Category: Politics

Next month in November, it’s another election, which may actually be important in that the midterms and the 2024 presidential race will determine whether our votes will ever matter again.

To skip, there is no point in me going over the partisan races (Republican vs. Democrat) because I’m voting Democrat in all of them. This is not because I went whole hog liberal Democratic partisan, it’s because I am a single issue voter. Some people’s single issue is abortion (on one side or the other). Some people’s single issue is more gun control. My single issue is: FUCK TRUMP and everybody who enables him. Which at this point is the entire Republican Party. Yes, even the reasonable ones. Because at this point, the reasonable ones are just the Republicans who still remember how to play both sides of the street. They hold to reasonable (or at least non-whacko) positions during the general election and then as soon as they’re elected they goosestep in line with the whackjobs because once they’re in office their loyalty is to the whackjobs who own the Party, not the general public.

And I can hear the cult chanting now: “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Let’s go back over definitions: Bush Derangement Syndrome was when liberals only believed the worst about George W. Bush. Obama Derangement Syndrome was when conservatives only believed the worst about Barack Obama. Trump Derangement Syndrome is when anybody believes anything that sack of shit says.

It should be obvious, just from looking back at the Helsinki press conference with Putin, that Trump has given more aid and comfort to the enemy than Jane Fonda ever did. If you still can’t figure out why, just read THIS, and then READ IT AGAIN, and keep reading it until you get it.

You want to know why I’m against that? Look at Russia and what that “post-liberal” agenda has done to that country. To its pride. To its military readiness against its neighbors. To its peoples’ survival.

That’s why.

And Putin, unlike Trump, is not a titanium hammerhead who has to stare at the can of orange juice for five minutes cause it says “CONCENTRATE”.

Even without Trump, these “conservatives”, and the Alito Supreme Court, are on track to create a legal system that would make the Islamic Republic of Iran look as libertarian as Burning Man.

So if that’s what you “patriots” want to turn MY country into, why don’t you just move to Asia and get a job doing this:

Right now, I have only one position in any partisan race. That position is:
FUCK.

TRUMP.

UP.

THE.

ASS.

Now to the ballot initiatives for Nevada, and this election there only seem to be three of them.

Question 1 is an initiative to ban all discrimination “on account of race, color, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability, ancestry or national origin.”

While equal rights amendments are part of some other state constitutions, they normally haven’t included sexual orientation or gender identity. In principle, I have no problem with doing this. In practice, the definitions of non-standard gender identity are still sufficiently vague that I wonder what protections would mean and how they would be implemented. In its ballot initiative analysis, Reason Magazine stated: “A more fundamental question surrounding the proclaimed need for an equal rights amendment is whether the protections they would offer are already accomplished by the Equal Protection Clause within the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Adopted following the American Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment states, in part: “No state shall…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Yes, but as we’ve seen, the Supreme Court can look at the Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clause and decide it doesn’t apply if they don’t feel like it.

Accordingly, even with my reservations, I support YES on Question 1.

Question 2 is an initiative to raise Nevada’s state minimum wage to $12 an hour. I have already stated my position on this issue: All minimum wage means is, if it were legal for the company to pay you less than that, they would. Because the cost of training your replacement would be worth that much to the company, or less. Especially since COVID, the demand for jobs has gotten to the point where gas stations and other shit jobs will actually pay more than $12 starting out now. Meanwhile the federal minimum wage is still $7.25 an hour, but then Congress is run by Southern “conservatives” who are that much more stingy than heartless capitalists. Believe it or not, the marketplace does correct itself, and often it does a better job than government. (Again, I’m not a liberal, I’m a Democrat Just To Fuck Trump.) I support NO on Question 2.

Question 3 concerns whether to convert Nevada to an “open primary” state. I have also already stated my opinion in favor of this initiative.

In theory, the two-party system could correct itself with one of the current “third” parties taking over for the weaker of the two ruling factions, as the Republicans ended up replacing the Whigs. But the duopoly has calcified even as it gets worse. Few people who still are partisans see any need to try alternatives to their registered party. With Democrats, they think any “third” party candidates are spoilers who are just going to increase the chances of a Republican getting elected, and Republicans are all theocratic fascists. Of course, that’s what they’ve been saying since at least 1964, but as of 2015, they’re actually correct. Meanwhile Republicans won’t consider any alternatives to their party because they think politics is a spiritual battle of Good vs. Evil, and the Democrat Party are all gay Muslim Communists who hate the Little Baby Jesus and want to send him to jail. And by Little Baby Jesus, I mean Trump, cause most of the Republican “base” won’t admit there’s a difference.

The alternative among people who have real lives and don’t think politics is like following House of the Dragon (except less plausibly scripted) is to quit being partisan. This really means that those people don’t have a vote in party primaries, which in many places is the real vote. Which makes the public at large that much more alienated from politics in general and reduces the voter pool to make it even more devoted to ideologues. To many in the duopoly, that is a feature and not a bug.

Remember, the whole premise of America’s party system, and the perceived need of the duopoly to limit competition as much as possible, was to serve as gatekeepers, to make sure that political movements were still capable of moderation and compromise and did not allow radical ideas to become part of mainstream political thought. But in our civics illiteracy, we lost sight of that and confused the mechanism for the goal. Now in at least one case the party institution is itself the vehicle for radical, un-American ideas. Ideas like, “democracy’ just means we impose our will on everybody else and if we can’t win an election with a minority of voters, it just means we didn’t use enough fraud and force.”

An open primary system would remove this emphasis which in turn would mean less focus on a politician’s brand identity.

Because no matter what I said earlier about voting down the line for Democrats, it may not matter cause gas prices are skyrocketing – for SOME reason – hurricane season is screwing the infrastructure network and Democratic candidates are in increased trouble. Adam Laxalt is totally on board with a nationwide ban on abortion, and he’s leading Catherine Cortez Masto in the Nevada US Senate race. In Georgia, Senator Raphael Warnock is up against Herschel Walker, who is basically Trump, only more belligerent and inarticulate, and there’s at least an even chance that Walker could win.

Further proof that we could present objective evidence that electing Republicans would send this country to literal Hell (or, in 2020, COVID Hell), and Americans would look at Hell, then look at the Democrats, and say, “Fuck it, let’s see what Hell is like.”

Changing states to open primary would be one way out of this trap. You are still going to have people running as Democrats and Republicans, but the channelling mechanism would be who among the general population gets the most voters, not who can win the party primary by being the most mindless political robot. That in turn would mean politics is less dictated by issues where no one will agree (like abortion) and more in terms of which individuals would do the best job running the government.

What a concept.

I support YES on Question 3.

The most maddening bit about The Church of Trump’s main article of faith, that their Lord and Savior didn’t lose an election fair and square and Joe Biden is not the legitimate president, is that by the time they will be in position to do anything about it, Joe Biden’s first term will be over. But that doesn’t change the fact that Trumpniks who deny the 2020 election are running in crucial states and if they take over state legislatures or Secretary of State positions, they may be in position to just throw out any election results they don’t like for the presidential race in 2024. And at the rate things are going, Trump IS going to be the Republican presidential nominee. I mean, guys like Ron DeSantis are certainly in competition to see who can be the most gratuitous dickweed, but Ron still seems to have enough grasp of reality to know how many fingers he has on his hands. That’s a liability with his voter base. No, Republicans want somebody who’s just as whiny, stupid and delusional as they are, and no one fills that role like Trump. Nothing will stop Trump. Why? How can he get impeached, TWICE, and not be convicted? Why can he commit crimes that anybody else would have gotten arrested for years ago and nothing happens to him? How can he survive into his mid-70s exercising as little as possible and eating food that would have given anybody else heart disease and Type II diabetes?

Why? Because God is real, and He hates us all. That’s why.

Still, it seems that even a Supreme Being can only do so much to cover for His Divine Instrument’s cosmic-level incompetence and stupidity.

Up to this point, Trump’s biggest liability was the Department of Justice investigation of his resort at Mar-a-Lago – or as Michael Cohen calls it, Mar-a-Lardo – where they found out the estate still held documents after Trump’s attorney said they’d turned over all the documents he had. But in his appeals through the judicial system, Trump managed to get his case to Southern District of Florida Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee who’d only been confirmed by the Senate after the 2020 election. She decided to grant the Trump legal team’s request to appoint a special master to review which documents the government had a right to, in the process completely blocking the DOJ use of the materials. This was a decision so obviously biased and lacking in grounding that Trump’s own Attorney General Bill Barr said it was “deeply flawed in a number of ways.” (Barr being the main expert opinion on twisting the law to make sure Donald Trump is immune to it.)

But the Department of Justice decided to humor the charade for a bit and acceded to one of the proposed choices for special master, Raymond Dearie, a Reagan-appointed judge who is currently serving in the District Court for the Eastern District of New York. And on Tuesday September 20, things didn’t start off well for Trump when the lawyers came to see Dearie in New York and based their case on the idea that they don’t HAVE to tell him, the special master, which documents Trump has a right to and which he does not, which documents are declassified and which are not. Now, if one takes the premise of a special master seriously, the officer would have cause to separate out documents which are attorney-client communications, personal messages, things of that nature. If you are to have a special master, he must be able to make the distinction. But Trump’s team refused to cooperate. There is of course a reason for this, one that the attorneys may have deduced only after taking the case. If they assert that documents have not been declassified, they have no case because the government has ownership. If they assert the documents have been declassified by Trump, then he retroactively did so after leaving office (i.e., he did not declassify anything) and he admits to holding sensitive documents which remain government property whether they are declassified or not. Ergo, the Trump lawyers must present the documents as being in this eternally nebulous state where their legal status must be undetermined but in effect favoring Trump’s case. As some of us called it, “Schrodinger’s Legal Defense.”

Dearie seemed to perceive this right off the bat, because again, the matter in question is, one, why does the former President have possession of documents that he has no legal right to hold? And two, why does the classification status matter if these are still government documents?

“The judge, a veteran of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, expressed puzzlement about what his role would be if the government says certain documents are classified and Trump’s side disagrees but doesn’t offer proof to challenge that.

”What am I looking for?….As far as I am concerned, that’s the end of it,” Dearie said. “What business is it of the court?”

James Trusty, one of Trump’s attorneys, called it “premature” for Dearie to consider that issue right now. “It’s going a little beyond what Judge Cannon contemplated in the first instance,” he said.

In one of several moments of palpable tension with the Trump team, Dearie replied: “I was taken aback by your comment that I’m going beyond what Judge Cannon instructed me to do. … I think I’m doing what I’m told.”

In other words, our boss has a pet judge, and she appointed you, so that makes you our pet judge, too.

That’s a great legal strategy, isn’t it? I wonder if they teach that in law school? Maybe David E. Kelley would come up with that, but he writes legal comedies. Even Denny Crane would think that was cuckoo.

And then this week, New York’s Attorney General Leticia James announced a lawsuit over Donald Trump and the Trump Organization misrepresenting their assets by billions of dollars, and seeking $250 million in damages. Assuming he’s good for it.

And, on the same day (Wednesday) the DOJ’s appeal to the 11^th Circuit was reviewed by 3 of the 11 judges, and that panel determined to remove the restriction against the government review of Trump’s documents. “The court also pointedly noted that Trump had presented no evidence that he had declassified the sensitive records, as he has repeatedly maintained, and rejected the possibility that Trump could have an “individual interest in or need for” the roughly 100 documents marked as classified.” (Y’know, other than ‘MineMineMineMineMINE!!!!’)

Contrary to Trump’s publicly stated opinion to Sean Hannity that he can declassify documents “by thinking about it”, The Son of Man cannot just wave his hand over documents like a priest consecrating the Host and decree, “I declassify thee, this stuff is mine now.” And even if he could, the government has stated, repeatedly, that classification status has no bearing on the government’s ownership and does not answer the question of why Trump has more right to the documents than they do.

Trump might have gotten his pet judge to stymie the DOJ’s investigation of him, but he forgot that the DOJ aren’t the only people investigating him, and there are multiple levels of the legal system that prosecution can appeal to just as well as he can. He’s not behind a shield, he’s behind a very leaky dike, and he doesn’t have enough fingers to plug it. Besides, those fingers are pretty stubby.

The other issue is that Trump simply CANNOT tell the truth. The truth is not in him. He fears the truth like Dracula fears the cross. Even when a truthful presentation would serve him better than lying, he has to lie. At the very least he has to spin some big-fish story that gets further and further out of control.

Like, if someone accuses him of rape, Trump could just look up where the crime was supposed to have occurred, trace his whereabouts, create an alibi for what he was doing, get someone to corroborate that, and that would be the defense. But more likely, Trump would say something like, “I NEVER touched that woman, and this is why. Because I have NEVER had sex. Everyone knows this. Never. Like, you know all those kids I got? How many kids do I have now, five? Four? I got four kids. So yeah, I got four kids. And they are all immaculate conceptions. Believe me. That I can tell you. Like, with Melania, one afternoon, Melania was in her bedroom, and suddenly, a ray of light came through the window, and The Angel of The Lord appeared to her in his glory, and he says to Melania, ‘hey, congratulations, yer knocked up.”

I had once made a comparison of the Trump movement to The Picture of Dorian Gray, except I said that the man was to his cult what Dorian Gray was to his portrait. Trump could move from scandal to scandal and remain unmarred, but the Republican Party became that much more visibly decayed and corrupt the more it assumed his spirit and the more it covered for his evil. Which may be why some Republicans in the 2022 midterms are starting to think it may not be such a good idea to campaign with Trump. I mean, why should they, if he’s going to give a “support” speech and make it all about him while humiliating them in the process?

But it occurs to me that the Dorian Gray analogy might apply in a different way. There is of course another strongman who has possibly had more malicious impact on the world than Donald Trump and been subject to even less legal challenge or restriction. That would be Vladimir Putin, the Russian Federation’s apparent president for life.

It may take quite some time and retrospective historical analysis to truly assess how much damage Putin has done to the world, but we’re learning more and more. It was recently revealed that Russian “troll factories” united to undermine the 2017 Women’s March campaign immediately after Trump was inaugurated president, by targeting the controversial Linda Sarsour. (I am NOT a fan of Sarsour’s politics, but she wasn’t the only person involved in the March, and that movement was not invalidated simply because she was involved.)

As in the Trump campaign, Putin’s Russia directly and indirectly aided “countercultural” political efforts in several other countries, including support for Serbia’s President Aleksandr Vucic, and Marie Le Pen in France. The most famous of these mini-Vlads is the Hungarian President Viktor Orban, even if he started being less overtly supportive of Russia in the wake of the Ukraine invasion. These declared heirs to conservatism (and media supporters like Tucker Carlson) say they are advocates of a “post-liberal” world order; post-liberal, like postmodernism, meaning a philosophy of cutesy sophistry and bad taste. I have gone over the connections between Putin and the Trump Organization to such extent that I don’t need to elaborate again.

We can speculate all day as to what Putin has “got” on Trump, but it’s not like he needs anything. The Occam’s Razor explanation for Trump’s slavish loyalty to Daddy Vlad is (I think) that Putin is to Trump what Trump is to the fan club that used to be a serious American political party. Those guys see their Leader acting like an inflamed asshole and making everything around him worse and suffering absolutely no repercussions, and think they should be able to do that too. To Republicans, Trump is the role model, and to Trump, Putin is the role model. He’s what Trump wants to be when he grows up and becomes a real dictator. Of course it seems to surprise Trump (and his fan club) when he actually does suffer consequences for his actions, and it seems to be a new experience for Putin, too.

Up to a point, Putin had had the world over a barrel (so to speak) because he was grinding down the resistance to his Ukraine invasion and is in position to cut off fuel and heating oil supplies to Europe when this year’s winter is expected to be especially bitter. He had reason to believe that if he just kept going as he was he could wear down European Union resistance to his military campaign and make the West go along with his land grab, even knowing it will just encourage him to consolidate and take more people’s territory later.

Of course he could not keep going as he was. In a military offensive that will itself be the subject of later history (and that I have some ideas about that I want to explore at a later time), Ukraine’s military attacked at several points along the fronts with Russia. Telegraphing an intent to retake the southern city of Kherson, they apparently got Russia to concentrate its best forces there while the main offensive went due north east of Kharkiv city, taking key cities and eventually rolling up most of Kharkiv Oblast up to the pre-war Russian border, recapturing almost 2500 square kilometers in less than two weeks.

This was such a clusterfuck for the Russian side that even Russian state media hosts on the Fox News-style debate shows had to admit they were losing. It was that much harder to deny, given how much intact equipment Ukraine captured after Russian soldiers cut and ran.

This all makes Putin seem a little less threatening. He has exactly three tools against Ukraine and the West: nukes (a bluff he can only call once), the military, and fuel exports, and now that his military has proven to be that much more hollow than we thought, the West has a lot less reason to fear long-term fuel boycotts, because there’s less reason to think Putin can win this thing.

So this Wednesday Daddy Vlad had his personal parliament pass new legislation not only authorizing a limited mobilization of Russia but increasing the penalties for avoiding service. Supposedly the reserve pool is 300,000, consisting of those who already have military experience, but that pool includes both sexes up to an age of 60. It remains to be seen how well Russia will meet its new recruitment goals, but the announcement did great business for Russian airlines. So great in fact, that Russian airlines are now prohibited from selling tickets to men between ages 18 and 65. Like apparently the country is in that much danger of running out!

Not like increasing the draft pool will even work in military or strategic terms, precisely because the problem with Russian military performance was that the government couldn’t properly train and equip the people it had (especially pilots, with the Russian Air Force nearly missing in action the whole war). It’s going to be that much harder for Putin to equip the new people now. BECAUSE Ukraine captured so much of his stuff.

Like I said, Vladimir Putin, President for Life. Let’s see how long that is.

Dorian Gray was apparently immortal as long as he kept his portrait, but when he destroyed it, he suddenly died. Once the false appearance of perfection was destroyed, reality reasserted itself. It may simply be coincidence, or just irony, but as Putin weakens himself with his irrational mistakes, the “post-liberal” proteges he has done so much to help are weakening too.

For instance, one of Putin’s other supplicants, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, is in danger of losing re-election. Bolsonaro is the guy for conservatives who think “I like Trump, but he’s not macho and stupid enough.” His leftist opponent is Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva, formerly the biggest politician in the country. He is a popular, populist leader with his own personality cult who got convicted several years ago on money laundering charges and later had his charges and conviction reversed on grounds of bias and improper prosecution. Basically, this guy actually IS what Republicans have accused Democrats of being for years. Even so, while Bolsonaro’s polling is picking up, Lula is still almost 10 points ahead. Why? Maybe because Bolsonaro was just as lackadaisical about coronavirus in Brazil as the Trump Organization was in the US. Or maybe because Bolsonaro is that much more corrupt than Lula.

And who would’ve thought, all it took was fighting back. Having a military that resists naked aggression. Having a legal system that asserts a universal standard of law. And having citizens who vote against parties that are destructive and unpopular.

If Ukrainians can go to war and get shot at to stop fascism, the least you can do is come out and vote.

So I broke into the Palace

With a sponge and a rusty spanner

She said ‘eh, I know you, and you cannot sing’

I said ‘that’s nothing, you should hear me play pian’er’

-The Smiths, “The Queen Is Dead”

So, Queen Elizabeth the Second has died. She was 96 years old. Her mother (also named Elizabeth) actually made it to 101 until dying in 2002. When you live that long, I see little reason to mourn, rather I would celebrate the fact that one could live so long, and for the most part in good health (although the Queen was seen formally recognizing Liz Truss as Prime Minister just two days before her death in Scotland, and she was smiling but really didn’t look great).

Yet there is still great mourning. This is after all a truly historic event. Elizabeth ruled 70 years, longer than any other monarch besides Louis XIV of France. (Even Ramses II was estimated to have reigned only 66 years.) The former Prince of Wales, now King Charles III, is taking the throne at 73, having been heir longer than most people get to live. Which is why, incidentally, I have no reason to believe Charles is going to follow a common rumor and hand over the title to his son, the far more popular and glamorous Prince William. I seriously have to ask, why would you give up a destiny that is literally the only reason for which you were born? And frankly, while Charles seems to be in good health himself, I don’t think William has nearly so long to wait.

There has been much said about how Elizabeth had her own personality, her hobbies with raising corgis and horses, her sense of humor (which she expressed in appearances with James Bond and Paddington Bear) and so on. But she was never part of the emotional celebrity culture like Princess Di or Andrew or other royals who kept the family in the scandal sheets. Elizabeth spent most of her life as a professional national symbol, never letting the uniform off, mostly because she had to. (And as Edward VIII showed, you really don’t HAVE to be monarch.) But also she was still part of that old-world, sense-of-duty culture. The other royals, including Charles and even Prince Phillip, were not quite so restrained, and that’s partly because the times changed but partly because they didn’t HAVE to be the monarch and set the national example.

Yet even somebody who (unlike some of those people) didn’t destroy her reputation with bad behavior is still inspiring rage and hate even before she’s buried. A Nigerian-born professor at Carnegie Mellon attracted a lot of attention when she said: “I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.” Other people used this event to call upon Great Britain to return the Kohinoor Diamond which has been part of the Crown Jewels since Britain conquered India during the Victorian Era.

It all points up the fact that Britain, that much more than America or Russia, has its glory and history built upon “centuries of exploitation, oppression, racism, slavery”. And while Britain is for the most part a free country where the monarch reigns but does not rule, the government still acts in the Crown’s name. All the stuff that we are obliged to celebrate (and there is much to celebrate in Elizabeth’s reign) is tied up with everything that the rational humanist must oppose if Britain is to progress.

This is why, in his Substack column, Andrew Sullivan said: “You can make all sorts of solid arguments against a constitutional monarchy — but the point of monarchy is precisely that it is not the fruit of an argument. It is emphatically not an Enlightenment institution. It’s a primordial institution smuggled into a democratic system. It has nothing to do with merit and logic and everything to do with authority and mystery — two deeply human needs our modern world has trouble satisfying without danger.

“The Crown satisfies those needs, which keeps other more malign alternatives at bay. No one has expressed this better than C.S. Lewis:

Where men are forbidden to honor a king, they honor millionaires, athletes, or film stars instead; even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.”

But then Sullivan, like Lewis, is an old British Conservative, from a culture where conservatism still means something more than “life begins at the point of erection.” Or at least it did.

I don’t think it’s either-or. Our current events indicate that there might be a need for some national focus beyond politics, and that some Americans’ desire for a strongman, not to mention our own gossip-rag obsession with the Royals, indicates that we have our own primal desire to look up to kings, as Edmund Burke might put it. But I am at heart an American, which means I am a small-r republican. The (C)onservative idea that every nation needs some monarchical leader, even if not titled as such, is to me not a virtue of humanity that must be accepted, but a tribal vice that must be overcome. The idea that someone is just better and made to rule, Dei Gratia, is inherently opposed to the Declaration of Thomas Jefferson, that “We hold these truths to be self evident; that all men are created equal”.

And while I’m on Jefferson, that example means that you don’t need to be a monarchy to have a racist and imperialist global regime, nor does such history invalidate the real virtues of a national culture. Nor does monarchy prevent or even mollify the worst aspects of humanity. Would the Germans have been better off with a Kaiser than with Hitler? The German Empire may not have been the lowbrow gangsters that the Nazi Party were, but they were still capable of committing genocide. Austria-Hungary might have been better in some ways than the nations that succeeded it, but it broke up precisely because it was a multitude of communities that were united only by one beloved old monarch, and after Franz Joseph died (and Austria lost World War I) there was no other common focus. Even Hungary wanted to call itself a monarchy but it didn’t want Franz Joseph’s successor. As for Russia, the Bolsheviks were definitely worse than the Czars, but most of the reason the Bolsheviks got traction is because the Czars were THAT bad.

You can see from that latter example that certain people in the Russian Federation (specifically, Vladimir Putin) want to have all the “good stuff” about monarchy (like absolute power) and the “good stuff” about a democratic republic, namely the premise that the leader is a regular guy who rules with popular support and not just cause he immediately crushes any dissent against his own evil and incompetence. At the same time, Putin has attempted to embrace traditional Russian culture (like the Orthodox Church) as he also attempts to embrace the “good stuff” about Bolshevism (which was historically anti-Christian). But just as the Soviets attempted to cast off both the monarchy and the church, but merely replaced them with their own secular religion, Putin has not transcended old-world traditions so much as replaced them with an arbitrary structure that cannot appeal to those primal, mysterious, anti-logical urges but just stands naked in its craving for power and fear. And as such it has even less justification than monarchy.

Because if you don’t have that sense of mystery, what reason is there to say one person should be anointed just because? The traditions themselves were a means of rationalizing that any barbarian who wanted to seize the realm was going to do so anyway and getting the blessing of the Church was the realm’s means of validating the fait accompli. And now that we have no reason to assume there is a Mandate of Heaven or that God will strike down those who strike the King, it is a lot harder for us to suspend our disbelief and embrace the mystery.

Simply having a monarchy doesn’t change the fact that Britain’s new government under Liz Truss (a British politician name that ranks right up there with Ed Balls) is facing catastrophic levels of inflation. A study this year indicated that the rising cost of living meant that one in seven adults is in food insecurity (food insecurity being a polite way of saying you don’t get enough to eat because you’re not making enough money to survive). You can have the lion and unicorn and castles and stuff but it doesn’t change the fact that the United Kingdom is in the real world with everybody else and its government is facing real problems, and as with some other countries, many of those problems are self-inflicted.

I think that exactly because Britain is a pragmatic, (small c) conservative culture, most of the British, and even most people in the outer Commonwealth, will resist the urge to republicanism and accept Charles, because it’s a lot easier to roll with tradition than contemplate the potential dangers that Sullivan and Lewis raise. But then the British are also pragmatic in their liberalism, which is why Burke could defend both British tradition and the American Revolution but stood against the French Revolution. In a similar vein, another British Conservative was quoted as saying “democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” That may indeed be why Britain has kept its monarchy for so long, because unlike France and so many other nations, its nobles and its commoners were both able to adapt. But I think the reason the monarchy is so well thought of is precisely that Elizabeth set an example that so many other royals (like the aforementioned Edward) failed to uphold. And the fact that she reigned so long means that in the modern world she became a standard with no other comparisons, as opposed to our opinions of presidents and prime ministers. So while I’m not expecting radical changes to the Commonwealth because of Charles, the world has already changed a great deal in the 70 years of Elizabeth’s reign, and I am not expecting Charles to attain the same level of reverence. And this year, even the popular William and Kate got a lot of flak for their tour of the West Indies, where in one case protests forced the couple to cancel an appearance, and as John Oliver pointed out, “this was a clear attempt to try and keep the Commonwealth together, especially as just four months ago, Barbados formally removed the queen as their head of state and, during the same ceremony, recognized Rihanna as a national hero, proving Barbados is currently making all the right decisions.”

We should feel glad that someone could rise to the occasion of her moment and be exactly the kind of figure that tradition required her to be. We should also acknowledge that not every human, even every born royal, has the kind of character to precisely maintain tradition, that, as with Diana Spencer and to a lesser extent Meghan Markle, the attempt to fit in to that world can literally break you, that privilege even without power has an immense temptation to spoil and deform the human character, and privilege WITH power is a temptation that much worse, that precisely because traditions are made within specific cultures, not every culture is made for monarchy and even those that are are finding it increasingly implausible to maintain, and maybe we could not put so much trust in specific individuals who are meant to represent lasting traditions even as they themselves come and go, and instead try evolving our governments to practice more shared responsibility and accountability?

Just a thought.

The Queen is dead boys

And it’s so lonely on a limb

When you’re attacking FBI agents because you’re under criminal investigation, you’re losing.

-Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Twitter, November 3, 2016

Make your move and plead the Fifth, cause ya can’t plead the First

-Rage Against the Machine, “Down Rodeo”

So, after almost years of everyone wondering if the Justice Department under the Biden Administration would ever see fit to seriously investigate the accidental President Donald Trump, this Monday, August 8, around 7 pm, Trump took to his shrunken media platform to wail that the FBI had gone through his place at Mar-a-Lago, including his safe.

Let me go over several points that have already been made in the media: Any such search had to be approved by a judge, and judges are loath to do so, especially where such a subject is concerned, if they are not convinced it is absolutely necessary. There had already been a subpoena earlier that Trump and his staff had complied with, but the government had reason to believe that Trump had not fully complied. Most notably, it is legally required that for any search or takings to occur, the subject must be presented with the search warrant explaining the details of the action. Meaning, Donald Trump could have explained at any time what the subject of the search warrant was and the details he was presented.

It should also be noted that the reason Trump himself was not in Florida to make an even bigger scene in person is that he had to fly back to New York this week for a completely different investigation by the State of New York into the Trump Organization’s finances. Which led to even more Schadenfreude when Donald had to take the stand and pleaded the Fifth Amendment at least 440 times on questions, with the possible exception of answering his name. If I were the prosecutor I would have used the opportunity to hit him with questions like “What was Beethoven’s most famous Symphony?”, “How much bourbon does Rudy Giuliani have before making an important decision?” and “What fraction of brain power do you use compared to the average person?”

Liberals of course had a big laugh fest over that, since during the 2016 campaign and afterward, Trump loved to make fun of Democrats in legal jeopardy, saying “you see the Mob takes the Fifth, if you’re innocent, why would you take the Fifth Amendment?” Well, on Wednesday, Trump addressed that very point: “I once asked, ‘If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?’ Now I know the answer to that question. When your family, your company, and all the people in your orbit have become the targets of an unfounded, politically motivated Witch Hunt supported by lawyers, prosecutors, and the Fake News Media, you have no choice.”

You know, fair enough. That IS a Constitutional right. We often refer to the Sun Tzu quote that one does not interrupt the enemy when he is in the process of making a mistake, and according to Trump, he pleaded the Fifth on the advice of counsel, which would be a rare occasion of Trump taking the advice of counsel or interrupting himself in the process of making a mistake. I also do not want to make much of anyone pleading the Fifth because in any jury trial, jurors are not allowed to take a subject’s lack of testimony as evidence against them. But then again: By definition, if you ARE innocent, why do you need to plead the Fifth? That legally can’t be used against you in a court of law, but Trump doesn’t want to engage in the court of law, but in the court of public opinion.

Because of course, Trump used the search as a basis for fundraising, cause Trump can and WILL make ANYTHING a basis for fundraising.

And of course Trump is presenting himself as the poor, persecuted, political victim of the globalists/deep state/Lizard People/Eternal Jew.

And while a few weeks ago people supposedly thought Trump’s power in the Republican Party was slipping, this attack on The Boss brought all of the “conservative” leaders out to make louder and louder professions of faith.

You had the usual suspects like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (BR.-Georgia) scream-tweeting “DEFUND THE FBI!” Orange Lives Matter!!

Then you had some of the other Banana Republican Fox News stars taking time off of their side gigs in Congress to offer their own takes. Like, Senator Rand Paul (BR.-Kentucky) speculating that maybe the FBI used the opportunity to plant evidence on Trump. So, apparently Trump is Brittney Griner?

These apparatchiks spread their rumors and slanders not knowing (or caring) that Trump’s cultists have even less intellect and emotional control that he does, and for some sudden unexplained reason, this Thursday a man attacked the Cincinnati FBI office with a nail gun before getting chased down and shot. Apparently the suspect was one of the people who joined in the January 6 riot. What are the odds?

So all this helped lead to Attorney General Merritt Garland’s decision to do what the Trump Pity Party and Beltway media have been nagging him to do all week, and make a statement explaining himself. In a brief press conference in Washington, Garland confirmed that he had authorized the search, and had furthermore filed a request in court to unseal the search warrant. At this point it would be Trump’s choice to either allow the unsealing or contest it, which would immediately raise the question of why the alleged victim of government abuse would want to do that.

In other words, put up or shut up, Donnie.

All the liberals (prior to Monday) were asking why Garland had seemed so scared of making an open move on Trump even knowing what we knew just after January 6. Well, this is why. Because everybody’s second guessing what he did. And part of that is the idea that the former president deserves some benefit of the doubt, which normally would be the case. The problem is that it is no longer the case that Trump or anybody in his Party can be taken in good faith on anything, but they are now taking advantage of the false impression that there are still two parties that are equally committed to the former American system of government.

There are some people who think that the Justice Department should have been more forthcoming about this search so as not to muddy the issue, but they don’t seem to grasp the point that muddying the issue is what Republicans DO. If Trump sprained his ankle at noon, by 5 pm Jesse Watters and all the Fox News goombas would be screaming and hollering that Hillary Clinton and George Soros made him do it.

Once again, I am reminded of an incident involving the old hair-metal band W.A.S.P., led by bassist and “singer” Blackie Lawless. Blackie would pose on posters with a spandex costume and a codpiece with a buzzsaw blade coming out of it, and on stage, he would frequently arm the codpiece with various explosive rockets so that they would fire off of his groin during the set. Well, one show, the explosive charges misfired and exploded inside the codpiece, leaving Blackie with screaming pain and a seriously burned crotch, as happens in these situations. And his bandmates came to visit him in the hospital, with the bandages on his crotch, and his guitarist told him, “y’know, Blackie, we wouldn’t have to do these gimmicks if we could just write better songs.”

Trump is like Blackie Lawless’ burned crotch, except less photogenic. If his Party could write better songs, they wouldn’t be where they are, but they are where they are, because they can’t. You would think, after Trump lost an election, after he got caught on tape telling the Georgia Secretary of State to “find” enough votes to switch the results, after he sent a mob to kill his own Vice President, after the January 6 committee summer sessions, the people in the Republican Party who know better, like Mitch McConnell, would, finally, FINALLY, be able to get rid of Edward Babyhands, but they still can’t. Because Trump is much more like the real Republican Party than people like McConnell. And if they had the imagination or spirit to pick someone better than him, they would have by now.

But that’s the other reason you don’t just make a move on Donald Trump just for the sake of doing it. You have this whole cult that pretends to represent everybody in America who’s not a Democrat or socialist, and we’ve seen what they try to do when reality doesn’t go their way. It goes back to the line, “You aim at the king, you best not miss.” The Department of Justice didn’t have to investigate Trump. They could have just done what Gerald Ford and the rest of the political establishment did with Richard Nixon after Watergate, just given him a slap on the wrist to let the country “heal.” Of course, the pardon of Nixon did not actually help the nation move on, it just created the public precedent that the President of the United States IS in fact above the law, that if the President does it, it’s NOT illegal, that a politician can be “too big to fail” and treating him like a common criminal would supposedly be a worse standard than not doing so, and therefore if you’re a career swindler who is fundamentally opposed to honesty and integrity, getting elected president is the best way to make your conduct literally unimpeachable.

Either we nip this in the bud now, or it gets worse. And if it gets much worse than this, the United States may make Putin’s Russia look like Utopia.

But then there’s just SO MUCH that Trump could be investigated for. Let’s see…

Serial adulterer who has been accused of rape at least once, and admitted to spying on contestants’ dressing rooms at the Miss America pageants he managed (one of these being Miss Teen USA), who was also a former confidant of Jeffrey Epstein, whose sex slavery crimes have never been fully investigated cause he died in suspicious circumstances,

During the 2016 campaign, openly begged Russia to release Hillary Clinton’s emails, and by another one of those magical coincidences, the very same day (according to the Mueller Report) Russian hackers attempted to probe email accounts at a domain used by a Clinton campaign office. During the same period, the Trump campaign actively worked with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to release emails from John Podesta and other Clinton associates. Assange is currently imprisoned in the United Kingdom and fighting the extradition process to be sent to the United States over the accusations against him,

As President, had a secret meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov – hours after firing FBI head James Comey over an investigation of Russian interference on his behalf in the election – allegedly providing Top Secret information including the details of a planned operation against Islamic State in Syria, in the process potentially exposing an Israeli intelligence asset,

As President, frequently hosted events at Mar-a-Lago, frequently holding discussions with diplomats and heads of state in public earshot. In one incident a Chinese national attempted to enter the property and was searched by Secret Service agents and found to have a thumb drive with malicious malware,

According to the January 6 congressional investigation, Trump Organization Chief of Staff Mark Meadows burned documents after a conversation with Pennsylvania Republican Congressman Scott Perry. Perry was one of the Pennsylvania politicians willing to press the strategy that Pennsylvania’s 2020 vote needed to be contested and thrown out in favor of Trump. Perry has acknowledged that he introduced Trump to Jeffrey Clark, and advocated for him to become the next Attorney General to push the election fraud allegations. This week, shortly after the Mar-a-Lago search, federal officials served another warrant to take Congressman Perry’s phone…

So if this search means that the DOJ is doing a serious criminal investigation against Trump, what exactly is Merritt Garland going to charge him with?

I’m sure he can think of something.

Ignorance has always been

Something I excel in

Followed by naivete and pride

Doesn’t take a scientist to see

How any clever predator

Could have a piece of me

Standing in the sun – Idiot savant – Something like a monument

I’m a dinosaur

Somebody’s digging my bones

-King Crimson, “Dinosaur”

As the January 6 congressional investigation winds down – for now – it has done that much more to prove incriminating behavior on the part of Vladimir Putin’s favorite oven mitt, Donald Trump. Which means that The Prince of Orange has to make that much more noise telling his cult he “may” start a run for President even as early as this year. In fact he may need to before it’s too late.

The conventional wisdom seems to be that Trump may be losing a lot of his support. Of course “conventional wisdom” is one of those phrases like “military intelligence” or “ethics in gaming journalism.” But still: It attracted a certain amount of attention when Fox News decided NOT to cover his most recent speeches live, and when the Murdoch-owned New York papers launched editorials blaming him for the January 6 attack.

At last weekend’s rallies – where, as at least one journalist pointed out, the Church of Trump is STILL booing Hillary Clinton and chanting “LOCK HER UP” when that was now TWO elections ago – he got little reaction when he told Turning Point USA that “a friend of mine once said that I was the most persecuted person in the history of our country“. (What, more than Jesus?) Previously on Friday, he had appeared in Arizona to endorse Eli Crane for Congress (who, like Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania, is considered something of a carpetbagger) and was actually booed. Trump then said, “But you like me, right?”

The fact that Trump has managed to get away with as much as he has, not just in politics, but prior to 2015, is a big reason why I think the whole premise of “karma” is bullshit. Still, it would certainly be poetic justice if Trump got kicked out of politics because the “base” he has been courting so fervently decided to treat him the way he treated his two-and-counting ex-wives.

Trump is- well, lemme put it this way. Back in the really old days of David Letterman’s late-night show, he would bring on this local kids’ party magician named Kamarr. And because the guy’s name sounded like K-Mart, Dave kept introducing him as “Kamarr, the Discount Magician.” That’s Trump. Trump is the K-Mart Hitler. Trump is the Dollar Store Dictator. He’s what you get when you want a ruthless, one-party banana republic but don’t want to shell out for anything serious. And anybody who actually buys this product is either that desperate or is too tasteless to know the difference.

Unfortunately, “desperate and too tasteless to know the difference” is a perfect description of both Trump and his cult. And if you’re a Republican with a brain, the problem is that the lunatics have taken over the asylum. It’s gotten beyond Trump, actually, because on those occasions when he has (in political self-interest) told his fan club to get vaccinated so that they can vote for Republicans and not die of Trump Virus, they boo him. And now at least one rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, has learned to play to that crowd by discouraging virus control in his state. So if you’re one of those oligarchs who is using the Republican Party as their vehicle to turn the nation into their personal latifundium, you’re in a quandary: go with Trump, who has pizzazz and a following but is starting to lose his luster and what little brain he had, or go with DeSantis, who is encouraging virus spread to play to that base, but at least seems to know what day it is?

Of course it’s kind of ironic. If Trump’s fan club trades in their first love for a younger, hotter version of the same model, they’re just being that much more like Trump.

Last week, The Atlantic posted an article by pollster Sarah Longwell, titled “The January 6 Hearings Are Changing Republicans’ Minds.” The findings of her polls are that Republicans both before the hearings and now are consistent in holding to the Church of Trump’s current dogma: That the 2020 election was stolen and Biden isn’t the legitimate president. What’s changed apparently is that only 14 percent of polled Republicans who supported Trump in 2020 want him to run again in 2024. “Their reasoning is clear: They’re now uncertain that Trump can win again. … Even if Trump could win, they say, he could only be president for four more years. (Or so one hopes.) But if it’s DeSantis or another rising star, Republicans have a better shot at eight years of political dominance. And they like eight better than four.”

Which would probably be the deciding factor for the Powers That Be in the Republican Party, at least the ones who aren’t based in Moscow.

But again, that’s not to say it will actually happen.

According to the New York Times, “Exacerbating the fundraising problems for Republicans is that Trump continues to be the party’s dominant fundraiser and yet virtually none of the tens of millions of dollars he has raised has gone toward defeating Democrats. Instead, the money has funded his political team and retribution agenda against Republicans who have crossed him.”

Gosh, it’s like the only reason Donald Trump does anything is to fuck over the rest of the world and make money off of suckers.

The real issue is that even if Trump himself can’t make a comeback in his party, it may not make any difference.

The “Stop the Steal” bullshit has gone far beyond just performative agreement with Trump. It has become a full-fledged political network that accounts for such organization and initiative as the Republican Party still has. From a New York Times article: “In 17 of the 27 states holding elections this year for secretary of state — the top elections officer in 24 states — at least one Republican candidate is running on the claim that the 2020 election was illegitimate, according to States United Action, a nonpartisan organization that advocates for free and fair elections. In four of the eight Republican primaries held so far, that candidate has won.” (This was before August 2)

In this year’s Republican primary elections, the “Big Lie” isn’t just reinforcing Trumpworld’s antagonism towards the rest of America, it’s being used by Republicans against each other. In Nevada, Joey Gilbert lost the primary race for Governor to Joe Lombardo by more than ten points, yet still filed a lawsuit (after the formal recount) using a model that one columnist referred to as “New Math.” For example, claiming that in Clark County/Southern Nevada, 55,000 votes were “stolen” from Gilbert, in a county where the tally shows he only got 30,000 votes, so he’s saying that somebody took almost twice as many votes as he actually got. And in the August 2 Arizona primaries, most of the candidates – including apparent winner for Secretary of State, Doug Finchem – are totally on board with the idea that the 2020 election was stolen and next time the Secretary of State (that would be Mr. Finchem, he hopes) should fix the results the way they “should” be. But in the Senate primary, Blake Masters, who endorsed the Big Lie, won against multiple challengers, including Jim Lamon, who also endorsed the Big Lie. Does that mean Lamon doesn’t have to admit he lost either? What would Doug Finchem say?

It’s one thing if the party is dictated to by one whiny little baby who has actual influence and the support of the mob. But what if you don’t have those things and you still want to be a whiny little baby? How do you expect to resolve disputes? By following rules and acting like an adult? Well, clearly that’s not cool in the Republican Party any more. So what happens when you have two or more people who don’t have a clear majority of supporters, expecting to speak for the Party, expecting to exercise supremacy when they don’t have it? What do you have then?

You have the Franks, Huns and Slavs who raided the carcass of the Roman Empire looking at your ass and going, “GOD, you’re stupid.”
Cause those guys, as savage and unlettered as they were, could at least come up with some ad hoc substitute for the civilization they destroyed. The Party of Trump can’t even do that.

Why? It all comes back to the famous quote of Robert E. Howard via Conan the Barbarian: “Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.”

The Republican Party incentivizes bad behavior instead of imposing discipline. As the Times article indicates, it’s been playing to the more-whacko-than-thou crowd for years before Trump. Indeed, that’s the reason Trump was such a big hit in the 2016 party primaries, because he was the only candidate who fit their model instead of compromising with liberal-bourgeois mores like “shame”, “decorum”, “the rule of law” or “reality.”

Trump bonded with the pre-Trump Republican “base” because he showed them it was possible to be like Trump and still succeed in politics. It has been said by many people, many times, but Trump gave Republicans freedom to be their worst selves. And even if he is no longer the ideal Leader, they’re not going to give that freedom up.

If you really think the Republicans are over Trump, or even trying to be, consider that the politicians who have all the buzz about being potential successors, namely DeSantis, still won’t buck the dogma that the 2020 election was stolen, which at this point is the Church of Trump’s profession of faith.

As another example, in that aforementioned Turning Point USA event, the shindig was hosted in DeSantis’ Florida. During the event, neo-Nazis displayed swastika flags and black SS flags – along with flags with slogans like “DeSantis Country.”

And of course liberal rags like Huffington Post are wondering why DeSantis didn’t speak out, as even the Turning Point organizers were able to do. But why would you expect DeSantis to object to Nazis in his Party? He knows his base.

Basically, this is an entire party of Eric Cartmans. And at some point, someone is going to have to tell them that dressing up like Hitler isn’t cool.

“The current Court is textualist only when being so suits it. When that method would frustrate broader goals, special canons like the ‘major questions doctrine’ magically appear as get out-of-text-free cards.”

– Supreme Court Associate Justice Elena Kagan, re: West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency

But the real problem with “conservative” opposition to the socialist agenda is that if we are going to define socialism in terms of Soviet-style communism and illiberal politics, we can no longer say that conservatism is the opposite of that.

-Me

At the end of the last Supreme Court session in June, Justice Stephen Breyer officially retired and swore in his replacement, Biden Administration appointee Ketanji Brown Jackson. Which means there was one thing to celebrate about this particular term of the Court: It ended.

In addition to Dobbs v. Mississippi (which liberals only refer to as ‘the Roe v. Wade reversal’ as though not naming the thing means it is not precedent) this term of the Court decided that a defendant can no longer sue the government if law enforcement didn’t read their Miranda rights. In contradiction of the idea that the Court has no standing to regulate abortion on a federal level, this Court did decide that it can stop any state from writing its own concealed-carry laws. And in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District the Court ruled that a high school football coach may pray on the football field without violating the separation of Church and State.

Personally, I think that if we have a house chaplain in Congress, then an official praying in public is not a violation of the First Amendment. It IS a violation of Matthew 6:5.

In the Dobbs case, Justice Samuel Alito decided that the Fourteenth Amendment due process standard did not apply in the case of abortion and that there had been no legal precedents or language in the original Constitution allowing it. Now, while many right-wingers have objected that the result of Roe v. Wade created a federal standard when the abortion issue should have been left to the states, Alito’s position blanks out the point that we had a Fourteenth Amendment in the first place because we already tried leaving the issue of slavery up to the states and that didn’t work out. Which brings up the relevant point that if the Reconstruction Amendments were meant to correct an institutional racism that had more precedent in American law than the standard going forward, and Alito has decided that these amendments do not apply to women because there was no previous historical standard protecting abortion rights, then there’s all kinds of things they don’t have to apply to.

When liberalism was ascendant in the judicial branch and creating “penumbras” and other standards asserting an unwritten or “living” Constitution that did not exist, rather than referring to existing standards like the Ninth or Fourteenth Amendments, conservatives- correctly- asserted that this was not interpreting the original source material as it existed but rather “legislating from the bench.” But apparently now that the Right is ascendant, that’s okay.

Now, new Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson may be a Democratic appointee, but she had said in her March confirmation hearings that “the Constitution is fixed in its meaning.” I personally think it’s better that we start from a fixed basis than assuming that the text means whatever a Justice writing the opinion wants it to mean. Of course, all the people who voted for Dobbs told their confirmation committees that Roe v. Wade was “settled law”, so take that for what you will. In any event, Jackson is only a replacement for retiring liberal-moderate Stephen Breyer, and the “conservative” majority is still 6-3, so a small infusion of new blood is not enough to reassert common sense in the Court.

But if the radicalization of the Court is clearly of a religious nature, there are contradictions in that: It has been pointed out that seven of the nine Supreme Court Justices are Catholic or baptized Catholic (all of the conservatives plus Sonia Sotomayor) but Catholic dogma asserts a pro-life position at all points, including the death penalty, and condemns gun violence. Not this court. In addition to the New York decision on concealed carry, the Supreme Court reinstated the death sentence of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokar Tsarnaev against the decision of a federal appeals court.

The other seeming contradiction is that the Religious Right is ascendant politically at a time when organized religion in America may be at its lowest point. According to a Gallup poll in 2021, US worship attendance (church, mosque or synagogue) had fallen below 50 percent for the first time, although some of this may be due to local COVID quarantine. However according to at least one other source, less than 20 percent of Americans actually attend church. An article in a religious site attributes the difference to a “halo effect” of overreporting socially approved behaviors like church attendance while under-reporting activities like drinking. But comparison of church membership rolls to attendance figures indicated a figure of 17.7 percent. In a 2002 survey of 1,159 U.S. churches, author Thom Rainer’s research team found that only 6 percent of the churches were growing, defining growth as not only increasing in church attendance, but also increasing at a pace faster than its community”s population growth rate. One other interesting statistic from the article: Other than Hawaii, the states that are actually leading in church growth are Texas, Florida and the Deep South states of Louisiana, Arkansas and Oklahoma. One of the researchers notes: “states with very diverse cultures tend to have lower attendance numbers than the states surrounding them. ‘Most of our churches know how to address only one culture,’ he says.”

So basically what we’re seeing in government is a drive to push not faith in general but the faith culture of a specific demographic, and as that culture becomes less popular with the body of the nation, the more determined that minority group is to use government to force its position on the rest of us. Of course these are the same people who oppose any state or federal effort to tell them what to do as “socialist”, apparently failing to grasp the irony. Thus, the spirit moves me to define their nature of their movement with a proper title: religious socialism.

I have said before that I do consider National Socialism (Nazism) to be a type of socialism even though the Left would vehemently disagree. This disagreement stems from the idea that Nazis and Socialists were opposed in their goals. In many ways they were, but they were frequently in agreement that the culture was undermined by capitalism and materialism, with the Nazis going that much farther in identifying these things as inherent to Jews as people, whereas Marx simply identified them with Jewish culture that could be changed. They both saw the liberal world order as the main enemy, much as the new Right attacks the financial system and “globalism”. It is generally agreed that National Socialism is a subset of Fascism, not leftist socialism, but Fascism was developed by Benito Mussolini, formerly a Marxist, anti-war, anti-nationalist journalist who decided in the middle of World War I that becoming an Italian nationalist would be better for his political career. He took over Italy in 1922 and got a lot farther in creating a one-party state that re-ordered the entire country toward one political vision than the established Italian Left had managed to do previously. The word “fascism” was invented by Mussolini as part of his appeal to Italian nationalism, referring to the fasces that was used as a symbol of authority in ancient Rome. Meanwhile in Germany, post-war nationalists organized in groups similar to those formed by the Left, because they were the existing model. (Prior to the German Empire losing the war, nationalists didn’t need to form revolutionary action groups, because they were the establishment.) Mussolini’s takeover in Italy directly inspired the former “German Workers’ Party” to organize on the fascist model, and led to the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, which was unsuccessful in the short term.

National Socialism is a subset of Fascism specifically geared towards the German culture, especially the prevailing “Aryan vs. Jew” myth of anti-Semitism. But the phrase “national socialism” is actually more generically descriptive of the concept than “fascism” which refers specifically to a Roman/Italian origin.

National socialism is nothing more or less than that: the application of socialist means towards nationalist ends. Specifically it is the radical collectivization of a society under one non-pluralist government towards the goal of creating a reactionary political culture.

Of course the leftist will object to this opinion, but the real contradiction is the Right’s bad-faith insistence that their new collectivism is anti-socialist and pro-liberty. Or as I put it elsewhere, if Socialism is Bad and Nazis Are The REAL Socialists, then why do “conservatives” emulate the Nazis? For example, if Democrats are the bad guys because they are the Party of the Confederacy and rebellion and segregation, then why did Trump’s fan club carry the Confederate battle flag into the Capitol on January 6, to rebel against a lawful election?

Part of this is just projecting, but another part is labeling: If Socialism is Bad, then the reactionary revolutionary seeks to position his movement as the opposite, representing God, Mom, Apple Pie and everything that’s good about America or whatever the local equivalent is. (In Mussolini’s Italy, the equivalents were the Crown and the Church, which is why the King of Italy, who could have easily stopped his coup, instead chose to endorse it in order to combat Marxism, while later Mussolini as head of government managed to negotiate a peace with the Catholic Church making the Vatican part of Rome a sovereign territory, a treaty that exists to this day.)

Frankly, I use this term “religious socialist” for precisely the same reason that the Left is offended by the idea that “National Socialism” is an accurate term or that socialism can refer to anything bad. I do not use the term in the same way as the British Fabians or the German Social Democrats who thought that the goals of 19^th Century socialism could be achieved, and should be achieved, through democratic processes. I am using it in the same way that Lenin and Mao used it, because they thought that it was not enough to act through bourgeois democratic governments and one could only ally with them temporarily until absolute power was achieved. To the Nazi or Leninist, the means are more important than the ends, because the means are the ends. A Menshevik in Russia might have been okay with gradual reform of the Czarist system and the March Revolution might have transitioned to a democratic republic. The Bolshevik goal wasn’t to achieve a better living standard that could or could not be accomplished under a socialist majority. The Bolshevik goal was to destroy the aristocracy and murder all of its political opponents, including those on the Left (especially anyone on the Left, who might have had a more humane idea). Achieving better living standards was secondary at best, and if they actually did so, it merely reflects on how backward the Russian Empire was compared to Western countries that had gotten farther along in Marx’ analysis of historical development.

Not that the new Right, which asserts any opposition to its agenda as “socialism” is willing to embrace the label of fascism. Lenin, of course, defined his system as “democratic” centralism. Hitler and Nazi theorists defined their system as “Germanic democracy.” In the modern day, Hungarian leader Viktor Orban defined his approach as “illiberal democracy.” Which is not a direct contradiction. If democracy simply means giving the people what they want, and human rights are subject to a majority vote, you can understand why classical liberals like the Founding Fathers did not see democracy as synonymous with liberty and sometimes thought that democracy was opposed to it. That is why in America’s case, the Founders were at pains to create the Electoral College, the Senate and other measures to counter direct majority rule in their republic.

But what the classical liberals did not anticipate and the new authoritarians have learned all too well is that the historical success of liberal representative government obliged statists to couch their power grabs as being in some way representing “the will of the people” as opposed to the Crown or the Church. If their schemes are not in fact representing the majority, they simply have to limit the number of people who can vote on them until they get the result they want and present that as “the will of the people.” And it’s in this aim that having a counter-majoritarian system really helps.

The current Supreme Court set up could be the greatest example of this strategy in practice: You have six conservatives, four of whom were appointed by presidents who won the Electoral College without the popular vote (a result which conservatives still insist reflects a federal consensus), one of whom was directly appointed because Senate Majority Leader McConnell used an effective veto against President Obama’s last appointee to prevent them from even having a confirmation hearing (when Article I of the Constitution doesn’t say whether the Senate Majority Leader has such power, perhaps because Article I does not say anything creating an office of Senate Majority Leader), the last of whom was frantically chosen and sent through committee in the wake of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death even at the risk of the senators getting coronavirus, because they wanted to have a “real” conservative to override John Roberts, and the end result has in one month overturned “settled law” that had been the case for decades, and the majority can’t do anything about it because these are all lifetime appointees, because we consider some issues too important to be left to democracy.

Much of this is justified or down-played by certain apologists on the Right who are much more concerned about the pernicious influence of the Left on this country, eliding the point that the Left’s overall success in the political culture prior to Trump meant that they did not reward radicalism in the same way that the Right does now, and to the extent that there are unreasonable, anti-reality radicals on the Left, they don’t have nearly as much influence on the mainstream Democratic Party as the woke Right has on the Republican Party. The Right asserts, accurately, that identity politics is poisoning our discourse, but they blank out the fact that one of the consequences of this is that it encourages identity politics among (mostly white) conservatives who see a number of pluralities with growing voices and are starting to realize that they are no longer the political default.

Occasionally, some of these traditional conservatives realize that their side’s bigotry, authoritarianism and subsequent abuse of innocents have done more to alienate the general public than any left-wing propaganda. But you would have to have the brains of a Rod Dreher to realize that, and such thoughtfulness is not common in the “conservative” movement these days. Including Rod Dreher.

For the sake of paying lip service to civic structures that they increasingly feel able to denounce in public, Republicans need to game the system, change who qualifies as a voter and then after the fact of election, change which votes qualify as valid if enough of them go against them, as they tried to do between November 2020 and January 2021.

Which is why I have been saying that pretty soon the real white majority in this country is going to find out what it’s like to be black people. Not that some level of default “white privilege” isn’t going to accrue in other areas, but in the sense that our votes aren’t going to count. You can see with the cases of Clarence Thomas and Stephen Miller that the cult is willing to accept people who aren’t of good Nordic stock, but they still go by percentages. It may be that their policies discriminate against black people mainly because black people vote Democrat, but that kind of begs the question of why Black neighborhoods and districts don’t go Republican. In any event, even if it’s not the same motivation as racism, it may come off as a distinction without a difference.

I am a secular humanist (though I would not describe myself as a leftist). And I know a lot of leftists and secularists have bashed religion over abortion and other reasons. I’ve done it. But look: Liz Cheney is a hard-core anti-abortion Christian conservative, but she is not a religious socialist. Pope Francis is a hard-core pro-life Catholic (obviously), who unlike the new American Right, has endorsed welfare programs for the poor. But he is not a religious socialist. Neither of these two thinks that one religion, or one approach to religion, should be supreme in a government, but the main Republican Party does. If anything Catholicism has always tried to hold that God is above the state and so are human values. But then I have another theory which holds that the difference between Catholic monarchy and Protestant monarchy is the the Catholic believes the State is a lesser aspect of the Church, while the Protestant believes the Church is a lesser aspect of the State.

What is the approach which endorses neither and holds the question to be moot because Church and State are to be kept separate? Liberal representative government. And it is that model of government that religious socialism seeks to destroy.

I return to another Dreher article where he spoke somewhat approvingly of the East European return to illiberalism even as he took apart Catholic integralism.

“I don’t know if (James) Kalb is an integralist, but he’s right about the nature of the Good as the basis of a postliberal political order. The problem, though, is that we in the United States are a highly pluralistic nation, in which Catholics are a minority, and the number of Catholics willing to submit their lives to the teaching authority of the Church is very small. … If political Catholicism is in trouble in Poland, where almost everybody is Catholic, at least nominally, how on earth is it ever going to triumph in the United States, where Catholics (nominal and serious) only number about 20 percent of the population? And of that number, how many of them would be willing to surrender American liberties for a reactionary 19th century ideal establishing the Catholic Church, and making the State subordinate to it? I bet you could fit all of them into Adrian Vermeule’s backyard in Cambridge, Mass.

“In any case, the vague definition of integralism on the Josias doesn’t sound threatening. It’s when you start asking what that means in real life that it turns freaky. Normally, intellectual engagement is something to be enjoyed and engaged. There are plenty of non-Catholics who are interested to figure out a workable future under the condition of postliberalism, and would like to talk it all out. Not these cats. See, this is the thing that you must not do — ask what this would mean in real life. It makes our integralists mad. They blow up online, and sneer, act all indignant, and say that you must be one of those David French types for asking. It’s a silly act, but it tells us something important about them. If they thought that their program would be appealing to people, they would be eager to lay it out and try to win converts. [my emphasis] They seem to think that they are going to insult and sh*tpost their way to power.

“…I am sure I would prefer integralism to whatever we are likely to get if liberal democracy falls. We will likely get Caesarism of either the Left or the Right. I see no reason to believe that the Catholic Church would be part of this. But maybe I’m wrong. When Vladimir Putin took over from the ruins left by Boris Yeltsin and the catastrophe of the 1990s in Russia, he knew that he needed some kind of legitimating authority, so he began to rehabilitate the Orthodox Church in public life. It was a wise thing for him to do, strictly speaking from a political perspective. Should Continental European countries undergo a similar catastrophe, it would make sense for whatever political order emerges from the aftermath to do the same thing with Catholicism.

“The United States, however, is an historically Protestant nation. My guess is that if a right-wing Caesar emerged, he would look something like Gen. Michael Flynn: a hard nationalist authoritarian with at least a veneer of Christianity. Unlike much of Europe, we simply don’t have the “bones,” so to speak, to support Catholic integralism in this country. … How Catholic integralism comes to be in a historically Protestant country like the US is impossible to fathom. It’s an interesting thought experiment, but nothing more. We are far more likely to get a nationalist-conservative government like Hungary’s, a Christian democracy that provides something that a majority can potentially affirm. That’s what I hope for, anyway, not a scheme in which we surrender our liberties to representatives of a Christian religion that only a minority accept.”

And again, that’s the thoughtful position in the Right.

The real problem with creating a homogeneous theocracy (that leans on Catholicism or in Putin’s case, Orthodoxy) in the United States is theology. Anybody who’s studied history knows that it’s hard enough to get everybody on the same page even when there is a state religion (as in the Eastern Orthodox Roman Empire, aka the Byzantine Empire). Literal wars have been fought over issues like transubstantiation. This is what Dreher means when he says our American religious culture is really not of a Catholic nature (that is, assuming an encompassing authority). Given that is the case, the appeal to religion necessarily has to be non-denominational and focused on the subjects that hard-right Catholics and Protestants can agree on, namely banning abortion. But a Catholic would insist that there has to be some doctrinal consistency and authority, otherwise the agenda is less a religious agenda using government than a political agenda under the label of religion. As Dreher also says, this project is most likely to produce a “hard nationalist authoritarian with at least a veneer of Christianity.” But when actual church-going in America is at its lowest point, why is the veneer even necessary?

Because, frankly, it is a lot easier to seal the appeal to authority fallacy when the authority is God. God by definition is above human values and therefore above human judgment, so saying “God told us to do this” is a lot harder for most people to argue with than saying “Jefferson (or Roosevelt, or Lenin, or Putin) told us to do this.” By the same token, the Left doesn’t understand that most people are not materialists and are not motivated by Marxist economic arguments. Many people would sacrifice their lives for God or Country. I don’t know who would sacrifice their lives for a tractor.

At the same time, the lack of reliance on a specific religious tradition or dogma is a plus in political terms. The need for a non-material universe persists in people who were raised in a Christian default culture, and if they don’t participate in traditional religious services, they still want to feel like they’re on that side. Equating one’s political allegiance to religion allows the “conservative” to feel that he has the benefits of religious faith without the spiritual work.

There may be “trad” conservatives like Dreher or the integralists who seriously think that doctrinal rigor is important, but they are ultimately only instrumental to the new Right’s political process, and the political process is not concerned with consistency or doctrine, only results. So it doesn’t matter that all of the conservatives on the Supreme Court are Catholic, because their “pro-life” doctrine is just as inconsistent and expedient as their federalism. The goal is to create the American doctrine and the American religion, and that religion is basically whatever the secular authorities say it is.

To the religious socialist, cognitive dissonance doesn’t matter because when you have total control of a population, their cognition doesn’t matter, only their obedience. Of course not even experienced totalitarians like Hitler, Stalin and Mao could exercise absolute control all the time, and their systems either collapsed or had to be heavily modified. But the new Right endorses this sort of thing on the assumption that liberal, individualist civilization is spiritually and intellectually exhausted. In point of fact, the history is that liberalism developed in the first place because we tried religious absolutism, found it to be spiritually and intellectually exhausted, unfit for modern conditions, and we had to get rid of it because it sucked. Now you can’t be surprised that the gang that threw out 50 years of legal precedent last month wouldn’t be scared of overturning 246 years of Enlightenment, but this is America. We don’t understand history any better than we understand socialism, and we clearly understand religion even less.

To honor our nation’s greatest holiday, I am posting a link to a speech about what the holiday really means and what freedom and independence mean at a crucial point in history, by writer and activist Frederick Douglass. This guy, I hear he’s doing really good things.

https://genius.com/Frederick-douglass-what-to-the-slave-is-the-fourth-of-july-annotated

Well, after first announcing that the January 6 congressional hearings would only take place in the month of June, then announcing new hearings for July, they just announced Monday that there was going to be a hearing called on Tuesday the 28^th, on the basis of “newly received information.”

By 6 am Eastern time it was announced that the main witness was one Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Trump Organization Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

Today Hutchinson testified, along with many other funny things, that Donald Trump, once and future Viceroy for Russian North America, heard that the Republican protestors on January 6 had weapons, and told Meadows’ staff, “I don’t f’ing care if they have weapons, they’re not here to hurt me.” He was apparently not happy that the Secret Service were screening people for weapons. When he heard about violence at the Capitol, he “almost had a lack of reaction.” Hutchinson said that when Trump was in the limo after his speech (where he said he wanted to join the march to the Capitol), a Secret Service agent who was at the wheel told her that Trump tried to lunge for the wheel to grab it from him. She testified that White House lawyer Pat Cipollone said that one reason the staff was against going to the Capitol with the mob is that Trump and his aides could be charged with “every crime imaginable.” She also corroborated Liz Cheney’s statement that when Trump heard the mob wanted to hang Mike Pence, he said “Mike deserves it.”

Hutchinson also said, “There were several times throughout my tenure with the chief of staff that I was aware of either him (Trump) throwing dishes or flipping the tablecloth to let all the contents of the table go onto the floor and likely break or go everywhere.”

I frankly don’t see any cause for surprise or alarm. Donald Trump is a flaming asshole. Quelle surprise. Lyndon Johnson was a flaming asshole. And he didn’t do anything bad besides, well, start a war in Vietnam while creating a giant redistribution program that combined to give us an inflationary economy that we are still living with. But even if you don’t like Johnson’s programs, at least he didn’t institute them to make the ex-head of the KGB happy.

This does give evidence, as if we needed it, that we need to scrap the Electoral College or at least modify the method of tallies, because the result that the Founding Fathers were so afraid of – that an unqualified demagogue could appeal to the gullible masses to get undeserved power – was only possible because that institution allowed Trump to get critical states and win on that basis even though he never won a popular majority. If the vote had been a national popularity poll, then you would have gotten Hillary Clinton, which really would have been the lesser evil. I mean, a lesser evil on the level of Asmodeus vs. Cthulhu, but the Devil has less slime and tentacles.

If nothing else, these January 6 hearings are gonna make Liddle Donnie’s campaign ads for 2024 SO much funnier.

“Hi! I’m Liddle Donnie Trump! I’m a screaming baby-man who can barely spell his own name, and I want YOU to give me back the nuclear weapons codes!!”

The real punch line is that that appeal works for so many people.