Not With a Whimper but a Bang

 

The stock markets are crashing today. People are talking major recession. To follow Covid lockdowns, rampant inflation, and war in Europe. 

If they are right, this should be the final nail in the coffins of Kamala Harris and the Democrats in the US, and Justin Trudeau in Canada. They were set to lose anyway, but this could be historic, like RB Bennet or Herbert Hoover in their day. The left might be discredited for a generation. It may also be lucky for Farage in the UK and LePen in France that they were snookered, in part by political machinations, in the recent elections: that leaves the left holding this bag.

Meantime, in his most recent column, written before today’s news from the world’s stock markets, Xerxes the leftist columnist already comes out hard against “the system.” He quotes left-wing Anglo-Irish blogger Paul Kingsnorth: “We like to believe that we live in independent nation states run by leaders of our choosing, but this is a mirage designed to disguise the reality: The Machine is a giant, global, digitized web of commercial power and control, managed by transnational corporations and gatherings of elite powerbrokers, none of whom have very much interest in what ‘the people’ think.”

Strikingly, this is exactly what the right is saying. This is just what Trump and Farage and Poilievre have been saying. To be fair, it is not just the left that has shifted. A few years ago, the right would have resisted blaming transnational corporations. Not any more. Both left and right are now alarmed at elite powerbrokers and the trend to globalization. 

Of course, in the recent past, as soon as some leftist raises this alarm, he is declared by the left to be “far right”—see RFK, Jimmy Dore, Tulsi Gabbard, Joe Rogan. But even if this continues, if the shadowy elites sustain their control over the Democratic Party or the Liberals and NDP, the end result will be the same. The people are uniting against the powers that be.

Kingsworth and Xerxes think the problem is that things are getting more complicated due to technology, so that there is a greater distance between the elites and the common people. I think the exact opposite is happening: the new technology is levelling things, removing the need for an elite, and all its advantages. And making it easier for he people to seize control.

Peace at Any Price

 

The current fate of the left reminds me of the fable of the Boy Who Cried “Wolf.” They have gotten themselves into this situation, of nobody any longer taking them seriously, either because they were never taught this wisdom growing up, out of hubris, or out of desperation. They have repeatedly stirred up imaginary crises and called everyone to the barricades: the “climate crisis”; the Covid lockdowns and the urgency of vaccination; describing January 6 as an insurrection; pulling the cord on the Emergency Act over the truckers’ protest; declaring a sudden assault on and urgent need to protect aboriginal rights, gay rights, trans rights; warning of a white supremacist or a Nazi under every bed; and so on and on seemingly ad infinitem. The latest being the charge that Trump, if not elected, will somehow launch a “bloodbath.”

It worked so well for them, they kept doing it. Now I feel the general public is fed up. The general public wants peace and quiet. When appeasing the left’s concerns looked like the easiest path, they appeased. But they are never appeased; appeasement has not worked. There is always a new, and more extreme, demand. 

Right about now, the general public is deciding that the only way to restore social peace is to turn decisively away from the left and refuse any more demands.

They should have stopped at the Sudetenland.

On Demonizing the Left

 

Sam Smith at the Grammys

One way to understand Andrew Coyne’s recent complaint about “demonization” of the left by the right is as a backhanded admission that, should the right go down this route the left have been crowding for so long, it would be devastating for the left.

I am reminded of Nathanial Erskine-Smith’s concern, in defending the Emergency Act, at the right raising the issue of the Nuremberg Code.

This struck me at the time, because I had never heard anyone on the right mentioning the Nuremberg Accords. Kin fact, I had never heard of the Nuremberg Code. I had to look it up. They were a code of conduct for medical experimentation, agreed upon after the Second World war, in reaction to the Nazis using prisoners in medical experiments. Those participating in the testing of experimental drugs or procedures must give informed consent.

And yes, reading the text,there was a strong case that, in mandating anti-Covid vaccines, the Canadian government was in violation of the Nuremburg Accords. People were being forced to use an experimental drug, the long-term effects of which could not possibly be known.

Thanks for the tipoff, Nate. It proves that the left is not acting out of ignorance. They know exactly what they are doing.

Coyne’s warning says the same. They know they are demonic.

Where, these days, are you likely to encounter an open endorsement of Satan? Among members of the Biden administration. Among the designers of the Target line of trans clothing. And these are people endorsed and embraced by the rest of the left. 

Who is in open rebellion against “conventional morality”? Who is burning down churches and dressing in mockery as nuns?

It is not as if they are being subtle about it.

The left is responsible for a genocide against the unborn: unrestricted abortion.

They are responsible for many deaths through their imposition of vaccine mandates. Not for the vaccine—one can accept that the rushing of the vaccine was done for the best of intentions, even if unwise or unnecessar in retrospect. But they surely killed people by imposing mandates, and they imposed mandates after it would have been clear to those in control that the vaccines did not work to prevent transmission and carried serious risks. They imposed mandates right when there was no medical justification for them, unless the intent was to kill people.

They are responsible for a growing genocide against the old, the infirm, and the mentally ill with their promotion of “medical assistance in dying,” previously known as euthanasia. They can claim consent; but that argument is flawed. The old, poor, ill and weak are, by definition, the most vulnerable among us. They can easily be pressured into giving consent; and there is much evidence this is happening. The mentally ill in particular are commonly understood not to be competent to give consent. They can now  be executed by the very families who drove them to madness. The elderly suffering dementia must only hope their children are not too eager to receive their inheritance.

The left is responsible for another, separate genocide against the poor and mentally ill too in their push for “safe supply” of addictive drugs, with no attention given to treatment or recovery. When was this a good idea? Did we ever treat alcoholism by giving out free whisky? 

While the approach might once have been defensible in theory—just conceivably--the left is doubling down even after the statistics roll in showing the spike in deaths.

They are responsible for physically mutilating and sterilizing children—the drive to “gender affirming surgery,” even behind the backs of parents. The motive can only be malice; malice against children. In no other circumstance would we consider children competent to make such life-altering decisions. 

The simple truth is that the left wants everyone—everyone else but themselves—dead. They are even open about this. They talk of people as a cancer on the planet. They will persist and push forward with this until and unless the rest of us call them out.

You don’t get more demonic than this.

Lactose Intolerance

The New Republic has a bizarre article half-endorsing the new left-wing craze for “milkshaking” political candidates they disagree with. The author ends with:

“I personally oppose violence in all forms, so I wouldn’t be able to bring myself to throw a milkshake at the nearest racist I encounter. But I don’t need to believe in it to recognize how effective it is at shaming the far right.”

That is surely, praising with faint damn.

But more interesting than the moral depravity is the odd assertion that the act of throwing a milkshake at an opponent is “effective.”

We do not yet know the results of the British EU election. Voting is today. On what basis can the tactic already be declared “effective”?

This, I think, is a key to the mindset of the modern left. It does not even care what the general population thinks. “Effective” means that the tactic is popular among leftists.

They genuinely see themselves as a ruling elite, and only what they think matters.

They are perfectly clueless about other views: they do not know, because they do not want to know, because they do not care. A party that is leading the polls, or a policy choice that holds majority support, can nevertheless be branded, like Nigel Farage and Brexit, “far right.” By any measure other than obliviousness, this is a contradiction in terms.

It should be obvious we are dealing with a self-designated, self-aware, elite; roughly, the professional class. My friend Xerxes was once quite open about it with me. I pointed out the illogic of expecting American voters to obediently accept the proposition that others should decide things for them. His response was that of course we should be ruled by an elite. And it of course includes him.

Another leftist friend, a book publisher, warned me against going down the same road as Jordan Peterson with my book on psychology. Yes, sure, he’s now a bestselling author, rich, and perhaps the world’s most famous public intellectual. But, don’t you see, he’s lost the respect of his colleagues?

There is a conscious us-them divide here: the professionals are aware of themselves as a class apart, and are acting for class interests, not in the interests of the whole. They even openly dislike ordinary people. They are the enemy, the “deplorables,” the rednecks, with their guns and their religion, and must be kept in their place. Making common cause with them is class betrayal.

Which may explain by itself the hatred for Farage, Trump, Benjamin, Peterson, or Tommy Robinson. Damned uppity peons.

Marx, purposely or not, got the classes wrong. He saw the Industrial Revolution as a transfer of power from a ruling landowning class to the bourgeoisie, who would in turn be replaced by the proletariat .Yet the landowning class were never the ruling class. In France, for example, they were the Second, not the First, estate. The First Estate, the acknowledged ruling class, was the clergy. So too in India: the top of the caste system was never the Ksatriyas, the Rajas and the landowning nobles. It was the Brahmins, the priests. In China, there was not even a landowning class. Everything was simply run by the Confucian mandarins.

“Priest” or “clerical” or “mandarin” here does not imply only religious office. Our term “clerical” best this ground: this was and is the educated class, the knowledge workers. In Biblical terms, the scribes and Pharisees. Other classes may or may not have had more material comforts, but the clerical class has always held the power. They have always run things, made and enforced the laws, run the businesses, and the schools and universities.

They have run things based on a monopoly, or rather, cartel, on information. Knowledge was their commodity, what they had to sell. Ideally, when the system was not corrupt, this knowledge was in principle available to all comers, and members of this class were admitted purely on their academic merit. But there is at all times a natural and inevitable incentive, among members of this class, to abuse their power, set their own prices for their labour, and to withhold knowledge from others in order to preserve their position.

To the extent that this has been a cartel, to the extent that this ruling group has been corrupt, the new information technology more or less blows that cartel apart.

There is no more cartel on raw knowledge. The information that once was the special preserve of a few is now generally available with a quick Google search. The “long tail” of the Internet also plays a part, revealing that what the “experts” now say is commonly the opposite of what they were saying a few years ago. In many professions, a striking lack of any real knowledge or expertise is being uncovered.

The more corrupt elements of the professional elite are reacting to this by circling the wagons. Realizing that the common people are growing suspicious, they are increasingly understanding the common people as the enemy. And more definitely seeing their own interests as against those of the common people. Hence the radicalization we are seeing on the left.

Their resulting utter disdain for others outside their group makes them peculiarly vulnerable to misjudgments. The New Republic author writes:

“Nothing animates the far right or shapes its worldview quite so much as the desire to humiliate others—and the fear of being humiliated themselves. It’s why alt-right trolls, projecting their own sexual insecurities, enjoy calling their opponents “cucks.” It’s why they rally around blustery authoritarian figures like Donald Trump who cast themselves as beyond embarrassment, shame, or ridicule.”

This is a magnificent example of projection. It is the leftist elite who so values social prestige. The left, like my publisher friend, is all about status, prestige, and being accepted as part of the group. It is the professional elite who fear humiliation, as they are exposed as having no special knowledge.

One of the keys if not the one key of Trump’s popularity is exactly that he seems impervious to humiliation. Marco Rubio tried, and died. Trump visibly just does not care what the elite thinks. Milkshakes? He’ll serve milkshakes and hamburgers at the White House. Humiliating news reports? He’ll just call the press out for “fake news.” He’ll say what he likes, and damn the tut-tuts from the tidy drawing rooms.

The left, in sum, is growing increasingly blustery and authoritarian, and Trump defies it—making him, despite his own wealthy background, a folk hero.

The same is true of Nigel Farage. The present author has the source of his appeal completely inverted; it is because, instead of putting on airs, he is shockingly frank. Benjamin and Robertson campaign in jeans and T-shirts; hardly pretending to be posher than they are. They make it the basis of their appeal that they are outsiders, ordinary working-class guys, not part of the establishment. So the left thinks the way to defeat them is to make it clear to the common yobs that they are ordinary guys, and not part of the establishment?

And those on the right do not call opponents “cucks.” Whether you think it right or not, they call others on the right “cucks,” for being too timid or obsequious to the elites, not ideological opponents.

Note too the uncanny lack of insight in not realizing for an instant that anyone else might just as easily use this milkshake tactic: so long as a single, solitary figure disagrees with any candidate, he can fling a milkshake at them. It is not just that the left does not seem to be listening to anyone else: they cannot even mentally acknowledge, it seems, that they exist. Not even one of them.

So flinging a milkshake says absolutely nothing about the candidate; it could happen to any candidate. It tells us something about the assailant, or their opposition, if it generally approves, and it is not a noble thing. It suggests that they feel they and their views are more important than anyone else’s and must be obeyed without question. The public must conform to their solitary views, or next time, they will vote them all out and elect a new general public.

The left, which is to say by and large the current professional elite, is committing suicide before our eyes.

"Make the Rich Pay" -- The Rich

The rich tend to be on the political left.

Have you noticed?

Sure, you have heard about “the Koch brothers.” Or Conrad Black. But they are the exception. Conrad Black was one big newspaper proprietor who was on the right. He made news because of this. How many newspapers are on the right? Apparently, the owners of all the others are on the left. Rupert Murdoch makes news for running a TV network on the right. But this was also a huge profit opportunity, precisely because most media are strongly on the left, and a customer base was not being served. Other proprietors were so strongly on the left that they were prepared to let their businesses suffer for the sake of their politics.

Pick a posh neighbourhood in the US or Canada. Odds are, it votes left. Westmount—Liberal. Outremont—NDP. Rosedale—Liberal. Vancouver Quadra—Liberal.

The left claims to be “for the poor.” It is really for the rich. The poor in the last US election seem to have mostly voted for Trump. Not that the right is necessarily for the poor—but they do not make this their banner slogan, either.

This is how that works.

Everyone who has more money than they really need sees poorer people and, even if they do not feel a tad guilty about this, they at least fear envy. So there is always a market for some scheme that will “help the poor.” This allows the rich to point for vindication of their own wealth to the fact that they have publicly supported such schemes. They are “progressives.” It’s a less painful alternative to the alternative of either actually, personally, giving money to the poor, or admitting they are a little selfish for not doing so.

Not, let us note, that there is any positive moral obligation to give money to the poor. But that is a separate and more complicated argument. People do feel guilty, and do experience envy.

The standard and most popular tactic among politicians, to meet this client need, is to conjure up an imaginary class of “rich capitalists” whose responsibility it is to divest their wealth for the sake of the poor, and not us, we poor people in Rosedale or Outremont. After all, they have more money than we do.

No matter how rich you actually are, this is necessarily always true. You can always pass the buck up the chain to someone who has more and is not doing their share. Everyone can use the same logic, and make the same claim, all the way up to the one last person who actually is the richest soul in the land, or the world. “Why should I be giving up what I have? After all, Warren Buffet has more. Take his money first.”

But even at the very top, a lot of the madly rich, like the magnates in Silicon Valley, are also on the left. You can find all kinds of them calling for higher taxes—obviously on themselves.

“Heck, I’m for helping the poor. I’m not greedy. I think we should all pay more taxes.”

This works for the really rich, too, who cannot fool themselves into believing they will not bear the higher taxes. They are passing the buck back down the line, in effect. You think he should pay instead of you. He says he’ll pay if you pay too. The positions are actually contradictory, but both on the left. They both come out as “the rich should pay more taxes.”

There are other considerations. It is naive, in the end, to imagine that money going to government goes to the poor. Most of it, of course, goes into the pockets of bureaucrats, and bureaucrats can be among the very rich. Indeed, just about all of the richest neighbourhoods in the US are in the suburbs of Washington D.C.. Guess who lives there (and guess how they vote). Even money specifically earmarked in budgets for the poor goes, apparently, 70% on administration costs—to bureaucrats—and only 30% to the poor. The figures are reversed, on average, for private charities.

At the same time, big government is to the advantage of those who are now rich. More regulation restricts competition. More corporate welfare is available, more fat contracts are put out to tender for established businesses. There is no reason for a big business to prefer a free market.