Saturday, March 25, 2023

The Postmodern Terraforming of The West


One of the more common themes in science fiction is alien invasion. The storyline is typically one where the aliens gain a skulking foothold, first to transform the ecosystem, before launching a full-blown conquering of the world. Of course this theme draws upon our own history replete with one civilization invading another, in which success would not only require winning on the battlefield but also a thorough evisceration of the language, culture and traditions of the postwar survivors. 

Today, traditional Americans have an increasing sense of foreboding as they are besieged at every turn by some alien form of newspeak or attack on their institutions. They see poll after poll that suggests people of all stripes are rejecting this madness, yet elections are lost and the encroachment continues. In response, our not-so-intellectually-curious “conservative” firebrands have dusted off the old Red Scare playbook with claims of “American Marxism” and quoting excerpts from “Proletarians and Communists” to substantiate their assertions. But the specter haunting America is not communism, and the sad persistence in consuming this chum is causing the American Right to be outflanked and steamrolled by today’s radical Left. We are quickly reaching critical mass. 

“American Marxism,” and Marxism in general were discarded to Reagan’s ash heap nearly a half century ago, when the 1960s counterculture began to collapse and left-wing intellectuals realized the masses could not be wooed by material grievance alone. This scheme was particularly fruitless in the United States where all of the cultural bromides and institutions that brought people happiness proved impenetrable. As rebellious youth grew older they had to get jobs and pay to support families and mortgages—not to mention tickets to baseball games, the movies, and the litany of other treasures one can enjoy in this country. Hence, Communism would become an embarrassing “nursery tale” (as Marx himself pegged it) and left-wing revolutionaries would themselves begin to view it with contempt and ridicule. 

Still, the “existing order of things” remained unacceptable, so by the late 1970s they began exploring new strategies to wage war on the West. 

Enter Richard K. Ashley and his philosophy of “postmodernism.” 

While Marx and Engels challenged the legitimacy of such things as religion, the family, and property rights, Ashley and his acolytes argued that the definition and validity of virtually everything could and should be called into question. In their estimation, the hierarchy of values and definitions we put upon them were the exponent of thousands of random occurrences throughout history, and thus our reality had been constructed by an empirical rolling of the dice on a cosmic craps table. For this reason the postmodernists believe that everything should be “deconstructed” via “critical theory” in an effort to reboot our perceptions and clear the path to rebuilding a more “equitable” and just world order. 

One rudimentary application of this mumbo jumbo would be that Europeans only “discovered” America because they were able to build seaworthy vessels from nearby forests and that a storm had blown Columbus off course to stumble upon it. Another would be that Constantine just happened to see a cross-shaped cloud in the sky which serendipitously thrust the Roman military behind Christianity to expand its footprint throughout the world. 

By these same principles no single individual or group could be credited with discovering gravity or algebra or electricity or anything else because these items all would have been discovered by some other entity if events had played out differently. Clearly, the possibilities are endless, which is why we hear about such things as “white math” and the Pythagorean theorem is challenged as “invalid knowledge.” 

So by the early 1980s, a beleaguered Left was reenergized and began weaponizing these theories to finally, as Saul Alinsky put it, “overwhelm the system.” If history, math, and science were subjective, then how could we possibly determine what was a passing or failing grade? How could a human being be “illegal?” Might the perpetrator of a crime be the real victim because of the society that produced him? What’s the definition of marriage? 

While much of this remained on the fanatical fringe, these methods finally entered our political mainstream in 1992 with the Clinton campaign who’s minions began telling us “No one cares about bad real estate deals” or “The American people don’t care about sex.” They would follow up on these Jedi mind tricks by deconstructing any potential witness against them. Things all came to a head in 1998 when Bill Clinton infamously defended himself in front of a grand jury by arguing “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” 

This bastardizing of reality was taken to an entirely new level in 2000, when the original election denier Al Gore first conceded to George W. Bush and then retracted it to embark on a bizarre attempt at cherry picking and recounting certain counties in Florida. After filing a barrage of frivolous lawsuits, operatives began trying to alter the definition of a vote with all types of subjective interpretations such as “hanging chads,” “dimpled chads” and “pregnant chads” to selectively chip away at Bush’s lead. Mercifully, the Supreme Court finally intervened and put an end to this insanity. 

As we’ve moved further into the 21st century it’s not surprising that we’re now seeing revisionist attacks on great Americans and the desecration of monuments to them. Perhaps the most insidious of all is the weaponizing of sexual orientation with all of the endless pronouns, gender bending, and now the grooming and transitioning of our children. We’re being told that obesity is “beautiful,” while whatever words they find “offensive” are censored, as they bully corporations into woke virtue signaling. We have economics based around the imaginary fiscals of “modern monetary theory” and a Supreme Court justice who couldn’t give an answer when asked to define “woman.” From here, obviously, we can also find the origins of all of the COVID gaslighting, fake racism and “reimagining” the police. It’s all by design. 

While much of this may be Orwellian, to reduce it to mere “Marxism” is like saying that mixed martial arts is “just wrestling.” If a fighter were to step into the octagon with that approach he would be destroyed utterly. It should be no surprise that’s precisely what’s happening to traditionalist and “conservative” Westerners today. It saddens and angers me to see avowed activists flailing away at these phantasms when they haven’t a clue what they’re up against. They repeat the same dumb rhetorical questions like “Can you imagine if a conservative said that?!” and/or whine about “hypocrisy” with the worst rejoinder being “This makes no sense!” 

It’s not supposed to make sense, you idiot!

Like the alien invaders or Spanish Conquistadors these imposters are not seeking parity or some “live and let live” compromise. Their objectives are resolute and ubiquitous. They can best be summarized by paraphrasing “The Terminator” (1984): 

Listen, and understand! Those postmodernists are out there. They can’t be bargained with. They can’t be reasoned with. They don’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And they absolutely will not stop . . . ever, until you are dead!

clarion call if ever there was one. 




And we know, Red Pill news, and more- March 25

 



Been a long week folks, enjoy tonight's rally in Texas! 

Here's tonight's news:


People Can Win

We've been trained to think that endless rule by tiny minorities of really horrible people is the natural order of things, but that turns out to be just another lie




America took one look at Jankowicz and at most a few fleeting moments considering the “Disinformation Governance Board” plan before concluding, correctly, that it was a beyond-loathsome expression of aristocratic arrogance that needed shutting down before the first Jankowicz presser. Characteristically, the press lied about the public reaction, claiming that the only displeasure was heard from the “GOP.” In fact, all sane people across the spectrum were instantly nauseated, their distress loud enough that the DHS hit “pause” on Jankowicz and the batty MinTruth plan after just three weeks. 


Even that might not have been fast enough, as was discovered by my co-author Sue Schmidt, who’s formerly of the Washington Post but joined Racket this month for a special report a team of us are preparing on what fellow #TwitterFiles reporter Michael Shellenberger calls the “Censorship-Industrial Complex.” (More on that later). Looking through the minutes of CISA’s subcommittee meetings last year, Sue found that the DHS’s little team of self-appointed information guardians was deeply worried about the “rollout” of their war against MDM, worrying repeatedly about how to “socialize” or “pre-socialize” various parties to the idea of a federal truth squad, realizing that just presenting the actual plan to a sentient person without lots of sweeteners wouldn’t go well. 


One subcommittee member, whose name in the spirit of our times is of course redacted, seemed to realize the concept was too hot to discuss in public. She “suggested removing mention of MDM” — this, from a member of the “MDM subcommittee”! — and “framing” the subcommitee’s efforts more in terms of “directing people to clear information about elections procedures.” Another member recommended CISA “point more to state officials and state laws to make the authoritative source of information less controversial. In other words: “Let’s make it sound like someone other than the hated us is running this thing!”


Even two years ago, nobody was paying attention to this world and the public, if it cared at all, was probably inclined to welcome more “election procedures” (as CISA would later call them), not fewer. So the DHS, sensibly one must conclude, dissolved its incorrectly named “Countering Foreign Influence Task Force” — the group spent most of 2020 zapping domestic election posts — renamed it the MDM subcommittee, and began meeting and posting about the need to build “national resistance” to “domestic threat actors.” As Sue just reported, these folks saw “MDM” everywhere here at home, insisting “CISA should consider MD across the information ecosystem,” which included talk radio, cable news, mainstream media, and “hyper-partisan media.”


The architects of this plan not only genuinely believed themselves above such temptations, but saw nothing wrong with asking for massive sums of money — Joe Biden’s first economic proposal sought $690 million for CISA — to captain an open-ended war on American badthink, as defined by [names redacted]. Here again, take note of Jankowicz’s lyrics:

It’s like when Rudy Giuliani shared bad intel from Ukraine

Or when TikTok influencers said COVID can’t cause pain

They’re laundering disinfo and we really should take note

And not support their lies, with our wallet, voice or vote!


This was a group of self-described experts in an utterly fictitious “anti-disinformation” discipline who were so sure it was okay for them to tell you whom not to vote for, one of them sang about it. This, despite the fact that of the ones whose names we know, like Jankowicz, many were open swallowers of the dumbest Russiagate hokum, like the Alfa-Server story. 


I spent a long time covering the 2008 Wall Street crash, which meant devoting large amounts of energy to some of the world’s most unredeeming people. These were swindlers who sold snake-oil mortgage products that put millions out of their homes and wiped out retirement funds of people who spent decades working as toll operators, firefighters, teachers. Such predators were awful, amoral people, but all the same, I occasionally found myself writing with something like admiration. These crooks were creators of truly ingenious schemes who did what they did out of lust, greed, jealousy, and other (at least identifiably human) forms of depravity. 


These [name redacted] would-be censors are different. They have no sense of humor, no imagination, and exactly one distinguishing characteristic: they know what’s best for you. Anti-disinfo work suits them because they all have a Poppins streak that quietly gets off on binning your digital dirty bits (after the voyeuristic thrill of logging on to watch them in secret, with special credentials, which they rub with pleasure in evenings). They’re the vilest kind of snobs, and when they finally were forced to show their real selves to the public — and here I feel safe in thanking Elon Musk for making that possible, via the #TwitterFiles — the public rightfully recoiled from these arrogant power-worshipping mediocrities. 


The Governance Board was already dead, and now the whole MDM mission is being wound down, which feels like a win. Perhaps they’re just publicly retreating from the concept for now, but at this point, I’ll take that. Moreover there are signs everywhere that people are losing their fear of departing from the orthodoxy such types would like to impose, and pushing for a return to normalcy, which for the first time in ages feels within reach. 


There was a ridiculous scene at Stanford law school recently, in which a conservative judge was muffled by a gaggle of future lawyers who’d been led by an assistant Dean in a characteristically moronic shouting-down exercise. The current strain of Junior Anti-Sex League-type protesters who fill campuses from coast to coast now sure do love their “heckler’s veto…”


The Stanford Law School Dean Jenny Martinez was brilliant in response. Instead of doing what the heads of organizations have been doing for years in such situations, instead of doing, frankly, what I did during my own cancelation episode — frantically over-apologizing to people who have no use for or interest in apologies — Martinez sternly called the students out as clowns, reminding them in a long, serious, punishing letter that if they ever become officers of the court, they will be held to a higher standard than “lay people,” swearing to conduct themselves “at all times with dignity, courtesy and integrity.” 


Martinez went further, saying that on her watch, the school would not be doing the usual and committing itself to starter slates of political positions out of fear of reproach. “Our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion is not going to take the form of having the school administration announce institutional positions on a wide range of current social and political issues,” she wrote. The age of just giving in to mobs instead of insisting on our right to have different opinions and beliefs seems to be receding. It is beginning to dawn on sane, tolerant people everywhere that there are more of us than there are of them, and this still matters in a democracy. 


There’s a reason why these people are so focused on technocratic solutions, from magic AI schemes to control information to deploying packs of Boston Dynamics robot-dogs, who’ll patrol suburban neighborhoods and peer in windows for visual confirmation of Alexa-overheard transgressions. General Mark Milley just said on a podcast that armies may be fully robotic in 15 years, arousing general neoliberal giddiness (Milley quoted Dylan). These people need tech, because you know what they don’t have? Friends. Organic support. Or, ways to win them, like art, music, literature, or comedy.


I have a theory about what happened to America in this regard. After 9/11, people were scared, and they fell for a succession of propaganda campaigns convincing them that the hole in Fortress America, the chink in our national armor, was our system of democratic rights. 


The “MDM subcommittee” members think the same way: there’s a section in one of last year’s meetings in which a former Secretary of Washington State notes that the bad countries, “such as Russia, use the First Amendment effectively.” Moreover, in general, “our adversaries… use our Constitution effectively.” They’ve been telling us this stuff ever since the Towers came down. We were told our enemies will use even our open system of justice against us, so forget the admirable streak of America never having had an in-camera criminal trial. Let’s clear the court even for deportation hearings of suspected terrorists, they said. Let’s not even tell the public the names of the deported! 


“The era that dawned on September 11th, and the war against terrorism that has pervaded the sinews of our national life since that day, are reflected in thousands of ways” the Third Circuit Court wrote in 2002, adding: “Since the primary national policy must be self-preservation,it seems elementary that, to the extent open deportation hearings might impair national security, that security is implicated.” 


It was the same with torture, rendition, watch lists, drones, whatever. To respond to terrorism, we were told, we needed to be more “nimble” than old-school democracy allowed. We couldn’t wait for congress to declare wars, or build probable cause, or afford the right to face one’s accusers. The stakes were too high for such luxuries. Even giving “enemy combatants” Geneva convention rights would confer legitimacy to the opposition it didn’t deserve, and we couldn’t afford to give that legitimacy. Our grip on safety was that tenunous. 


No: the new era of a West infected with a borderless evil returned from the 8th century needed a bureaucracy of super-empowered minders, who’d do torturing if it needed doing, and quietly make lists of who gets to fly or open a bank account. Most of all, these minders would make those terrible decisions about who gets to live and die in a drone-patrolled world. The Imitation Game from 2014, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and telling the awful tale of Alan Turing’s quest to crack the Enigma code, was a great movie, but perhaps also the ultimate portrait of the Obama-era political class, whose members all saw themselves as misunderstood geniuses quietly saving civilization through endless mathematical murder, committed from afar, by remote control, without fanfare or appreciation. 


America balked some at George W. Bush as “The Decider,” but was more than happy to let the Community Organizer head up those secret decisions. With the genial and patient-sounding Obama in office, the deciders assumed a new brand of business-casual cruelty. I vividly remember going to a ballgame with a longtime Justice source in those years, someone I liked, who casually told me in between bites of a hot dog that of course we should just drone Julian Assange, because he was a “terrorist,” and the “reality is, you just have to kill them.” 


Each year, more and more of government became classified, and we had less and less access to information about where tax dollars were being spent, or what was going on at places like the Federal Reserve. We let it happen, abandoning the democratic responsibility to govern ourselves, in the process willing the world’s smuggest aristocracy into existence. It wasn’t the worst time — a lot of good TV was made in those years — but while we were napping, these people were turning America into a secret administrative state committed to endless war, mass surveillance, social credit scoring, censorship, and other horrors, a system that’s only just now beginning to show itself. 


The managerial state was held in place for over a decade by a kind of magic spell, which works thanks to the public’s faith in the competence of our minders. That spell held by default for an extra four years while Trump was in office, but it’s been broken now, in part thanks to refuseniks like Musk (who caused all kinds of havoc by opting out of an airtight information-control cartel), but mainly because we’ve now had enough opportunities to examine up close the loathsome nanny-staters to whom we surrendered all those years ago. Whatever hold these people had on us, and it was real — I spent years worrying about regaining the favor of people who were denouncing me as a Russian asset even as they demanded my vote — it’s gone now, and we can start thinking about moving on to something better. 


This is what I choose to think, this weekend evening. We don’t have to concede to a future of always being at war somewhere abroad, and with each other at home. We don’t have to put up with a government that doesn’t tell us anything. Most of all, we can go back to enjoying life, on our own terms, without stressing over an endless succession of panics invented by politically insecure losers. We can do so much better, and we will, because this place is ours to run, a fact the singing censors should never have let us remember.



Canada’s Assisted-Suicide Policy Body Surfing Toward America

Best to keep an eye on Canada’s “Medical Aid in Dying” policies. The American Left does—and they like what they see.


Invariably, no matter the issue, whenever the Left aims to implement a policy proposal it deems innocuous, a triggered Right declares it part of a  slippery slope on the road to serfdom. Invariably, too, the Right is correct—as recent developments regarding Canada’s assisted-suicide law show.

Why should you care about Canada and assisted suicide? Well, in the first place, the American Left is constantly importing other nations’ insane and injurious policies. The Left is not necessarily engaged in this activity for subversive reasons. Often, they cite the acceptance of so-called “cosmopolitans” as evidence of the merit of these policies, because they cannot cite their efficacy. Consequently, it is wise to be wary of the international Left’s agenda and their efforts to implement it. 

As we consider what’s happening in Canada, one might also recall the (paraphrased) words of my late father: “stuff rolls downhill.”

Canadians are body surfing down the slippery slope of assisted suicide to dystopia. In 2021, “Medical Aid in Dying” (MAiD) accounted for over 3 percent of deaths nationally, with some provinces’ rates topping 5 percent. Nonetheless, “free” government-run healthcare costs remain painfully expensive. One of the most obvious ways to cut costs—compassionately, of course—is to reduce demand. While it is doubtless a coincidence, the Canadian government’s “compassion” for state sanctioned assisted suicide has grown along with the government’s health care costs. 

Of late, the Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers (CAMAP) has expressed its altruistic concern that not enough of our neighbors to the north are aware assisted suicide is an option. As reported by Breitbart:

The Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers (CAMAP)intends to provide guidance to physicians, nurse practitioners, nurses and other allied healthcare professionals on bringing up MAiD as a clinical care option. We aim to facilitate equitable access to information about MAiD for all patients across Canada. We also aim to find an acceptable compromise with healthcare professionals who conscientiously object to MAiD, respecting their personal views, while working together to best serve patients.

And, yes, we all know that whenever the Left asks for a compromise with dissenters, it is but a matter of time before they demand the dissenter’s complete submission.

Be that as it may, some will argue that “suggesting” allied healthcare providers mention assisted suicide to patients is merely informing terminal patients of their options. Indeed, CAMAP expressly states the provider should not attempt to persuade any patient to adopt assisted suicide as an option. In real life, however, this red line is not as bright as the Left might claim. Canadian veterans have alleged healthcare providers’ “suggestions” have tried to steer them toward assisted suicide for post-traumatic stress disorder and other nonterminal conditions.

Wait. “Nonterminal conditions”? That’s right. Per the National Post (via Breitbart):

One year from now, in March 2023, Canada will become one of the few nations in the world allowing medical aid in dying, or MAID, for people whose sole underlying condition is depression, bipolar disorder, personality disorders, schizophrenia, PTSD or any other mental affliction.

How the slippery slope steepens. Soon, Canadians will be able to seek “medical aid in dying” for non-terminal mental disorders. So much for the Hippocratic Oath. Citing the pain of living with a non-terminal mental disorder, proponents argue it is as compassionate to kill someone so afflicted as it is a terminally ill person. That the mental disorder may prevent a patient’s informed and rational consent is a consideration, but it is a factor the healthcare provider will be able to determine. What could go wrong? After all, we are dealing with mature adults . . .

And . . . nope.

As reported by Chris Tomlinson in Breitbart:

A Canadian parliamentary committee has recommended the government expand its assisted-suicide policies to allow ‘mature minors’ to seek medical assistance to end their lives . . . The report does, however, suggest that the children who undergo assisted-suicide should only do so if their natural death is ‘reasonably foreseeable’ the National Post newspaper reports . . . Other recommendations from the committee include calling on the government to look into the views of minors themselves on the topic of assisted-suicide and their personal experiences.

“Mature minors” is one of those Orwellian phrases that epitomizes the madness driving the disordered leftist soul and impelling his hellbent lust to destroy innocence—literally. And this lust for destruction isn’t limited to the political realm. Canada’s corporate world is complicit in “informing” youth that MAiD is not just an option—it’s cool! Apparently, the private sector missed CAMAP’s guidance that a “suggestion” should not become “persuasion,” especially for the most impressionable among us.

What are the fruits of MAiD for Canadians? In addition to the commercial benefits of making Canada a hot “death tourism” destination, MAid has given the nation a distinction:

Canada is also harvesting the organs of those killed and has become the number one country for harvesting organs from those who have undergone assisted-suicide procedures in the world . . . According to a report published in December of 2022, Canada accounted for half of the organs harvested from those who underwent assistance in death and were transplanted into others. MAiD accounted for six per cent of all transplanted from deceased donors in 2021.

At least, unlike Communist China, the Canadian government’s organ donors had a say in the matter—for now.

Envious of Canada’s devolution into a death cult, two recent developments evince how the American Left wants to import our neighbor to the north’s assisted-suicide policies and seek to erode existing American restrictions upon assisted suicide. 

For one, “death tourism” is continuing to spread among the 50 states. According to the National Catholic Register, one of the 10 states allowing assisted suicide, Vermont, is poised to join Oregon in removing residency requirements for those seeking such “treatment.” As with the movement to have states legalize marijuana consumption and production, should Vermont become the east coast outpost for assisted suicide, it will not be long before other states drop their residency requirements or approve assisted-suicide laws. State legislatures are always looking to expand and enhance their revenue streams. If you think moral qualms play a role in determining which revenue sources to access, I have a lottery ticket to sell you.

Further, as in Canada, U.S. proponents are seeking to expand among the states the permissible reason for assisted suicide—a terminal illness—to include mental disorders. The Colorado Sun’s Jennifer Brown reports how Dr. Jennifer Gaudiani has revealed the way she steers patients with eating disorders toward assisted suicide, despite that being illegal under Colorado’s assisted-suicide law. Once more, a self-anointed savior of the Left unilaterally deems the law to be subordinate to its ever-shifting desires and ideological tenets. And, no, it never ends well. 

Best to keep an eye on Canada’s MAiD policies. The American Left does, and they like what they see. It’s why they want to ensure Canada’s assisted-suicide laws roll downhill to America. Sure, all life’s paths lead but to the grave. But we shouldn’t hurry to get there.