theory (part of Women’s Studies) championed by UCLA’s Sandra Harding, there seems no interest in truth, only misandrist propaganda.
[5] Neither postmodernists science deniers, like UCLA’s feminist theorist Sandra Harding who drives a car and uses computers, nor the New Right’s science deniers like Limbaugh and the New Right’s liar’s silo have financial incentive to acknowledge the truth of science represented by its astounding success, it’s foundation in our national defense, its record-breaking Covid-19 vaccine, its building of the West, and their use of science every day.
[6] Ferry and Renaut, pg. 12-14.
[7] Alternative Facts, Wikipedia.
REBECCA MORIN and DAVID COHEN, Giuliani: ‘Truth isn’t truth’, POLITICO, 08/19/2018.
[8] For anyone who doubts the authoritarian nature of political correctness there are countless examples, but one recent display destroyed the lives of innocent working people at Smith College: Michael Powell, Inside a Battle Over Race, Class and Power at Smith College, New York Times, Feb. 24, 2021. Notice this negative assessment of an aspect of liberal political correctness comes from the “liberal” New York Times, something Limbaugh repeatedly asserted could never happen. An earlier example is chronicled by Alan Charles Kors & Harvey A. Silvergate, The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses, Harper Perennial, 1999.
[9] The New Left, Britannica. Some of this had already been paved by early 1900s progressives, like J. Allen Smith’s The Spirit of American Government in which he protested the Founder’s form of representative republican government because he wanted a direct democracy like the Greeks had when they lamented the poisoning of Socrates thanks to that form of order. Also early was Herbert Croly’s The Promise of American Life. However, none of these would have argued for expulsion of rational thought.
[10] Limbaugh was also not beyond finding the most fringe Left-wing stories online (or perhaps were not “Left” at all) and painting the Left with it as though it were a common feature.
[11] Of course, like 82% of “Republicans,” Limbaugh also claimed to be a Christian. Yet, long before Limbaugh lied for a living, Apostle Paul said, “We no longer lie to one another, we only tell the truth.” Ephesians 4:25.
[12] With age, death’s doorway, and his “Dittoheads” increased acceptance of lies, Limbaugh got weaker. After Trump’s January 6 jihadists stormed the Capitol, Limbaugh said on 1/18/21 that the forty Trump rallies before January 6 were all peaceful, yet the Democrats locked down D.C., and for what? Hmm… Because of January 6? Adding that the fence around the Capitol violated what he said is the Democrat’s opposition to walls, a nod to Trump’s border wall, “paid for by Mexico.” After Trump recommended injecting disinfectant into our veins to fight Covid and was excoriated for such abject stupidity, Limbaugh lambasted NYC Mayor Cuomo for having subway train cars disinfected as though the two were equivalent. Other examples of weakness include his complaint that the “drive-by media” will claim Biden inherited the Covid-19 crisis from Trump, not that it belongs to Biden himself. This was said after almost a year of Trump’s colossal ineptitude, erratic distortions, and 400,000 dead in the U.S. In his final weeks, Limbaugh saw the 200,000 flags ordered in rows at the Capitol Mall during the Biden inauguration, and saw in them a sign the U.S. had become China. That’s not merely weak, that’s asinine. More asinine than claiming the Left hid top stories he deemed threatening to them, when any and every Left and center media outlet in the country could he seen and heard covering these stories at the top of their broadcast. Limbaugh only got away with this because he knew his flock never tuned in to anything but he and the Right-wing silo.
[13] We all got to see Trump’s “Christians” parade a golden Donald in flip-flops as their Golden Calf at CPAC’s cult meeting and pep rally in Florida: Zack Beauchamp, This golden statue of Trump at CPAC is a perfect metaphor for the state of the GOP. Apparently CPAC attendees missed the part of the Bible about the Golden Calf., VOX, Feb 26, 2021.
Brett Williams, King Trump has no clothes. What a sight… Let the laughter begin!, on Goodreads, January 4, 2021.
Brett Williams, Charlie’s Exposé, Part 1: When America’s Right-Wing Became What it Most Despised, on Goodreads, November 2, 2020.
Brett Williams, America’s history lesson: Seven truths Trump taught the world, on Goodreads, September 7, 2020.
Brett Williams, Why my old Right-wing tribe betrayed everything it once stood for, on Goodreads, March 2, 2020.
Brett Williams, The Collapse of American Christianity, on Goodreads, January 18, 2020.
Brett Williams, America is asking, “Are Trump and his Party, traitors?”, on Goodreads, January 6, 2020.
Brett Williams, Our Dear (mafia) Leader, on Goodreads, December 24, 2019.
Brett Williams, The betrayal of Christ: global warming denial, on Goodreads, November 5, 2018.
[14] Hugh Trevor-Roper Ed., Final Entries 1945: The Diaries of Joseph Goebbels, AVON, 1979.
[15] Ibid. pg. pg. xix. And, Kim Bellware, Trump ‘in danger of losing the mandate of heaven’ over Syria decision, Pat Robertson warns, Washington Post, Oct. 8, 2019.
[16] Trevor-Roper. pg. xxiii.
[17] Ibid. pg. xxxix
[18] Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science, Penguin, 2016, pg. 104.
[19] Pervez Hoodbhoy, Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality, Zed, 1991. Hoodbhoy spells the name with an added “z:” Al-Ghazzali. In comparison to Limbaugh and the New Right’s hostility to universities, regardless of department or process, Hoodbhoy notes, “With time the attitudes against secular learning hardened. By the 12th century, the conservative anti-rationalists schools of thought had almost completely destroyed [rationalist] influence,” pg. 100.
[20] Ibid. pg. 99.
[21] Ibid. pg. 104.
[22] Rush Limbaugh Giuliani: ‘Truth isn’t truth’, Rush Limbaugh .com, April 29, 2013. Ironically, Rush also had a habit of quoting “scientific” evidence, which is whatever he designated as “real science,” while he was opposed to what he called “junk science.” His definition of junk science is revealed by an old joke: A modern artist is anybody who says they are, and modern art is anything they say it is. Ditto for Limbaugh, whatever served his creed. As scientifically illiterate as most of his followers, Limbaugh didn’t know science from a kumquat and was terrified of integers.
Until next time: May 3, 2021.
February 1, 2021
February 1, 2021: Lies, Dupes, and How to Patch Cracks in America’s Broken Foundation. Part 1
When I was a small, innocent, and naive boy living in Iowa, I discovered Erich von Däniken’s bestselling book, Chariots of the Gods?. [1] It was full of inexplicables, including ancient geoglyphs recognizable as animals only from high in the sky above Peru’s Nazca Desert. Von Däniken resolved these mysteries with a “simple” answer: our ancient ancestors were given technology by extraterrestrials. Giants of the publishing industry, print media, cinema, and TV all jumped in to validate the stunning claim. I told everyone I knew. “Space aliens visited planet earth!” “Read this book!” “It will change your life!”
A few years later, still an innocent and naive boy living in Iowa, though not as small, I happened across another book by archeologist Clifford Wilson, Crash Go the Chariots. [2] I assumed it a validation of von Däniken’s discovery, crash-landed spacecraft perhaps.
Surprise.
Step-by-step, Wilson dismantled von Däniken with science. I was stunned. I’d been duped. I was embarrassed for having pushed nonsense on so many people, like an ass for impossible conspiracies. I committed never to be suckered again, though I would be.
Decades later, I witness similar gullibility from 60 million Americans still breathlessly devoted to fantastical fabrications of 2020 election fraud. The Internet says so. Right-wing propaganda daily stirs the blood for ratings cash. Demagogues Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley manipulate the flock for political gains. And the National Loser, who claimed the Emmys were rigged because his gameshow didn’t win one, asserts the election was rigged too. [3]
As Timothy Synder writes, “To make sense of a world in which the 2020 presidential election was stolen requires distrust not only of reporters and experts but also local, state, and federal government institutions [of both parties], from poll workers to elected officials, Homeland Security, and the Supreme Court… Imagine all the people who must have been in on such a plot and all who had to work on the cover-up.” [4]
But as we saw at the U.S. Capitol, lies don’t come free. “To tell the big lie is to be owned by it,” writes Snyder. [5] “No fraud is necessary; only allegations that there are allegations of fraud. Truth is to be replaced by spectacle, facts by faith... To claim the other side stole an election is a promise to steal one yourself.” [6] And paves the way for standard practice.
While cocksure on this and every topic at the tavern, in the halls of reason’s offspring—science and democracy—such people are lost, even when acting out their Beer Hall Putsch. “[Trump sent] them on a rampage in the Capitol,” writes Snyder, “but none appeared to have any idea of how this was to work or what their presence would accomplish. It’s hard to think of a comparable insurrectionary moment when a building of significance was seized that involved so much milling around.” [7]
I’ve struggled to understand these people for four years through personal engagements, email, and face-to-face, including acquaintances, friends, and family. What I came to find with perfect certainty is that there’s no reasoning with a cult. [8] And per Johnathan Rauch, education doesn’t matter. [9] One of them I know has a Ph.D. in my field of physics. All but one of thirteen I know have university degrees.
I once told them my financial success never saw such a high return investment as that provided by a web link. They clicked the bait only to find the U.S. Treasury FinCEN website detailing Trumps most recent record fine for (Russian) money laundering. [10] Their response? All politicians do this—including Lincoln and Reagan; Trump only ran the operation, he didn’t know what went on behind the scenes; God chose Trump, He works in mysterious ways; I didn’t vote for daddy. And this from people who said character was paramount during the Bill Clinton era.
One, a self-described “devout Lutheran,” instructed me to take Apostle Paul’s quote, “‘We no longer lie to one another, we only tell the truth,’ and shove it up your ass. I live in the real world. Force wins!” So much for his devotion.
In a 180-degree reversal of the Founder’s moral means to ends, these people not only prioritize immorality, they glorify it as a tribal identifier. No surprise, “Republicans” favor Putin (60%) and want fascist authoritarian rule in the U.S. (52%), while they claim reverence for the Constitution and fly the Stars and Stripes. [11] Precisely the self-contradiction we saw when Confederate flags waved—from an enemy country we defeated—through the building under which George Washington set its cornerstone.
Per David Brooks, “One core feature of Trumpism is that it forces you to betray every other commitment you might have: to the truth, moral character, the Sermon on the Mount, conservative principles, the Constitution.” [12]
When National Guard surrounded the Capitol to protect it from the president, one Trumper I know stood his ground. Commencing with “whataboutism,” because these “Christians” can’t “Pull the plank from your own eye first.” [13] Then he embraced the big lie as “some pretty underhanded ballot manipulation.” The Right got “a little rowdy,” he said, “demonstrating their displeasure,” and for that, “they are Domestic Terrorists?”
As Billy Graham Center Direct Ed Stetzer said, what evangelicals have done is “The definition of selling out your beliefs." [14] Though it’s not only the evangelical sector, “a sacrilegious mob blasting Christian pop music, chanting ‘Hang Mike Pence.’” [15]
After the botched Capitol coup, our New Right ignored it and doubled down on election fraud claims because Trump taught them something useful. GOPP voters demand lies because truth is an obstacle to winning political power. [16] Even without Trump, his base has made it clear they are eagerly conned. By lying demagogues and cowards like Kevin McCarthy, Louie Gohmert, Rand Paul, Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar, Ron Johnson (there's so many, 147, House and Senate), and Georgia QAnon Representative Marjorie Taylor Green who claims Hillary Clinton cuts the face off children to wear on her own, and that there’s no evidence a plane crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11. [17] And then there’s NY Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, who clarified she’s never said there was widespread voter fraud but voted to reject the Electoral College certification anyway. [18] Why? Because there are 60 million Americans who believe there was fraud. Why? Because liars like Malliotakis said so.
Notice, all the above are “adults,” not nine-year-old boys duped by another hustler.
How long can a civilization hang on when vipers like these are elected by ignorant masses, charged with national powers?
As Thomas Jefferson said, “A nation that believes it can be ignorant and free is a nation that never was and never can be.”
By April 2020, I started to cut ties with these people. No matter how much proven evidence is triangulated, there’s always another Limbaugh lie to push after the last one failed. [19] It’s no surprise their militias, “better trained, with more weapons, and more members than Al Qaeda or ISIS,” would impersonate Al Qaeda’s 9/11 by leading their own attack on 1/21. [20] Vandals, thieves, and cop killers among them are cheered by Putin, China, Iran, and Trump as he watched his jihadists on TV, stalling support for overwhelmed Capitol Police. [21] A week after the desecration, 45% of “Republicans” supported it, 73% believed Trump was trying to “protect democracy.” [22]
So, can we keep it? as Benjamin Franklin asked of the Republic, or lose it to monsters among our own ex-friends and family?
Starting only with systemic government matters, Johnathan Rauch answers with solutions that take stock of the fact humans are an inherently unstable species. [23] Make gerrymandering illegal. The U.K., Australia, and New Zealand already do this. Eliminate primaries begun in 1912. No one cares about politics so early in a cycle but radicals. This and abolition of gerrymandering would terminate incumbents from being “primaried” by even crankier cranks appealing to extremists. Bring back pork-barrel politics in which lawmakers trade legislative votes for wasteful home-district “pork.” They’ve nothing to show home for compromise, so compromise is treason. Small change compared to the cost of what we’ve got. Like the 1787 Constitutional Convention, make select committee deliberations secret from public scrutiny so politicians can speak freely without militant special interests twisting every word. No more 4-day workweeks, then back home. Require all Congressional members reside in D.C. with regular, scheduled, one-on-one family gatherings of the opposition. “It’s really hard to hate your political opponent when you know his wife and kids.” [24] Impose strict regulations on asocial media. Kill Section 230. Resurrect the Fairness Doctrine; crush the propaganda silos. Stop the mountains of corrupt dark money in campaign finance. Fix our educational system. It will be a gigantic bill. But we gave Wall Street’s gamblers trillions after they destroyed the world economy in 2008, we can’t educate our own people out of the gutter? And not STEM alone. Americans proved they know less about Founding governance, law, and ethics than they know about kumquats. When “Republicans” can support the fascism of a Russian-groomed tyrant and feign support for the Constitution, something is unspeakably perverse. [25]
Or, we can jettison reason, justice, and democratic governance. Let Trump and his crime family free, and watch our terrorists take over. Lenin did it, Hitler did it, Mao did it. As we’ve seen, psychologically and morally, almost half of America is little different. [26] While already they eat each other: “‘A Total Failure’: Proud Boys Now Mock Trump;” “QAnon believers in disarray after Biden inaugurated;” “Trump Ignites War Within the Church: After a week of Trumpist mayhem, white evangelicals wrestle with what they’ve become.” [27] Demonstrative of how absent Trumpist “ideals” are, and a gauge of American immorality, credulity, and ignorance. A vast resource for Putin and despots like Trump to come.
[1] Erich von Däniken’s, Chariots of the Gods?, Putnum, 1969. Notice Berkeley Press reissued the book in 1999 without a question mark in the title. It has a 3.5-star rating with 13,698 ratings on Goodreads at time of this blog post. At the time of its first publication, newspapers told of its breakthrough, a movie was made, and a television program. The film was based on “The book that shattered conventional theories of history and archeology!” The television program, which I saw, was called “In Search of Ancient Astronauts.”
[2] Clifford Wilson, Crash Go the Chariots, Lancer Books, 1972, with a 3-star review and 64 ratings on Goodreads. Sensational rubbish sells more than thoughtful analysis.
[3] DANIEL WHITE, Yes, Donald Trump Thought the Emmys Were Rigged Against Him, TIME, OCTOBER 19, 2016.
[4] Timothy Snyder, The American Abyss, New York Times, January 9, 2021.
In America, we’ve seen these big lies and their consequences before in the denial of man-made global warming and Creationist rejection of human evolution. Analogous to Snyder’s argument, there are tens of thousands of scientists from every discipline, from every nation, of every religion, or none at all—the vast majority as complete strangers—investigating millions of physical phenomena with over a century of fieldwork and terabytes of measured data direct from nature. Who could possibly herd so many cats pointed in so many directions that all end up at the same conclusion: man-made global warming is a fact; human evolution really happened. The only naysayers of apparent authority are paid by or affiliated with the likes of Heartland Institute in Chicago and ICR.org outside San Diego. Affirmative proof for scientific conclusions comes from the same science of physics, chemistry, and biology that drives the world economy, our national defense, and every working device on planet earth from iPhones to SpaceX. All as the planet burns and fundamentalists force schools to teach religion in science class, dumbing down American students already at bottom of the industrialized world. This is the same ignorant, gullible, and largely Christian apostates with no intention of “Seeking the truth” their Savior counsels that we’ve scrutinized, pondered, and poked here before. Recall, their politics trumps their religion. They hate liberals more than they love Jesus. And regardless of faith or lack of it on the New Right, truth is an obstacle to winning their political arguments.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] As David Brooks notes, “You can’t argue with people who have their own made-up facts. You can’t have an argument with [the] deranged…” David Brooks, Trump Ignites a War Within the Church: After a week of Trumpist mayhem, white evangelicals wrestle with what they’ve become., New York Times, Jan. 14, 2021.
[9] Jonathan Rauch, How American Politics Went Insane, The Atlantic Monthly, JULY/AUGUST 2016.
[10] Contact: Steve Hudak, FinCEN Fines Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort $10 Million for Significant and Long Standing Anti-Money Laundering Violations, U.S> Treasury FinCEN, March 06, 2015.
[11] Henry E. Hale and Olga Kamenchuk, Why are Republicans using Putin’s talking points? This study helps explain. Increasingly, Republican voters think Vladimir Putin is a good leader. , Washington Post, Feb. 4, 2020.
Aaron Blake, The GOP has caught autocratic fever, The Washington Post, August 7, 2019.
[12] Brooks.
The point was also noted here: Brett Williams, Why my old Right-wing tribe betrayed everything it once stood for, on Goodreads, March 2, 2020.
[13] For those uninitiated into the latest American slang, “whataboutism” is simplistic diversion which allows one not to answer a question defensively, but rather go on the offense to ask “what about:” Black Lives Matter protests, burnings, killings of police from any era so long as it can be associated with liberal radicals, ignoring that according to FBI reports the New Right is responsible for more violence since 1994 than the radical Left, and that America’s Capitol GOPP jihadists are also cop killers. Whataboutism is also a version of motivated-reason that only accepts evidence if it supports what we already believe, contrary to right-reason which accepts validated evidence no matter how it makes us feel. We used to call these people liars. I still do. They still are. “Pull the plank from your own eye first.” Matthew 7:5.
[14] MELISSA BLOCK, “How Did We Get Here?” A Call For An Evangelical Reckoning On Trump, NPR: Morning Edition, January 13, 2021.
[15] Brooks.
[16] GOPP: Trump’s Grand Old Putin Party
[17] David Gilbert, Marjorie Taylor Greene Believes in Frazzledrip, QAnon’s Wildest Conspiracy Theory, VICE, January 27, 2021.
[18] CNN & Brian Tyler Cohen, Republican tries to defend her vote to overturn election... it backfired HORRIBLY, January 23, 2021.
[19] My termination of friends and family over Trump and his cult has been labeled “cancel culture” in an attempt to lump me with the Left. The label applies equally well to any among the New Right, including Matt Gaetz’s cancel of fellow “Republican” Liz Cheney at a rally he held in her home state of Wyoming in January 2021, or Arizona’s State GOPP cancel of Governor Doug Ducey, ex-Senator Flake (not in office), and John McCain’s wife, because they “didn’t say very nice things about Trump,” and South Carolina’s State GOPP cancel of Rep. Tom Rice for voting to impeach Trump an historic second time for his treason. Since I don’t belong to a tribe, I’m not required to lie for it. Trump and his cult are far past politics, deep into moral matters which apply universally to all, not only the other party, while we give our own a pass. I have no more obligation to associate with immoral Americans than I have to associate with the Taliban.
[20] Former FBI Special Agent Clint Watts. MSNBC Deadline Whitehouse. January 2021.
[21] Ashley Parker, Josh Dawsey and Philip Rucker, Six hours of paralysis: Inside Trump’s failure to act after a mob stormed the Capitol, Washington Post, Jan. 11, 2021.
[22] Matthew Smith, Jamie Ballard, Linley Sanders, Most voters say the events at the US Capitol are a threat to democracy, YouGov, January 06, 2021.
[23] Ibid, Rauch. Of course, this is not a full coverage of all of America’s many ills or their solutions, nor are they all from Rauch, but rather simple common sense.
[24] Reference lost.
[25] David Smith, ‘The perfect target’: Russia cultivated Trump as asset for 40 years – ex-KGB spy, The Guardian, 29 Jan 2021.
[26] Brett Williams, King Trump has no clothes. What a sight… Let the laughter begin!, on Goodreads, January 4, 2021.
Brett Williams, Charlie’s Exposé, Part 1: When America’s Right-Wing Became What it Most Despised, on Goodreads, November 2, 2020.
Brett Williams, America’s history lesson: Seven truths Trump taught the world, on Goodreads, September 7, 2020.
Brett Williams, Why my old Right-wing tribe betrayed everything it once stood for, on Goodreads, March 2, 2020.
Brett Williams, The Collapse of American Christianity, on Goodreads, January 18, 2020.
Brett Williams, America is asking, “Are Trump and his Party, traitors?”, on Goodreads, January 6, 2020.
Brett Williams, Our Dear (mafia) Leader, on Goodreads, December 24, 2019.
Brett Williams, What is “truth” in America’s post-truth fog, and how can we find it?, on Goodreads, December 12, 2019.
[27] Sheera Frenkel and Alan Feuer, ‘A Total Failure’: The Proud Boys Now Mock Trump, New York Times, January 20, 2020.
Brian Fung, Kaya Yurieff, QAnon believers are in disarray after Biden is inaugurated, CNN, January 21, 2020. Notice from this article: “Other believers insisted that the lack of a climax was itself a part of the plan, theorizing that Trump merely "allowed" Biden to become president "for appearances" while the former reality show host would be the one pulling the strings. ‘Anything that happens in the next 4 years is actually President Trumps doing,’ wrote one 4chan user.” I wish I’d had this for my previous post, adding to the laughter.
David Brooks, Trump Ignites a War Within the Church: After a week of Trumpist mayhem, white evangelicals wrestle with what they’ve become., New York Times, January 14, 2020.
Given Trump’s insurrection in the U.S. Capitol as a capstone to his inaugural claim of carnage, this unscheduled blog was posted between the usual bimonthly submissions. Trump and (mostly) his fake Christians—not just casual sinners, but determined apostates—have been responsible for a number of such insertions over these last four interminable years. With the exception of a parting salute to Rush Limbaugh after he’s dead, and the occasional historical, psychological, and moral comparisons between fascist tyrants of the past and Trumpers today, we will return to more uplifting subjects. Those being the subjects of nature and science, history and civilization, religion, mythology, and philosophy, leaving this downer of America’s epic disgrace behind for as long as our jihadists allow. Unfortunately, that won’t be long.
Until next time, the first Monday in March, the 1st, 2021.
A few years later, still an innocent and naive boy living in Iowa, though not as small, I happened across another book by archeologist Clifford Wilson, Crash Go the Chariots. [2] I assumed it a validation of von Däniken’s discovery, crash-landed spacecraft perhaps.
Surprise.
Step-by-step, Wilson dismantled von Däniken with science. I was stunned. I’d been duped. I was embarrassed for having pushed nonsense on so many people, like an ass for impossible conspiracies. I committed never to be suckered again, though I would be.
Decades later, I witness similar gullibility from 60 million Americans still breathlessly devoted to fantastical fabrications of 2020 election fraud. The Internet says so. Right-wing propaganda daily stirs the blood for ratings cash. Demagogues Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley manipulate the flock for political gains. And the National Loser, who claimed the Emmys were rigged because his gameshow didn’t win one, asserts the election was rigged too. [3]
As Timothy Synder writes, “To make sense of a world in which the 2020 presidential election was stolen requires distrust not only of reporters and experts but also local, state, and federal government institutions [of both parties], from poll workers to elected officials, Homeland Security, and the Supreme Court… Imagine all the people who must have been in on such a plot and all who had to work on the cover-up.” [4]
But as we saw at the U.S. Capitol, lies don’t come free. “To tell the big lie is to be owned by it,” writes Snyder. [5] “No fraud is necessary; only allegations that there are allegations of fraud. Truth is to be replaced by spectacle, facts by faith... To claim the other side stole an election is a promise to steal one yourself.” [6] And paves the way for standard practice.
While cocksure on this and every topic at the tavern, in the halls of reason’s offspring—science and democracy—such people are lost, even when acting out their Beer Hall Putsch. “[Trump sent] them on a rampage in the Capitol,” writes Snyder, “but none appeared to have any idea of how this was to work or what their presence would accomplish. It’s hard to think of a comparable insurrectionary moment when a building of significance was seized that involved so much milling around.” [7]
I’ve struggled to understand these people for four years through personal engagements, email, and face-to-face, including acquaintances, friends, and family. What I came to find with perfect certainty is that there’s no reasoning with a cult. [8] And per Johnathan Rauch, education doesn’t matter. [9] One of them I know has a Ph.D. in my field of physics. All but one of thirteen I know have university degrees.
I once told them my financial success never saw such a high return investment as that provided by a web link. They clicked the bait only to find the U.S. Treasury FinCEN website detailing Trumps most recent record fine for (Russian) money laundering. [10] Their response? All politicians do this—including Lincoln and Reagan; Trump only ran the operation, he didn’t know what went on behind the scenes; God chose Trump, He works in mysterious ways; I didn’t vote for daddy. And this from people who said character was paramount during the Bill Clinton era.
One, a self-described “devout Lutheran,” instructed me to take Apostle Paul’s quote, “‘We no longer lie to one another, we only tell the truth,’ and shove it up your ass. I live in the real world. Force wins!” So much for his devotion.
In a 180-degree reversal of the Founder’s moral means to ends, these people not only prioritize immorality, they glorify it as a tribal identifier. No surprise, “Republicans” favor Putin (60%) and want fascist authoritarian rule in the U.S. (52%), while they claim reverence for the Constitution and fly the Stars and Stripes. [11] Precisely the self-contradiction we saw when Confederate flags waved—from an enemy country we defeated—through the building under which George Washington set its cornerstone.
Per David Brooks, “One core feature of Trumpism is that it forces you to betray every other commitment you might have: to the truth, moral character, the Sermon on the Mount, conservative principles, the Constitution.” [12]
When National Guard surrounded the Capitol to protect it from the president, one Trumper I know stood his ground. Commencing with “whataboutism,” because these “Christians” can’t “Pull the plank from your own eye first.” [13] Then he embraced the big lie as “some pretty underhanded ballot manipulation.” The Right got “a little rowdy,” he said, “demonstrating their displeasure,” and for that, “they are Domestic Terrorists?”
As Billy Graham Center Direct Ed Stetzer said, what evangelicals have done is “The definition of selling out your beliefs." [14] Though it’s not only the evangelical sector, “a sacrilegious mob blasting Christian pop music, chanting ‘Hang Mike Pence.’” [15]
After the botched Capitol coup, our New Right ignored it and doubled down on election fraud claims because Trump taught them something useful. GOPP voters demand lies because truth is an obstacle to winning political power. [16] Even without Trump, his base has made it clear they are eagerly conned. By lying demagogues and cowards like Kevin McCarthy, Louie Gohmert, Rand Paul, Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar, Ron Johnson (there's so many, 147, House and Senate), and Georgia QAnon Representative Marjorie Taylor Green who claims Hillary Clinton cuts the face off children to wear on her own, and that there’s no evidence a plane crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11. [17] And then there’s NY Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, who clarified she’s never said there was widespread voter fraud but voted to reject the Electoral College certification anyway. [18] Why? Because there are 60 million Americans who believe there was fraud. Why? Because liars like Malliotakis said so.
Notice, all the above are “adults,” not nine-year-old boys duped by another hustler.
How long can a civilization hang on when vipers like these are elected by ignorant masses, charged with national powers?
As Thomas Jefferson said, “A nation that believes it can be ignorant and free is a nation that never was and never can be.”
By April 2020, I started to cut ties with these people. No matter how much proven evidence is triangulated, there’s always another Limbaugh lie to push after the last one failed. [19] It’s no surprise their militias, “better trained, with more weapons, and more members than Al Qaeda or ISIS,” would impersonate Al Qaeda’s 9/11 by leading their own attack on 1/21. [20] Vandals, thieves, and cop killers among them are cheered by Putin, China, Iran, and Trump as he watched his jihadists on TV, stalling support for overwhelmed Capitol Police. [21] A week after the desecration, 45% of “Republicans” supported it, 73% believed Trump was trying to “protect democracy.” [22]
So, can we keep it? as Benjamin Franklin asked of the Republic, or lose it to monsters among our own ex-friends and family?
Starting only with systemic government matters, Johnathan Rauch answers with solutions that take stock of the fact humans are an inherently unstable species. [23] Make gerrymandering illegal. The U.K., Australia, and New Zealand already do this. Eliminate primaries begun in 1912. No one cares about politics so early in a cycle but radicals. This and abolition of gerrymandering would terminate incumbents from being “primaried” by even crankier cranks appealing to extremists. Bring back pork-barrel politics in which lawmakers trade legislative votes for wasteful home-district “pork.” They’ve nothing to show home for compromise, so compromise is treason. Small change compared to the cost of what we’ve got. Like the 1787 Constitutional Convention, make select committee deliberations secret from public scrutiny so politicians can speak freely without militant special interests twisting every word. No more 4-day workweeks, then back home. Require all Congressional members reside in D.C. with regular, scheduled, one-on-one family gatherings of the opposition. “It’s really hard to hate your political opponent when you know his wife and kids.” [24] Impose strict regulations on asocial media. Kill Section 230. Resurrect the Fairness Doctrine; crush the propaganda silos. Stop the mountains of corrupt dark money in campaign finance. Fix our educational system. It will be a gigantic bill. But we gave Wall Street’s gamblers trillions after they destroyed the world economy in 2008, we can’t educate our own people out of the gutter? And not STEM alone. Americans proved they know less about Founding governance, law, and ethics than they know about kumquats. When “Republicans” can support the fascism of a Russian-groomed tyrant and feign support for the Constitution, something is unspeakably perverse. [25]
Or, we can jettison reason, justice, and democratic governance. Let Trump and his crime family free, and watch our terrorists take over. Lenin did it, Hitler did it, Mao did it. As we’ve seen, psychologically and morally, almost half of America is little different. [26] While already they eat each other: “‘A Total Failure’: Proud Boys Now Mock Trump;” “QAnon believers in disarray after Biden inaugurated;” “Trump Ignites War Within the Church: After a week of Trumpist mayhem, white evangelicals wrestle with what they’ve become.” [27] Demonstrative of how absent Trumpist “ideals” are, and a gauge of American immorality, credulity, and ignorance. A vast resource for Putin and despots like Trump to come.
[1] Erich von Däniken’s, Chariots of the Gods?, Putnum, 1969. Notice Berkeley Press reissued the book in 1999 without a question mark in the title. It has a 3.5-star rating with 13,698 ratings on Goodreads at time of this blog post. At the time of its first publication, newspapers told of its breakthrough, a movie was made, and a television program. The film was based on “The book that shattered conventional theories of history and archeology!” The television program, which I saw, was called “In Search of Ancient Astronauts.”
[2] Clifford Wilson, Crash Go the Chariots, Lancer Books, 1972, with a 3-star review and 64 ratings on Goodreads. Sensational rubbish sells more than thoughtful analysis.
[3] DANIEL WHITE, Yes, Donald Trump Thought the Emmys Were Rigged Against Him, TIME, OCTOBER 19, 2016.
[4] Timothy Snyder, The American Abyss, New York Times, January 9, 2021.
In America, we’ve seen these big lies and their consequences before in the denial of man-made global warming and Creationist rejection of human evolution. Analogous to Snyder’s argument, there are tens of thousands of scientists from every discipline, from every nation, of every religion, or none at all—the vast majority as complete strangers—investigating millions of physical phenomena with over a century of fieldwork and terabytes of measured data direct from nature. Who could possibly herd so many cats pointed in so many directions that all end up at the same conclusion: man-made global warming is a fact; human evolution really happened. The only naysayers of apparent authority are paid by or affiliated with the likes of Heartland Institute in Chicago and ICR.org outside San Diego. Affirmative proof for scientific conclusions comes from the same science of physics, chemistry, and biology that drives the world economy, our national defense, and every working device on planet earth from iPhones to SpaceX. All as the planet burns and fundamentalists force schools to teach religion in science class, dumbing down American students already at bottom of the industrialized world. This is the same ignorant, gullible, and largely Christian apostates with no intention of “Seeking the truth” their Savior counsels that we’ve scrutinized, pondered, and poked here before. Recall, their politics trumps their religion. They hate liberals more than they love Jesus. And regardless of faith or lack of it on the New Right, truth is an obstacle to winning their political arguments.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] As David Brooks notes, “You can’t argue with people who have their own made-up facts. You can’t have an argument with [the] deranged…” David Brooks, Trump Ignites a War Within the Church: After a week of Trumpist mayhem, white evangelicals wrestle with what they’ve become., New York Times, Jan. 14, 2021.
[9] Jonathan Rauch, How American Politics Went Insane, The Atlantic Monthly, JULY/AUGUST 2016.
[10] Contact: Steve Hudak, FinCEN Fines Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort $10 Million for Significant and Long Standing Anti-Money Laundering Violations, U.S> Treasury FinCEN, March 06, 2015.
[11] Henry E. Hale and Olga Kamenchuk, Why are Republicans using Putin’s talking points? This study helps explain. Increasingly, Republican voters think Vladimir Putin is a good leader. , Washington Post, Feb. 4, 2020.
Aaron Blake, The GOP has caught autocratic fever, The Washington Post, August 7, 2019.
[12] Brooks.
The point was also noted here: Brett Williams, Why my old Right-wing tribe betrayed everything it once stood for, on Goodreads, March 2, 2020.
[13] For those uninitiated into the latest American slang, “whataboutism” is simplistic diversion which allows one not to answer a question defensively, but rather go on the offense to ask “what about:” Black Lives Matter protests, burnings, killings of police from any era so long as it can be associated with liberal radicals, ignoring that according to FBI reports the New Right is responsible for more violence since 1994 than the radical Left, and that America’s Capitol GOPP jihadists are also cop killers. Whataboutism is also a version of motivated-reason that only accepts evidence if it supports what we already believe, contrary to right-reason which accepts validated evidence no matter how it makes us feel. We used to call these people liars. I still do. They still are. “Pull the plank from your own eye first.” Matthew 7:5.
[14] MELISSA BLOCK, “How Did We Get Here?” A Call For An Evangelical Reckoning On Trump, NPR: Morning Edition, January 13, 2021.
[15] Brooks.
[16] GOPP: Trump’s Grand Old Putin Party
[17] David Gilbert, Marjorie Taylor Greene Believes in Frazzledrip, QAnon’s Wildest Conspiracy Theory, VICE, January 27, 2021.
[18] CNN & Brian Tyler Cohen, Republican tries to defend her vote to overturn election... it backfired HORRIBLY, January 23, 2021.
[19] My termination of friends and family over Trump and his cult has been labeled “cancel culture” in an attempt to lump me with the Left. The label applies equally well to any among the New Right, including Matt Gaetz’s cancel of fellow “Republican” Liz Cheney at a rally he held in her home state of Wyoming in January 2021, or Arizona’s State GOPP cancel of Governor Doug Ducey, ex-Senator Flake (not in office), and John McCain’s wife, because they “didn’t say very nice things about Trump,” and South Carolina’s State GOPP cancel of Rep. Tom Rice for voting to impeach Trump an historic second time for his treason. Since I don’t belong to a tribe, I’m not required to lie for it. Trump and his cult are far past politics, deep into moral matters which apply universally to all, not only the other party, while we give our own a pass. I have no more obligation to associate with immoral Americans than I have to associate with the Taliban.
[20] Former FBI Special Agent Clint Watts. MSNBC Deadline Whitehouse. January 2021.
[21] Ashley Parker, Josh Dawsey and Philip Rucker, Six hours of paralysis: Inside Trump’s failure to act after a mob stormed the Capitol, Washington Post, Jan. 11, 2021.
[22] Matthew Smith, Jamie Ballard, Linley Sanders, Most voters say the events at the US Capitol are a threat to democracy, YouGov, January 06, 2021.
[23] Ibid, Rauch. Of course, this is not a full coverage of all of America’s many ills or their solutions, nor are they all from Rauch, but rather simple common sense.
[24] Reference lost.
[25] David Smith, ‘The perfect target’: Russia cultivated Trump as asset for 40 years – ex-KGB spy, The Guardian, 29 Jan 2021.
[26] Brett Williams, King Trump has no clothes. What a sight… Let the laughter begin!, on Goodreads, January 4, 2021.
Brett Williams, Charlie’s Exposé, Part 1: When America’s Right-Wing Became What it Most Despised, on Goodreads, November 2, 2020.
Brett Williams, America’s history lesson: Seven truths Trump taught the world, on Goodreads, September 7, 2020.
Brett Williams, Why my old Right-wing tribe betrayed everything it once stood for, on Goodreads, March 2, 2020.
Brett Williams, The Collapse of American Christianity, on Goodreads, January 18, 2020.
Brett Williams, America is asking, “Are Trump and his Party, traitors?”, on Goodreads, January 6, 2020.
Brett Williams, Our Dear (mafia) Leader, on Goodreads, December 24, 2019.
Brett Williams, What is “truth” in America’s post-truth fog, and how can we find it?, on Goodreads, December 12, 2019.
[27] Sheera Frenkel and Alan Feuer, ‘A Total Failure’: The Proud Boys Now Mock Trump, New York Times, January 20, 2020.
Brian Fung, Kaya Yurieff, QAnon believers are in disarray after Biden is inaugurated, CNN, January 21, 2020. Notice from this article: “Other believers insisted that the lack of a climax was itself a part of the plan, theorizing that Trump merely "allowed" Biden to become president "for appearances" while the former reality show host would be the one pulling the strings. ‘Anything that happens in the next 4 years is actually President Trumps doing,’ wrote one 4chan user.” I wish I’d had this for my previous post, adding to the laughter.
David Brooks, Trump Ignites a War Within the Church: After a week of Trumpist mayhem, white evangelicals wrestle with what they’ve become., New York Times, January 14, 2020.
Given Trump’s insurrection in the U.S. Capitol as a capstone to his inaugural claim of carnage, this unscheduled blog was posted between the usual bimonthly submissions. Trump and (mostly) his fake Christians—not just casual sinners, but determined apostates—have been responsible for a number of such insertions over these last four interminable years. With the exception of a parting salute to Rush Limbaugh after he’s dead, and the occasional historical, psychological, and moral comparisons between fascist tyrants of the past and Trumpers today, we will return to more uplifting subjects. Those being the subjects of nature and science, history and civilization, religion, mythology, and philosophy, leaving this downer of America’s epic disgrace behind for as long as our jihadists allow. Unfortunately, that won’t be long.
Until next time, the first Monday in March, the 1st, 2021.
