DAREN JONESCU

Enjoying the view from Limbo

Tagged: populism

America Descending

A Joke That Gets Less Amusing Each Day

Dinesh D’Souza, arguably the fakest fake intellectual in America’s “right-wing populist” infrastructure, has just pulled back the curtain on his biggest fraud ever — albeit while attempting, per his usual style, to play-act some measure of personal detachment from his own self-promoting, America-hating misdeeds, thereby (he hopes) saving some hope of further tribe-baiting, money-grubbing schemes in the future. Specifically, he has quietly, oh-so-carefully...

Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics

Jordan Peterson and the Whiff of Mortality

Justin Trudeau has testified under oath that the Kremlin-sponsored media outlet RT is “currently” funding bloggers and other personalities “at the right,” among whom he specifically names Canada’s most famous pop intellectual du jour — or rather du hier — Jordan Peterson. Trudeau’s wording is sufficiently hazy to avoid directly claiming that Peterson himself is knowingly on the take from the Putin regime,...

2024 U.S. Election / Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics

Random Notes: U.S. Decline, Populism’s Bright Spot

The U.S. is apparently “unimpressed” with Volodymyr Zelensky’s plan for victory over Russia. This sage judgment coming from a country that has been involved in several major wars over the past sixty years, and has lost every single one of them due to inept planning, cowardly leadership, lack of moral purpose, and a world-historical genius for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory...

2024 U.S. Election / America Descending

First and (Probably) Last Musings on the Trump Shooting

The fatal shooting at Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Pennsylvania — the state to which Barack Obama was referring when he spoke of the uneducated underclass “clinging to their Bibles and their guns,” interestingly — is the kind of moment in American politics that tends to crystallize divisions, blur rational judgment, and send the media (all forms) into seizures of exploitation mania. I...

What is Progressivism? / World Politics

Running Out of Saviours

Nigel Farage, the relatively well-spoken, relatively reasonable, and relatively principled British politician — I eschew the word “statesman” and its accompanying concept, as that species went extinct decades ago — who is commonly identified as the hero (or villain) of the Brexit movement, has, on the eve of a British election, reasserted his ideological alliance with the worst elements of the worldwide “far...

Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics

American Dreaming, Kremlin Style

A few Republicans in the U.S. Congress are finally willing to admit to themselves, and more importantly to the world, what so many have refused to face until now with regard to their populist faction’s opposition to offering any further aid to Ukraine, and to House Speaker Mike Johnson’s newfound willingness to concede the need for some form of Ukraine package. As Texas...

Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics

Telltale Sign of Putin’s Western Apologists

Listen to Elon Musk talking about the “tragic loss of life” in Ukraine that could be ended if only the Ukrainian government would concede its losses and sit down to negotiate with Russia, because a happy Russia is a profitable Russia. Listen to Senator Mike Lee, a former freedom-pitching politician who, having sold his soul to Donald Trump’s cult of populist demagoguery for...

2024 U.S. Election / Liberty's Labors Lost

The Republican Catastrophe Continues

The danger of the Republican Party’s fateful decision, back in 2016, to hold onto its traditional voter base by playing along with Donald Trump, was never primarily that he would promote or embark upon explicitly anti-republican policies (although he has certainly done that), or that he would convert the GOP into a populist apologist faction for tyranny on the global stage (although he...

America Descending / Liberty's Labors Lost

A Sad Allegory

Does anyone — including those millions who were personally invested in it until eight years ago — remember the American Tea Party movement? This genuine grassroots uprising, as civil as it was reviled by the establishment, and as feisty as it was indignant at the progressive usurpation of American society, thrived on a devotion to certain essential tenets: republican constitutionalism, a reason-based anti-establishmentarianism,...

Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics

What “People” Do the Populists Serve?

The populists of the world today, eager above all causes to bury Ukraine, though sometimes euphemizing the death they are willing as “fiscal responsibility” or “not getting mired in others’ problems” or “an end to endless wars” — whose interests do these populists seek to serve?  It is not their own to be sure. For in abandoning a large and courageous nation to...