Enjoying the view from Limbo
Joni Mitchell has joined Neil Young in demanding that Spotify remove her music from its platform, in protest against Joe Rogan’s podcast, which discusses the Covid-19 pandemic in terms that do not perfectly align with the Biden administration’s official statements. Since Young and Mitchell are both Canadian by birth and upbringing, it is not surprising that they are so quick to favor authoritarian...
The neo-conservative crowd in the backrooms of U.S. politics, which has always been a largely bipartisan faction, has recently found the Republican Party an inhospitable host, and has therefore shifted most of its weight over to the Democratic Party. Hence the Democrats, partly for opportunistic political reasons related to Donald Trump (who was a consistent and valuable Putin asset for five years, with...
I wrote about the incompetence of the world’s ruling “elite” yesterday, citing the amusing example of the back-to-back inanities by U.S. Supreme Court justices Gorsuch and Sotomayor. Apparently, however, Gorsuch was misquoted in the court’s published transcript, which has since been corrected. This leaves Sotomayor, whose “flub” was more outright lie than error, to stand alone as Ruling Class Boob of the Day....
Last week in the U.S. Supreme Court, the most powerful judges on Earth began their formal dive into the Biden administration’s federal vaccine mandate policy. The occasion was marked by a profoundly representative reminder of what power is really about in this age, and, more sadly, what it is not about. Justice Gorsuch hinted at his opposition to the mandate by commenting that...
Former U.S. Senator Bob Dole died a few days ago. Dole fought, and was severely wounded, in World War II. He was a member of congress for most of his adult life after the war, and a leading Republican senator for a generation. In 1996, he was the Republican Party establishment’s chosen presidential candidate, where his intended role was roughly the same as...
America Descending / Pandemic that Ate a Planet / What is The Establishment?
by Daren Jonescu · Published November 22, 2021
Bill Kristol, who has chosen to express his disdain for the divisive and anger-infested rhetoric of the Trump cult that destroyed “his party” by throwing his support behind the Marxist front group that calls itself the Democratic Party today, has outdone himself, even by his own high standards of collegial, grinning, Harvard-man hypocrisy. Responding on Twitter — where the intellectuals gather — to...
Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost / What is The Establishment?
by Daren Jonescu · Published November 10, 2021
So much of the ruin of modern civilization, with its once-noble attempt to realize practical liberty, may be traced to the gradual calcification of democratic political institutions into freedom-stifling tunnels of partisan loyalty. This hardened devotion to a group or tribe eventually entails little or no demand that one’s party exhibit any of the characteristics or impulses that originally attracted one to it;...
Ann Coulter, one of the most audacious and enduring stars (read “unprincipled profiteers”) of the so-called conservative media, has read the tea leaves and, after a few years helping to foment the unique brand of anti-American hatred that is “MAGA,” suddenly realized that there was no future in it, i.e., no long-term career prospects in the Trump cult industry. That is to say,...
The political problem.— If the best people — the most talented, most thoughtful, most learned, most dedicated, most nobly motivated — went into politics, the world would be almost exactly the opposite of what it is right now. But the best people, by definition, will never enter politics — or if they do, will fail and come to despise themselves. For “best,” in...
I just read the following headline from Reuters — one of the world’s largest and most widely-read news agencies — related to the Hollywood gossip story of an actor’s accidental shooting of a cinematographer on a movie set: “Gun not thoroughly checked before Alec Baldwin fired fatal shot.” Really? It wasn’t thoroughly checked. Well, who could have guessed? I mean, prior to this...
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