Category Archives: Politics

Any Questions?

“The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.” – Elena Gorokhova, A Mountain of Crumbs

Breach Of Contract

In response to an extraordinary rise in subterranean crime over the past few years, New York Governess Kathy Hochul has announced that she will be deploying National Guard troops and State Police in the NYC subways in an attempt to make the system safer, or at least to seem safer. They will apparently be conducting […]

Axioms And Theorems

Imagine a large-scale mathematical society whose aim is to work together to broaden the scope of demonstrated mathematical truths. The way they would go about this is by building upon the theorems that have already been proven: finding new relations and isomorphisms between existing theorems, and proving new ones. They wouldn’t all work on the […]

Repost: On The Taxonomy Of Civil War

In the course of the ongoing conversation about America’s prospects over at Bill Vallicella’s website, Bill mentioned two of the various types of civil wars (in my view, there are at least three). Having written an article about exactly that at American Greatness four years ago, in the runup to the last election, I posted […]

Four More Years!

At this point it hardly seems worth mentioning, but the Daily Mail reminds us today, in painful detail, of what a frail and feeble dotard our President is. What times we live in!

Invasion Of The Mind Snatchers

I’ve had nothing, so far, to say about Donald Trump’s show-trial for “fraud” in New York, which the other day resulted in a guilty judgment, and a fine of $355,000,000. I’m still having difficulty. The process was a sham, of course, from start to finish. There was never any crime, any complainant, or any victim. […]

Sound And Fury

As I write, the House has impeached Homeland Security secretary Mayorkas: a pointless gesture, a little kayfabe for the fans. Yes, he’s lied to us, and to Congress. Yes, he’s an enemy who hates us. But he’s an underling, a myrmidon, a stooge, an infantryman, a dogsbody. His impeachment will die in the Senate, like […]

Letting Go Of Brandon?

Special Counsel Robert Hur has released his report on Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents. I don’t say “alleged” mishandling, because the second paragraph of the report states the following: Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen. These materials […]

Here There Be Monsters

With a hat-tip to Bill Vallicella, here is a sickening dispatch, posted in a Disqus comment-thread at Powerline, by “Diego Palma“, who says he lives in Arizona at the Mexican border. Is this real? I have no way of knowing. The place Mr. Palma describes certainly is; it’s at 31°20’3.81″N, 110° 8’53.86″W, and if look […]

A Higher Duty

Yesterday, five justices of the Supreme Court (the obvious ones, plus Barrett and Roberts) decided to lift an injunction against the Biden administration’s attempt to force open the portions of the national border in Texas that Texas had unilaterally decided to seal off with razor wire and other barriers. Think about that; the administration appealed […]

Gird Up Thy Loins

Well, here we are: mid-January 2024, with the first round of electoral winnowing behind us, and another a few days away. Already we are down to three still in the running for the GOP nomination, but it doesn’t look like much of a contest. Over at Maverick Philosopher, Bill V. has put up two posts […]

What Is Best In Life?

“To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.” – Conan the Cimmerian, on the Iowa Caucuses

Wisdom vs Folly: Compare And Contrast

I’ve just run across a Twitter (okay, “X”) thread so remarkable that I’m going to unroll it for you right here. The principals are Emmett Shear, a serial Internet entrepreneur who has just been selected as CEO of OpenAI, and a science-fiction author by the name of Devon Eriksen. How did I come across this? […]

The Relativity Of Principle

Over at Maverick Philosopher, Bill Vallicella links to two contrasting articles. The first, by Binyamin Applebaum, an editor at the New York Times, is a panegyric on the presidency of Joe Biden. The second, by Peter van Buren at American Conservative, is a jeremiad called “Evening in America”. It’s a stark and fascinating juxtaposition. In […]

The United Metastates Of America

Have you heard of “superheating”? If you haven’t, Wikipedia describes it as: “the phenomenon in which a liquid is heated to a temperature higher than its boiling point, without boiling. This is a so-called metastable state or metastate, where boiling might occur at any time, induced by external or internal effects… This may occur by […]

Mind The Gap

The cataract of aliens pouring over our southern border has risen, in December of last year, to a rate of about three-and-a-half million a year. (Can anyone, at this point, doubt for a moment that this an intentional feature of government policy?) Meanwhile, as our efforts in Ukraine slump toward failure — as has been […]

Notes From The Zoo

We live in a world of obvious lies. Magna est veritas, et praevalebit, goes the old saying — “the truth is mighty, and will prevail” — but “will prevail”, as should be apparent to all at this moment in our history, is clearly not the same thing as “does prevail”. I’m fond of quoting Theodore […]

After Reconstruction, Now Deconstruction

In Arlington National Cemetery stands a memorial, sculpted by a Jewish sculptor named Moses Ezekiel (who, by the way, was the first Jew to graduate from the Virgina Military Institute). It features a classical female figure wearing a laurel wreath, and bears the inscription “They have beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into […]

Nice Work If You Can Get It

I see that a jury has just ordered Rudy Giuliani to pay two Georgia election workers the stupendous sum of $148,000,000 for some things he said about them regarding the 2020 election. I will confess that I had known nothing whatsoever about this ongoing trial until hearing this news today, but I will say that […]

A Disease Of The Heart

Published at City Journal today: a scathing article by my friend Jim Meigs on our shameful response to COVID-19, and how those in power at the highest levels of our public and private institutions (looking at you, Drs. Fauci and Collins) worked to suppress dissent and debate, interfere with legitimate inquiry into the disease’s origins, […]

Just Wondering

I hear there was some sort of political debate last night. How did it go?

Missouri v. Biden

Yesterday U.S. District Court Judge Terry Doughty gave us a fine Independence Day gift: a preliminary injunction against the government’s censorship of social-media content. The case built upon the government’s coercion of Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms to suppress commentary on COVID, the 2020 election, the Hunter Biden laptop, and other matters we should have […]

Well!

Here’s an interesting item about New York State’s election system. (I’m sure you will be as shocked as I was.)

More On Acceleration

This entry is part 4 of 6 in the series Accelerationism

Over at Bill Vallicella’s place, commenter “mharko” (who also has things to say over here from time to time), left such a fine comment on Bill’s accelerationism post that I am going to repost it here: I had a thought mulling these things over while pulling weeds and cultivating soil that I wanted to risk […]

Should The Culture War Take A Back Seat?

This entry is part 3 of 6 in the series Accelerationism

On April 27th, Josiah Lippincott published an essay at American Greatness arguing that we’ve lost the culture war, and that the way forward is for the Right to focus squarely on the issues that got Donald Trump elected in 2016. Lippincott’s article, which you can read here, stakes out the argument as follows: Immigration, trade, […]

P.S.

This entry is part 2 of 6 in the series Accelerationism

My old friend Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, has put up an item about my “accelerationism” post, and some discussion has ensued in the comment-thread. You can read it here.

Should We All Now Be Accelerationists?

This entry is part 1 of 6 in the series Accelerationism

In case you haven’t noticed, America, and the West more generally, are falling to pieces. How so? Here’s a brief, but far from exhaustive, list: — Public confidence in the government and media are at all-time lows; — The printing of money in order to support government spending at an astronomical rate has triggered dangerous […]

Jumping The Shark

Everyone’s waiting breathlessly for the indictment and arrest of Donald Trump. It’s a fantastically bad idea: if it happens, it will die in the court system; the rickety legal theory behind the indictment is one that the DOJ has already rejected, and even if a tendentious jury convicts him in New York City, the thing […]

Power Failure

Reuters reports that California will be having problems with its energy supply this summer: California says it needs more power to keep the lights on May 6 (Reuters) – California energy officials on Friday issued a sober forecast for the state’s electrical grid, saying it lacks sufficient capacity to keep the lights on this summer […]

Live By The Court, Die By The Court

Well, this SCOTUS leak about Roe v. Wade has really livened things up. I think we might even have a new Current Thing on our hands, and will now be moving on from Ukraine, which of course became the Current Thing right after … well, I can’t quite recall … but it was very important. […]

The Department Of Reality

Here’s one of the best essays Moldbug has published in a long time: The Cathedral or the Bizarre. In it he revisits the foundations of what, way back in Chapter 4 of his Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives (2008), he first called “the Cathedral”: the curiously coordinated institutions of journalism and academia that seem to […]

The Confusion Of Tongues

I’ve referred on several occasions to the old Chinese story about “calling a deer a horse”, which describes the scheming courtier Zhao Gao’s stratagem (this was way back in the third century BC) for testing the loyalty of potential political allies by seeing what lies they would assent to. I first read about this over […]

Food For Thought

Writing at City Journal, my friend Jim Meigs (who is also, by the way, a hell of a good musician) discusses the folly of U.S. biofuel policy. In brief: it’s a disaster already, and it’s about to make things much, much worse. Here.

Jim Kalb On Our Mass Craziness

James Kalb stopped by to comment on yesterday’s post, and his remarks deserve a post of their own in reply. (I’ve known Jim for quite a few years now, and for those of you who don’t recognize his name, he is a lawyer and scholar who has written extensively on politics, religion, and culture, and […]

Everything Is Fine!

Here is a caustically sarcastic item by Michael Anton that I encourage you all to read and share.

On “Mass Formation” In The Here And Now

Recently I published an essay at American Greatness about the idea of “mass-formation psychosis”, a concept that has gone “viral” after being discussed by Dr. Robert Malone in a widely viewed interview with Joe Rogan. (The interview was, within days, widely censored on media platforms — which is, we should note, relevant in itself.) The […]

Point Deer, Make Horse

The astonishingly prolific Victor Davis Hanson observes Insurrection Day with a fine essay on just who constitutes the actual threat to the American Way. Read it here. If you are wondering, by the way, what the title of this post refers to, you can read the story of Zhao Gao over at Spandrell’s place, here. […]

There’s A Special Feeling In The Air Tonight

Well, tomorrow is January 6th, the anniversary of the greatest assault on civilization since the sack of Rome — and all of the good people in our news media, and all of our friendly Democratic politicians, are breathless with excitement thinking of the gifts this special day will bring. From Washington to Atlanta to New […]

Meet The New Boss

New York has a new governor, Kathy Hochul. Obviously, she’s a Democrat, but what kind? Old-school centrist? Moonbat radical? If you aren’t sure yet, read this brief item by Betsey McCaughey.

On The Bright Side

It’s important to keep in mind just who, or what, was just defeated in Afghanistan. It wasn’t the traditional American nation (and military), but rather those who have stunned it into helplessness and have been wearing its senseless body as a skin-suit. If there is any silver lining to all of this, it is the […]

What Next?

My previous post was, I have to admit, pretty gloomy even for me. It’s been difficult to watch events unfold over the last year or so without getting the feeling that the USA as it has existed for the past two-and-a-half centuries has reached a point of fatal exhaustion. (Looking at the familiar cycle that […]

H.R. 1319

Off to the White House it goes. It will be signed into law by Friday, if Mr. Biden can still lift a pen. (The full text of the thing is here, if you have a strong stomach, low blood pressure, and a month or two to read it.) “When the people find that they can […]

The Enemy Within

This post was just reprinted at American Greatness, so I’ve taken it down from here for a little while. Please read it over at their website.

National Archive

A while back the New York Times mounted a direct assault on American patriotism called “The 1619 Project”, which sought to promote the idea that the founding of the American nation was nothing more than an act of organized evil, with its only basis and purpose the subjugation of other races by white, male, Europeans. […]

Watershed

Here we are. It’s been a long twelve months: from sailing along at the beginning of 2020 with a booming economy and gathering momentum for a second Trump administration, and for holding terminal decline at bay for a precious few more years, to COVID, St. George Floyd, a long hot summer of government-sanctioned rioting for […]

Nothing Is Real

The fog of war is abroad in the land, and in every direction sturdy, familiar realities dissolve into grotesque phantasms and chimeras. Trumpets and bullhorns blare in the smoke and chaos. The ground trembles and shifts under our feet. One thing seems clear, I think: this Republic, as we have known it in our lifetimes […]

2021, Day Six

As I have been saying for a long time now: “Gradually, then suddenly”.

Round Two

OK, so the polls are open in Georgia today. At stake in the two runoff elections is control of the United States Senate. Is everyone feeling as optimistic as I am?

2021

Well, here we are. Happy New Year. I thank all of you who’ve visited in recent weeks; there hasn’t been a whole lot to see here for some time now. My shoulder injury kept me off the keyboard for a while, but that’s not a problem any longer. Mainly it’s been that we have entered […]

Go Local

Writing at American Greatness, Christopher Roach argues that the Left, after patiently mounting a well-organized assault on all institutions, and after a century of expansion of the managerial state, now has power that is “largely immune from elections.” (After what we’ve just seen in 2020, can anyone doubt this?) He advises us that henceforward “Any […]