"Why am I a conservative? So that you can be a liberal!"

"Why am I a conservative? So that YOU can be a liberal."

😉👌 pic.twitter.com/g4TSkLm0zN

— PragerU (@prageru) September 16, 2020

"The day that liberalism died, and progressivism rose from the ashes, a dark turn in leftist history that no one seems to have noticed."

In the American Spectator, Jack Cashill writes in part, about the Travon Hoax, a new movie presently showing on YouTube.

Zimmerman’s arrest marked the day that liberalism died, and progressivism rose from the ashes, a dark turn in leftist history that no one seems to have noticed.

The results have been catastrophic. In January 2009, 79 percent of whites and 64 percent of blacks held a favorable view of race relations in America. By July 2013, following the Zimmerman trial, those figures had fallen to 52 percent among whites and 38 percent among blacks. They have never recovered. As Gallup notes, “Since 2013, Americans’ overall positive perceptions on race have cooled, and perceptions among blacks have soured considerably.” Propaganda works.

...Getting neither satisfaction nor any corrective truth from President Barack “If I had a son” Obama, militants transformed their anger into action. The most radical of these activists formed Black Lives Matter (BLM), a group whose website traces its founding “to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer, George Zimmerman.”

In August 2014, a year and a month after Zimmerman’s acquittal, protesters chanting “black lives matter” torched the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson and left much of it in ruins. Ferguson represented the second major racial conflagration in two years rooted in a hoax, this time, “Hands up, don’t shoot.” The media chose not to notice.

Nationwide, but especially in cities where rioting followed lethal police–citizen encounters, cops instinctively began to pull back from actively policing black neighborhoods. Sensing opportunity, criminals moved into the void.

...The murder rate began a steady decline once Barack Obama left office, but God knows what the final body count will be when the “Minneapolis effect” runs its course. Once again, the great majority of the dead will be black. This time, God willing, the young African Americans who survive may demand real answers as to why their brethren had to die.

Read more here.

The essence of liberalism

Jeffrey Folks writes in the American Thinker,

The essence of liberalism, as I see it, is a lack of restraint rooted in egotism and self. The Warren presidential campaign is a perfect example. If elected, Elizabeth Warren will, according to her own admission, attempt to closely regulate all large businesses, eliminate fracking and the jobs that go with it, provide Medicare for All, dictate health care decisions (including practically unlimited abortion "rights"), eliminate capital punishment, raise taxes on the wealthy and on corporations, provide free college, cancel student debt, eliminate the Electoral College, ban assault weapons, open our borders, legalize marijuana, and significantly cut the defense budget.

Read more https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/10/democrats_contempt_for_the_sanctity_of_life.html

Is there a racist virus, or are there serious defects in liberalism?

Richard Fernandez writes in PJ Media,

The year 2016 was a traumatic experience, shattering the left-wing sense of safety and dominance. Hillary's defeat -- and to a lesser extent Brexit and the rise of populism in Europe -- demonstrated the astonishing fragility of the mainstream liberal project and provided shocking proof that "the plague never dies." The boogeymen the progressives seek to exterminate can apparently resist any fumigation, indoctrination or persuasion, leaving liberal activists like those characters in horror movies who shoot at Dracula without effect. This in turn led to renewed interest in outright socialism among Democrats. If Hillary and her billions proved useless against the MAGA werewolf, perhaps Bernie Sanders and AOC have the silver bullet.

...Only experience can falsify -- and only temporarily -- cultic belief. In this respect, Venezuela is also instructive. It changed. For decades Venezuela's poor held loyal to the belief that the socialists were on "their side." Now they are fighting Maduro. How did this turnabout happen?

...The most telling indicator of socialism's fall in Venezuela is that forces have flipped. Now it is the poor who challenge Maduro and the Russian- and Cuban-supported military that props up the regime. One way to understand this is that the burn through moment in Venezuela occurred.

This might also throw light on why Hillary failed precisely at the very moment the dream seemed close enough to touch. At that instant it was clear enough to see.

Is the return of racists and Nazis the explanation for the current headlines? Or are people genuinely rising up against bloated incompetence? Time will tell. Reality always tells us which model is correct.

On that will turn the Democratic Party's future. Will it be someone like Bernie Sanders or someone like Howard Schultz?

Read more here.

The heart and soul of contemporary liberalism

In the Wall Street Journal on March 5, Shelby Steele wrote,

America, since the ’60s, has lived through what might be called an age of white guilt. We may still be in this age, but the Trump election suggests an exhaustion with the idea of white guilt, and with the drama of culpability, innocence, and correctness in which it mires us.

...White guilt is not angst over injustices suffered by others; it is the terror of being stigmatized with America’s old bigotries—racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia. To be stigmatized as a fellow traveler with any of these bigotries is to be utterly stripped of moral authority and made into a pariah. The terror of this, of having “no name in the street” as the Bible puts it, pressures whites to act guiltily even when they feel no actual guilt. White guilt is a mock guilt, a pretense of real guilt, a shallow etiquette of empathy, pity and regret.

It is also the heart and soul of contemporary liberalism. This liberalism is the politics given to us by white guilt, and it shares white guilt’s central corruption. It is not real liberalism, in the classic sense. It is a mock liberalism. Freedom is not its raison d’être; moral authority is.

When America became stigmatized in the ’60s as racist, sexist and militaristic, it wanted moral authority above all else. Subsequently, the American left reconstituted itself as the keeper of America’s moral legitimacy. (Conservatism, focused on freedom and wealth, had little moral clout.) From that followed today’s markers of white guilt—political correctness, identity politics, environmental orthodoxy, the diversity cult and so on.

This liberalism evolved within a society shamed by its past. But that shame has weakened now. Our new conservative president rolls his eyes when he is called a racist, and we all—liberal and conservative alike—know that he isn’t one. The jig is up. Bigotry exists, but it is far down on the list of problems that minorities now face. I grew up black in segregated America, where it was hard to find an open door. It’s harder now for young blacks to find a closed one.

...Let’s stipulate that, given our history, this liberalism is understandable. But American liberalism never acknowledged that it was about white esteem rather than minority accomplishment. Four thousand shootings in Chicago last year, and the mayor announces that his will be a sanctuary city. This is moral esteem over reality; the self-congratulation of idealism. Liberalism is exhausted because it has become a corruption.

Read more here.

"Circling the bowl"

Z Man writes,

...Buckley Conservatism is circling the bowl. It is chasing an audience that is locked up by their masters on the Left. Liberalism is the secular religion for the girls, mostly single white girls. They try to cobble together a coalition of hues for political reasons, but it is mostly a religion for cat ladies and the women who intend to be cat ladies. Buckley Conservatism is trying to fish in those waters, but that hole is all fished out and take that however you like.

Read more here.

"If fascism ever comes to America, it will come under the name of liberalism"

Medieval studies and penal justice

Gagdad Bob notes that

the Obama administration thinks the problem of ISIS can be solved by a job fair and maybe a little counseling on how to get that résumé in shape. Like, don't say "spent two years decapitating infidels in the desert." Rather, something like "two year program of medieval studies with subspecialty in penal justice."

Back off man, he's a psychologist! Immersed as Obama is in Marxist ideology, Gagdad Bob believes that

ideology is a kind of readymade, or "off the rack" mental illness. An all around ideology will have various compartments in which to "plug in" one's complexes, drives, and conflicts, e.g., rage, envy, greed, the will to power, sexual confusion, desire to control others, inferiority, meaninglessness, etc. No matter how crazy you are, liberalism has a place for you. It's a big tent!

The bad news: its "physical analogy is cancer." Why cancer? Because cancer involves a revolutionary part that declares independence from the whole, and presumes to be the whole. 'Til death do you part. A cancer is ultimately suicidal. As is liberalism. It is unsustainable -- fiscally, morally, economically, spiritually, educationally, environmentally, aesthetically, demographically, etc.

In the comments section at One Cosmos, Buttercup adds:

I find it not the least surprising that Obama shows a decided lack of interest in anything that might challenge his world view. It's hard work to remain that arrogantly smug in the face of constant failure.

Read more here.

What is "Social Justice?"

Is Social Justice" a mirage (Hayek) or is it a Trojan horse (Jonah Goldberg), concealing a much more radical agenda? Goldberg asserts that

"Social Justice" is a profoundly ideological term, masquerading as a generic term for goodness.

This has been the primary disguise of liberalism ever since: "We're not ideologues, we're pragmatists! And if only you crazy ideologues" — "market fundamentalists," "right-wingers," "zealots," "dogmatists," etc. — "would just get out of the way and let us do what all smart people agree is the smart thing to do, we could fix all the problems facing us today."

The subtext is always clear: People who disagree with liberalism do so because they are deranged, brainwashed, corrupt, selfish, or stupid.

According to Jonah Goldberg,

if the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist, the greatest trick liberals ever pulled was convincing themselves they’re not ideological.

Today, “objective” journalists, academics, and “moderate” politicians peddle some of the most radical arguments by hiding them in homespun apho­risms. Barack Obama casts himself as a disciple of reason: He’s a pragmatist, opposed to the ideology and drama of the Right, solely concerned with “what works.” And today’s liberals follow his lead, spouting countless clichés such as:

One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter: Sure, if the other man is an idiot. Was Martin Luther King Jr. a terrorist? Was Bin Laden a freedom fighter?
Violence never solves anything: Really? It solved our problems with King George III and ended slavery.
We need complete separation of church and state: In other words, all expressions of faith should be barred from politics . . . except when they support liberal programs.

With humor and passion, Goldberg dismantles these and many other Trojan horses that liberals use to cheat in the war of ideas. He shows that the Pro­gressive tradition of denying an ideological agenda while pursuing it vigorously under the false flag of reasonableness is alive and well. And he reveals how this dangerous game may lead us further down the path of self-destruction.

Exemptions, useful pretensions, smart career moves: the joke is on us.

Liberals really should just give up. There is one person who does not miss any of their hypocrisies. Victor Davis Hanson takes a look at just how it is that "dudes" like Tommy Vietor and Ben Rhodes got qualified to be in the Situation Room during Obama Administration crises. He also takes a look at the Steyer brothers and Al Gore,

For them, 21st-century liberalism is a useful badge, a fashion not unlike wearing good shades or having the right sort of cell phone.

And then there is Elizabeth Warren, whose

life is about as much a part of the 99.9 percent as she is Native American. She is not worried about welders getting some work on the Keystone Pipeline or farmworkers put out of their jobs in Mendota, Calif., over a baitfish.

Let's not forget Paul Krugman, who is probably not

going to study the inequality inherent in the modern university’s exploitation of part-time teachers.

And what about Donald Sterling's embrace by the NAACP?

Sterling apparently thought that supporting the local NAACP either was not antithetical to his racist sloppy talk and rental practices, or was a wise investment in progressive insurance.

Al Sharpton?

Al Sharpton receiving a “person of the year” award from the same branch of the NAACP is no less absurd than Donald Sterling’s “lifetime-achievement award” — given that Sharpton is on record as an anti-Semite, homophobe, inciter of riot, former FBI informant, tax delinquent, and convicted defamer of a district attorney.

And, what about the NAACP itself?

the NAACP brand nowadays functions much like our green culture, as a sort of way to display correct coolness. It surely would not go after Joe Biden, Harry Reid, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonya Sotomayor — or Barack Obama — for either using racialist speech or denigrating others on the basis of race or tribe. Such a fact is widely accepted because it is just as widely assumed that the NAACP has become something fossilized, like Betamax in its waning days, as it existed for a bit longer because it had once thrived.

Concern for the Sierra toad and frog should stop logging-road and mountain development, but incinerating fauna with solar mirrors or grinding up eagles and hawks in wind turbines is the necessary price of green membership.

Affirmative action is necessary to stop “old boy” hiring and power wielding, but the sort of incestuous D.C. relationships that the Carneys or the Rhodes brothers have (Jay Carney’s wife, Claire Shipman, is a senior correspondent for ABC News; Ben Rhodes’s brother, David, is the president of CBS News) are not what we are talking about.

No prominent progressive really believes that his children belong in a public school with the “other.” He does not wish to live in an integrated neighborhood in order to promote his notion of high-density, non-suburban racial assimilation. A Che poster does not mean you want to live somewhere like Venezuela and wait in line for toilet paper.

The liberal is not immune from the material allurements of the 1 percent. Whizzing off on a private jet or climbing into a huge black ten-mile-a-gallon SUV limo is no problem. You do not necessarily denounce all racist stereotyping, given that sometimes attacking friendly bigots could be a headache. Taking the Google bus with like kind instead of the messy public bus or the uncertainties of the commuter train does not mean you are against mass transit for “them.” You surely don’t want the Coastal Commission enforcing beach-access rights for hoi polloi when who knows how many of the 99 percent wish to walk right by your deck in Malibu. It would be like ruining your beach view with a wind farm.

Liberalism offers a wise investment for a politician, a celebrity, an academic, or a journalist, by letting him take out inexpensive insurance against a politically incorrect slip of the tongue.

The joke is on us. Having lots of stuff and lots of money, while deriding the system that provides it, is perverse, but perverse in a postmodern sense: You fools love the free market, where you didn’t do too well; we whose parents or selves did very well in it don’t like it all that much. How postmodern — like guffawing that lots of smoke came out of that Gulfstream ride, or lecturing about inequality from Rancho Mirage or the back nine at Augusta.

Liberalism professes a leftwing ideology, but these days it has absolutely no effect on the lives of those who most vehemently embrace it. In other words, being liberal is professionally useful and psychologically better than Xanax, but we need not assume any more that it is a serious belief.

Please read more here.

Simple and pernicious

Victor Davis Hanson writes,

If only people had to live in the world that they dreamed of for others.

At some fateful moment in the 1970s, the other California on the coast, drunk with the globalized wealth that poured into Napa Valley, the Silicon Valley, the great coastal university nexuses at Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA and Caltech, the entertainment industry, the defense industry, and the financial industry decided that they had transcended the old warnings of more Californians needing far more water to survive more droughts. When you are rich, you can afford for the first time in your life to favor a newt with spots on his toes over someone else that lacks your money, clout, and sensitivities.

Had we finished the California Water Project and the Central Valley Project, or had population tapered off at 30 million, or had global warming been real and created a Central and Southern California tropics with 40 inches a year of rain, then we would not be courting ruin. But we grew and stopped building water storage at the same time and the climate remained what it always was.

There is a great sickness in California, home of the greatest number of American billionaires and poor people, land of the highest taxes and about the worst schools and roads in the nation. The illness is a new secular religion far more zealous and intolerant than the pre-Reformation zealotry of the Church. Modern elite liberalism is based on the simple creed that one’s affluence and education, one’s coolness and zip code, should shield him from the consequences of one’s bankrupt thoughts that he inflicts on others. We are a state run by dead souls who square the circle of their own privilege, who seek meaning in rather selfish lives, always at someone else’s expense.

It is that simple — that pernicious.

Read more here.

Can we nominate Victor Davis Hanson for President?

Victor Davis Hanson wonders

So how hard is it for a Republican simply to say, “I oppose illegal immigration because (1) it is illegal. It undermines the sanctity of the law and discriminates against the law-abiding waiting in line to enter the U.S. legally. (2) It benefits corporate grandees at the expense of working people. (3) It is driven by self-serving elites of the ethnic-grievance industry to enhance their own advantage, rather than to help poor folks struggling to find decent wages and schools.

Cannot a Republican rebuttal to the State of the Union simply say, “Mr. President, you are shamelessly taking credit for gas and oil production that you did all in your power to thwart. The middle class is enjoying a temporary cut in gas prices, despite, not because of, you.”

How hard it is for Republicans to say to liberals, “I accuse! The wealthy have their security details, most of them armed. The underclass has access to illegal weaponry as the armed crime sprees in a Detroit or Chicago attest. Why then go after the middle class, who neither outsource their security nor break the law? Before we issue sweeping edicts aimed at the law-abiding, let us disarm all the security guards of Hollywood and Washington, D.C., and put away for good the criminals who use illegal firearms to hurt the innocent.”

Hanson goes on to show how Obama's policies are hurting the middle class and young people. On fairness:

At some point cannot a conservative make the case that liberalism, as preached by its elites, is a psychological mechanism to shield wealthy progressives from the ramifications of their own ideology?

Cannot a Republican ask Obama at least to forgo Martha’s Vineyard next summer or the next zillionaire golfing outing if he wants to rant about the perks of the 1%?

How liberal was it that a few hundred Bay Area elites went to court over the last few years to divert about 20 million acre-feet of precious irrigation water to flow out to the sea, in vain pursuit of their fantasies about expanding bait fish populations in the delta or in hopes of seeing a salmon jump out of the river by Fresno? Tens of thousands of poor people will lose their jobs this summer, as irrigation water reserves are exhausted and acreage goes out of production.

He includes the green and diversity categories:

Are the heads of Hollywood studios reflective of the rich diversity of California? And if we are going down the diversity and fairness routes, then surely Al Gore needs a sermon — after he unloaded a failed network to an anti-Semitic, carbon-burning medieval sheikdom, in failed efforts to beat the new capital gains tax that he so strenuously supported. How fair, how egalitarian, how diverse is all that? What is the ethnic profile of Sierra Club membership?

Surely there is a populist case to be made — or is the Republican establishment to manage a permanent, sober, and judicious out-party, as it is demagogued to death by the privileged?

A critical mass welling up?

Apparently some New York Times writers complained to someone at the New York Observer that the New York Times editorials were dull. Roger L. Simon writes that the problem is ideology.

How, for example, do you write an eloquent defense of Obamacare or justify the administration’s actions in Benghazi without resorting to the kind of obfuscation that makes for convoluted, or at best tedious, writing? How do you advocate for yet more government programs in a country already so mired in debt it’s hard to see how it will ever get out? It’s Keynesian economics itself that’s the problem, not Paul Krugman.

Apparently liberals have also turned on one of their icons - Jerry Seinfeld - who said in a Buzzfeed interview,

Funny is the world I live in. You’re funny, I’m interested. You’re not funny, I’m not interested. I have no interest in gender or race or anything like that. But everyone else is kind of, with their calculating — is this the exact right mix? I think that’s — to me it’s anti-comedy. It’s more about PC-nonsense.

Simon summarizes,

Both of these seemingly minor media dust-ups are yet more indications that our society is at a tipping point. A critical mass may be welling up against the tyranny of modern liberalism. The next few years will be interesting — culturally and politically.

The iron triangle of modern liberalism

Gaghdad Bob points out that the left consists of an aristocracy that did not exist at the time of the founding of America: Big Media, Big Government, and Big Stupid (academia).

The bottom line is that aristocracy is a permanent temptation for the human being. As is its mirror image, democracy, AKA mob rule. Since these represent permanent possibilities, the founders built them into the system, with the executive branch being an expression of royalist tendencies, the senate for the contemplative and slow-to-change aristocratic trend, and the house for the hotheaded and mercurial rabble.

The history of liberalism shows that liberals are principled, loudmouthed authoritarians, or principled, loudmouthed anti-authoritarians, depending upon who is in charge. When it was Bush, they were reactionary anti-authoritarians. Now they are reactionary authoritarians (with a few principled exceptions).

Allied with this is the left's insistence upon equality unless equal treatment results in inequality, in which case they are all for unequal treatment. Not enough female firemen or marines? Okay, let 'em take the test. Oops! Even a strapping hulk like Michelle Obama can't pass it. Therefore, the law must treat men and women differently. Likewise, not enough blacks in law school? Easy. Just systematically treat them as inferiors.

The point is, just as the left is authoritarian or rebellious, depending upon whether they are in or out of power, they are egalitarian or discriminatory, depending upon how it effects one of their client groups, i.e., how it redounds to their power.

Big Media, Big Government, and Big Stupid compose

the iron triangle of the left, replacing the triangle intended by the framers. Looked at in this way, academia is the priesthood/church, the state is royalty, and old media is the elite/aristocracy.

Which is why Obama was so tough to defeat, what with (to paraphrase Siegel) his TV looks, his radio voice, his phony preacher's cadences, and his pseudo-intellectualism. He is the total package, three frauds in One. Thus, he is the three they've been waiting for since JFK, who also had the media looks, the royalist glow, and the superfical, liberal-approved intellectualism.

What is liberalism?

Gaghdad Bob, sharing what he has learned from reading Fred Siegel's book "The Betrayal of the Masses," writes,

liberalism is the doctrine that dedicates itself "to preserving the problems for which it presents itself as the solution."

A quick search reveals that most of the poorest cities in the country -- i.e., those with the highest poverty rates -- have been controlled by Democrats for over fifty years.

Without the constant payoffs, liberalism might have gone the way of its cousins, fascism, socialism, and communism. The problem with those latter three is that they didn't involve enough people in the scam; or, to be precise, they didn't allow enough pigs at the trough.

Now, we all know liberalism is a status-centered belief system rooted in snobbery, moral superiority, and intellectual one-upsmanship. But again, in America, that just won't sell. And from the elite side of things, it is understood that not everyone can be an elite. Besides, if everyone can be one, then the elitism has no status value.

The greatest threat to the left is rampant individualism in the boobeoisie, because then they are not subject to top-down control by elites. This is why uppity blacks who stray from the liberal plantation are treated so cruelly, in an intellectual version of the old Fugitive Slave Laws. If you find one hiding somewhere, by all means turn him in! The same goes for fugitive women, fugitive homosexuals, fugitive journalists... and fugitive filmmakers, for revenge is a Dinesh pest served a cold indictment.

I think Bob makes many good points in this post. I would just add that intellectual one-upsmanship, moral superiority, and snobbery are also displayed by conservatives.