UPDATED: End Of Empire?

After four years of Trump's heroic--some might say, Quixotic--attempt to return America to the greatness of its founding principles, the ruling elite staged a coup that enabled them to plunge back headfirst into the moral, political, and financial corruption that is the progressive regime. It's been a long time coming. For decades America's status as an empire rather than a constitutional republic was concealed from its citizens, but especially with the end of the Cold War the ride on the slippery slope has accelerated. 

The origins of our problems actually pre-date the rise of America as a world power--you can trace those origins certainly to the progressive era that began in the late 19th century when our ruling elite embraced the German ideal of government by science inspired "experts". Anyone with some sense of irony will note the repeated invocation the terms "science" and "experts" in support of our Covid Regime, even as our rulers abandon virtually even the pretense to scientific guidance. We find ourselves in the hands of half educated crackpots, neo-gnostic ideologues, and cynical power and money hungry elites who operate through frontmen.

Emerald Robinson put an important part of the problem we're facing well in her two tweets late yesterday: 

The reason that neoliberals are weeping all over Washington today: Afghanistan's fall is not just a crisis in credibility for Biden but for Brookings, for the Council of Foreign Relations, for the entire foreign policy establishment.

The neoliberals are self-aware enough to know that if they failed to plan a basic evacuation from a third world country then nobody really believes that they’re competent leaders of the free world.

ER is focusing on the foreign policy implications of this failure--which is natural, since foreign policy is at the core of running an empire. Ask every president since Clinton.

Nevertheless, the implications are broader. Off the top of my head, here are two:

UPDATED: Guardians Of Tradition

Writing here may be a bit slow today--I have a lot to catch up on and there may be additional fallout from yesterday's developments. 

However, it's necessary to offer some comment on the Vatican's renewed effort to suppress the traditional liturgy--popularly known as "the Latin Mass", more popularly termed something like the Roman-Gregorian liturgy. That's because it was Gregory I "the Great" (c. 540 – 12 March 604) who codified the traditional liturgy of Rome. The first attempt to suppress this traditional liturgy--which can be traced back to Apostolic Tradition--occurred nearly 1400 years later in 1970--with very mixed results. Perhaps this latest and renewed effort at suppression of Christian worship means that the V2 was emboldened by the passive reception by catholics of Pachamama worship in the Vatican. Whatever. Bergoglio has issued the ironically titled motu propriu in our subject line, Traditionis custodes, with the obvious intent of suppressing the Roman liturgy of ages.

This event has implications in connection with the planned Great Reset--Bergoglio obviously hopes to transform the V2 into the 'spiritual' vehicle of the globalist Great Reset--a Neo-gnostic religion. We touched on this yesterday at the end of Class, Influence, Power by citing Maureen Mullarkey's Inside The Vatican’s Surprising Alliance With Biotech Venture Capital, which I highly recommend in its entirety. Nothing that we see happening around us is happening is some sort of a vacuum. It's all connected. The Power Elite really does have global ambitions, both literally and figuratively.

Bret Weinstein Speaks On The Pandemic Regime And The Censorship Of Science

Jan Jekielek spoke at length recently with Bret Weinstein--a biology professor, formerly at Evergreen State. He was ousted for speaking out against identity politics on campus. The interview deals with troubling aspects of the Pandemic Regime--especially censorship of those who dissent from an artificially imposed narrative. You can find a video of the interview plus a transcript at American Thought Leaders:

Perverse Incentives’ in the Vaccine Rollout and the Censorship of Science

Here are a few excerpts to give you a flavor for the whole. It's well worth your while--these are important issues that are evolving from day to day but which have ramifications for almost every aspect of our lives

The Covid Cult, Its Origins

Big picture stuff from Bobby Jindal, and it's really pretty good. I'm sure many others have generally sensed that with the Covid Panic we're dealing with a Neo-Gnostic cult--to call it a religion seems vaguely sacrilegious. Jindal examines where this weird cult is coming from, and how the Covid Panic is a perfect expression of its deepest yearnings--which aren't all that deep. You can find the whole article here:

COVID's liberal religious revival – how their God-less theocracy's destroying politics, culture

What is unique about COVID that brought this new left religiosity to the fore?

However, before we get to excerpts from Jindal himself, at the page there's a brief sound clip of Niall Ferguson talking about the rise of "fake religions". Notice that he, too, is uneasy about applying the term "religion" to this phenomenon, although he does draw disquieting historical parallels:

So we are dealing not just with the decay of traditional religion, but--far worse--with the rise of new fake religions, political religions. And one thing that's very clear from the twentieth century is that, when people take their religious feelings and they apply them to political ideologies, terrible things can happen. Central to what made Communism so deadly is that ultimately it's a religion.

Fundamentally, while I sympathize with Ferguson's concerns, I can't agree with the substance of what Ferguson is saying--it's sadly warmed over Classical Liberalism, with its fake dichotomy of "religious feelings" and "political ideology." Politics always reflects a religious worldview--there is no neutral ground. Some of that is also present in Jindal's opinion piece. Like the liberal Ferguson, Jindal appears to identify "religion" with subjective "feeling," rather than with reasonable belief. However, here's what's central:

Fascism

 

Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good. It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity is part of the ‘problem’ and therefore defined as the enemy. I will argue that contemporary American liberalism embodies all of these aspects of fascism.

I hope that definition of Fascism strikes a chord with readers. It represents the ideal of essentially all modern states. In terms of Meaning in History, what Fascism represents is the powerful urge of post Christian man to return to the compact unity--the "organic unity"--of "archaic" pre Christian cultures. Those cultures, and the states in which they were embodied, existed as compact, organic unities in which everything that we consider somehow separate were regarded as inseparable. Religion, politics, cultural expressions--it was all part of the organic expression of "archaic" man's self understanding as existing in a divinely instituted cultural unity. 

Dissent from any aspect of that unity was understood as rebellion against the whole. Thus, Socrates expression of free thinking and questioning required that he be executed. So, too, the Christian refusal to sacrifice to the official Roman gods was an act of rebellion against all things Roman--state, politics, religion.

The Christian insistence that God--understood as creator of all that exists and the sole father of all men--is knowable to human reason without societal, state, or cultural intermediation destroyed that compact unity. Within that compact unity man had felt at home. Christian faith--reasoned belief in the infinite creator God, as expressed by Paul in Romans 2--was a demanding way of life. In return for a reasoned understanding of man in the world under God, it demanded serious commitment and reasoned endeavor.

The final breakdown of Christendom faith as a unifying force for Western society in the late Middle Ages, leading to the religious wars of early modernity, led to post Christian man seeking an alternative. There really was only one alternative--an attempted return to the "archaic" vision of man in the universe. However, Christian faith made a return to the now naive worldview of paganism impossible for the modern nation states--although we see the attractive power of neo-paganism in our own culture. Instead, modern man was forced to formulate an alternate, competing ideology to Christianity--an ideology in the sense of being no longer based on a reasoned interaction with reality but an attempt to impose a man made reality on the world.

Don't Mention The Learning Loss

The issue of government school closures and the effect of an entire generation of kids is something that I've referred to regularly. Today Steve Sailer comments on a NYT article, in which we learn that, among Liberals, there's a debate whether this issue should even be mentioned. 

What does this tell us about the state of America? Nothing good. I mean, what kind of weird country closes its government schools and then tries to cancel discussion of the obviously harmful effects? 

Sailer begins with these general comments which mirror another of my favorite themes--the denial of reality in neo-gnostic ideology:

Sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick famously said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

But during the Not So Great Reset, an increasingly powerful belief is that reality will go away if we just stop talking about it.

That's the Lib/Prog worldview in a nutshell.

Sailer then goes on to quote from the NYT article. It seems "educators" are leery of discussing the documented fact that kids ... aren't getting educated. This is typical of the Compassion of Liberals. They're not so much worried about the lack of education and socialization. No, they're worried that talking about this lack of learning could harm the kids. I kid you not. According to the author the "roiling debate" is not the fact that kids aren't learning and are falling behind--quite possibly permanently. No, the "roiling debate" is whether to document (what we already know) and even whether to mention it:

Is Covid The Product Of Bioweapon Research At The Wuhan Lab?

When the Covid scare first became a reality my first focus was on the possibility that it was a product of a Chinese bioweapon research program. That was natural, given that the last 12 years of my career had been spent working PRC CI matters. This focus was also a factor in leading me to accept--with less than the amount of knowledge and skepticism than I should have had--the official narratives. I spent a bit--but just a bit--of time this morning trying to figure out when I got away from official narrative. As nearly as I can figure, nothing really rigorous, it must have been in the late Spring or early Summer, because in Informed Opinion On Covid? (dated June 27, 2020) I began the post with these two paragraphs:

My wife and I were lamenting yesterday the glaring lack of transparency regarding SARS CoV-2 (i.e., Covid). I've long since come to the view that this lack of transparency on the part of most of our State and local governments and the public health authorities can only be explained by political motives. There's no health related reason why, at this point, we should not have access to the data that they have. Not to put too fine a point on it, Lib Prog fear mongering must be behind the lack of transparency. The fact of the matter is, you know and I know that--after months of the pandemic--there is no lack of relevant data out there, collected by government health officials. Yet somehow that relevant data is, for the most part, not being pushed out to the people (you and me) who need it to respond rationally. It's as if there are people or 'folks' who don't want us to know, who don't want us to be part of the decision making process.

Amid the talk of a new surge of "cases", I want to know what a "case" is, how that relates to hospitalizations and deaths, and who these people who have become "cases" actually are. More, I'd like to know how they became "cases."

For the past several weeks, at least, there's been a steady stream of information coming out, all of which tends to confirm what was apparent at an early date--that the outbreak of the new version of the SARS virus that we refer to (in shorthand) as "Covid" originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Today Just The News has a piece that repeats this conclusion but adds some authority to the report by quoting a prominent investigator in the field of detecting weapons programs: 

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:

The Christian Intellectual Tradition

The other day I did a post featuring a description of the Neo-gnostic currents of ideology that are so dominant among the Ruling Class in modern America. While these ideologies obviously involve the manipulation of concepts--often to an excessive degree of complexity, with resort to outlandish neologisms--they are actually characterized by a desire to conform reality to the human will, either in the form of escapism or, as we see increasingly, a demonic will to power. As such, despite the excessive rationalism they exhibit--the conceptual gymnastics--these ideologies are actually anti-intellectual in this sense: the use of conceptualism is about escapism or domination, but in neither case about deep and sympathetic understanding of reality.

Today at the same site that I linked (above) Peter Kwaśniewski--another traditionalist Catholic thinker--has an article that describes the alternative to Neo-gnostic ideology: What Is the Catholic Intellectual Tradition? Before quoting several of the basic elements of this intellectual tradition--or perhaps, better, this tradition of intellectualism that seeks to unite the understanding to reality in a sympathetic fashion--I'd like to suggest two points of reference for readers in evaluating what Kwaśniewski has to say.

The first point of reference is the thought of C. S. Lewis. I suspect many will be familiar with one or more of Lewis' books. Lewis himself, of course, was a noted intellectual as well as a committed Christian and championed in his books the Thomist style of intellectualism that came down through the likes of Anglican thinkers like Richard Hooker.

The second point of reference is simply the experience of each reader. My contention is that these essentials of intellectualism reflect what we could call the overall spirit of the American tradition--a tradition of reasonability and of an embrace of reality that unites the American tradition with the intellectual tradition of the West while setting it apart from Neo-gnostic ideologies. I'm thinking here of something along the lines of Russell Kirk's Roots Of American Order.

I realize that, historically, this may appear to be an over simplification. However, I'm not attempting here a detailed demonstration but simply a kinship of spirit, of intellectual approach, as distinct from the dominant ideologies of our Ruling Class that so violently reject the intellectual tradition of the West.

So, here we go, in severely abbreviated excerpts. I offer this for those who are seeking to consciously define where they stand as opposed to the currently dominant forces that seek to transform us into their image and likeness.

On Neo-Gnostic Ideologies

The great constant in human life, as we live our life stories out in history, is the search to understand the meaning of our lives. The constant temptation is the attempt to assign a meaning to the world of reality rather than discover such meaning as is accessible to our understanding. To discover meaning requires patience and persistent effort--and humility. But life is ultimately short and man tends to be impatient. Throughout history there have been repeated attempts to legislate--as it were, by an act of our will--the meaning of existence: to make the meaning of existence to be what we want it to be rather than humbly submit to such meaning as we may be able to discover.

The urge to follow our will in assigning meaning to existence has become the defining note of modern ideologies, described by Eric Voegelin as neo forms of the ancient gnostic current of thought. The motivation may vary. At times the motivation may be simple despair of achieving certainty in our lives in a disordered world. At other times this urge to will a meaning into existence may be motivated by rage at injustice or, demonically, a will to power. As modern man has rejected traditional Christian faith, he finds himself more and more a prey to ideologies that promise heaven of one sort or another in this life. That promise has become the common currency of American politics, certainly and overtly on the Left, but sometimes more subtly on the Right as well.

Today at the traditionalist Catholic site, One Peter Five, there's a post that discusses this aspect of modern life from a traditionalist Catholic perspective. Unfortunately, the title--Currentism: The Perennial Lie--uses an awkward neologism, but as you'll see the author is speaking of Neognostic ideologies. I'm offering some excerpts below because it may help some to orient themselves in these confusing times in which the Left appears to be riding high in their attempt to propagate the "perennial lie" and to dominate and shape reality to their own desires. As the author maintains, these efforts always lead to tragedy and suffering if not checked, and yet the appeal of the perennial lie to many--as well, also, to those who seek personal power--is undeniable.

The Amazon Synod As Sign Of The Times

I frankly haven't been paying much attention to the Neo Gnostic Amazon Synod going on at the Vatican these days. Most of the commentary on it has been all too predictable--handwringing or platitudes, but nothing terribly incisive. Today at First Things, however, Douglas Farrow, a Professor of Theology and Christian Thought at McGill University, gets to the heart of the matter in an article that wastes no time getting to the point: THE AMAZON SYNOD IS A SIGN OF THE TIMES. I have long maintained, although not at this blog, that the crisis in American and the West generally is closely connected to the crisis in what used to be the Catholic Church (if you object to that statement, please read on). I don't mean that in a general sense, although that general cultural sense is also true. I mean it in a very specific sense in that the same globalist actors--prominently, George Soros, are at work both within society generally as well as now within the Catholic Church itself. Or, within what used to be the Catholic Church. Farrow is no bomb thrower. He has considered what he needs to say carefully. Herewith some excerpts to give you an inducement to read the whole article:

This is Bergoglio's Game

How many times have you heard people say things like: "Bergoglio is really very traditional--he talks about the devil all the time?"

Today at Catholic World Report you can read in an article about reform of the Roman Curia--yes, a joke topic if ever there was one--the following:

[Bergoglio's] constant recommendation to pastors, that they foster and encourage popular piety and private devotion among the faithful, is water in the desert.

OK, so what's "popular piety and private devotion"? For the sake of argument, let's say that a major form would be Marian piety and especially, saying the rosary. That seems to be what the author has in mind, since he cites Bergoglio's "personal simplicity and deep devotion to Our Lady."

Question: Does "deep devotion to Our Lady" preclude a determination to utterly sweep away every vestige of an objective moral order? It would seem not, based on Bergoglio's own example. After all, Amoris Laetitia to one side, we've all seen his interviews with the atheist journalist Eugenio Scalfari, Bergoglio's chosen mouthpiece to the world. In them we can read such nuggets as this: