Category Archives: Politics

A House Divided

The social-media site formerly known as Twitter was aflame, over the past couple of days, with a squabble among various factions of the new Right about the importation, by H-1B visas, of tech workers from other countries. One one side were Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who argue that in order for the U.S. to […]

The Days Just Ahead

Former General Mike Flynn — who knows a thing or two about what the entrenched Washington oligarchy is capable of, and willing to do — has posted a threat-assessment of the risks we face between now and Inauguration Day. Read it here.

The Iron Law Of Oligarchy

RFK on Ukraine: Robert F. Kennedy Jr EXPOSES the TRUTH about Ukraine in 3 minutes. Make the World Safe again pic.twitter.com/T8Vpeyw2Io — Marjorie Taylor Greene Press Release (Parody) (@MTGrepp) November 20, 2024

Can The Fever Have Broken?

In the runup to the election I said how worried I was about rising conflict between the two warring American social and political factions once the winner had been determined. I thought it likely, barring massive fraud, that Trump would win, and I thought that if that happened the seething Left would stage massive chimpouts […]

Playing With Matches

By now you’ve probably heard about the sad end of P’Nut the Squirrel, who, during his brief time on Earth, lived in happy and playful companionship with a fellow named Mark Longo (who had rescued the wee rodent after its mother had been squashed by a car). As their relationship blossomed, Mr. Longo had made […]

Buckle Up

Over the past few years, prominent members of our ruling Democrat oligarchy have declared those of us not aligned with “progressivism” to be racists, sexists, white supremacists, bitter clingers to guns and religion, deplorables, irredeemables, Nazis, and Fascists. Last night, we learned, also, that our sitting President thinks of us as “garbage”. That’s at least […]

Repost, With Commentary: The Inverted Monarchy

The following is a repost of an essay I published at American Greatness in October 2020. Four years on, I think it holds up fairly well, but its closing remarks about the Constitution need, I’m afraid, some further qualifications, which I have added at the bottom of the post. Not a day goes by lately […]

On Carl Schmitt’s Friend-Enemy Distinction

In a pair of posts at Substack and his own website, Bill Vallicella revisits a conversation he and I had a couple of years ago about the shrinkage of circles of moral inclusion in periods of deep political strife. I had commented on this passage of his: …haven’t the barbarians forfeited their (normative) humanity to […]

There’s No Fixing This

Yesterday I sat at a dinner event with some members of our ruling overclass, including a wealthy and powerful septuagenarian Washington lawyer and her husband, a D.C.-area doctor and hospital administrator. (I will not name names, but we are talking about the very highest levels of swamp creatures here. If I had been carrying an […]

Wormtongue

This is what we’re up against, folks. (You can almost smell the sulfur.) Raddatz: "The incidents were limited to a handful of apartment complexes… A handful!"@JDVance: "Do you hear yourself? Only a handful of apartment complexes were taken over by Venezuelan gangs and Donald Trump is the problem and not Kamala Harris' open border?" ? […]

Snitches Get Stitches

By now you have probably heard that Eric Adams, the glabrous black ex-cop who is (for now) Mayor of New York, is under multiple indictments for various acts of political corruption involving bribery and foreign influence, the culmination of a probe that has over the past couple of months swept up a number of his […]

By Other Means

Here are the results of a recent survey conducted by Scott Rasmussen’s Napolitan News Service: Seventeen percent (17%) of voters believe America would have been better off if former President Trump had been killed in last week’s attempted assassination. That figure includes 28% of Democrats who say that America would have been better off if […]

Any Questions?

Another day, another insane violent leftist bent on partisan violence. (I refer, of course, to today’s foiled attempt to assassinate Donald Trump — the second in two months.) Say what you like about Carl Schmitt, but the man had a keen eye for the truths of human nature. I’ve posted this quote before, but it […]

Interesting Times

“There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.” – Lenin As I write, Joe Biden has yet to be seen in public following his fishy letter of abdication. Rumors are spreading that he may be dying, or even already dead. As Moldbug remarked in a post today: There is simply […]

As I Was Saying

In light of today’s events it seems timely to repost this item from January. Still almost half of 2024 to go, folks, and the caldera is rising. P.S. Having now seen footage of Mr. Trump’s female Secret Service detail dithering in panicky confusion (and seemingly unable, in their agitation, even to holster their weapons properly), […]

Sowing The Wind

In his “Finest Hour” speech of June 18th, 1940 — eighty-four years and two days ago — Winston Churchill warned of “the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.” With news now appearing of the widening spread of the deadly H5N1 virus, there’s […]

What’s So Great About Democracy?

Over at Bill Vallicella’s place, I’ve expressed in several comment-threads my increasing lack of enthusiasm for democracy — a disaffection that has increased in proportion to the fetishization of “Our Democracy!” in political discourse and propaganda. To listen to it all, you’d think that Democracy is somehow an end in itself, the founding principle of […]

Trump “Guilty” On 34 Counts

Insane. Sickening. Buckle up, folks. The earth is shaking. The rest of this year is going to be very lively indeed. Also: this is a carefully calculated provocation. They’ve done this flamboyantly, daringly, pugnaciously, right before our eyes, as if to say “well, what are you going to do about it?” Any jacquerie that results […]

“You Are A Slow Learner, Winston”

Today the White House posted this audacious tweet: George Floyd should be alive. He deserved so much more. Today, I join all those who loved him and all those touched by the civil rights movement he inspired in remembering the tragedy and injustice of his death. He changed the world. Now, let's act in his […]

Court Of Last Appeal

“And where the body of the people, or any single man, is deprived of their right, or is under the exercise of a power without right, and have no appeal on earth, then they have a liberty to appeal to heaven, whenever they judge the cause of sufficient moment.” — John Locke, Second Treatise on […]

President, My Foot

The State of Georgia’s Election Board is grilling Fulton County over missing 2020 ballot records, in particular ballot images and .SHA files (these are digital fingerprints more generally known as hash-files, which are widely used in information security). We’ve known since the night of the “election” that things were awfully fishy; the stink is now […]

Let’s Go!

Fifty years ago, I lived with some friends in a rented farmhouse on Cider Mill Road, in East Amwell Township, New Jersey. It’s still mostly farmland out there. I was looking at the old place on Google Earth just now and saw this, just a mile or so away. (Click to enlarge.) Warmed my heart.

On “Trumper”

The political philosopher Carl Schmitt wrote: Let us assume that in the realm of morality the final distinctions are between good and evil, in aesthetics beautiful and ugly, in economics profitable and unprofitable. The question then is whether there is also a special distinction which can serve as a simple criterion of the political and […]

In The Belly Of The Beast

I love the Outer Cape, where I live, but the prevailing ideology out here is as “blue” as it gets. (Aside from the occasional reactionary like me, there is also a subclass of people around here who build and fish and dig and pave and fix things — in other words, who earn a crust […]

Power, Meet Truth

Hunter Biden’s former business associate Tony Bobulinski testified today for the House Oversight Committee’s impeachment inquiry. I haven’t had a chance to review the testimony itself — but hoo-boy, his opening statement is a corker. (Some clips from the hearing are here.) (Don’t get too excited, though, or start imagining there will be actual consequences. […]

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 7 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 7 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, […]