Enjoying the view from Limbo
Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost
by Daren Jonescu · Published January 13, 2026 · Last modified January 14, 2026
The leaders of the MAGA cult, looking at every video of an ICE shooting in Minneapolis, insist that they see, and therefore that you must also see, an honorable law enforcement officer being rammed by a car driven by a domestic terrorist and therefore fully justified in defending himself with lethal force against this act of extremist violence. The cult submits its perceptual...
Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published January 6, 2026 · Last modified January 7, 2026
For decades, the world has been stabilized, in the sense that the democratic or nascently democratic nations’ greatest external threats and adversaries have been relatively constrained, by a tacit acceptance of, and acquiescence to, U.S. military and diplomatic preeminence. That is to say, Europe, most of the Americas, and much of East Asia had welcomed, or at least submitted relatively comfortably to, America’s...
The following is an account of a new interview of Donald Trump’s chief “negotiator” with Vladimir Putin, Steve Witkoff, conducted by the perfect interviewer for putting Witkoff at his ease in expressing his true thoughts about his assignment, namely Tucker Carlson, who has been the American media’s number one apologist for the Kremlin since the weeks before Russia’s full-on invasion of Ukraine. “What...
Coding the future.– Elon Musk asserts with enthusiasm that in ten years there will no longer be jobs for humans — where by humans he means, in general, humans not at the very top of the digitized food chain, and in particular humans other than himself. Avarice being a native illness of the soul, it is not surprising that those most severely infected...
Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published October 18, 2025 · Last modified October 28, 2025
In Trump Fantasy Land, America’s aspirational (thus far) dictator and Nobel Peace Prize earner has just brokered perpetual peace in the Middle East. In reality, of course, which never looks very much like Trump’s imagination, a hostage exchange has taken place, though at the point when there were very few Israeli hostages who had not already been killed; and a temporary ceasefire agreement...
America Descending / Liberty's Labors Lost / What is The Establishment?
by Daren Jonescu · Published September 25, 2025
Back on November 9th, 2020, in the immediate aftermath of Joe Biden’s election victory (known to this day among Trump loyalists as “The Steal”), I wrote here of the short-term future of America’s two main political factions. In that rumination, I posed a couple of questions about the prospects for the respective factions in 2024, questions which time has now firmly answered, though...
Human, all too human.– When everything you and your friends once decried as a communist plot to overthrow your country, you and your friends now espouse and embrace with brio to achieve your own ends. And when you manage to convince yourselves — or rather accept without a moment’s doubt or hesitation — that this hypocritical adoption of the very totalitarian methods you...
America Descending / Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost
by Daren Jonescu · Published September 13, 2025 · Last modified September 14, 2025
Luckily, I am not an American. In the past, I often felt quite the opposite sentiment, as anyone who has ever read my public writings from the pre-Trump era would know. One of the most flattering things that was ever said to me came from an American reader-correspondent many years ago, an elderly veteran with a highly independent and inquisitive mind, who defended...
The other day it was John Bolton, and I noted here, as many others did elsewhere, that this had nothing to do with “classified documents” and whatnot, but was a simple and straightforward personal attack against someone within the Republic sphere who had become a public critic of Donald Trump. Today it is Chris Christie. For the apparently no-longer-acceptable behavior of appearing on...
Well, Donald Trump has staged another of his great summits with a tyrant, in which the only clear purpose, as usual, was to legitimize and normalize the tyrant’s brutality while belittling The United States of America and marginalizing her Western “allies.” This time, most impressively — if you agree with me that unmitigated gall and civilizational suicide on a grand scale can be...
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