Category: America Descending

Random Reflections on the Current Scene

Covid-19, as a health crisis: At most, a moderately severe global pandemic, which barely even qualifies as moderate when compared with the 1918 flu outbreak (which the world withstood and transcended quite well, in the end). Covid-19, as a political crisis: At least, the most severe case of globally coordinated authoritarian government expansion and Orwellian speech-crushing propaganda in our lifetime (from which the...

Mission Almost Accomplished

Ten years ago, early in the second term of America’s first overtly socialist presidency, I wrote a book review at American Thinker, “Progressivism: Revenge of the Sociopaths,” outlining the unofficial blueprint, published a century earlier, for the Marxist transformation of America, namely Philip Dru: Administrator by Edward Mandell House. A few years later, I incorporated that review into my series, “Progressivism 101,” on...

The Fox News Republican Presidential Debate Show, in Super 3D

Fox News hosted a fake presidential debate among a bunch of yokels who couldn’t get elected president if you offered all the voters in America free MAGA hats for going to the polls. The guy who stockpiles those hats in his gold bathroom, as camouflage for the boxes of national security documents he stole from the White House, was not present at the...

The Trump Supporter’s Error

The mistake that Donald Trump’s admirers and defenders have consistently made since 2015 may be reduced to one fundamental error of confirmation bias: They saw his flouting of ordinary party politics, ordinary presidential rhetoric, ordinary administrative state regulations, and ordinary Republican establishment conciliation, as evidence that he saw the corruption of modern American politics the way they did, and that he was standing...

Random Reflections On American Politics

The heirs of Frankfurt. — The American left’s intellectual strategists have long believed that the way to break the country’s resistance to progressivism was to forge ahead, with their vanguard fringes displayed in bright colors, in open defiance of the popular consensus, precisely because those fringes would be perceived by the “silent majority” as too much, too extreme, too immoderate and anti-American. The...

Trump, Insurrectionist or Idiot?

A group of highly credentialed conservative lawyers is publicly arguing that Donald Trump is constitutionally disqualified from running for the presidency ever again, on the grounds of his “participation in the attempted overthrow of the 2020 presidential election.” Meanwhile, Alan Dershowitz, the most distinguished liberal lawyer of the past forty years, has spent the past seven of those years so deep in the...

A Defense Alliance For Our Time

Matt Gaetz, U.S. congressman and living proof that Trump-level strategic thinking is alive and well in American government, has responded to a media question about Ukraine’s bid for NATO membership by suggesting that he would prefer to see Russia rather than Ukraine joining NATO, in order for the alliance to be more effective against China. So that would mean a globally aggressive, West-subverting...

Can You Name the U.S. President?

Everyone who is even vaguely attentive to American politics, and even half-honest about the evidence of his own senses, knows that Joe Biden is no more serving as the active president of the United States — the “here” at which, as Harry Truman said, the buck stops — than I am. That is to say, everyone can see as clear as day that...

Barack Obama’s Summer Playlist

In keeping with his annual tradition, Barack Obama has posted his 2023 summer playlist, which is to say the collection of songs he claims to have on his portable listening device at the moment. Amusingly, one musician, someone called Lucy Dacus, objected to being included, using the opportunity to accuse Obama of being a war criminal. Good for her, I say! After all,...

Two Reflections On Anti-American Things

When Vladimir Putin’s regime finally falls, or the Botox Tyrant himself withers and dies, probably in prison somewhere, will the apparent entity we call “Tucker Carlson” actually go poof, and the last two years of his “life” simply disappear entirely from the universe and the collective memory? I commit this thought to writing here in the nature of an experiment. Specifically, if my...