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...
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...
I have seen headlines over the past few days railing against the incredible racist fascism on display at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally. Dismissing this as just the usual mainstream media hyperbole and something-out-of-nothing-ism, I refused even to allow myself to scan any of the articles to find out what the supposed controversy was all about. Today, however, I admit to having...
In less than two weeks’ time, The United States of America will vote for one of the two alternative methods of losing World War III. A vote for the Democratic Party as it now exists is a vote for engaging in the fight but then, when the priorities of economic totalitarianism at home and global progressive activism abroad rise to the forefront of...
An expert is a person who knows more than you do about one thing, and very likely less than you about almost everything else — including, potentially, about the presuppositions underlying his own area of expertise, which he sees not as presuppositions but as facts. That false perception of his presuppositions is part of what identifies him as an expert. Political life is...
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