Briefly Noted: Full Disclosures

This should come as news to no one--I've always assumed that Dr. Robert Malone is liberal in his inclinations. It's just one of things that goes with the territory he has inhabited all his life, so I assume liberal inclinations on those that live and work there. I'm always happy to be wrong, but it's one of those show-me things.

To his credit, this morning he provides that full disclosure, and to his greater credit he acknowledges at least part of it to being mistaken rather than offering it as a belated effort to return to the woke world's good graces:

Robert W Malone, MD

@RWMaloneMD

To those that think I am posting due to my political bias.  News 4 you - it is because of my upbringing. I was taught to not lie. And I got fed up with the lies, misrepresentations, obfuscation, censorship, and imbicilic factchecking. I actually donated to the Biden campaign.

9:28 AM · Aug 28, 2021·Twitter Web App

@RWMaloneMD

Replying to 

@RWMaloneMD

And I am not the only one that made a mistake that I regret in this case.  I am confident that there are many others.  We all make mistakes, including myself. I should not have taken Moderna after having been infected in late Feb 2020.  That was also a mistake.

I see two major admissions in these tweets.

Similar Events Are Happening More Often

For details go to CTH:

New Hampshire Police Arrest Maskless Parents Attempting to Confront School Board – Following Arrests Board Cancels Meeting To Avoid Parents

The post is written in a mostly satirical style. Key sample:

A maskless rogue citizen could put a compliant society at risk of infection. They may not carry biologics they could carry a more alarming virus of wrong-thought against the interests of the state. Rogue citizen assembly at this critical juncture would be subversive to our new society.

Accompanying the article is a photo of police arresting and cuffing an elderly woman for attending a school board meeting maskless, i.e., disturbing the peace of mind of the variously authoritarian and anti-science inclined officials as well as neurotics in the community.

This is the kind of action by the police that will lose them the public support they rely upon. This is called foolishly picking the wrong side, because concerned parents will win the day against would be authoritarian school boards. But the actions of the police won't be forgotten. 

Liberals own this mess. America--certainly not Middle America--isn't ready for this type of police state.

ADDENDUM: It's a really bad look--and just when police need support, and from the type of people they're arresting. Do police think they're going to get the support they need from the politicians--and that very much includes school boards? Not very smart. Telling law abiding family people that "We serve and protect" is about politicians, not about them? That won't end well.

Covid And Liberalism

A little over a week ago science writer Nicholas Wade came out with an article that explains the 

Origin of Covid — Following the Clues

Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?

Nicholas Wade, of course, is a very big name in science journalism and reporting. He's been at this for 50 years and for 30 of those years wrote for the NYT. If you have any interest in science news, you've come across his name and his articles on a regular basis. This fact, that Wade wrote this article, is a big part of the story that Tucker Carlson dove into last night.

There's nothing exactly new in Wade's article, and in fact it leaves out a lot of what many other scientists around the world have been saying from the very beginning. It's never been a mystery that SARS CoV 2--what we call Covid--came from gain-of-function (GOF) research into the SARS virus at China's Wuhan virology lab. This probably followed on from Chinese research into SARS Classic or, if you prefer, SARS CoV 1 (that's an additional part of the story that's still officially denied).

Gain-of-function means that the virus is manipulated or engineered to enhance its capabilities in some way. It can lead to a coronavirus that's endemic to some animal species becoming capable of infecting humans, for example (cf. SARS Classic). Or it can lead to the virus becoming more harmful, or more infectious.

This type of GOF research was banned in the US during the Obama administration but, during the early part of the Trump administration, Tony Fauci personally decided to fund this specific type of research at Wuhan. That Covid came from that research is, IMO, beyond doubt. My opinion is based on the studies of numerous reputable scientists around the world, who have no doubt at all about the origin of Covid. That's the part that Wade mostly leaves out (although he does append an "acknowledgment" section in which he refers to some--but by no means all--of those who did the research).

So, none of the above is really news at all, although the article reads as if it's some sort of expose. What is, nevertheless, newsworthy about Wade's article is precisely the fact that Wade wrote it and that Wade--with all the prestige behind his decades of science reporting--lays the blame for the Covid pandemic at the feet of Tony Fauci and other complicit US scientists. Even though Wade characterizes Fauci as "a longtime public servant who served with integrity under President Trump"--a characterization that is, shall we say, open to question on all counts--the fact that Wade has written what amounts to an indictment of Fauci and the other scientists is important. It gives leave to others to raise the question of responsibility in the same sentence with Fauci's name.

Liberalism, Religion, Tyranny

Earlier today I was reading a couple of articles that fall, more or less, into the category of political philosophy. However, the implications of these articles go beyond the merely theoretical--they have a lot to say about our current crisis.

Both articles start from the phenomenon of what we could call the crackup of liberalism--the clear descent of liberalism into tyranny. Sohrab Ahmari, an editor for the NYPost, sets the terms of the discussion well in an article for the The Spectator US:

Tyranny is the inevitable consequence of liberalism

Ahmari begins with a simple question: "Are citizens of liberal societies permitted to question liberalism?" In theory the answer should be as simple as the question: Of course citizens can question liberalism--that's the whole point of liberalism! The open marketplace of ideas. And yet that's not the reality of America--not really. Much of the energy of liberal opinionating is expended in attempts to shut down all discussion that strays beyond whatever the current liberal orthodoxy happens to be. This is usually done by a process of demonizing all dissenters from the liberal orthodoxy--a tactic that has become familiar over many decades. As Ahmari observes:

Such tolerance is rarely in evidence in practice, however — a reality illustrated in hilarious fashion by a writer for a Washington magazine who recently decried ‘cancel culture’ even as he insisted that: ‘It’s absolutely necessary to de-platform public intellectuals who object to liberal democracy.’

As an historical matter, the liberal ideology arose as a supposed solution to the intolerance of religious quarrels, which had led Europe into seemingly endless wars. Separation of Church and State was supposed to lead to tolerance in society, a live and let live culture. 

Church and state have long been separated. The ideal is that a new liberal order ushers in a new, rational, tolerant and secular regime: cleaving apart day-to-day politics from religion and metaphysics. So instead of enshrining any one orthodoxy, a liberal neutral ground would be created, one that could be contested by rival accounts of the good life. The religious would be able to live happily beside the unbelievers, with all minorities protected. In this way, the advent of liberalism would — once and for all — put an end to the persecutions of the past.

Not only has this not turned out to be true now, but it arguably has never been true. Liberalism has everywhere shown its true colors, its true religious nature. Its claims to to establish a promised land of enlightened tolerance turn out to have been a ploy. The claim that any society could live and thrive without a philosophical narrative of the good life, of the common good, was always transparent bunk. Liberalism has never been neutral, and as it has gained the ascendancy its essential, inevitable, intolerance has become apparent to all:

Liberal Intolerance As An Established Religion

We're used to the idea that liberalism is a civic religion, in that it presents an all embracing worldview. Characteristic of a civic religion is that dissent is rarely tolerated--indeed, public expression of competing views is regularly discouraged and, when possible, persecuted.

The Founding Fathers believed that Americans had enough in the way of shared Christian beliefs or understandings, derived from a common education rooted in Western history and civilization, that free expression and free exercise of religion could safely be guaranteed in the federal Constitution--even while allowing for established religions in the states. In that sense it's possible to say that a generalized Deism, characteristic of that period of English history, was established by the Constitution as a sort of default civic religion. We can see that in the opening passage of the Declaration of Independence.

At this point in history that type of shared understanding--a common philosophical outlook regarding human nature and the place of man in reality--is sorely and quite obviously lacking. That much is clear from the concerted liberal assault on key provisions of the Constitution, which is now attacked as enshrining White Supremacy, rather than regarded as empowering all citizens to a full life of citizenship. What is also obvious is that the adherents of liberalism are increasingly uncomprehending of even the possibility of disagreement with their views. So much so that the calls to "deplatform" or to "cancel" opponents--not so long ago an unthinkable violation of the spirit of the Constitution--are openly voiced in elite educational, cultural, and political circles. And these "calls" to action are being followed up in ever more coercive ways.

A few examples of where we are at this moment follow. Some may seem ridiculous or trivial, yet they are all too indicative of a societal trend.

Briefly Noted: The Vision Thing

"The Vision Thing" is Jen Dyer's latest article. As usual with Dyer, it's humongously long. Here a link to the full title:

The vision thing: Handy guide to the biggest earthquake in human affairs in 2,000 years

While the entire article is extremely lengthy, what I see as the true core is brief enough and follows on conveniently from two recent posts here:

On Neo-Gnostic Ideologies

The Christian Intellectual Tradition

Dyer's article is basically about: Where are now? and, What do we do about it? What recent events tell us is where we are as a nation. Duh! These events tell us that we're a deeply divided nation that is definitively ruled by an oligarchy that is composed of: a corrupt political class, a class of radically ideologized neo-gnostic public and university activists, Deep State actors in the military, diplomatic and, above all, intelligence agencies, and Big Tech corporations.

How divided is the United States? My guess is that America is not quite as divided as the 50/50 election results over the last several national would indicate. The hard left element of the population--or that element that is willing to throw the constitutional order (such as it now is) up for grabs--probably doesn't exceed 30%. The difficulty is that a significant portion of the remainder are not committed to the steps needed to wrench control back from the ruling oligarchy--they'd like to muddle along in the hope that a non-upsetting solution will emerge. The real question for our future becomes: How committed will the Left be to pushing their agenda through if popular resistance stiffens and spreads? And of course the wild card is in the "if".

With this in mind, here's the core, as I see it, of Dyer's article. The reason I say this brief passage is the core is because Dyer doesn't actually offer a plan of action. At all. She says we need to see what emerges, much as I just said. However, here are her guiding ideas:

Brilliant: The Road Ahead

Smart people are unfazed by the events of yesterday. After all, as I ... 

mark wauck January 7, 2021 at 8:11 AM

74M voted for Trump, and I doubt they'll repent of their vote. Trump has done the great service to the nation of pulling the masks down off establishment figures. I suspect that those who are now revealing themselves as fair weather conservatives will experience a very large drop in their credibility and influence, analogous to what has happened to Fox on a larger scale and what has also happened to the WSJ over the Trump years.

and commenter Cassander ...

Cassander January 7, 2021 at 8:47 AM

If you count unregistered children and friends and neighbors of Trump voters, maybe he's got 100 million supporters. Maybe more. That's a big number, which would appear unlikely to just apologize for having a different point of view and slink away so that Chuckie Schumer can "Change America".

noted this morning, there is still a future. Mitch McConnell's GOP--based, it seems, on attempting to foist unelectable females of a certain type (McSally, Loeffler, Ayotte ... no Blackburns need apply to Mitch) on an unwilling electorate --is not the model for the future that awaits us, or any successful political party, down the road.

The future happens a lot faster than most people can imagine, so it's best to be ready for it. John Daniel Davidson writes about that this morning:

Briefly Noted: A Covid Success Story?

Yesterday Steve Hayward at Powerline returned to a topic he's touched on before: The Higher Ed Meltdown Accelerates. He includes a chart that pretty much tells the story. The meltdown he's talking about is the collapse of employment at universities as a result of Covid. The other meltdown, the ideological meltdown, continues apace, of course. Here's the picture:

Hayward follows with some more or less anecdotal examples--but which surely must reflect the larger reality across the country--and takes some pleasure in pointing out that the deepest cuts are in the liberal arts. I'm a liberal arts guy, myself, but I recognize that the liberal arts are from where they used to be--are the epicenter of our cultural and, therefore, political crisis. Obviously, the universities are symptomatic of a deeper spiritual problem in the West, but they have also become an engine driving us more quickly down the slippery slope.

Hayward does recognize that the STEM departments have also been ideologically affected, and includes an example.

It occurs to me, however, that there really is no happy ending here. Of course Covid on its own won't cause universities to shed their ideological baggage and return to educating American young people for productive futures--which, I fear, is how the purpose of university education is viewed by most Americans. Still less will they return to passing on the spiritual core of Western culture. If the two most recent 'scientific' hoaxes--Global Warming and Covid--have taught us anything it is surely that "science" as we thought we knew it is largely dead. It is now increasingly an adjunct to politics, seeing its role as supporting whatever the current political orthodoxy of the Left happens to be. Few in the STEM departments of our universities have the intellectual background and training to launch a defense of the disciplines they grew up in.

The other side of the coin is that, if Trump is indeed forced out by a global Left coalition, our Republican senators will gleefully join in opening the floodgates, not just to cheap blue collar labor, but to foreign born (largely Asian) students and researchers who will work for less and will replace our dumbed down offspring. The Trump economy will prove to have been a speed bump, unless--against all odds--there is a spiritual rebirth in America that will prove capable of sparking an intellectual rebirth. The resources are there--scattered behind us along the roadside of our history. Otherwise, the Great Reset awaits us, sooner or later. Or worse.

Covid and the God-Sized Hole in the Heart of the West

An excerpt from the article of the same title--Covid and the God-Sized Hole in the Heart of the West. Ultimately, only a great re-awakening to our spiritual heritage will deliver us from the Great Reset:

The pandemic has exposed a deeper sickness in secular-humanist society.

Covid has exposed a crack, with the potential to become a catastrophic floodgate failure, in the dam that materialism and secular humanism has built around man’s search for the eternal. What held the water back until now was a simple premise: Progress, technology and material comfort will sate your needs and provide all the answers. Death can be pushed to the margins of consciousness by various forms of self-care and chalked off to the random machinations of the universe when the Grim Reaper prevails over the former. You are both the source of and the solution to any problem you may encounter in the search for meaning you may embark upon. Any attempt to justify your existence likewise starts and ends with you. You are the measure of all things.

All of these anthropological claims about the nature of existence, as Anthony Pagden points out in The Enlightenment: And Why it Still Matters (2013), are not in fact timeless truths, but inventions of 18th Century philosophes. The Enlightenment philosophers took Thomas Aquinas’s Christianized natural law, rebranded it as natural rights, and made off like a thief in the night with new presumptions about human nature. Gone was the idea that all humans were by nature relational beings who sought out the community of others; gone was the notion that man had imprinted on his soul the desire to search for and know God. In their stead was Locke’s “blank slate” of a potentially perfectible mankind shaped by his environment and the freely assumed obligations of the self-interested individual. Even things as fundamental as ties to family and nation, as Yoram Hazony points out, were construed as somehow “chosen” by the individual as he emerged from the pre-hisotrical “state of nature.” As Hazony surmises:

“In reducing political life to the individual’s pursuit of life and property, Locke did not merely offer an impoverished and unsuccessful account of human motivation and action. His political theory summoned into being a dream-world, a utopian vision, in which the political institutions of the Jewish and Christian world–the national state, community, family, and religious tradition–appear to have no reason to exist.”

Voilà--the philosophical underpinnings of Classical Liberalism and ... of our Globalist elite. If we wish to escape the toils of Globalism, we must also break out of the intellectual dead end box of Classical Liberalism. The way forward is the way back--back to our spiritual and philosophical roots. From this standpoint, strange as this may seem when considering the man, I see Trump's appeal to that heritage as the major source of the elite's extreme hatred for him.

UPDATED: Just A Bit About Polling

Well, not exactly about polling, but about electoral statistics and models for predicting results.

This is a topic I have absolutely no qualifications to discuss. But, yesterday I read a looong article by Sean Trende, who does have those qualifications: As Goes Washington, So Goes the Nation? I would never have dreamed of trying to summarize the article, but Don Surber has done it for us. Trende's point is basically that if you examine primary election voting patterns in Washington state over a period of years, those patterns tend to be pretty predictive for national elections.

So, this morning Surber digests the Trende article, and adds a bit that I wasn't aware of: that the "jungle primary" system was invented in the Dem Jim Crow South to disenfranchise Republicans in general and blacks in particular. Here's that summary, from his Highlights of the News:

UPDATED: From Pro-Diversity To Anti-Divisive To ...

Funny how that works, because it turns out the mantra of being pro-diversity has morphed into being anti- "divisive". And, in practice, being "divisive" simply means being "different" or "non-conforming." For example:

American cyclist suspended from team over so-called 'divisive' tweet supporting Trump

The one-word tweet was apparently enough to get him sidelined

Here's how it worked:

Another Big Step Toward MAGA

Andrea Widburg has the story at American Thinker, with plenty of documentary explanation: Trump strikes a second, massive blow against Critical Race theory. It's hard to overemphasize how important Trump's new move is. Trump's first executive order against Critical Race Theory indoctrination in government agencies--which he enforced when CDC tried to ignore it--was a big first step toward healing the nation from Leftist inflicted hate mongering. This new executive order extends the ban on CRT indoctrination to: 

the military, 

government contractors, and 

"grantees" (i.e., among others, institutions of education).

The scope of this ban is now, essentially, society wide. It adds the ban to two more fundamental societal institutions--the military, with its vast network of contractors, and education--taking them out of the indoctrination game, bringing the Gramscian long march of the Left through our basic institutions to a grinding halt. Control of indoctrination in the military and in educational institutions has been key to the poisoning of our youth's minds with Leftist ideology. Universities can "resist" the ban, but they'll be doing it without federal money. 

Obviously this is still the first step. Trump's reelection is an essential next step if we are to see the full fruits of this bold initiative. In particular, if we are to see how far the provision regarding "grantees" and contractors may extend. For example, do social media and tech companies qualify as "government contractors". My guess is that most of them do, in one way or another. This executive order could be a far more effective and expeditious way of addressing the problem of Leftist indoctrination and censorship than years long anti-trust lawsuits. Those lawsuits can begin and continue, but effective change and control over Leftist attempts to silence opposition will not have to wait on the results of antitrust litigation.

Getting a new conservative voice on the SCOTUS will be another big step in this direction.

The stakes in this election could not be more clear.

Excerpts from Widburg's article:

Suicide Of The Liberals?

Earlier this week emailer George sent me a link to a new article by Gary Saul Morson, a professor of Humanities at Northwestern University. As many of you will already know, Morson is fascinated by parallels between the current crisis of our constitutional order and the pre-Revolutionary period in Russian history. His latest article focuses on the almost mind boggling upsurge of revolutionary terror in Russia during the first decade of the 20th century--and the liberal embrace of this virtual orgy of violence. That liberal reaction--which Morson wants us to see in our current "mainstream" progressives and liberals--led directly to the Bolshevik Revolution, with violence on a scale unparalleled in previous history.

I'll provide some fairly extensive excerpts and you can judge for yourself as to the aptness of the comparisons between Russian liberals and those of our own day and in our own country. For all the historical, social, and political differences between then in Russia and now in America, I do find the parallels to be striking. Morson clearly wants us to consider those parallels and to find common elements that underlie revolutionary violence, and it's there that I question whether his explanation of the common elements is completely satisfactory.

What I'd like to do here is to point out elements of current events that remind one of central themes in the thought of Mircea Eliade. Eliade saw many parallels between the thinking and acting of "archaic man," the man of "traditional" societies of any age, and the ideologies of the modern Western world. Thus:

Eliade notes that, in traditional societies, myth represents the absolute truth about primordial time. According to the myths, this was the time when the Sacred first appeared, establishing the world's structure—myths claim to describe the primordial events that made society and the natural world be that which they are. Eliade argues that all myths are, in that sense, origin myths: "myth, then, is always an account of a creation."

That may seem abstract, so let's draw out some more concrete implications. For "archaic" man, the ordered, structured world is brought forth by the gods from a primordial chaos. Creation or, better, origin myths expresses this worldview. However, for the man of any society, we are faced with the reality that our existence always threatens to slip back into chaos--more so at some times than at others. Thus, a key part of traditional religion has always been to seek to "regenerate" the ordered world through rituals. Those rituals typically occur at the New Year--or other significant times, such as the spring planting or harvest. The rituals often include elements that invoke an overturning of the entire order of the world or of human society, to make way for the new creation or regeneration of a perfect order. Such disorder can obviously lapse into outright violence.

So, for example, in The Myth of the Eternal Return (1949), Eliade describes the ancient Babylonian New Year rituals:

The first act of the ceremony ... marks a regression into the mythical period before the Creation; all forms are supposed to be confounded ... every feature suggests universal confusion, the abolition of order and hierarchy, "orgy," chaos. We witness, one might say, a "deluge" that annihilates all humanity in order to prepare the way for a new and regenerated human species. (p. 57)

I suggest that what we are seeing in the chaotic riots and "peaceful" violence is an unconscious reenactment of these types of rituals--indeed, the ritual element in Leftist demonstrations should be very apparent. The prominence that sexual disorder has for the modern Left--the "trans" movement (I think 'movement' is the right word) epitomizes and evokes the 'abolition of order'--is a strong indication of what's going on: a ritual evocation of chaos that will, by magical reenactment, lead to a 'regenerated human species.'

America: A Propositional Nation?

That's the idea that has been popularized in the last decade or two, especially by that motley group known as Neocons. The idea is that America has no national identity beyond the belief in the proposition advanced by some dead white male that "all men were created equal." If you believe that, hey, you're an American, too! That seems to have developed into another proposition, also advanced by a white male (still alive), that we all have an equal right to define for ourselves what Justice Scalia famously called "the sweet mystery of life." What happens when differing visions of that "sweet mystery" come into conflict is what we're trying to come to terms with these days. We thought we had a constitution, but, well, it turns out that constitution may not be as helpful was we had hoped.

I was reminded of all this while reading an article this morning, Two Lawsuits That Could Kill Yale. I highly recommend it to your attention. It highlights some of the confusion at the heart of our politics, both on the Right as well as the Left.

I can't summarize the whole article, but the Yale lawsuit that was brought by AG Barr follows on a similar lawsuit against Harvard--but adds the weight of the federal government:

Woke Conservatism--Is Its Time Now?

Sohrab Ahmari is best known for his May, 2019, article Against David French-ism. Here is how Wikipedia characterizes the argument Ahmari presented in that article:

The dispute centered around their differing opinions on how conservatives should approach cultural and political debate, with Ahmari deriding what he calls "David French-ism", a political persuasion he defines as believing "that the institutions of a technocratic market society are neutral zones that should, in theory, accommodate both traditional Christianity and the libertine ways and paganized ideology of the other side". He argues that this belief leads to an ineffective conservative movement, and contends that the best way for culturally conservative values to prevail in society is a strategy of "discrediting ... opponents and weakening or destroying their institutions", which he maintains is a tactic already utilized by progressives, leaving conservatives who adhere to the David French-style of politics impotent in what he views as a waging culture war in the United States. He argues that the political realm should be viewed as one of "war and enmity", and that the power of the government should be directly utilized to impose culturally conservative values on society.

Ahmari has a new article, following up on Against David French-ism. Below I present enough excerpts to outline his argument. I thought this approach is especially relevant in view of what Lee Smith refers to as The Permanent Coup, the "resistance" against not only President Trump but against--in essence--all things American. It's a war, and Ahmari calls on conservatives to recognize that reality.

As you read you'll probably be frustrated at a lack of specific proposals, beyond Ahmari's skepticism that the libertarian "marketplace of ideas" will magically lead to an agreeable solution and his clear view that that "marketplace of ideas" has been jiggered by "private tyrants" in collaboration with entrenched liberal government. Also lacking, or so it seems to me, is any attempt or appeal to ground this critique in what I would call the humane civilizational principles that lay behind our constitutional order. That is particularly unfortunate because those principles are now under increasingly open and explicit attack.

Nevertheless, there is food for thought. A GOPe is part of our current crisis because its accommodationism plays into the progressive usurpation of constitutional institutions for distinctly unconstitutional ends. Ultimately, Ahmari is calling for conservative to wake to the true nature of the threat that our country is facing, to wake--as we face a crucial election--to the fact that this is a war, and wake to what tactics are necessary to preserve our civilization.

In a sense, one could argue that Ahmari is calling on conservatives to wake to the fact that de Toqueville's misgivings, as expressed in Democracy in America, regarding the way democracy would play out are, in fact, coming true:

Tocqueville speculates on the future of democracy in the United States, discussing possible threats to democracy and possible dangers of democracy. These include his belief that democracy has a tendency to degenerate into "soft despotism" as well as the risk of developing a tyranny of the majority. ... 

Tocqueville also outlines the possible excesses of passion for equality among men, foreshadowing the totalitarian states of the twentieth century.

... 

Tocqueville observed that social mechanisms have paradoxes, as in what later became known as the Tocqueville effect: "social frustration increases as social conditions improve". He wrote that this growing hatred of social privilege, as social conditions improve, leads to the state concentrating more power to itself.

De Toqueville's misgivings have turned out to be prophetic warnings. Conservatives must come to grips with that reality if they are to have any chance of winning this civilizational war.

The Challenge of Marxism

I'm inserting here an extensively edited version of Yoram Hazony's fine essay, The Challege of Marxism. The essay is Hazony's explanation of why Marxism--which was assumed to have been defeated and discredited with the end of the Soviet Union--has made an astounding comeback in, of all places, the United States, the winner of the Cold War. The short version is simply that a Marxist frame of reference is inherent in what Hazony calls Enlightenment Liberalism or Classical Liberalism--which includes most of those who call themselves "conservatives". Marxism of the variety that we see resurgent in America, argues Hazony, is a logical outgrowth of the Liberal Democracy that was enshrined in the American Founding. If that sounds far fetched, give him a chance--I've edited it to provide the bare outline of his argument.

You may recognize similarities between what Hazony is saying and the thought of Patrick Deneen--as presented here in past posts in which we discussed his Why Liberalism Failed. Hazony, however, is coming from a somewhat different direction than Deneen. Hazony is an Israeli philosopher and a Modern Orthodox Jew. He is also "an outspoken nationalist and has written that nationalism uniquely provides 'the collective right of a free people to rule themselves.'"

For my part, I can agree with his views on religion and tradition to a point--the point at which he rejects reason. Or, at least, I would want to interrogate him as to his exact meaning. However, my purpose here is not to dispute that point but to present Hazony's ideas for the positive value they have in drawing attention to the nature of the crisis in our constitutional order that we're facing. It's important for understanding exactly why this election is so important. It's also important because it will challenge readers to ask just what the way forward is for those who do not wish to slide down the slippery slope into the fantasy anti-reality of Neo-Marxism. Or who believe they have something worth preserving for future generations. What is that? And how can we preserve it?

Fact Or Fiction?

You decide from the titles:

Top Pelosi Staffer Registered As ‘Foreign Agent’ To Lobby For Chinese State Media Outlet

Nation’s Empty Churches To Become Spirit Halloween Stores

Sorry--I know that was too easy.

Aussie Rules

Couldn't happen here? We're part of the Anglosphere and are still the freest country within that sphere, but the winds of totalitarianism are blowing ever stronger throughout the sphere. Teachers unions and Blue State governors and Blue City mayors are doing what they can to bring the country to a grinding halt, pending the outcome of the November election. The extent of their efforts includes denying necessary medicine to actually affected persons.

Today Lifesite has an article on the Covid response Down Under, in Australia's most liberal state, Victoria:

COVID rules in Melbourne, Australia let police enter homes without permission, smash car windows 

'We have a curfew from 8 pm to 5 am, rigorously enforced including by the use of police helicopters and search lights. Is the virus a vampire that just comes out at night? ...This is all about inducing mass fear, and humiliating the populace by demanding external compliance.'

It's about coercion.

Are the police defying these rules? Refusing to oppress, bully, and humiliate their fellow citizens? Um, no. Apparently "fellow citizens" is not how they view the other inhabitants of the areas in which they live and work. I guess you get the government you vote for--good and hard, when it's liberals.

Check this out. The original article has a video of the Victoria police commissioner lecturing--hectoring?--the subject population that they must submit. There's also a video of police forcibly subduing a young girl for failing to wear a mask on what looks like a pretty deserted street. Note, too, that what's at issue appears from a reading of the article to be "guidelines" promulgated by "the chief health officer". In other words, the subject populace doesn't get a say in this.

One has to believe that there will be a significant backlash at the polls. One believes it will happen here, too.

Here's an excerpt:

===============

Recommended For Today: Bill Barr; Dem Death Wish, Dems Riot

A lot of people are searching for further segments of Mark Levin's interview of AG Bill Barr, but this intro is pretty excellent:

AG Bill Barr: The American Left is Secular and Only Feels Grace When They're in Power

Barr's opening remarks are an excellent lead-in to what follows.

Don Surber has a longer than usual historical retrospective of US politics leading up to where we are now:

Are You Afraid To Talk To Pollsters?

If you're not, then you're in the minority of Americans. Even worse, there's a good chance that means you're a "staunch liberal".

Poll: 62% of Americans Say They Have Political Views They’re Afraid to Share

And the numbers of those who fear to express their views is going up since 2017. We've all heard of how many people won't talk to pollsters at all, as well as of people who won't express their true views, preferring to say something closer to what they believe they're expected to say. This poll, commissioned by the Cato Institute, puts some numbers to those seat of the pants suspicions, and those numbers are revealing for what they tell us about polls results:

Strong liberals are “the only political group who feels they can express themselves” without fear of repercussions, a new Cato Institute survey finds. Is there any result that could be less surprising than that low information people who are out of touch with the real world--strong liberals--feel free to shoot their mouths off and feel unashamed to put their ignorance on full display? The MSM constantly affirms them in their ignorance and bolsters their belief that they're the best and brightests and most numerous in society.

Highlights: