Ghislaine Maxwell Found Guilty on Five of Six Counts Related to Jeffrey Epstein’s Sexual Assaults

Jeffrey Epstein’s predatory enabler, Ghislaine Maxwell, has been found guilty on five of six counts related to her participation in sexual assaults of minors.  Four women testified that Maxwell was the facilitator of their abuse, essentially grooming them to be raped by Epstein.

Maxwell was found guilty of conspiracy to entice minors to travel to engage in illegal sex acts; conspiracy to transport minors with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity; transportation of a minor with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity; sex trafficking conspiracy; sex trafficking of a minor.  The lone count on which Maxwell was acquitted, enticing a minor to travel to engage in illegal sex acts, applied only to one Jane Doe victim.

NEW YORK (AP) — The British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted Wednesday of luring teenage girls to be sexually abused by the American millionaire Jeffrey Epstein.

The verdict capped a monthlong trial featuring sordid accounts of the sexual exploitation of girls as young as 14, told by four women who described being abused as teens in the 1990s and early 2000s at Epstein’s palatial homes in Florida, New York and New Mexico.

Jurors deliberated for five full days before finding Maxwell guilty of five of six counts. As the verdict was read, Maxwell appeared to show little reaction behind a black mask. She stood with her hands folded as the jury filed out, and glanced at her siblings as she herself was led from the courtroom, but was otherwise stoic.

She faces the likelihood of years in prison — an outcome long sought by women who spent years fighting in civil courts to hold Maxwell accountable for her role in recruiting and grooming Epstein’s teenage victims and sometimes joining in the sexual abuse.

The defense had insisted Maxwell was a victim of a vindictive prosecution devised to deliver justice to women deprived of their main villain when Epstein killed himself while awaiting trial in 2019.

During the trial, prosecutors called 24 witnesses to give jurors a picture of life inside Epstein’s homes — a subject of public fascination and speculation ever since his 2006 arrest in Florida in a child sex case. (read more)

The Everlasting COVID Crisis

Can we muster the fighting spirit and a willingness to push back against the administrative tyranny that rings round all of modern life?

by Josiah Lippincott for American Greatness

In 1972, three black men, Melvin Cale, Louis Moore, and Henry D. Jackson, Jr., hijacked Southern Airways Flight 49, demanding $10 million and safe passage to Cuba. The hijacking lasted nearly 30 hours and involved multiple stops throughout the United States, Canada, and eventually, Cuba. In the process of negotiating with the FBI, the hijackers threatened to ram their aircraft, a Douglas DC-9, into the High Flux Isotope Reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee if their demands weren’t met.

Until that point, American airlines had resisted installing metal detectors in airports, worried that treating Americans like common criminals to board a plane would wreck their burgeoning industry. But that threat of nuclear attack, and the 130 other hijackings between 1968 and 1972, convinced the government to take a stand at last. In 1973, the FAA used its bureaucratic and administrative powers to make passenger screening mandatory. In 1974, Congress validated the requirement, ignoring passenger rights’ groups that protested the intrusive screening of luggage and persons in order to board aircraft. 

There is an important lesson here: Once the modern American state imposes surveillance measures it never relaxes them, even when the threat no longer exists. That’s why, even after American troops have left Afghanistan, Osama Bin Laden was killed, and ISIS has been destoyed, Americans are still removing their shoes in airports, treated like would-be terrorists for traveling. The humiliating X-ray machines that force grandmothers, children, and ordinary businessmen alike to stand like felons with their hands up while probing machines attempt to peek under their clothes at their naked bodies is the height of ritual humiliation.

The seeming elimination of this surveillance network’s reason to exist doesn’t mean these leftover policies of the war on terrorism are over—far from it! My children and grandchildren, barring some dramatic political shift, will be subject to the same post-9/11 security measures I grew up with. 

The bureaucratic state moves in one direction—it always gets bigger, more powerful, and more entrenched. There is never any reversal of state power, even when the threats that seemingly necessitated government interference in the first place are gone. 

COVID will follow the same course. The attention and energy the regime gives to the illness will wax and wane but it will never disappear entirely. The biomedical security state created in the virus’ wake is here to stay. Ten years from now, for instance, discussion about boosters, vaccine efficacy, health checks, asymptomatic spread, and “flattening the curve” will still be part of our national discourse, permanently ingrained in our collective psyche by the innumerable bureaucracies, corporations, and media entities that see in this “global health crisis” a never-ending potential for grift.

At a psychological level, liberals gravitate to despotic surveillance measures. Liberalism is a feminine tyranny. Like a neurotic mother trying to protect her toddler from every possible pain, the liberal longs for a world without any possibility of danger. The padded cell with every risk and inconvenience removed is her paradise.

A diverse, androgenous, inhuman, impersonal mode of being without any kind of blood or ancestral ties—this is the vision—John Lennon’s “Imagine” made flesh! If you want to understand the leftist mind just look at their art. The flat, childish, soul-dead, primary color laden, “inclusive” cartoon-style that virtually every major corporation gravitates to in order to market their products. I call this art form “liberal surrealism” and like all art, it reveals the soul. Or, in this case, the absence of one.

The spiritual inclination toward weakness and ugliness explains why, in the face of all rational decision-making, leftists collectively decided that closing schools, cutting off the elderly from the outside world, and crushing small businesses were the only ways to stop the illness. There was never any concern for the possible social, economic, or political side-effects. In fact, those very pains and challenges made the draconian social measures all the more enticing. 

Crisis gives our decrepit, aging, and ideologically fanatical ruling class something to live for. COVID is just one more narcotic with which to fill the God-shaped hole in the liberal heart. Like any good religion it has its prophets (Fauci) its villains (the unvaccinated) and its own demand for ritual sacrifice—in this case, of the young. And like all religions, it does not tolerate heretics. 

The crackdown on the unvaccinated reveals how deep and rotten the liberal instincts have become. Joe Biden’s pre-Christmas message promising a “winter of death” explains exactly who these people are. The Biden regime will never declare victory over COVID. There will be no return to the way things were. In 2020, World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said as much: There will be no return to the “old normal.” That is why the World Economic Forum was already hawking the slogan “build back better” in the summer of last year. 

Whether the COVID response was a product of a global conspiracy or not is irrelevant. The ruling class of the world is already on the same spiritual sheet of music. They all want the same thing—the reduction of the world into one homogenous, undifferentiated mass that they can shake down for the foreseeable future. The destruction of all higher life, all aspiration, all real science, and all real human community is what these people mean by “democracy” and “human rights.”

If there is to be any freedom for Americans from the techno-medical despotism spreading across the world, it will require either a supreme act of statesmanship or cataclysm. And by cataclysm I don’t mean another hyperventilating media-driven “crisis” like COVID. Financial collapse, famine, and war might finally liberate us from the rule of the spiritual hysterics and grifters who currently run the world. 

That is a tough “black pill” to swallow. But, in human life, every black pill is also a white pill. Every abyss is a chance at rebirth. Like the phoenix rising from the flames of the cleansing fire, new possibilities can emerge out of moments of profound terror and death. 

This is a problem, of course. No one prays to live through Armageddon. It would be better if we could have a life of liberty and peace without terror and crisis. But that requires a fighting spirit and a willingness to push back against the administrative tyranny that rings round all of modern life. 

The West isn’t too far gone. Not yet. But we need leaders willing to fight. Let us pray that we find such men.

X22, And we Know, and more-Dec 29

 

Evening. Here's tonight's news.

Be Not Afraid! (Reject Their Reset)

Man must existentially free himself from the clutches of oppressive systems, and choose love and responsibility, even (and especially!) in dark times.

by Emina Melonic for American Greatness

It has been almost two years since the world entered into an alternate reality brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Even in its early stages, many (including myself) have observed that there were two types of viruses: COVID-19 itself and its antecedent, fear. First, it was the fear of the unknown: The general population had no idea what this virus consisted of and what kind of impact it would have. Then came the fear of the medical and political system that, in the last two years, has proven to be quite oppressive and anti-human. 

Anyone who even remotely questions the current structure of our society is branded a conspiracy theorist, anti-vaxxer, and generally a bad person. The revelations of the so-called Great Reset and subsequent discussions about it sound like something out of a James Bond novel and film: a globalist S.P.E.C.T.R.E organization under the leadership of Ernst Stavro Blofeld is planning to take over the world. It seems far-fetched, yet at the same time, plausible. After all, globalist ideology has dominated among the elites set on breaking down national sovereignty, especially that of the United States. 

Although most globalist power players are not Bond villains who like to pet their cats while making evil plans, the concept of the “Great Reset” is not a conspiracy theory. At the same time, it is nothing we haven’t heard before directly from the mouths of Bill Gates, George Soros, Klaus Schwab, and other proponents of globalism for the last 20 or so years.

COVID-19: The Great Reset, published in July 2020, is a book written by the aforementioned Schwab and Thierry Malleret. Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, and Malleret, the managing partner of the Monthly Barometer, as well as the founder of the Global Risk Network at the World Economic Forum, outline a plan on how the entire world should address the pandemic. Of course, Schwab and Malleret are entitled to their opinions, but what makes this “practical” manifesto troubling is that the suggestions for how to “make the world a better place” sound more like coercive strategies that, by their lights, world leaders will have no choice but to accept and implement. 

“The fault lines of the world—,” write Schwab and Malleret, “most notably social divides, lack of fairness, absence of cooperation, failure of global governance and leadership—now lie exposed as never before, and people feel the time for reinvention has come. A new world will emerge, the contours of which are for us to both imagine and to draw.” A return to normal will never arrive, and “the coronavirus marks a fundamental inflection point in our global trajectory . . . we should take advantage of this unprecedented opportunity to reimagine our world . . . one path will take us to a better world: more inclusive, more equitable and more respectful of Mother Nature.” 

This idea of “start from zero” is a usual leftist principle. It always seeks to first destroy and then build something else, which is more aligned with ideology. The slogan “Build Back Better” falls into the same category, and instead of actually addressing the science behind this pandemic (something Anthony Fauci likes to talk about a lot), globalists such as Schwab are concocting a plan to restructure society using COVID as the reason (or the excuse) for getting the ball rolling. 

Schwab and Malleret in the book attempt to address different spheres of human life and how all of them will need to be reset. They divide it among macro (economic, social, geopolitical, environmental, technological), micro (industry and business), and individual resets, in which we are called to “redefine our humanness.” The book is filled with contradictions: on one hand, everything will change and we are dealing with the “Black Death”; on the other hand, we shouldn’t make such dramatic statements. Everyone will get used to the changes and digitization of one’s identity, yet at the same time, this will not change the way we live. 

It is a distinctly secular outlook, with a “morality” based on globalist ideology. In fact, Schwab and Malleret have written a book rooted in Karl Marx’s historical materialism (whether they know it or not). It uses history as the primary mover and decider of the new reality, even as it is peppered with noncontextual and cherry-picked quotes from Nietzsche, Camus, and other serious thinkers to give the book more credibility. The Great Reset, in fact, is a dull work of gnostic atheism and social scientism, in which a particular ideology is crammed into an already established mindset and already envisioned result.

Schwab and Malleret are correct about one thing, however: The world has changed and it can’t go back—but that merely states the obvious. History marches on, yet they don’t seem to understand that their outlined “suggestions” might be met with resistance. They assume everything will go according to plan because people will fall in line. If anything the last two years have shown us that implementing the “great reset” has proven to be a rather difficult task. 

These looming political, economic, technological, and media powers have created fear among people, who are either terrified of the virus or of their authoritarian measures. Supply chains of material goods are in danger, but the constant supply of fear and anxiety is always available. Those metaphysical shelves are always filled. It has been a whirlwind year, yet we have experienced much of the same, and fear continues to dominate our society. Do we stop to ask whether we should continue to be afraid? 

Much of this problem lies within the spiritual framework of our society. In his 1994 book, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, Pope John Paul II points to the root of the problem, the effects of which we still see today, and are related to the human response to the crisis of modernity. “Hegel’s paradigm of the master and the servant is more present in people’s consciousness today than is wisdom, whose origin lies in the filial fear of God,” he writes. “The philosophy of arrogance is born of the Hegelian paradigm.” 

Once we make man the measure of all things, then the only relationship available will that of master and slave. One person can affect another in such a way that one’s entire metaphysical constitution may be under threat or possibly even taken over. This is what we have witnessed in the last two years. 

Daily worries about how life might continue in its present state are entirely normal. We are not made of stone; we have emotions and ideas that fluctuate based on events that are unfolding before our eyes. But the fear that I am speaking about is a deep, existential fear, in which an entire personhood is under threat of annihilation. It is a metaphysical condition that thrives on human despair and listlessness. 

As we head into another year of this sort of mental tyranny, it is only natural to wonder what the new year will bring. People naturally engage in such yearly reflections and look to the future under normal circumstances. All the more so in our current times of upheaval. In the midst of these worries, one thought keeps coming back to me: “Be not afraid!”—words spoken by John Paul II on October 22, 1978. They still ring true. 

Man must free himself existentially from the clutches of oppressive systems, and choose love and responsibility, even (and especially!) in dark times. It is essential to not lose hope. This choice also proves the strength of the human spirit and an affirmation of human dignity, which no ideology can destroy.

Fauci Is Just a Bureaucrat

We’ve been worried for 100 years what will happen when we finally succeed in making machines human. We ought to be at least as worried about what happens when we make humans into machines.

by Dan Gelernter for American Greatness

Franz Kafka’s stories are described as surreal or dreamlike. In fact the chief distinguishing characteristic is perpetual instability: The narrator in a Kafka story accepts whatever new situation he faces with unquestioning compliance. As soon as he begins to accustom himself to the new rules—as soon as he begins to feel comfortable and learns to make the best of them—everything changes, for no apparent reason, and the narrator again finds himself totally at sea.

The chief bureaucrats and administrators of Kafka’s shifting and unstable worlds are usually exactly that—bureaucrats and administrators. Kafka was himself an administrator at a large insurance firm, and he hated it. He lived in Prague, under a government that would become one of the earliest and most thorough adopters of bureaucratic statism. (Though constructed a few years after his death, the Central Social Institution building with its famous mechanically moving desks seems emblematic of the world that subsumed him.) The people who manipulate and torment Kafka’s narrators—especially in The Trial and The Castle—are the ultimate embodiment of the pointless tedium that Kafka encountered in everyday life.

Bureaucracy is a permanent decoupling of activity from morality. A bureaucrat isn’t paid to understand the rules he enforces or the forms he is required to have you fill out. There is no “why” involved in his life, and so he allows no common sense or flexibility to inform his actions. Bureaucracy is there for its own sake; it is its own justification. Bureaucrats are often called civil servants, but in reality they provide no service at all: It is you, the individual citizen, who must come to serve them, to follow their instructions, to bend the knee and do exactly what they say, as a token of submission to the powers that be. Otherwise no license, no permit, no job.

A Kafka narrator, unlike the people he interacts with, is utterly flexible and submissive. He understands that there is no point in questioning authority. He is told to go to this office or that office, to speak to this or that official, and he dutifully does so. He never wants to harm anyone, though he is often accused of causing deliberate harm. He just wants to get on with his life, to be left alone. He wants to be permitted to earn a living in whatever menial job he can get (janitor, elevator operator, it makes no difference—he is not picky and cannot afford to be).

The instant he has everything sorted out and is about to get to work, the standards suddenly change. The bureaucrats are back and seem angry with him for not being in compliance with the new set of rules they just invented. Goalposts are forever shifting. The finish line—or, really, the start line—is always just a few feet in front of him, moving further away every time he tries to get closer.

Does any of this sound familiar? And are you fully vaccinated yet? Got your fourth booster? We were well aware of Orwell’s warnings about fascism; Nineteen Eighty-Four was explicit. (Even so, Orwell’s estate has just approved a rewriting of the novel as a “feminist retelling;” I wonder how that will go.) Kafka, meanwhile, has been under our radar. His warnings about bureaucracy were subtle, deep, artful. But he was describing precisely the shadow-world in which we are now trapped, the world Jen Psaki thinks is so funny—such a laugh at the expense of us ordinary people.

Anthony Fauci is a terrible man. And he has been identified in the public mind with a great deal of the evil in our current situation. But the real danger in Fauci is that not that he is unique, but that he is typical. Fauci is just a bureaucrat. He is no worse and—this is the key point—no better than the vast army of faceless fascists who have insinuated themselves into every aspect of our daily lives. His medical experiments on dogs and children are just routine to a genre of people whose idea of right is aligned entirely and absolutely with anything that will increase their own power and authority.

Fauci lacks the imagination and the intelligence to become a tyrant-king, but he offers the king his own insatiable greed, an eager helping hand, an impenetrable stupidity, a mind totally divorced from absolute moral distinctions. He will never be the top man, but he is just as dangerous in his enabling role—he represents the rest of government: the No. 2 man, all the way down to number 3 million. And apparently we do have about 3 million federal government employees at this point—let that sink in for a moment. One percent of the country spends their lives taking money from the rest. We could call them one-percenters . . .

This is not to suggest that federal bureaucrats are evil—only that their jobs deliberately slice away their humanity, and suppress, through rules and regulation, the care they might otherwise have for a poorer neighbor. Bureaucracy allows people like Fauci to get the money and power they crave in the only way they understand—not by adding value or inventing new things, but simply by stealing it from other people.

We’ve worried for 100 years about what will happen when we finally succeed in making machines human. We ought to be at least as worried about what happens when we make humans into machines—into soulless robots that will pursue a simple goal single-mindedly, executing instructions without understanding them. Such people can, and have, laughed at the death of millions.

As Expected, Timeline of January 6th Commission Highlights Mid-Term Election Intent

Sundance reporting for Conservative Treehouse

The Washington Post, the primary outlet for the Fourth Branch of government operations, is publishing information from the Lawfare operatives that work inside the Jan-6 committee showing their timeline.

Deep state operative Mary McCord (not named but transparently visible) and administrative insiders tell WaPo, “The rough timeline being discussed among senior committee staffers includes public hearings starting this winter and stretching into spring, followed by an interim report in the summer and a final report ahead of November’s elections.”

The early 2022 hearings will target GOP primary candidates and the effort of Democrats to influence the primary elections.

The summer interim report will be dropped after the primary races are finished and will be intended to influence the summer campaign season.  The final report will drop as the coordinated DNC/Lawfare “October surprise”.  None of this should come as a surprise to those who follow the deep weeds of DC politics.

The coordinated Lawfare and Democrat fingerprints are obvious even in the WaPo report.  The Legislative Branch will work with the Fourth Branch (intelligence apparatus writ large) to blend the senate “federal election reform bill” with the recommendations from the J6 committee:

[…] ” The public business meeting earlier this month, where panel members revealed a sliver of the 9,000 documents and records provided by Meadows, was a taste of what it hopes to accomplish in hearings throughout 2022: a dramatic presentation of the behind-the-scenes maneuvering by Trump, his allies and anyone involved in the attack or the attempt to overturn the election results.

[…] The panel will continue to collect information and seek testimony from willing witnesses and those who have been reluctant — a group that now includes Republican members of Congress. It is examining whether to recommend that the Justice Department pursue charges against anyone, including former president Donald Trump, and whether legislative proposals are needed to help prevent valid election results from being overturned in the future.” (more)

Anyone who cannot see this coordinated political framework is willfully blind at this point.  Additionally, any GOP member who does not publicly point out the political intent of this effort is, as we say, a DeceptiCon.

10 Ways Christians Are Being Persecuted In America

Babylon Bee🐝

All around the world, Christians face imprisonment and death for their beliefs. But in America, the persecution of Christians has become far worse. It's extremely difficult being a Christian in America these days, and here are ten horrifying reasons why. 

1) Sometimes, people are mean on Twitter: It's horrible. Only Christians have to endure this treatment online. This is exactly what the early Christians must have felt like when they were burned alive!

2) Starbucks still won't put "Merry Christmas" on their holiday cups: Every morning when you pick up your double peppermint oat milk latte with extra sprinkles, you're assaulted by their godless heathen "holiday" message. Sad! 

3) Thousands of Americans get shot every day just for being a Christian (in Halo): Come to think of it, maybe they're just getting shot because they're on the opposing team... BUT STILL! 

4) One time a waitress got mad when I tipped her with one of those fake $100 bill gospel tracts: Well, EXCUSE ME for trying to save your soul! 

5) Many Christians still haven't gotten their hands on a PS5: This is just the kind of suffering the Bible warned us about. 

6) Sometimes, the lines at Chick-Fil-A are really long: Oh, the humanity!

7) They still haven't made an Oreo flavor that acknowledges our Christian beliefs: We have a Lady Gaga Oreo and an LGBTQ+ rainbow Oreo, but no cookies with the Nicene Creed printed on them? We are exiles in this land. 

8) This week's church bulletin is folded a little crooked and it's bothering my OCD: Someone needs to talk to Church Secretary Ethel Rutherford about this. 

9) They take Christian superheroes like Superman and make them gay: Who do we Christians have to look up to if not Superman? 

10) At least 3462 Christians, including ten priests or pastors, were murdered in the first 200 days of 2021: Oh wait-- that was in Nigeria. Our bad. 

 

Article by Barry Poulson and David M. Walker in The American Thinker

America should not abandon Jeffersonian debt principles

For Thomas Jefferson, having one generation passing on excessive debt to future generations was immoral and an unjust encumbrance on posterity. When Jefferson became president, he was successful in reducing federal debt until his last year in office when defense spending was increased in preparation for what would become the War of 1812. This Jeffersonian principle that debt could be incurred during wartime periods but in peacetime the government should reduce debt burdens (public debt to GDP), was practiced until the Great Depression in the early 20th century.

During World War II, the U.S. debt burden reached an all-time high, but in the postwar years it was reduced to prewar levels. The debt burden was increased again during the Cold War, exacerbated by increased spending associated with social insurance programs; but after the Cold War era (1998-2001), debt burdens were again reduced through bi-partisan legislative actions.

Over the past two decades, America appears to have abandoned Jeffersonian debt principles. The federal government has responded to major economic crises with massive increases in spending, social insurance program spending has continued to increase, thereby resulting in increased in debt burdens.

Indeed, the total debt burden now exceeds the size of the entire U.S. economy and is approaching an all-time record.

Even worse, in coming decades, the debt burden is projected to increase dramatically. By midcentury, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that the U.S. will have a debt burden approaching that of Japan, the most indebted nation in the world, which has experienced economic stagnation for several decades. This is not a desirable outcome for our country and future generations.

The longtime consensus supporting Jeffersonian debt principles appears to have disappeared. In addition, the subsequent principles espoused by British economist John Maynard Keynes have also been abandoned. For example, the Peter Peterson G. Foundation has periodically brought together leading policy organizations from across the political spectrum to propose plans to achieve long-term fiscal sustainability. The consensus of these organizations was that the nation should reduce the ratio of public debt to GDP well below 100 percent. In a survey conducted by the foundation this year, however, the consensus was that the government should seek to close the future gap between revenues and expenses, but not at the expense of meeting new fiscal challenges. What does this mean?

Before Congress fully abandons Jeffersonian debt principles, it should understand how European countries have addressed their debt challenges.

In a referendum, Swiss citizens, with an overwhelming majority, approved an amendment to their constitution that requires the government to bring expenditures into balance with revenues over an economic cycle. The government may incur deficits in some years, but must offset those deficits with surpluses in other years. Enabling legislation to satisfy this amendment constrained the growth in spending to the long-term growth of the economy. A “debt brake” was enacted, reducing the growth in spending required to balance expenditures and revenues. Switzerland cut the ratio of debt to national income in half. Today, it has the highest credit rating, and the second highest per capita income of any country. In short, the Swiss enacted new fiscal rules satisfying Jeffersonian debt principles even though Switzerland is a neutral country that has avoided participating in major wars.

Similar fiscal rules have been enacted in other European countries, and are incorporated in European Union fiscal rules. These new fiscal rules, which focus on limiting deficits and debt levels as a percentage of GDP, allowed European countries to respond to recent economic crises without massive accumulations of debt.

In the current political climate, it is clear Congress is not about to propose fiscal rules to address our mounting public debt/GDP challenge. But American citizens do not need to rely on Congress to decide whether or not to abandon Jeffersonian debt principles. The U.S. Constitution does not provide for a public referendum, but it does provide citizens with an alternative route to amending the Constitution. Article V provides that when two thirds of the state legislatures (34 states) approve a resolution calling for an amendment convention, Congress must call the convention. With a subsequent ratification of a proposed amendment by three quarters of the states (38 states), the proposal becomes an amendment to the Constitution.

 Over the years, state legislatures have submitted many resolutions calling for an Article V Convention, but none of these has yet to reach the requisite two-thirds majority for Congress to call the convention. In December of this year, a disparate group of organizations proposing Article V amendments met at a conference in San Diego held by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). While these organizations proposed different Article V amendments, there was a consensus that the country needs to restore Jeffersonian debt principles to address our mounting debt challenge. It is time for American citizens, like their Swiss counterparts, to have a say in answering this question.  We are committed to doing our part to make such an amendment a reality.

 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/america_should_not_abandon_jeffersonian_debt_principles.html

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New Progressive Poll on Biden Is Likely to Terrify Dems

Nick Arama reporting for RedState

We’ve seen a lot of bad polling for Joe Biden.

It stands to reason that he isn’t doing well with Republicans. But he’s also not doing well across the board with a variety of other groups including independents and Hispanics.

But when he’s also facing trouble in the progressive polls, too, you know it’s bad. Now, part of that is that Joe Biden has promised a lot and then delivered a whole lot of nothing. So, even some on the left are not happy right now. We see that in reactions to things like the failure to pass the Build Back Better bill and against the CDC guidance to shorten the isolation time on people who test positive for COVID.

But the 37 percent approval rating in the Civiqs’ poll — a progressive poll — is bad. It’s worse than the Real Clear Politics average which was already bad enough at 43 percent approval to 54 percent disapproval, and the Trafalgar Group poll that has him at 40.4 approval and 55.9 disapproval; although, the fact that they are so low, too, tends to indicate that Civiqs isn’t an outlier, that it’s on-trend.

In contrast, Civiqs delivers demographics by the barrel, and … few of them give Biden or Democrats in general any reason to celebrate. The split among independents is actually worse in this poll, 26/63, for a gap of thirty-seven points rather than thirteen among indies. Unlike other recent polling, Biden’s ahead with Hispanics but only 50/39, and only 65% of black voters approve of his job performance. Biden is underwater in almost every other Civiqs demo, even among 18-34YOs (29/55!), post-graduates (42/49), and even women (41/48). For the first time in a long while, a consensus has formed between college graduates (37/55) and non-college graduates (36/55).

It’s gotten worse since we last checked in on the poll. In October, they had only 10 states that were overwater approving of Biden. That was bad enough. But now it’s only five as of today, which means they went underwater and lost five states since then. The ones that are not underwater are California, Hawaii, Vermont, Maryland, and Massachusetts. That’s pretty shocking, if true, and just complete quicksand for him.

California, which went big for Biden just a year ago at 64-34, now has him at just 46 approval to 43 disapproval — more or less even. It also means passing the infrastructure bill didn’t help Biden at all. Indeed, given that he didn’t pass Build Back Better, all the back on forth on the issue might have hurt him with multiple groups including the folks on the left mad that it didn’t pass — and the folks on the right mad that it was even proposed.

So in a situation where, to have any hope at all in the mid-terms that are shaping up to be a tidal wave of a debacle against the Democrats, you would need to whip up the base as much as you can. Instead, you have a base that is seriously unhappy with Biden, at the same time everyone else can’t stand him either. That’s looking very bad for the chances for Biden and the Democrats. But Joe being Joe — he always seems to be able to find a way to go lower. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if we came back in a month and he’d lost more states.

 

Article by Declan Leary in The American Conservative

Individualism Is the Enemy

No man is an island, except for George Will.

 

When I was but a young collegiate firebrand making waves on campus in the distant days of two-thousand-eighteen, my academic advisor—a kind-hearted boomer liberal in the history department—found himself worried about my situation. I was too smart, he insisted, to write the way I did. (On the contrary, I promise I am exactly dumb enough to write like this.) “You can either be some shock jock,” the professor warned in a fatherly tone, “or you can be George Will.”

Well, I thought to myself silently, I sure as hell don’t want to be George Will.

A year or so later, in a less paternal moment, he accused me publicly of the thoughtcrime of “rank individualism.” I was a bit confused, given that the comment (and my less-than-voluntary resignation from the university’s newspaper) had been provoked by a broadside against the expressive individualism of the school’s gay-activist community.

Both moments came to mind this week as I read an unusual column by the very pundit whose name my advisor once invoked. Having revisited an essay by one of the liberal right’s chief philosophers, Michael Oakeshott, Dr. Will thinks he has stumbled on the key “to the United States’ distemper in 2021.”

From right and left, Will says, individualism is under attack. On the left, “critical race theory subsumes individualism, dissolving it in a group membership—racial solidarity, which supposedly has been forged in the furnace of racist oppression.” At the same time, “U.S. ‘national conservatives,’ who are collectivists on the right, recoil against modernity in the name of communitarian values, strongly tinged with a nativist nationalism and with a trace of the European blood-and-soil right.”

I am not a national conservative, for reasons I have previously explained. Yet Will seems to have sloppily assumed that the label applies to anyone on the right who is not a liberal, so I will take the liberty of counting myself among those criticized.

Both groups, the post-liberal right and the progressive left, are what Will calls “modernity’s enemies.” Will writes that “modernity’s greatest achievement, which was the prerequisite for its subsequent achievements, was the invention of the individual.” Before the advent of modernity,

Persons knew themselves only as members of a family, a group, a church, a village or as the occupant of a tenancy: “What differentiated one man from another was insignificant when compared with what was enjoyed in common as members of a group of some sort.”

This began to change in Italy with “the break-up of medieval communal life.” As the historian Jacob Burckhardt would write, “Italy began to swarm with individuality; the ban laid upon human personality was dissolved.” Individuals detached themselves from derivative group identities, becoming eligible for individual rights grounded in the foundational right to an existence independent of any group membership.

This is a ludicrous overstatement, inspired by a cursory reading of Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Burckhardt, an art historian writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, suggested that:

In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness—that which was turned within as that which was turned without—lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues. Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only through some general category.

This is not only untrue but fundamentally unbelievable. The son of a Protestant minister, Burckhardt sits squarely in the tradition of Reformation historiography, which relies by nature on a cartoonish reduction of the Middle Ages to “faith, illusion, and childish prepossession.” No one can be expected to believe that medieval man was actually unable to think of himself as a distinct human person. The truth behind the lie is that medieval man did not think of himself first as an individual.

This is because he was not a moron. He knew, as a matter of fact, that he belonged to things bigger than himself, that his identity could not possibly be established without reference to the external world. Will’s “foundational right to an existence independent of any group membership” is an absurdity, especially so in a species whose every individual necessarily belongs to at least one definite group on being brought into existence. As far as I know, George Will was not created in a lab.

More than inevitable, though, the fact of identity’s dependence on interpersonal relationships is eminently desirable. It is a very strange kind of conservative who celebrates “the break-up of…communal life” (medieval or otherwise) as one of the great developments of human history. Beyond strange, it is impossible: The conservative’s interests necessarily transcend the individual, not least of all because tradition, the act of handing something down, hinges on connections between people. Individualist conservatism is a contradiction in terms: For whom could something not held in common possibly be conserved?

The achievement and preservation of the common good is intergenerational, “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born,” in Edmund Burke’s famous words. The world of Will’s imagination must be one in which nobody is ever born and nobody ever dies.

The conservative, meanwhile, lives in the real world. He not only sees that all people enter the world with bonds—to family and tradition, to place and neighbor—but celebrates that fact; he seeks to strengthen those bonds and the joy secured by them. Mindful of the ravages of time, he pursues that security not just for a moment but well beyond his lifetime, taking hold of something handed down and ensuring its preservation after he has gone. He knows that the atomic man is a vicious fiction, a deception whose success would loose every bond and wipe out every attendant joy. And so, as his critics worry, he “recoil[s] against modernity in the name of communitarian values.”

Will ends his individualist manifesto with an aphorism from Paul Valery, a gifted French poet with an astonishingly dull mind: “Everything changes except the avant-garde.” It is perhaps not the coup the column’s author thinks to admit his opponents are the only ones who have stood fast through the ages.

 

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/individualism-is-the-enemy/ 

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