Dangerous Times: Naomi Wolf Sleeps with the Patriarchs

In the past few weeks, militant jihadism has won two major propaganda coups.

First, Al Gore, the world’s most famous critic of dirty oil, sold his „progressive network” Current Media, LLC, to the oil sheikhs of Qatar for a reported $500 million.

Second, Naomi Wolf, renowned author of Vagina: A New Biography and other top feminist works, sold her soul to the same Islamist patriarchy.

The price of Naomi’s soul (possibly including other appendages) has not yet been named. As one wag put it, Naomi will now be the official „on-air Jihadess” of the biggest Islamist propaganda network on the planet.

Al and Naomi are acting like rational capitalists: they are selling out while the market is good for their personal brands of mass demagogy. They are selling out now, because they don’t see a future for their famous brands.

Al Gore’s future looks bad because of huge shale discoveries all over the world, from Poland to Canada. Shale gas has already turned the United States into a net exporter of natural gas, even with the eco doomsters of the Obama crowd in charge. The doomsters can see the writing on the wall. Natural gas is the cleanest source of energy known.

All the public rants against hydrocarbons are going to disappear, leaving the human race both happier and healthier. Millions of dumb suckers haven’t realized it yet, but Al knows it’s time to sell and get out of town. Gore knows the oil business, because he is heir to a large Occidental Petroleum fortune. He has people who study the oil supply every single day. The Chicago Carbon Exchange crashed four years ago, and they know the jig is up.

So Al is getting out at top dollar.

What about Naomi Wolf? Her business of feminist agit-prop is also on the skids. Naomi has just sold her radical soul to the last murderous patriarchs on earth. The oil sheikhs keep their women pregnant, barefoot, and locked in the harem.

Even Naomi knows that.

Feminists have been screaming themselves silly about America’s „patriarchy” for decades, while American men gave them everything they desired, including abortion on demand, any imaginable use of their genitalia, and most of all, the free speech right to peddle any degree of anti-Western nonsense.

In return, Naomi has written articles for the rad left with titles like „Fascist America, in 10 easy steps,” saying

„From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all.”

Alas, George W. Bush is gone, and all the blind Guardianistas can’t see a hint of danger of fascism today in Obama’s Predator assassination policy. The pacifist left is strangely silent, and thank heavens, civil rights are well-protected under Attorney General Eric Holder.

As for the „constitutional freedoms” in Qatar, these come straight from the Holy Koran, a well-known document  protecting the rights of women, Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and atheists.

So – why did Naomi sell out to the desert sheikhs of Qatar?

Let’s face it, Ms. Wolf is also facing a declining market. Naomi Wolf is in the feminist propaganda business, where she takes boring dissertations written by feminist „theorists” and turns them into popular best-sellers. When radicals like Eve Ensler make a hit with Vagina Chronicles, Naomi scents big money and writes a popular book like Vagina: A new biography.

The oldest organ in human biology becomes new again.

Ms. Wolf’s real job is to promise her readers thrilling orgasms forever and ever, a Paradise on Earth for millions of sex-starved women. Add a constant stream of complaints about hubby, whose imaginary „patriarchy” keeps two billion woman in abject frustration, and you have the two biggest selling points of pop feminism.

Ms. Wolf delivers a satisfying enemy and a promise of pleasure eternal, all packed in that provocative organ Down There.

She makes out like a bandit.

But why is pop feminism declining? Naomi’s problem is not like Al Gore’s technological revolution of vast new hydrocarbon discoveries.

But Ms. Wolf is a creature of PR, and her publishers keep constant track of book sales. If sales of her Vagina are declining, she needs a new schtick. (Pardon the phallic pun).

Al Jazeera provides the schtick. Naomi is getting middle-aged and fat, and part of her PR magic has been to look eternally young, to fit the fantasies of her readers. The news photo that appeared with the announcement of her surrender to the patriarchs made her look like that Worker Woman of the Thirties, straight Soviet Realism, with the wind in her face and talking heroically into (you should pardon us) a big microphone.

The sheikhs get what they want, a famous and popular „radical feminist” to prove to millions of suckered viewers how modern and „progressive” those Islamic fascists really are. Naomi is our Tokyo Rose.

Naomi gets what she wants, which is much more than thirty pieces of silver. The exact amount hasn’t been publicized, because that would be in bad taste.

As for half-billion Muslim women who have just been pushed back into the 7th century by the „Arab Spring,” they get exactly nothing. They are once again jailed in their homes, forbidden to walk outside without a male relative. Women are routinely threatened, beaten, and murdered to protect the „honor” of the family, wherever Islam takes over. That’s a real patriarchy.

It’s very sad, but it can’t get in the way of real money.

Like Al Gore, Naomi plays a mass media sucker game. She has simply turned her declining brand into a fat contract from those oil sheikhs. A couple of trillion dollars come out of those oil fields every week. That kind of money buys a lot of demagogues.

But what about liberating two billion women?

What about saving the Earth from all that nasty, dirty oil?

Well may you ask.

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Human Excellence and Dependency: Who Built What?

It was not long ago that the zeitgeist of America was the Horatio Alger story, a patchwork of tales serving as the reigning motivational compass pointing towards individual success. It was the time of the Bootstrap Ethic: the notion that a man was limited only by his own zeal and perseverance in service to his lofty goal. How many magnificent ideas were mulled over and refined while cleaning offices or flipping hamburgers? How countless are the fledgling businesses that found their genesis in a garage or kitchen; and by virtue of investing the hard-won nest egg, these gamblers wagered all for the sake of a far-off vision? How many industrious hands have spun straw into gold?

It is in light of this individualist ethic that the current administration stands in diametrical juxtaposition to the American Dream. To be sure, the Democratic Party has made common cause with the fundamental premises of a foreign statist ideology that somehow the savory fruit of the private sector’s accumulated risks and exertions are the moral property of the system that suckled the Golden Goose. Viewed through this lens, the blood, sweat, and tears of individual success are only a self-interested mirage by which a lucky draw of the cards made one a winner in a zero-sum game. Government, which built the roads and bridges that facilitated your financial bankroll, therefore, reserves a significant claim on your winnings: to a tune far exceeding the paltry sum that you have begrudgingly allotted your patient Masters. And as we speak, that pound of flesh is accruing interest and rapidly metastasizing into a dark Socialist reality.

But the conservative spirit begs to differ. The template of America’s Dream is perhaps more owing to our own unique understanding underlying the philosophic relations between the City and Man. The construction of Negative Liberty – that we might do that which is not forbidden by law, stands in contradistinction to the collectivist idea that what we may do must be sanctioned with permission by the regime: which is the sole arbiter of private action by virtue of authority. The American experiment, with its original laissez-faire firewall separating the public and private spheres of life, had been to entrepreneurship what gasoline is to fire. It unleashed self-interest in a way that optimized human excellence and efficiency and allowed the resulting public coffers to be filled and in turn utilized for the common weal. Therefore, contrary to the Progressive’s deconstructed narrative of political economy, it is the undirected genius of the private sphere which is primary for the Good Life. Free Markets providentially contributed the finances for government programs and institutions that have arisen only as a consequence of a second-order redistribution through moderate taxation and altruistic private largesse.

Of itself, government can do nothing, and the notion that somehow it is the proverbial tail that wags the dog is both philosophically and economically poisonous. The progressive analysis of the State’s inordinate primacy has placed us suspended beneath the Socialist Gordian Knot while dangling over the Abyss of Insolvency. Those who would cast man in the collectivist mold would have us imbibe the weltanschauung of Hegel, which holds that humanity is the evolving construct of history and society in synthesis and that we possess no antecedent natures or morality. Viewed in this light, what we term as rights and duties proceed en utero from the emergence of the state. In America, the Founding Fathers claimed that we were endowed with natural rights and that the genius of our regime lay in distilling them from our thickly drawn ontologies that existed prior to government in an incalculably valuable essence. In the European model, our value is derived from our utility to the State and the collective. Thus, we are the children of such a collective and it is by necessity of the emergent regime that we obtain our identities.

As the mocking refrain: „You didn’t build that” has travelled like lightning throughout the land as a testament to the people’s realization that our overlords have lost touch with the Founders’ vision, how quickly the progressives claim the bounty of an economic powerhouse they did not labor to build. One sees them salivating like vampires over their prey, whom they care for only as a parasite contemplates its host. The progressive construct, in service only to utopian abstraction, has no power of its own to create the wealth it requires to give flesh to its Egalitarian City. Therefore, it must, as a consequence, pander and buy off its political support through the redistributed wealth of others – convincing the equation’s recipients that they are powerless without their black hand of corruption. It is here that we fully understand what instruments government has built of its own necessity; and that what perhaps began its germination in altruism has matured through cynicism into a noxious choking weed of venal compulsion.

The liberal edifice has spared no expense in indoctrinating us to its catechism that the American Dream stands as a direct consequence of pro-active governmental economic manipulations. This is an unqualified lie. If anything, the bulk of its interventionist regulatory powers have of late served only to stifle and warp the economic engine – to strangle prosperity in its cradle by incessant and persistent instrumentalities that are more owing to the patronage of special interests. And so often, these interests fly under the altruistic colors of environmental concerns or the insipid charade of social justice egalitarianism. In the name of compassion, the redistributionist machine has transmogrified their high-minded ideals into a protection and extortion racket with its political operatives serving as „Bag Men:” Princes of the Rake-Off. No, neither Obama and his choreographed cacophony of progressive intellectualoids, nor any of his spiritual forefathers, can claim credit for either the germination or the cultivation of the American Dream and its consequential virtues. But in all fairness, there is something without equivocation that we can lie at their gilded doorsteps: the Crises of the Broken Family and the Bastard Child.

The unqualified disaster of the Great Society in ameliorating poverty is by now a tonic wisdom to be wielded in narratives reserved for those who will in the future study our decline and click their tongues. The lessons they will uncover will be how a society, steeped in unreflective compassion, believed that by shoveling money at what are largely moral problems, they could constrain the source of poverty. Instead, the foolish assumptions of academic altruism served only to institutionalize poverty generationally and to destroy the primary human institution for the rearing of children; and in the bargain, corrupt and taint the moral psychology of its hapless recipients. Having denied the reality of a fixed human nature, Social Science and its skewed understanding of psychology and economics failed to consider one of the most persistent iron laws of economics: what you subsidize you will get more of and what you penalize you will inhibit. Having provided the perverse incentives for economic failure by throwing redistributed cash at the young and foolish, the liberal monstrosity effectively turned nature on its head.

In the dynamics of such a convoluted system, men were reduced to economic fifth wheels: useful only in their capacity as cultural roosters and diminished in their contingent status within female dominated households. The entire unsavory enterprise can be laid at the doorstep of Uncle Sam, who bankrolls this subsidization of upturned nature wherein children became the de facto economic fulcrum by which money comes to the savvy mother. That the explosion of African American illegitimacy in a span of fifty years  surged from the high teens to nearly 75% nationwide and over 90% in urban housing projects is unquestionably a consequence of the crooked incentives of misbegotten compassion. Moreover, the lack of structure and commitment that flows like a draining boil from these broken families has led to the moral indolence and the learned helplessness of men and women who have bought into the wretchedness of psychological servility fostered by a crooked view of existence near the bottom rung. Boys have learned that they are more accoutrements than men: lashing out at their environment’s masqueraded hopelessness in a structure designed to perpetuate need – effectively feeding into a loop where the stunted human horizon yields a self-fulfilling prophecy of quashed potential and dismal outcomes.

What began as the golden gleam in a liberal’s eye has become a chain that has tied generations to the political plantation. Moreover, and more nauseating, is the knowledge that the liberal edifice, knowing the ramifications of its error, has cynically traded altruism for the calculated understanding that a dependant client is a valuable and sure vote. And thus the wheel spins full circle – government becomes complicit in the moral corruption of its citizenry via the desire for the aggregation of political power in perpetuating its own ignoble interests.

It is said that „Success has many fathers, and failure is an orphan.” Obama’s ill-advised comment: „You didn’t build that” carries with it all the statist arrogance and ideological narcissism that has ruined the Social Democracies of Europe, just as they are now drawing America inexorably into a position where we are circling the drain. Human excellence, in economic and human terms throughout history, has always owed its impetus to self-sufficiency, relentless perseverance, fortitude, genius, and the ability to translate initial failures into eventual successes.

Our progressive Princelings, in seeking to whet our appetites for the bounty of another’s toil, are only now discerning the crescendo of unvarnished ire directed at the dark core of their managerial tyranny – whose „benevolent mask” is even now slipping away. What Obama and the Progressives have built is the blueprint for human failure and a descent into national subservience and mediocrity. It is a legacy that not even a blind mother could love, and the sooner we realize that the narcotic that crawls through our veins is a terminal Progressive poison, the sooner we can crush the head of the serpent and his brood that we have so foolishly allowed inside our House. The antidote, however painful or unpalatable, yet lies within our grasp.

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Pope Francis: A Disappointment for Catholics Who Don’t Like Being Catholic

How can we tell that the conclave made a good decision in elevating Jorge Mario Bergoglio to the papacy?  Exhibit A (through at least D): liberals are annoyed.  But leftists’ problems with Pope Francis, well-emblazoned as they were within hours of the announcement, reveal some crucial truths about the Church that even many Catholics are loath to confront.

When it came to Benedict XVI, the willfully uninformed chattering class had a field day – rather, a field eight years – with the thoroughly discredited „Nazi pope” meme.  (We might call noted luminary and theologian Susan Sarandon the „Nazi ambassadrix” in this effort.)  In the same vein, media outlets in all corners are itching to label the new Holy Father, and despisers of the office may find purchase in Francis’s hard-line – or, to put it more accurately, quite Catholic – stance on „gay rights” and homosexual acts.

The caviling has already started.  Indeed, as Saint Peter’s Square erupted with applause, and as the newly elected Pope Francis gave his first address to the Catholic faithful, Cavan Sieczkowski of the Huffington Post was already flexing his fingers for the first of a procession of disappointed jeremiads.  „Pope Francis Against Gay Marriage, Gay Adoption,” Sieczkowski’s headline blared, with the new pontiff’s vestments still settling on his shoulders.  He quotes GLAAD President Herndon Graddick, who decries a „Catholic hierarchy … in need of desperate reform.”

There’s more to this lashing out than just „Francis the Homophobe.”  From the parade of hand-wringing gay activists in Sieczkowski’s piece to the aggrieved commentators at Mother Jones, what really dismays the dismayed is the inflexibility not just of Francis, but of the Church herself.  At MJ, we read, „I think this is a missed opportunity to bring the papacy closer to where the people are,” and even at Forbes, John Baldoni, an ardent admirer of the Jesuits (Francis’s order), writes of „a Catholic Church that is resistant to change but one that must certainly adapt (and rather radically) if it is going to continue to attract well-intentioned men and women who adhere to its faith but also are willing to devote themselves to its perpetuation.”

As for leftists from the likes of HuffPo, these are the same people who were disappointed when Vatican II didn’t result in female priests and an ecclesiastical shrug of the shoulders on marriage.  What they share with Baldoni and other beaters of the „resistant to change” drum is a fundamental misunderstanding of Catholicism.

Granted: in a representative republic like the United States, where a dedicated force can use public opinion to effect sweeping social change, it can be hard not to project a similar democratic system onto the Catholic Church.  The same temptation proliferates when professedly Catholic politicians wave around misleading polls about the number of Catholic women who use contraception – implying that, as in a democracy, a majority of people wanting something should be grounds for rewriting policy.  And when other professed Catholics aggressively seek to cement their state’s position as the abortion capital of the world, it’s hard to blame outsiders looking into the Church when they throw their hands up in plain bafflement.

But of course, all these people are seeking to define the Church policy based on the opinions or actions of a single (albeit highly visible) Catholic, or from a group of Catholics.  This can’t work, because we all sin.  Catholics acknowledge that we all fall short of the glory of God.  So how could any individual Catholic indicate in full the tenets of the Church?  (And no, not even the pope does this.  He knows – probably better than most of us – better than to try.)  How could any group of Catholics, with their discrete sins, do any better?

In short, here’s the thing about the Catholic Church that cannot be repeated enough: she is not a democracy.  There is no veto power against the Word of God; as the cliché goes, God does not change to accommodate the Catholic.  The Catholic changes to accommodate Him.  (When even avowed atheist Penn Jillette is strongly defending this point – against a Catholic, no less! – we know we’re approaching objective truth.)

Catholics acknowledge that Jesus Christ gave his flock a pope and the Magisterium – the former to lead, and the latter to teach.  (By the way, both of these precede the Bible – and, it bears repeating, they came directly from Jesus.)  So we Catholics count on the Holy Spirit to guide the Magisterium, and we count on the Magisterium to guide us.  Even if 98% of American women use birth control (preposterous), that doesn’t entitle Catholics to vote on whether the Pill is no longer sinful.  No matter how much activists like Herndon Gladdick clamor for an ex-cathedra embrace of homosexual behavior, Catholics are not entitled to rewrite the Catechism (nor Romans 1, for that matter, nor Matthew 19).

And if we’re talking about laws revealed to us by an everlasting, all-powerful, all-knowing God, what could make more sense than that?

So those who blast Pope Francis for his „doctrinaire” stand on marriage, family, and homosexuality need to remember that the leader of the Catholic Church is always going to be pretty solid on Catholic doctrine.  And those who furrow their brows over a Church „resistant to change” should recall that (according to Catholics, at least), the Word of God is eternal, therefore resistance to change sounds not half-bad.

So what’s the best that Catholics can hope for from Pope Francis?  Namely, that he keep doing what he’s been doing.  The man who forsook a mansion and a chauffeured limousine in favor of „a simple bed in a downtown room heated by a small stove” can teach us a lot about holy living, if we’ll listen.  And if he has strong words against the dissolution of marriage or against homosexual couples adopting children, dissenters must remember that, like it or not, the Catholic Church does condemn homosexual acts as sinful – but as Pope Francis knows, Jesus enjoins us to love the sinner even more strongly than we hate the sin.  So we should have little patience for accusations of homophobia or cruelty against the man who kisses and washes the feet of AIDS victims and drug addicts.

We have a new pontiff who has made his lifestyle a breathtaking example of humility and poverty – who has eschewed sensual pleasures and bodily ease to better turn his thoughts and his will toward Christ.  Catholics can look on our Holy Father as an exemplar of how to show boundless love and compassion for people from all walks of life, all the while holding fast to the God-given principles that spur the functioning of our society.

This is a beautiful thing.  Catholics should cherish Pope Francis for as long as we have him, and it won’t hurt for those outside the faith to see what he can teach them.

…In fact, best start learning from our Holy Father immediately.  „Little patience”?  On second thought, we should have a lot of patience.  With all we’ve got on the horizon, we’ll need it.

Drew Belsky is American Thinker‘s deputy editor.  You can reach him at drew@americanthinker.com.

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Dangerous Times: How Euro-socialism Set off a Fascist Bomb

In the terrible economic crisis of 1922 Benito Mussolini got 25% of the vote in Italy. Two years later he had more than a majority.

You know the rest.

In the economic crisis of 2013, Beppe Grillo received 24% of the vote (see last week’s analysis of Grillo’s political beliefs). This week he blocked a government from forming. Grillo now controls the Senate, but he is going for a majority in both houses in the upcoming vote in June.

That’s in Italy, but in Greece the Golden Dawn party is following the same path. So is the new Hungarian fascist resurgence. In Germany it’s called the „Pirate Party.”

 Europe’s political class is shocked and panicked. They are pretending Grillo is just a „populist” and a „reformer” – but he also wants to „process” all the Jews in the world, who are responsible for all the evil. Grillo wants to nationalize the banks and abolish interest rates, „just like the Islamic Development Bank.”

To understand the new upsurge of European fascism, you have to imagine what it’s like to live in Rome.

Imagine the US government being sunk in red ink. The United Nations suspends the US Constitution and compels us to adopt a new UN currency called the UNO, designed to favor other countries. The United States no longer runs its own currency. Our economy tanks and our deficit keeps getting worse.

Therefore the UN unilaterally appoints a caretaker president for the US named Monti, who imposes radical budget cuts on our dependent welfare state.

1. Social Security is cut by half. People have to live on 700 euros per month.

2. ObamaCare is cut by half. Two hospitals in Rome do not pay their medical staffs for six months.

3. Taxes on income and sales are raised to an average of 50%.

4. Small business taxes are increased – but big businesses taxes are lowered, „because big business is more efficient.” (Meaning it has bigger unions).

5. Politicians and bureaucrats get major pay raises. The figurehead President of the US doubles his salary.

Government at all levels is corrupt. It’s the only way people can survive. Everybody is playing double games. People are doing two jobs and running their own businesses out of government offices. Everybody cheats on taxes. The mafia controls half the country. Survival depends on the black market, the black economy. The currency is kept artificially high, so exports crash.

It’s happened to Italy under the European Union. Don’t think it can’t happen here. Obama is a Euro socialist, representing faculty lounge socialism in America, so completely arrogant and cocksure that Paul Krugman just knows how to run the trillion-dollar US economy. Nobody else can figure it out, but Krugman knows that he knows. Our new rulers are control freaks, just as free market economists have said since Adam Smith. They are six year olds steering the family car and thinking they are in control until…

… until it all blows up.

This week Europe blew up. The media haven’t caught up yet, because they are what they are. But the markets are catching up fast.

This is a huge event for the United States, because our political elite is bound and determined to turn us into Europe. Hasn’t the EU found the answer to war and peace and prosperity forever?

Our Democrats believe it. Europe is their model. Every batty new idea they have is copied from the glorious European Union. Twenty years ago they still celebrated the Soviet Union, until that house of cards crumbled. Now they have shifted their fantasy paradise to Europe.

Over there, fifty years of increasingly centralized control have made it impossible for voters to be heard. The political parties are stuck in GroupThink. Only the fascist „protest” parties agitate for reform. The ruling class doesn’t listen. They don’t have to – they don’t have to run for election.

So European voters fled to the fascists to express their rage and despair. Imagine one out of four US voters going for Lincoln Rockwell, and you get the idea.

In Italy, Beppe Grillo the Clown just received 24% of the vote, the biggest percentage a single party has received since Benito Mussolini, Il Duce, in 1922, another economic crisis year.

 The Italian vote gives the Clown control of the Senate, and the biggest voice in the lower house. The Grillini now speak for the capital city of Rome. Since fascism is illegal in Italy, the Five Star Party pretends not to be fascist; but scratch the surface and that old grinning ghost stares back at you.)

The EU and US media are still in denial, but Italian party politicians instantly flew to Berlin to talk with Angela Merkel, and came back to build a common front against Grillo the Clown. But the Joker refused to play. He wants another election in June.

Currency markets are signaling panic. Don’t believe the media. Believe the markets.

Europe is our future. It’s Obama style of Chicago „governance,” and as long as the people were inundated by EU propaganda they believed that Europe had discovered the secret of peace and welfare forever. Talk to any European and that’s what you hear. They keep wondering why we don’t follow them to Never-Neverland. If you tell question them they turn a deaf ear. They’re mentally stuck.

As long as America defends Europe, they will keep hating us and pretending they are running the ocean liner, like kids with plastic steering wheels.

 The key to the whole farce is Europe’s „democracy deficit,” which means that the people can vote for the European Parliament – but it has no legislative powers at all. The Parliament is a Potemkin front. It has no power to pass binding laws.

On the other hand, the unelected ruling class has centralized more and more power in „Commissions” – which is what the word „Soviets” used to mean. But the EU has no electoral legitimacy. Nobody votes for the people who really run the place. That means the EU receives no feedback about the impact of its cult-like policy fantasies. When the people wanted a public referendum on the EU, the political class arrogantly told them to go… yes.

In France, the Grand Corps of the State („Enarques”) run the government. Germany and Britain are similar. Together they appoint the European ruling elite. This is the EU socialist Apparat, the Political Machine that controls everything. And yes, there are capitalists, but they work hand-in-glove with the Apparat. It’s Crony Social Capitalism (technically the same as fascism).

As a result normal people feel totally powerless. As long as the Ponzi scheme lasts, the victims loved it. The media churned out neo-imperialist propaganda about how Europe had finally discovered peace and welfare forever, and everybody wanted to believe.

Today, southern and eastern Europe are running into a brick wall, designed by Europe’s ruling class in its delusional way. The north blames the south, and vice versa. Nobody can stop the ruling class from its mad rush to destruction, so we are seeing a ‘protest vote” in Germany, Poland, eastern Europe, and the PIIGS – the Mediterranean coastal countries plus Ireland.

The only protest party people can vote for are barely disguised fascists: The Five Star party in Italy, Golden Dawn in Greece, Pirate Party in Germany, and fascist insurgents in Hungary.

Here’s how it’s done. In Italy Beppe Grillo ran as a sly comedian, spinning off conspiracy theories about ‘chemtrails” (jet contrails) that poison the Italian people, the Rockefellers, Rothschilds and Illuminati who run the world to oppress the poor, and all the usual paranoid fantasies. But he also attacked massive corruption (which is true) and self-serving politicians (also true), and the euro currency that killed Italian exports (also true). Grillo voiced criticisms that other politicians avoided. Everybody knows about massive corruption, for example. Grillo said it.

Now the Clown has his own sources of money and ideology, which lead straight to Tehran, as we have pointed out. The Clown hates the Jews, and his website mentions „Jews” 2,500 times, and „Iran” 2,500 times. The Islamic Development Bank doesn’t charge interest, the Clown tells us. This is pure Islamic fascist propaganda. Banks that loan free money don’t exist in the real world, because they can’t survive. But demagogues tell sucker lies, and this is a good one. Beppe tells his followers that he will nationalize the banks (like Il Duce) and give away free loans. It’s like Obama phones, straight from Obama’s stash. The suckers love it.

The Jews run the world by charging „usury” (this is an old, old story in Europe). In Beppe’s Fantasyland money comes free, exactly what Islamist propaganda says. Beppe tells the world that „Everything I know about the Middle East I’ve learned from my father-in-law” Parvin Tajik, who runs a major construction business in Tehran, and therefore has to be in cahoots with the super-corrupt mullahs.

Guess who plays the scapegoat in this age-old drama? Yup.

People laughed at old Beppe the Clown for fifteen years.

Today the joke’s on them.

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The Third Sex in Massachusetts

One afternoon in May, 1990, Robert Kosilek murdered his wife, Cheryl. Brutally. He strangled her with piano wire, virtually decapitating her, and left her body in a mall parking lot in a suburb of Boston.

Since his conviction, Kosilek, now 64, has been serving a life sentence at Norfolk, a high-security prison for men. For years Kosilek has been a member of the „sisters,” a particularly violent, sexually deviant subset of the prison population. But in 1993, Kosilek decided to do a complete makeover, changing his name to Michelle, letting his hair grow long, and dressing as a woman in an all-male prison.

Since 2000, when Michelle, diagnosed with a „gender identity disorder,” sued the state for violation of the Eighth Amendment, („cruel and unusual punishments”) he has received female hormone therapy, electrolysis, and psychotherapy. In 2002, U.S. District Judge Mark Wolf, in a 129-page ruling, decreed that Kosilek was entitled to treatment of gender identity disorder, but stopped short of ordering sex-change surgery.

Last fall, however, Judge Wolf, after a decade of legal wrangling – the legal fees exceed $700,000 – decided that Kosilek, according to the Boston Globe, „is entitled to the surgery because it is a medically necessary treatment for her [sic] gender identity disorder.” This surgery, to be paid for by the taxpayers, would cost somewhere in the vicinity of $50,000.

Then, last month, again according to the Globe, Wolf –„looking for any possible willful disobedience”– ordered „the state’s prison chief to swear under oath he is making an earnest effort to find a surgeon willing to perform gender reassignment surgery [on Kosilek],” to sign status reports detailing the search for a surgeon under oath, and to also swear under the pain of perjury that he has personally read Wolf’s seven-page order.”

Interestingly, at about the same time Wolf delivered this order, Dr. Joseph Berger, a prominent Toronto psychiatrist, issued a statement saying that from a medical and scientific perspective there is no such thing as a „transgendered person, that terms such as „gender expression” and „gender identity” are at the very least ambiguous, and are more an emotional appeal than a statement of scientific fact.” (LifeSiteNews.com)

Dr. Berger „stated that people who identify themselves as ‘transgendered’ are psychotic or simply unhappy, and pointed out that hormone therapy and surgery are not appropriate treatments for psychosis or unhappiness.” He added that he was speaking from the scientific perspective, „and not from any political lobbying position.”

People who claim that they are women trapped in a man’s body or men trapped in a woman’s body are suffering from „delusions, psychosis, or emotional unhappiness,” and that any treatment for such conditions should not include surgery.

He explained that „cosmetic surgery will not change the chromosomes of a human being in that it will not make a man become a woman, capable of menstruating, ovulating, and having children, nor will it make a woman become a man, capable of generating sperm that can unite with an egg or ovum from a woman and fertilize that egg to produce a human child.”

He continues, „The so-called ‘confusion’ about their sexuality that a teenager or adult has is purely psychological. As a psychiatrist, I see no reason for people who identify themselves in these ways to have any rights or privileges different from everyone else….”

Possibly the best-known adversary of sex-change surgery is Dr. Paul McHugh, psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins, who shut down the gender-identity clinic at Johns Hopkins in 1979. Dr. McHugh is a proponent of „autogynephilia,” explaining, in his book The Mind Has Mountains:

The „transgender” activists (now often allied with gay liberation movements) still argue that their members are entitled to whatever surgery they want, and they still claim that their sexual dysphoria represents a true conception of their sexual identity. They have made some protests against the diagnosis of autogynephilia as a mechanism to generate demands for sex-change operations, but they have offered little evidence to refute the diagnosis. Psychiatrists are taking better sexual histories from those requesting sex-change surgery and are discovering more examples of this strange male exhibitionist proclivity. (P. 227)

In one of his articles, „Surgical Sex,” Dr. McHugh details how he and a colleague, Dr. Jon Meyer, studied the issue: „…I wanted to test the claim that men who had undergone sex-change surgery found resolution for their many general psychological problems:

We saw the results as demonstrating that just as these men enjoyed cross-dressing as women before the operation, so they enjoyed cross-living after it. But they were no better in their psychological integration or any easier to live with. With these facts in hand I concluded that Hopkins was fundamentally cooperating with a mental illness. We psychiatrists, I thought, would do better to concentrate on trying to fix their minds and not their genitalia.

Interestingly, Dr. McHugh makes the same observation that we laypeople make at such events as „gay pride” parades: „The post-surgical subjects struck me as caricatures of women,” confirming „once again that to provide a surgical alteration to the body of these unfortunate people was to collaborate with a mental disorder rather than to treat it.” It need hardly be noted that of course Dr. McHugh finds himself the object of angry invective „to the effect that in making such judgments I was drawing on sexual stereotypes.”

As it stands now in Massachusetts, the Department of Corrections remains unconvinced that killer Kosilek must have sex-change surgery, and even Governor Deval Patrick says, according to the Boston Herald, that there is „a very strong argument” that Judge Wolf ruled incorrectly and that „the administration has decided to appeal the ruling.”

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A Few Things I Never Want to Hear Again

Tired.  That is my overriding sensation as I write this.  How to bang one’s first impressions of hell out on a keyboard?  Let us begin a new day, in a new world, with a first principle of sorts – in this case, a negative principle.  Here is a short list of words or turns of phrase that I never want to hear again.

(1) „America is a center-right country.”  Center and right are entirely relative terms.  The „center” between Lenin and FDR, for example, is very far to the „left” of George Washington.  And political self-identification is a meaningless standard of judgment, even by meaningless current standards.

Many on the „right” are fond of reminding us that only twenty percent of Americans self-identify as „liberals.”  I actually heard Brit Hume trying to squeeze this bromide out during the Obama victory post-mortem.  But in a nation that embraced a vast social welfare system eighty years ago, and has expanded it continually ever since; a nation that for the past fifty years has moved inexorably towards the locus classicus of socialist egalitarianism, government-controlled health care; a nation that elected and re-elected a man who has openly self-identified as a progressive and advocated wealth-redistribution; and a nation in which the popular culture is dominated by artless harlots, pimps, and gangsters, a „centrist” is a person who embraces social disintegration and authoritarianism.  To be „moderately conservative” in such a milieu simply means that one finds the latest music video about teenage lesbian orgies just a little over the top.

America is not a center-right country, whatever that means.  It is – notwithstanding its still-sane minority (which includes almost everyone reading this) – a socialist-leaning nation that lags behind the rest of the progressive world only due to a slight residual guilt complex regarding all that old Constitution stuff.  The events of the past couple of days suggest that even that little bugaboo has now been largely overcome by the majority, for whom most inhibitions about accepting their chains – and chaining their neighbors – are now gone.

(2) „Mitt Romney was only the nominee because of a thin primary field.”  Phooey.  He was the nominee because the entire GOP establishment threw everything it had at all the other candidates, in order to guarantee that it would get the candidate most likely to succumb to their advice and direction.  As of September 2012, Romney was the only candidate left in the primary field whom no one had ever described as a conservative, let alone a constitutionalist.  That, in short, is why he was the nominee.

(3) „Republicans need a candidate who can appeal to moderates.”  See point 1 above.  Appealing to moderates means apologizing to voters for not being quite as forward-looking as Barack Obama.  It is to set oneself up as the inferior choice.  It is to presume that the moderates are with the Democrat candidate by default, and must be peeled off by stealth.

This election was the last chance to spare America the final degradation of ceasing to be a constitutional republic altogether.  That battle has now been lost.  The things most needed now are clarity and forthrightness.  The danger most imminent now is that, having forsaken the principles of liberty, the nation will simply forget that those principles ever existed.  Therefore, from now on, to whatever extent possible, every candidate running against the Democrats in any election must be the most unapologetic, relentless constitutional conservative available.  He or she must call out the Democrat as a leftist, a socialist, an authoritarian, and every other simply accurate designation appropriate to the situation.  And he or she must be intellectually prepared to prove that case against the Democrat, and to make the moral, constitutional case for individual freedom.

Will this kind of blunt, hard truth lead to victory?  Not likely, or not in the short run.  The danger, however, is that if the true identity of modern American leftism is swept under the rug in the name of the big lie of „electability” (another word I hope I never hear again), the popular optics will forever belong to the Democrats, who, after all, have actively created a society in their own image and will therefore always appear as the most natural position to their monstrous offspring.

The name of conservatism, and more importantly its proud truths, must never be allowed to slip from the public consciousness.  They will do exactly that if the non-Democrat in future campaigns hides from this name and from these truths.  Eventually, it will be impossible – realistically, if not legally – to run as a genuine conservative.  (I do not use the word „legally” facetiously; the more entrenched authoritarian socialism becomes, the more an advocate of liberty becomes a perceived threat to the nation’s basic principles.)

The real alternative to leftist authoritarianism (to be labeled as such at every opportunity) must be presented often and with vigor.  Politely asking to be forgiven for not being as exciting as one’s leftist opponent is the surest path to permanent serfdom.  The only way out of this morass is to stand firm on principle and speak proudly of the superiority of one’s position.  Over time, a new generation may rise up that will find this clear light more appealing than the dull gray of socialism.

Yes, it may take a generation, or more.  But it is the only way to victory – not merely electoral victory, which is meaningless without defining principles according to which one can govern, but victory in the name of liberty, of the American Founders, and of civilization.

(4) „I know he’s a good man, and wants what’s best for America.”  I hope this is the last presidential election in which conservatives will have to hear this validate-your-opponent claptrap from their standard-bearer.  Barack Obama is neither a good man nor one who wants what is best for America.  He is a bad, conscienceless man, who wants to undo America in the name of a very foreign model of social organization.  When we say this among ourselves, the mainstream media’s dupes do not hear us.  A conservative presidential candidate, on the other hand, is the one man who has the national microphones of the mainstream media at his disposal – the one man, in other words, who has the ear of those dupes.  To fail to speak truth to illegitimate power at that moment, and into that microphone, is nothing less than an act of cowardice.

Allen West, who is not a coward, may just have lost his congressional seat.  He is losing it in part because he had the courage to say what we all know – that there are communists in the United States Congress – and his supposed compatriots in the GOP abandoned him as a crank.

Michele Bachmann – whom I strongly supported in the primaries – came within an inch of losing her congressional seat.  She almost lost in part because she has had the courage to speak out about a host of constitutional issues, from the debt to the Muslim Brotherhood infiltration of the government, and her supposed compatriots in the GOP quietly refused to support her campaign in the hope that she would disappear, and take her embarrassing hard truths with her.

No more apologies.  No more embarrassment.  No more veiled language when on the big stage.  The left won the day by making the most radical, anti-human irrationalism of this epoch seem safe and normal, while portraying freedom and individualism as the dangerous, radical path.

The electoral battle between leftism and liberty is lost, and perhaps will now remain so for a good long time, regardless of the name of the winning party in any given election.

The moral war, however, is still in its early stages.  It is an educational war, which means a war of ideas, which means a civilizational war.  It is going to get ugly, and we are going to lose more battles than we win.  As you know, however, the ultimate victor is the side that wins the last battle.

„Forward”?  Bring it on.

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Where We Go From Here

I have never been so unhappy to be right. I’ve long said that Barack Obama would win re-election, and two weeks ago I stated as much in print. In making this prediction, I was almost alone among traditionalist pundits, with some, such as Dick Morris (Mr. Batting Zero), actually forecasting a Mitt Romney landslide. And, no, I’m not pointing this out to numb despair with some perverse kind of gloating, like a man consumed in flames looking to suck on an ice cube. It’s because of why I knew that Romney would lose: America is lost. And there is something to be found, but not unless good people understand what truly lies ahead.

America is heading toward a dark winter. Of course, I can’t give you a Mayan-like prediction of a precise time of reckoning; details are always sketchy, which is why I wasn’t entirely right on the micro of the election. But this is much like how it’s difficult to predict the weather for two Wednesdays from now, but easy to forecast cold in February. And of our civilization’s overall weather pattern, there is no doubt. Now let’s discuss what prevents conservatives from seeing the clouds on the horizon.

Rationalization

Many conservatives probably knew better in their hearts than to predict a Romney win, but just couldn’t come to terms with the depressing reality of a second Obama term. Rationalization is common among man; it’s how we avoid unwelcome truths. But it also blinds us to danger. Just think, for instance, of Jews who saw their coming winter in 1930s Germany and emigrated; then think of those who didn’t because they couldn’t face reality. This is how dangerous rationalization can be.

Likewise, for years I and a few others have been warning that fighting in the political arena while losing the culture is like trying to grow beautiful leaves on a tree whose roots are beset with steady rot. Sure, we may win some battles, but they’re merely a rightward movement of deck chairs on a ship steadily drifting left. Yet even when this phenomenon’s specifics are explained to simplicity, they’re often rationalized away by conservatives. Most would rather talk about Obama this and Romney that, about how we just, by gum, need a real conservative. But this is for naught without a real conservative electorate. And we can’t elect a better government when we’ve bred a worse people.

And just as I knew Obama would win last night, I’m quite sure of something else.

No truly „conservative” Republican will ever win nationally again.

Ever.

(Don’t click that mouse and grab the hemlock, because there is hope. I’ll get to that later.)

To understand a major reason why, read my piece, „Does the GOP’s Demographic Death Spiral End in a Texas Graveyard?” And to understand why I put „conservative” in quotation marks, click „Conservatism is Dead; Long Live Conservatism.” I’ll give many such recommendations in this piece, as they’re necessary background for a proper understanding of our coming dark days.

But let’s start with a simple fact: Mitt Romney is a photogenic, articulate, moderate Republican who was up against a scandal-ridden, leftist radical presiding over a listing economy and foundering foreign policy. Still he couldn’t win.

Or, I should say, voters chose to lose.

Because what the American people were before, they are no more.

I know, I know. The media deceived the citizenry. Romney started playing not to lose instead of to win. There was vote fraud. There was that storm and Chris Christie playing Misty for Mr. Limp Wristy.

Rationalization.

Oh, it’s not that the above isn’t true. But no candidate is tactically perfect; Obama certainly made his share of mistakes. There also will inevitably be unforeseen events during any campaign, and they don’t matter when enough people can distinguish good from evil. And the left does steal hearts and minds through the media and votes through electoral sleight-of-hand, but this merely reflects our cultural decay. And it’s only getting worse.  

If You Can’t Get Elected, Appoint a New People

This variation on a Bertolt Brecht line gets at our problem. And our new people has been forged via both importation and domestic production.

While conservatives complain about illegal migration – ever more tepidly – I’ve been warning that it was merely an exacerbation of a larger problem: legal immigration, through which statists have been importing reliably socialist voters. This I have explained thoroughly over and over and over and over and over and over again, yet most conservatives won’t touch the issue. This is partially due to „immigrationism,” dogma stating that immigration must be a permanent and unquestioned fixture of American life (death?); partially due to pundit cowardice; and partially due to rationalization. After all, immigration is here to stay, we think, so better to shunt its scary implications to the mind’s recesses, where the rest of the wild things are. 

But I’ll make this simple: remember the pre-election stories about how Obama was wildly popular overseas? The English are enchanted, the French are all aflutter, Indonesia is infatuated, and Kenya is kvelling. Obama isn’t foreign to foreigners, and do you think this will change because the foreigners come here? Just as with religion, people bring their ideology with them. And unless you think you could talk a Muslim jihadist out of Islam, why suppose you could talk a socialist out of socialism?

The world’s consensus political orientation is no surprise, mind you. Note that nascent, adolescent, and young adult America was the rarest of anomalies, as man’s historical default is tyranny. And as geriatric America has proven, it’s difficult enough instilling the mindset that birthed her into the native born, never mind those who come here in the hardened clay of adulthood. Having said this, there is a reason why we are being, as Alan Keyes put it, „colonized….”

„Israel hath cast off the thing that is good; the enemy shall pursue him. They have reigned, but not by me: they have been princes, and I knew not….” – Hosea 8:3-4

As a people’s morality goes, so go its fortunes. You simply cannot be one kind of people but have another kind of government (see „Written in the Eternal Constitution„). And what has happened to our sense of virtue in America? So lost it is that even the word has been replaced with „values,” that fixture of the atheistic literary style. For decades we have instilled children with leftism, nihilism, hedonism, relativism, and atheism through academia, the media, and popular culture; we have seduced them into sin and made them, as Ben Franklin wrote, „more corrupt and vicious, [so] they have more need of masters.” For sure, masters will be one’s lot if he has not mastered himself.

And this inner anarchy has outward manifestations: the imagery of pagan barbarism. Like primitive tribesmen, the young today deface themselves with tattoos and body piercings; the tramp stamp has become a stamp of youth-generation membership, while even large earlobe rings, something the West previously reserved to Discovery Channel documentaries, are now worn. And this physiognomy correlates with a certain voting pattern. Do you know what it is?

Speaking of voting patterns, for my atheist friends…

„It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains” – Patrick Henry

Like many reading this, I once was that rare breed: an agnostic conservative. And, like so many who bristle when I now promote faith, I probably didn’t realize how rare I was – and always would be.

Fox News alluded to this when trying to explain Obama’s win last evening, pointing out that religiously unaffiliated voters are 20 percent of the U.S. for the first time ever. And does a poll showing that this burgeoning group of Americans favors Obama surprise you? It shouldn’t. There is a strong atheism-statism correlation the world over, which is why it’s no coincidence that „conservatives” in heavily secular Western Europe are simpatico with our liberals. Take note of this before you cheer the diminution of faith and fancy it can be replaced with Ayn Randism. Without the Christian right, there is no right at all.

So where do we go from here? First, we must stop rationalizing and look truth in the eye. There are no national ballot-box solutions, and America’s winter is nigh. And will we, as all civilizations eventually do, soon go the way of ancient Rome? It’s possible. Remember, however, that when Rome fell there were still people living in her lost lands. They still had to forge societies. And some did a better job than others.

And what of the immediate future? Well, I’ll write more about that in the coming months. For now I’ll leave it at this: what would you do if you were part of an organization whose leadership became ever more tyrannical and intransigent?

We must focus on our states and localities, on uncompromisingly doing the right thing within them. Are you with me? Because all I can say is that if I were a governor, I would certainly make news. What else can you do when caught in the course of human events?

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Twitter or log on to SelwynDuke.com

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The Death of Ordinary Decency

This has been a mean-spirited campaign, and the meanest, most destructive people won.

So be it.

In the last two Democratic administrations we have seen a sleazier, angrier and more selfish part of America rising up more and more in our political class. The Founders told us that ultimately our elected politicians are a mirror of ourselves. Just like you, before November 7, 2012, I lived in the fervent hope that the degradation of the Clinton and Obama years might be an exception to the long trend of American history. But two times eight years of radical leftists in high office can’t be an accident. We can’t just blame our sleazy media, or just the leftist political class, as corrupt and malevolent as they truly are.

No – the balance of decency in America has changed. Every society has normal, decent people and the other kind. The America we grew up in was fundamentally decent. Decency was the expected standard.

Now the balance has changed.

The evidence for our sleazified culture can be seen all around. It is in our pop music, which has lost melody and now just has rhythm. We have a President who won on revenge against middle class values. That’s what he meant by telling his people to vote for revenge. And they did – showing us exactly who they are.

We are now a society divided between the makers and the takers, and the takers are on a campaign of theft and revenge.

We have a President who takes dangerous pride in his hatred for „middleclassness” as Jeremiah Wright taught him to believe. We have a President who culminated his campaign with a ghetto singer rapping about hoes and bitches, about drug-ridden and broken families, as if all those cruelties were good.

This is not normal, decent America.

It is not.

We need to face that.

Morality and values are not small things. The new tide in the affairs of America also means that we can no longer be trusted to defend civilized values around the world, as we have done for the last hundred years.

It’s a sea change. Fools around the world will applaud Obama as a savior, but wise people will see us crumbling. They know they will be the worse for it.

Today the world is far more dangerous place than four years ago.   If you doubt that, keep an eye on the rise of barbarisms around the world. Obama constantly facilitates barbarism, and the barbarians understand that much better than decent people do.

History buffs will remember that we’ve had decades of sleaze before. The Founders were followed by Jacksonian corruption. Abraham Lincoln was followed by Reconstruction. Yet we somehow found our way back. Come-backs can happen, but probably not soon.

So this is an elegiac moment, a moment of mourning for what has passed. From Truman and Eisenhower to Bush 43 we have had leaders of character.

 No longer.

 Republicans by and large still look, act, and speak like normal, decent people. But they have a hard time even understanding a thoroughly sleazified America. Normal, decent people do not know how to live in this new, barbaric society. We live in protected communities, we drive around in SUVs, like armored cars.

The left knows exactly how to act in this Brave New World. They’ve made it. We are now ruled by sleazy demagogues who take bribes from foreign nations that do not wish us well. Obama is the worst example so far. Even the Clintons, both selfish narcissists, were somewhat better.

 With the decline of American decency, the civilized world has lost its foremost defender. America wasn’t a world power in earlier times of corruption. We could afford to make mistakes. Today, our national decay endangers the world. The left has purposely attacked our self-respect, our pride in our morality and decency, and our crucial role in the defense of civilized values. We are no longer the Leader of the Free World, because we have lost – for now – the values that guided us.  America can no longer be trusted, as we saw so clearly in Benghazi and the fraudulent Arab Spring. Any nation that places any trust in our promises today is run by fools. Our allies must arm up to protect themselves, or they must find new, trustworthy allies.

For sixty years Europe has lived off our willingness to come to its defense.  The southern rim of Europe is now going bankrupt, and even France looks ready to crumble. Without our leadership Europe has to rely on itself, or on Russia, or on the spreading Muslim empires. But Europe has shown no capacity to defend itself. Maybe they will learn. Or maybe they will be swamped.  We can no longer be trusted.

William Butler Yeats’s most famous poem, „The Second Coming,” was written out from overwhelming sense of social degradation in Europe in the 1920s and 30s. Years afterwards Yeats wrote that maybe he was anticipating the rise of Hitler and Stalin, the two greatest evils that rose from the rubble of World War I.

But Yeats wrote it for us, too:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

 

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

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The Big Picture

While countless pundits slice and dice the election, some core truths remain the underpinnings of the apparent outcome.

First, as Pat Caddell so rightly and passionately stated, the mainstream media has become an enemy of the people.

„Journalists” in America have sunk to such a new low they rarely even bother to pretend to be anything other than shills for the President. Shouting through their large bullhorns – snide, arrogant, and obnoxious – they are active proponents of „progressive” (i.e. Marxist) ideology. In sum, they are propagandists.

Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel of the Daily Caller have a less scathing perspective of media bias. They’ve concocted the notion that somehow this dreadful, dangerous bias will soon vanish as our current batch of „journalists” will move onto other positions. But I disagree. Any journalists who retire or move onto non-journalist positions will simply be replaced with more just like them.

I stand with Pat Caddell in his assessment of how extraordinarily dangerous the situation has become with respect to the media in America.

Second, the education of our children has become a shameful exercise in smoke and mirrors. Instead of being taught to be critical thinkers and discerning consumers of information, they are being brainwashed. Educational institutions have become settings where propaganda flourishes.

Third, political correctness, multiculturalism, class warfare, and victimhood have taken hold in the minds of far too many Americans (thanks in no small part to the first two points above).

Fourth, the ever-rising number of Americans dependent on the government ensures power to those who create and sustain that dependency.

Perhaps most serious of all is the breakdown of the moral fabric of our society. Fewer and fewer Americans appear to have a moral compass. Fewer and fewer are able to think critically for themselves, unable to distinguish fact from fiction.

No. Romney did not lose because of who he is. Or his message. Or poor strategy.

He lost in large part because he was battling a society on the decline and what amounted to state-run propaganda. It is sobering, indeed, to realize how powerful this propaganda machine is when one absorbs the fact that millions upon millions of Americans denied the reality of what is happening in their individual lives, in the country, and around the world, in favor of pabulum fed to them via the media.

So where do we go from here? How do we reclaim centers of influence? In the media? In the schools? How do we stop what Yuri Besmenov talks about with such prescience?

How do we rebuild a magnificent society?

I have no answers on this sad and dreadful day. Only questions about where to go from here. And how.

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NOTĂ. Marile spirite se întîlnesc, chiar și peste mări și țări – primul titlul care l-am dat articolului Războiul cultural a fost The big picture (Bleen)

Why Obama Must Go

One overlooked influence on Barack Obama’s political philosophy and governing style (if those are the terms I’m groping for) involves the Islamosocialist dictator typical of Islamic states during the mid-20th century.

This class of ruler was washed up in the wake of the colonial period, as the Western imperial states retreated with no serious efforts to assure stable governments left behind them.  Strongmen then stepped into the vacuum.

Superficially, these leaders resembled Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the legendary figure who, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, took Turkey by the scruff of the neck and dragged it into the modern age.  But Kemal was sui generis.  None of his successors had his ability or his vision, or were able to obtain the same results.          

The prototype of the post-colonial Islamosocialist tyrant was Gamel Abdel Nasser, an Egyptian army officer who rose from lower-middle-class origins (he was the son of a postman) to mastery of Egypt.  Nasser joined the army at a young age.  During WWII, he was involve d in a number of questionable escapades, among them a scheme to turn Egypt over to Rommel.  After the war, he founded the Association of Free Officers, a group of disgruntled junior officers who after several false tries succeeded in overthrowing the almost sublimely corrupt King Farouk.  Nasser in short order edged aside General Muhhamed Naguib, the new regime’s figurehead, and, after consolidating his position, made himself president for life.  Theatrically handsome and with considerable personal charisma, Nasser enthralled the Egyptian populace and the Arab world beyond.  

Unfortunately, Nasser’s accomplishments failed to match his image.  In hopes of creating a pan-Arab state with himself as leader, he attempted to set up a political condominium with Syria in the form of the United Arab Republic (UAR), which foundered after only three years.  He fomented several failed wars with Israel, ending up with his own personal version of Vietnam in the Yemen War (1962-1967), and initiated a number of economic schemes which succeeded only in squandering Egypt’s potential.

His one major success was facing off the combined forces of Great Britain and France after his seizure of the Suez Canal in 1956.  A planned October invasion by British and French forces was cut short by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who threatened to ruin the British pound if the invasion proceeded.  (Patton, on the other hand, would have gone all in.)  Although the city of Alexandria took a beating from British bombers, and Egypt’s army was once again whipped by the Israelis (who were in on the operation), Nasser came out still in possession of the canal, and smelling like a rose.

This success gave him enormous cachet in the third world.  Nasser became the model for leaders of developing countries in every corner of the planet, Islamic or otherwise.

But Suez was Nasser’s last hurrah.  He spent the ’60s creating senseless uproars (and being whipped once again by Israel in 1967) while Egypt stagnated.  Upon his death in September 1970, his place was taken by his close collaborator Anwar Sadat, much less colorful but unquestionably more pragmatic and capable.

Among others in the Islamic world influenced by Nasser was Sukarno of Indonesia.  (He never used his first name, Achmed.)  Indonesia was a colony of the Dutch, and Sukarno was involved in the independence movement from the late 1920s.  During WWII, he served as a somewhat recalcitrant puppet ruler for the Japanese.  When the war ended, he embarked on a four-year war of independence against the returning Dutch.

After throwing out the Dutch, Sukarno established standard one-man rule under the rubric „guided democracy” – as pretty a name for a tyranny as anyone has even come up with.  He became more autocratic and erratic as time passed.  He was deeply influenced by traditional Islam.  He had attempted to establish sharia under the Japanese and accepted such practices as polygamy (he ended up with four or five wives, depending on how you count the divorces).

Like Nasser, Sukarno instigated several wars, seizing West Irian and threatening the Sultanates of both Brunei and Malaysia (both attempts were ended by British intervention).  In the ’60s, his rhetoric grew more strident and his actions more extreme.  He rejected aid from the U.S., and he pulled Indonesia out of the U.N.

The communists, in the form of the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI), had always been a part of Sukarno’s movement.  They gained power and influence as Sukarno isolated himself from the West.  Along with Sukarno’s alliances with North Vietnam and China, this raised the very real possibility of a communist state smack between Australia and the Philippines.

With internal tensions rising, the communists in 1965 carried out a confused and strange attempt at a coup.  A group of disaffected junior army officers, evidently under the influence of the PKI, assassinated a half-dozen generals and seized several bases.  General Suharto, chief of reserves, took overall command and with a series of swift moves isolated the rebels.  There followed a countrywide crackdown of incredible violence and thoroughness.  A minimum of 100,000 communists, sympathizers, and the odd bystander were shot by government troops and rural vigilantes.

After several months of maneuvering and negotiations, Suharto in March 1966 forced Sukarno to step aside.  Sukarno was placed under house arrest and died in June 1970.  The quiet but extremely able Suharto ruled the country until 1998.

Witnessing the aftermath of these events were an American expatriate, Stanley Ann Dunham, and her young son, Barry, who had traveled to Indonesia in 1967 to join Ann’s husband, Lolo Soetero, a geographer and oil company employee.  She may have had other agendas in mind as well.  Angelo Codevilla, nobody’s idea of a crank, has pointed out considerable circumstantial evidence that the entire Dunham family was, at one time or another, active in the CIA.  This would explain a lot of things, including the otherwise puzzling fact of a young woman barely out of her teens trotting around a country recovering from one of the most vicious massacres in modern history with a small child in tow.

It was in Indonesia that Ann’s son Barry began his primary education in the Indonesian school system, where he encountered Islam and the cult of Sukarno.

Sukarno remained very much a folk hero In Indonesia, in much the same way that Stalin is still admired by many Russians.  A large number of Indonesians believed that he would return from internal exile, like some eastern Barbarossa, to straighten things out.  The cult of Sukarno was particularly pronounced among the educated, as apt to fall for bogus messiahs and their programs in Indonesia as they are anywhere else.  Included in this group were many members of the teaching profession.

It was under these circumstances that Barack Obama formed his first impressions of leadership, politics, civil society, and the relationship between governors and the governed.  It left its mark.  Look at Obama’s method of governing:

  • Like Nasser and Sukarno, Obama is the adherent of no single ideology, but instead of a grab-bag of Marxism, liberalism, technocracy, Chicago, and for all anybody knows the secret oaths of the Mugwumps.  While such a mélange is nothing unusual among contemporary Democrats, its more exotic elements call to mind nothing other than the belief system of the typical third-world autodidact.
  • Gigantic, demented social schemes with no chance of success.
  • Charismatic politics – both Nasser and Sukarno, along with third-world tyrants by the basketful, basked in and encouraged intense and universal personality cults – though none, to my knowledge, ever compared himelf to God Almighty.
  • Government by decree – Obama typically deals with disagreement and opposition by means of „executive orders.”  If that isn’t „guided democracy,” then what is it?
  • Strange and disturbing outside alliances – Nasser at various times had contacts with the Nazis, the Italian fascists, and the Soviets, along with a menagerie of Islamic groups.  Sukarno had his connection with the PKI and its mindboggling array of offshoots.  With Obama, we have seen ACORN, the Soros network, and whatever glorified version of street gang Van Jones is running this week.  This is something new in American politics – no previous president has ever operated this way (despite fringe rantings about the Bilderbergs or the CFR).
  •  Personal cadres – no smart, sophisticated tyrant is ever without his entourage, from whom he accepts advice and praise in equal measure while listening to no one else.  With Nasser, it was his old army buddies.  With Sukarno, his comrades from the anti-Dutch underground, including the PKI.  With Obama, it’s Bill Ayers, Valerie Jarrett, Van Jones, Eric Holder, Anita Dunn, and an endless parade of czars.

And, as in all these cases, there’s that ambiguous connection with Islam.

Clearly, what we have had in the past four years is a mutant variety of third-world rule in the United States.  It is not something we have benefited from, and not something we’d want to repeat.

This is the real danger of electing someone who does not have an actual American background, whose character and ideas were formed in utterly different social and political milieus.  It’s not that he may turn out to be a Manchurian candidate, or a mullah in disguise, but simply that, in the nature of things, he will have picked up concepts and practices that are alien, if not – as I believe to be the case here – utterly unacceptable in the United States.

During his term, Barack Obama has governed not as a president in the way that we understand it – a chief executive loaned vast powers for a brief period as representative of the people – but as a caudillo, a charismatic figure, the leader of a movement.  He has ruled as a third-world chieftain.  While this is understandable, if less than admirable, in developing nations such as Egypt or Indonesia or any of the rest, it is not even close to understandable in the United States of America.  Those nations began under, and most are still mired in, conditions that have never touched the U.S. at any stage of its existence. The U.S. has never required tanks in the streets to guarantee a succession.  It has never witnessed the massacre of hundreds of thousands of members of a political opposition.  We have never settled solely political disputes with roaring machine guns or blazing pistols.  The fact that this country has been run for four years by a man whose thoughts and ideas were formed in such conditions is, over and above anything else, an absurdity to the highest degree.  It is a historical mistake that demands correction.

The U.S., unlike Egypt, or Indonesia, or Malawi, or Sri Lanka, or Argentina, is a functioning democracy.  We can correct our political mistakes.  This week, we will have an opportunity to do so.

Vezi sursa articolului aici.