Enjoying the view from Limbo
The fatal flaw of all democratic arrangements: The only person who ought to be granted power over other people is one who is temperamentally averse to possessing practical power over others, who sees none of the personal material advantages of power as desirable in the least, and who has pressing concerns and abiding enthusiasms which would make the commitments and duties of political...
Bad Bunny was the performer at the Super Bowl half-time show. I never heard of Bad Bunny before this month. I understand he sings in Spanish. (I cannot verify whether “sings” is strictly the correct verb here, though I suspect not, based on the photos of Mr. Bunny that I have seen; and I surely will not attempt to verify it by listening...
Do you remember back in the days before 2016, when tens of millions of Americans, Republican Party voters, defended the right to bear arms, against all critics, arguing that the real reason for the Second Amendment had nothing to do with hunting or recreational shooting, but was all about the God-given right of a free people to arm themselves against a potentially tyrannical...
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...
First, they came for the neocons, but I was not a neocon so I said nothing…. John Bolton’s house was raided by federal agents in the early morning hours of August 22nd. It was not a document request, not a subpoena, but an FBI raid — the showy and scary kind, with streets blocked off and boxes summarily removed, by uniformed federal officers...
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...
Douglas Murray, one of those “trending” fake intellectuals du jour who manifestly calculates his every angle and word with his fame-dazzled eyes focused on the many and the money, has garnered some headlines this week for (sarcasm alert) daring, while a guest on Joe Rogan’s podcast, to criticize the host’s approach to choosing guests, which sometimes causes him to lend his enormous platform...
Elon Musk, the richest man ever to owe most of his fortune to government handouts and regulatory favors awarded to him to perform services utterly unjustified by the principles of limited government he now pretends to espouse, is trying to justify his random none-of-this-will-ever-affect-anyone-I-know torching of the federal bureaucracy in exactly the Trumpian way one would expect from an unprincipled businessman without a...
The problem with Donald Trump’s political rise, as I have said many times, is not so much Trump himself, but rather the tens of millions of Americans who are sanguine — nay, enthusiastic — about this buffoonish Putin agent and anti-American demagogue running roughshod over their country’s traditions, decimating its alliances, disrespecting its constitution and its institutions, befouling its public discourse, turning her...
Cause and effect. — Prod people into desperation by denying and disemboweling everything they ever held dear. When they actually become desperate and begin to act as desperate men do, accuse them of being extremists and assert the need for stern measures to tamp down their irrational outbursts. Voter’s dialectic. — “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” Fool me...
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