Enjoying the view from Limbo
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...
Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost / What is The Establishment?
by Daren Jonescu · Published August 1, 2025
In the past few days, Donald Trump has publicly floated the idea of granting a presidential pardon to a convicted serial sex trafficker and child abuser, even sending his own personal lawyer, who also happens to be the deputy attorney general of the United States, to meet with that vile creature to discuss her terms. Now, as an obvious adjunct of this transparently...
Donald Trump is parading around another “greatest deal ever made,” this one with the European Union. And once again, like his deal of the century with Japan, the trumpeted victory is a permanent (until Trump changes his whim of the month) fifteen percent tariff on most goods from Europe, as though fifteen percent were a great accomplishment because it is only half as...
President Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” has passed the United States Senate, surviving the No votes of the only three Republican senators who are apparently still able to muster a bit of shame. For the GOP, in abject obedience to the MAGA mob and its cult leader, has just produced one of the biggest and most beautiful instantiations of everything that is wrong with...
America’s Republican voters used to believe, with near unanimity, that nothing was more dangerous to their country than the threat of an executive branch that sought to circumvent the U.S. Constitution’s separation of powers by legislating through executive fiat, i.e., without deference to Congress, and disregarding court rulings, such as by concocting phony emergencies to justify the expansion of presidential authority beyond the...
Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published April 22, 2025
Back in 2013, when Barack Obama was well into his second term of running roughshod over American principles and destroying the last remnants of the constitutional guardrails against excessive executive power, I wrote an essay for American Thinker in which I attempted to outline the wide array of forces that had been gradually corralled into a generational shift away from the moral premises...
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