Enjoying the view from Limbo
A society in which the great mass of the population has no shared idea of what human life is supposed to be is not a community. If that social division includes fundamental disagreements about the proper relationship between citizen and government, then the society is in faction. If, in turn, this political divide consists of one or more large parties seeking to use...
Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. One can debate about the unreasonable conditions the Democrats exploited to gain an advantage — unconditional early and absentee voting in many states being the most obvious — but it is clear that, pre-established conditions being what they were, Joe Biden beat Donald Trump. To refuse to accept this is simply to defy and deny the...
Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost
by Daren Jonescu · Published January 11, 2021 · Last modified January 14, 2021
I would rather face the ugliness squarely and suffer through its worst than comfort myself with pretty and convenient illusions. If I am to live the rest of my life as a slave, let me know this and embrace the reality I cannot avoid, rather than presenting me with fantasy heroes and earthly saviors whose appeal will only serve to tighten my shackles....
Yet another Trump cultist with a respectable public position has taken advantage of this tinder box moment in America to incite deadly violence on behalf of the worst (and in a sense, probably the last) president in U.S. history. This time, it was Texas state Republican executive committee member Terry Harper — I do not care about the man’s personal existence whatsoever, but...
In a fit of self-fulfilling prophecy, the Trump cult appears to be trying to put itself on a path to the internment camps their propaganda wing has been fearmongering about for years. If they continue demanding executions for elected Republicans and threatening violence in the streets to overturn a presidential election result they do not like, they may indeed put the U.S. Federal...
For a generation or more, Republicans have built a substantial and ardent, albeit frustrated, grassroots voter base largely on the mantra, implied or directly stated, that the Democrats are trying to shift America toward despotism. The entire array of opinion sources that are generally collected under the term “conservative media” have built their considerable audience on the more explicit form of that mantra....
Today, Louie Gohmert, a Texas congressman often cited by “grassroots Republicans” (aka grass-smoking populists) as some sort of constitutional hero, is leading a new lawsuit claiming that Mike Pence has, and should assert, constitutional authority as Vice President of the United States to decide, in direct defiance of the results of the electoral college vote, “which” electoral college voters ought to be counted...
An essential worker, defined not as our totalitarian age defines that term, but as reason and human nature define it: A person whose work is necessary in a given context. For example, in the context of a private family household, in which an income is essential to eating and maintaining a home, a person who earns money for the material continuity of that...
I have written several times over the past, oh, let’s say four years (hmm…) about the sudden and complete shift of the U.S. House Freedom Caucus into an anti-American, anti-Constitution, corporate GOP appendage, the unfreedom caucus. When they essentially forced their only principled member, Justin Amash, out of the group (and the Republican Party) for his refusal to reject every single pro-liberty position...
Early in the 2016 Republican primaries, when it became obvious that the GOP establishment was lining up behind Mitch McConnell’s anti-Tea-Party megadonor Donald Trump, I began shouting from the rooftops that Trump was the Republican establishment’s secret weapon to demolish the pesky but electorally-needed constitutional conservative faction of the party forever. (For my troubles, I lost my highest rooftop.) Mission accomplished. Not a...
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