The American descent into madness
That’s the title of Victor Davis Hanson’s latest essay, and I think he’s got it right:
America went from the freest country in the world in December 2019 to a repressive and frightening place by July 2021. How did that happen?…
In the last six months, we have seen absurdities never quite witnessed in modern America. Madness, not politics, defines it. There are three characteristics of all these upheavals. One, the events are unsustainable. They will either cease or they will destroy the nation, at least as we know it. Two, the law has largely been rendered meaningless. Three, left-wing political agendas justify any means necessary to achieve them.
Hanson then proceeds to list and describe many of the details. I’ll just give the title headings here: “Citizenship as Mere Residency” (on illegal immigration), “The Campus Con” (the further leftist-driven decline of universities), “Commissars and Jacobins” (thought control through social media plus government), “Inflation Is a Mere Construct” (pseudo-economics to shrug away inflation), “Our People’s Military” (wokeness taking over the armed forces), “Keep Cuba Castroite?” (failure to support the demonstrators), “The United Nations Über Alles” (asking the UN to investigate our human rights).
The list isn’t exhaustive nor do I think it’s meant to be, and it certainly didn’t just start in the last six months. But Hanson’s general description is a good one, because person after person on the right has described this feeling of witnessing something crazy happening to the nation and to some extent the world. But radical leftism has never made much sense, although it often purports to do so. It actually rides on the idea that – as Orwell so aptly described – two plus two equals five if the Party decrees it to be so.
That’s already a form of madness, but it describes the left’s essential rejection of logic in favor of the quest for power and the consolidation of power, and the double-think required to maintain belief in the party’s goals despite contradictions and 180-degree switches that sometimes are quick enough to give a person what one might describe as concept whiplash. That illogic, boldness, and sense of whiplash is what the right experiences as “madness,” and part of the “madness” is that the left doesn’t experience it that way at all, and that the “left” (or useful idiots of the left) now constitutes half of America. For most of us, among that half are our friends and family, which only adds to the sense of bewilderment and confusion.
The perception of the world or the country having gone mad also has the effect of making it difficult to know how to counter it. It seems as though it’s already very far gone, and that perception is correct. I can recall, for example, noticing some of this – certainly at the university level – back in the late 80s and early 90s, and speaking out against it but not getting anywhere. There were attempts during the Obama years – the Tea Party comes to mind – but that movement was unsuccessful in fighting off the combined forces of the MSM and the Obama administration smearing it as racist, as well as persecution by the IRS.
One of the benefits of the current madness, though, is that many more people than before are noticing it and experiencing the effects of it up close and personal. For example, inflation can be redefined and excused by the left, but it still affects the pocketbook in ways that are hard to deny. And when CRT wokeness comes for the average schoolchild, parents can be mobilized to fight it off.
COVID fear was used to temporarily keep people in a state of obedient passivity, but for a lot of people (including some in the middle and even some reliable Democrat voters) that era is over. Is the madness of the Biden administration – which includes the bizarre Emperor’s-New-Clothes condition of its nominal leader, Biden – enough to wake the sleeping giant that is the American people?
Useful idiots of the left, really IDIOTS
2+2 “=” (i.e. sociopolitical congruence) 5
” Is the madness of the Biden administration – which includes the bizarre Emperor’s-New-Clothes condition of its nominal leader, Biden – enough to wake the sleeping giant that is the American people? ”
Simply put: No. From what I can tell from the center left, Biden voting,”regular” people that I know, they are oblivious to the madness that is happening. They are quite happy in their “Trump is no longer president; all is well with the world” bubble. Lately, the only thing that gets them going is the Delta variant cases which is just a rehash of the previous 16 months. By the time reality catches up with them it will be too late
The left is not mad; it is cagey. It could get nowhere without its faithful army of tens of millions of mush heads who actually believe.
Mark Levin (in an excellent conversation last night on Fox with Pete Hegseth on the topic of his recently-published American Marxism) had some good suggestions such as showing up at school-board meetings and at shareholder meetings, as well as lobbying for the de-funding of destructive institutions of higher (mis)education, but it would take a truly Herculean effort to engineer a counter-revolution against a system which has been so thoroughly corrupted by the Gramscian “Long March” that “woke” insanity permeates everything in this decaying republic. The likelihood that leftists, now entrenched atop the commanding heights of the entire culture and nearly the entire polity, will allow themselves to be dislodged from their comfortable position of power and privilege is perhaps non-existent.
VDH’s most powerful essay.
Dominic Green at The Spectator weighs in as well:
https://spectatorworld.com/topic/joe-biden-digital-serfs-misinformation-jen-psaki-facebook/
physicsguy:
You’re right about the left, of course. They’ve drunk so much of the Kool-Aid that they’ve lost contact with reality. Where the wakening is possible is in the center, and in that portion of the right that seemed to think this was an ordinary political conflict of the kind they grew up with and not a battle against madness. Will enough of those realize what’s happening to turn things around? I don’t know. But it makes sense to ty to help waken them as much as we can.
Last week I heard Kelly Evans on CNBC. Bright young lady and very sincere. She speaks as if global warming is a given. Then on Sunday night she tweeted out that natgas for cooking use is very tiny. She’s upset that the Left doesn’t want new houses to have natgas heat or cooking. This, of course, is insane. Any decent cook will tell you that natgas is the only way to cook. (Other than on the grill with coals.)
My point – and there is one – is that the Left is making so much money on the CAGW scam and there is no incentive to call them out on the facts. Same for all the other things VDH mentions in his essay.
We are headed for something very bad. I don’t know what it will be, but clearly Biden isn’t up to the job. At some point, people will know that the Emperor has no clothes.
The other thing that drives me crazy is that Biden is on track to let 2m illegal aliens into this country. That’s greater than the entire population of Nebraska; my home state. It is all illegal. Why aren’t more people talking about this? Why isn’t he being impeached.
Those in the middle…the ones you give books or links or notes with radio station frequencies on. Or buy subscriptions to The Epoch Times or other such media.
Almost like being in the underground.
“Why isn’t he being impeached?”
– Because the people who stole the election are now firmly in charge and serious about guarding their ill-gotten gains, as only criminal and paranoiacs can be. Moreover, they plan to be in charge for ever and ever. They will NEVER relinquish their criminal gains.
– Because the corrupt media and info-tech corps totally support the people above and their plans to destroy America. As a result they are churning out non-stop lying propaganda while censuring truth and decrying free speech while doing their best to shut it down (“free speech” meaning ANYTHING that might weaken support for government policy, offer alternatives to such policy or point out that such policy is based on lies and is built on quicksand.)
– Because it’s not “Biden” ‘s who’s running the show but Obama and his totalitarian cabal. In particular, the current corrupt DOJ is prepared to step in and nip in the bud any attempt to stop Democratic Party policy. And now, apparently, the US Armed Forces leadership has joined the forces of darkness in their efforts to destroy the country.
– Etc.
By they way, for these gangsters, 2 + 2 does just happen to equal 5….
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-argues-massive-government-spending-will-help-fend-off-inflation-not-exacerbate-it/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=24493137
@j.e.:
You are so correct. It is what eventually happens when one side follows the rules, and the other side does not. We are done for, though we let it happen, inch by inch. We surrendered with no knowledge of the fact of surrender.
Can citizens take the USA back? Not with Gen. Milley, the JCOS commandant thrusting CRT onto our troops and the ongoing culling of non-PC officers. Milley will have our military turn on our citizens.
Thoroughly Modern Milley: Trans-Golem extraordinaire.
jon baker:
I share your concerns about the people we see in the middle. My hope is that he insanity we’re seeing will wake some of them up from that. I’m not making any predictions about how many, or if it will be enough, just that we don’t have any other choice than to try to help that process along. It’s either that or surrender, and then we’ll deserve all that we get. It’s our children and grandchildren who won’t deserve it, but they’ll get it anyway.
Cuban exiles’ warning…and they know what they’re talking about:
https://saraacarter.com/cuban-exiles-warn-u-s-leftists-threaten-freedom-and-work-to-destabilize-nation/
Keeping in mind that:
https://nypost.com/2021/07/15/blm-shows-its-true-colors-in-statement-praising-cuba/
https://nypost.com/2021/07/19/nikole-hannah-jones-said-cuba-most-equal-western-country/
https://nypost.com/2021/07/16/aoc-breaks-silence-on-cuba-protests-calls-for-end-to-cruel-embargo/
etc…
Last year I put a Trump bumper sticker on my car, was an election observer for Election Integrity Project, donated to right wing lawfare groups instead of Repub candidates … and hung out at TheNewNeo in order to get The News instead of The Agenda.
As the year unfolded my eyes were bugging out in disbelief and dismay.
Things fell apart so quickly and it seemed like so many were sleep walking.
I’m still completely radicalized … but I’ve had a couple conversations with semi non political people who are speaking up and showing that they are (or “are becoming”) aware. They’re way down the curve from my hyper sensitivity but their calm, positive and confident outlook is infectious. At least to some extent.
Additionally, we have Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Joe Rogan’s “emergency podcast on Ivermectin”, and other signs that some in the middle are Waking Up.
@Topo:
I doubt we will have enough recruits until the USA resembles a Venezuela writ large, and it will clearly be too late then. Our Democratic voters are the same as those who voted for Chavez; our net incomes are higher, for the moment. But the inflationary wave is coming. Gotta destroy the Middle Class.
Cicero:
You may be right. But if we go down, isn’t it better to go down fighting? And is there a more certain way of guaranteeing that we’ll go down than to decide we’ve already lost, so what’s the point of trying?
Madness-with-a-Method, Inc.: The severe problem of Soros-elected “Progressive State Prosecutors –
https://justthenews.com/government/courts-law/stay-your-lane-former-da-warns-against-prosecutors-choosing-which-laws
Minding my own business and choosing to not be vaccinated has caused a stir among my liberal in-laws.
Simple pleasures.
Topo Gigio:
Just don’t use the word “Eeyore,” that gets folks fighting mad. 😉
Two points from Prof. Hanson’s essay;
“After the election of November 1860, in a matter of weeks, Americans went from thinking secession was taboo to visions of killing the greatest number of their fellow citizens on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line.”
Unfortunately, thats inaccurate. There was plenty of buildup to the war and formal Secession & the attack upon Ft Sumter was the catalysts that precipitated the onset of the war.
The other point is that Hanson’s assertion that the left’s attacks upon America are not sustainable is entirely correct. Not sustainable in that everyone has their limit to the amount of abuse they will and can take.
neo wonders if enough people will awaken in time. They already have. More than half the nation’s voters, voted for Trump. They’re just anxiously and fearfully waiting until the left lights the match, which the left’s ideological fanaticism ensures they will inevitably do…
I was reading about the Afghan fiasco, the latest installment of a long history of failed conquest at that crossroads. U.S. data: 4500+ casualties, 10’s of thousands of lives forever altered by injury, physical and mental, $2 trillion + spent. You can argue endlessly over the rationale, but the results are pretty unambiguous. Why the perpetual failure? A plurality of local Afghan people weren’t on board; they weren’t convinced of the benefit, and being forced to adhere to an outside view doesn’t work, at least in a longer term.
I see a connection to the current impasse in this country. While the left may control the institutions and have the resultant power that conveys, it is of limited use. They cannot force change on a recalcitrant, and very large, population of fellow citizens. It will never work. As they become ever more crazed and totalitarian in their collective psyche in the face of an immovable object, their effectiveness diminishes, being more and more exposed as the (essentially) religious zealots they are. The opposition will strengthen in its resolve.
Where this leads is not knowable. One side cannot just withdraw geographically. The best case scenario is a realization that compromise is the only way out, but human history doesn’t offer much confidence in that…
The left side wants you enslaved to the State. Our side wants to be free. What’s a compromise? 20 years indentured servitude?
Had the same thoughts. Used the same essay as “Article of the Week (so far)”
om:
I wouldn’t dream of it.
“The likelihood that leftists, now entrenched atop the commanding heights of the entire culture and nearly the entire polity, will allow themselves to be dislodged from their comfortable position of power and privilege is perhaps non-existent.” j.e.
There’s no ‘perhaps’ about it. They’re going to have to be forcibly removed. The 2022 and 2024 elections are going to prove that to be the case. And I hope I’m wrong about that but see no evidence to support any hopeful expectations.
Topo Gigio,
Don’t underestimate the ability of the left to open the eyes of a not insignificant percentage of liberals as well. Liberal parents awakening to children being told they’re evil simply because of the color of their skin. Girls having to undress in front of boys. Feminists getting their noses rubbed in discrimination based on ‘gender’. Troops being told to hate the country they’ve sworn to defend and, that just the color of their skin makes them white raging racists. Cops demonized and imprisoned for doing their jobs. Rampant crime with criminals getting off scot free. Skyrocketing inflation.
It’s not we on the right that are opening liberal eyes, it’s the Left.
Cornhead,
Millions of people are privately talking about the illegals being brought into the country. The mass media and social network platforms are suppressing public awareness of how many people are upset about it. The administration and relevant Federal departments refuse to follow the law, which arguably makes them criminal organizations.
Democrats and RINOs in Congress won’t allow impeachment.
Barry Meislin has the right of it.
“Can citizens take the USA back? Not with Gen. Milley, the JCOS commandant thrusting CRT onto our troops and the ongoing culling of non-PC officers. Milley will have our military turn on our citizens.” Cicero
So you believe that the majority of the troops, sailors, airmen and marines are buying what Milley et al are selling? I don’t. They’re just keeping their heads down. But if an ‘incident’ happens with US Military shooting down citizens… katey bar the door… it’s going to get real.
As for becoming another Venezuela, before that happens those 300 million guns will come out to play because they have to first disarm us. Which is another ‘trigger wire’.
Here’s the thing, the central question the left is forcing upon us; are you willing to ‘live’ on your knees? Being told what to think and say upon pain of your life being ruined?
If someone is not willing to, if neccesary, die to remain free then they’re just playing at it.
Here’s the reality we’re being forced toward; if you’re not willing to kill those who would enslave you through force, then you’re a sheep not a sheepdog willing to fight to the death against the wolves. And sheep are incapable of being free without “rough men who stand ready to do violence upon their behalf”. Killing is not easy and stains the soul but totalitarians eventually leave no other choice.
Dave from N.J.,
The results of our adventure in Afghanistan are pretty unambiguous. We don’t fight to win, we fight to ‘win hearts and minds’.
We haven’t fought to win since WWII.
Read an article today about Gen. Curtis LeMay. He of “You’ve got to kill people, and when you kill enough of them, they stop fighting.”
“War is hell. You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it. Those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.” William Tecumseh Sherman
The American public has no stomach for killing people, regardless of how much they need killing. That, more than any other factor may be the death of us. Not talking about indifference to killing, much less enjoying killing, just accepting that there are times when it’s an unavoidable neccessity and recognizing when that circumstance is inescapable. Among others, the Chinese Communist leadership is counting on our unwillingness to kill. They have no such compulsions. The “bad guys” never do.
VDH is an honest man. One who is paid well by the Hoover to be Reasonable and Collegial. I wonder if his private musings are more apocalyptic?
I note, too, in his essay he only lists the Progressive Left pathologies and creeping authoritarianism he is so worried about. He has nothing to say about why the Conservative (sic) side of politics always loses and the wider corruption and sickness in the body politic. If he did that, he’d be eating alone in the Hoover Cafeteria or learning to fly from the Tower in the manner of the Late Great James Forrestal.
“The American public has no stomach for killing people”
au contraire D.H. Lawrence has us pegged.
“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”
The Japanese thought we were effete, wanting only luxury and pleasure and nice Iowa farm boys burned them alive with flamethrowers.
For most of us, among that half [of Americans who are useful idiots of the “Biden” junta] are our friends and family, which only adds to the sense of bewilderment and confusion.
This.
Several weeks ago at a dinner party, I lost my patience with one of my oldest friends, an MD/MPH who ought to know better but blindly follows “the science” because Not Orange Man. When he regurgitated yet another usefully idiotic talking point, I asked him, “Do you get all your news from Facebook memes?”
He immediately had a hissy fit and told me that I am arrogant (never mind his own endless pronouncements about the putative “best interests” of millions of people he has never met and in whose icky company he would not be caught dead). Then he told me that he certainly does not get all his news from Facebook memes–he reads the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the New Republic, Slate, Salon, the Intercept, the Guardian, Vox, etc.
I apologized for my intemperance but have decided just to keep my mouth shut with my old friends while finding some new ones, too. After all, I am the one who has changed, and I know from once having shared my old friends’ mind-set how truly blinkered and impenetrable it is–and this was before our current era of totalitarian social media.
It’s all so discouraging.
I read an article – maybe even here – about some small towns in Germany being relatively normal through WWII, the citizens just assuming things would sort of go on the same, even as shortages progressed, the young men were drafted away, bad things happening in the paper. Sure there were some bad people in charge and that nice Jewish family is no longer around, but everyone pretended that things will sort of go on the same even as artillery could be heard in the distance.
That’s the state we’re in here. People can see with their own eyes that there are political prisoners now in the US, that laws apply differently to different groups, that government is in collusion with monopolies to strip its citizens of fundamental rights, that millions of people are being let into the country with no benefit to the people that are already here, but people will do nothing to stop it, pretending that things will stay the same even as things around them go up in flames.
Another warning, this time from a South African…
https://nypost.com/2021/07/19/how-equity-ideology-plunged-south-africa-into-inequality-and-chaos/
There were attempts during the Obama years – the Tea Party comes to mind – but that movement was unsuccessful in fighting off the combined forces of the MSM and the Obama administration smearing it as racist, as well as persecution by the IRS.
The Tea Party movement was also co-opted by barely-outside-the-Establishment political professionals, who led us back into going-with-the-GOP-flow.
Whatever: I read an article – maybe even here – about some small towns in Germany being relatively normal through WWII …
Part of the “banality of evil” Hannah Arendt chronicled.
I don’t think we’re down that deep hole, yet. But we are beset with a similar “banality of decline”, resulting from over a century where people have been led to accept these ways of thinking as simply The Way Things Are and beyond question:
> Putting elites on pedestals of worship and trust.
> Trusting “non-profit” entities as inherently virtuous, while approving restriction after restriction of those who HONESTLY admit they’re out to make a HONEST buck.
> Replacing thoughtful consideration with more and more “rules”.
> Willingly considering our own, proximity-informed insight unqualified to challenge the above … and therefore thinking we should just go with the flow of the status quo.
That is how we sell ourselves short, render ourselves vulnerable to the failures of The Pedestaled … and effectively unplug the distributed intellect of our nation, outside that elite few and their top-down centralized decision-making.
The blind, leading the blinded.
Why can’t our “leaders” – including those claiming to be conservative/libertarian – even make a coherent case to oppose this flawed paradigm, let alone start solving problems instead of creating more? Because our leaders are a reflection of US and can’t think outside the Pandora’s Box of this paradigm any more than we seem to be able to … likely because it is the only paradigm we have all fully experienced in our lifetimes.
If we want to reverse this lemming parade we are on now and make it stick … getting ordinary people to QUESTION the world around them, then build trust in their own insights and NOT delegate their decisions to others – even if that looks like more risk and effort for them – is essential to diminish the power of The Pedestaled and plug all our distributed intellect back in.
Events are beginning to make that happen – but will enough begin to question, fast enough, to act and corral the busybody bulls now running through our institutions and spreading their manure upon our lives?
Even know someone is blaming The Madness®™ on pesticide, cell phones mutating our brains, dyes in foods, steroids, drugging children or not drugging children, hidden infections, fungal infections,… or lead being removed from gasoline.
No, wait, lead poisoning was what brought down the Roman Empire.
Truth is, no one knows. And probably never will.
Listing the problems over and over isn’t and is not going to lead to a solution. I’m bored to death with that approach. It’s starting to sound like a mother telling her terrible two child, “NO!” To a two year old that’s just white noise. At some point a physical intervention needs to take place. We need to know how to do that. And if you say elections, go slap yourself silly until you realize every signal coming from the left on that matter indicates they intend to cheat and stonewall just like they did in November. With every arm of government and culture on their side, stopping a cheat is almost an impossibility. Get real. And VDH, move to the next phase.
Geoffrey Britain on July 19, 2021 at 6:30 pm said:
“They’re just anxiously and fearfully waiting until the left lights the match, which the left’s ideological fanaticism ensures they will inevitably do…”
When that happens we had better have a strategic plan to end it rather that to just strike back, willy-nilly. What are the primary points of engagement? How should they be approached? What level of effort should be expended to engage them and turn them? I write couched for your wise discretion.
What are the warning signs of incipient tyranny?
Why is the Biden regime putting out such obvious lies, such transparent falsehoods? The reason is not to convince the people who use commons sense. That remains the majority of the people of any country including the United States.
The reason lies in the history of tyranny and dictatorship. Would-be dictators need to identify people who are potential enemies of their regime. Tyrants throughout history, most recently people like Stalin, Hitler, Mao, followed the same pattern.
Would-be tyrants can identify their allies by putting out obvious lies and seeing who repeats them, uncritically. These people are the trusted guardians of the totalitarian regime.
Those who publicly reject the lies identify themselves as enemies of the regime.
For the rest, perhaps the majority, will stay silent and continue their lives as well as they are allowed to. They are not a threat.
We can take warning from that and learn before it’s too late.
difference today is Democrats didn’t always live in opinion bubbles where their rantings seem not just sane but absolutely necessary
combination of splintered media and assortative political migration has ugly consequences
deep blue districts have completely abandoned both logic and rule of law while embracing an ideologically parochial paranoia
simultaneously convinced that Ashli Babbit needed to be shot (and dozens more held without bail) to preserve our sacred democracy from a two-hour unarmed protest and also that you’d need F-15s and nuclear weapons to oppose the government and also that climate activists barricading the WH is not just constitutionally protected speech but Very Necessary To Demonstrate Our Legitimate Concerns
simultaneously convinced that AZ audits are completely unnecessary because science has shown vote fraud only affects .00000000000000001% of votes, but also that AZ voting machines must be thrown away after the audit due to the risk the audit itself could become an instrument of fraud
sanity has left the building and moved to Texas
all Calvinball, all the time
Walter Kirn has a nice piece summing up the media today:
https://walterkirn.substack.com/p/the-bullshit
But he is very naive about why our betters have decreed that Calvinball is the only game allowed.
Additionally, we have Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Joe Rogan’s “emergency podcast on Ivermectin”, and other signs that some in the middle are Waking Up.
Tabibi had an essay of “Police Brutality” last week that shows he still has a way to go to reach common sense.
I could live with the authoritarian state if the people running it only had competence and logic.
au contraire D.H. Lawrence has us pegged. “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”
Uh huh. The writer Elaine Morgan noted that academic anthropologist were fond of this sort of rhetorical flourish. She suggested you insert as the subject of the sentence someone you knew and see if it still makes sense. As in, “Brent at the Fresh Market is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.
Like many big events there is a long, slow process that led up to the last year. Covid was simply the last push that got us to reaching the tipping point of that long, 50-60 year cultural march.
Thus undoing it will not be easy, not easy at all. In fact, more likely than not we’re eventually in for some kind of shit storm, be it cultural, financial, or God forbid, war (Taiwan?).
The amazing thing is that there is a kind of situational blindness that takes hold of whole countries/cultures as they descend towards the abyss, and despite warnings and pushback they’re powerless to put the brakes on enough to stop it. With we humans, certainly nothing new under the sun.
Art Deco,
No problem. That describes my late father to a T. Strategic Air Command air crew and later war planner, 152 combat missions in Vietnam, Distinguished Flying Cross, seven awards of the Air Medal. Of course my father grew up in a log cabin without electricity or running water up the Mohawk Valley north of Eugene so maybe that generation was tougher than mine.
But it also sounds like a millennial friend of my kid. I know he can kill because he shot and killed a cougar in the last year or so (6.5 Creedmoor for the curious). He was also in line to see Milo Yiannopoulos in Seattle a few years back when Antifa attacked the people in line and was maybe 20 feet away from the Antifa punk that got shot so I know he has already seen leftist violence up close and personal.
The illegitimate Biden administration is a biproduct of the madness. Allowing the fraudulent election result to stand and hoping that the whole thing is just a phase will work about as well as California’s lax shoplifting laws. Permitting lawlessness and fraud only begets more of it.
A much above even the great VDH columns.
My thought is the Deep State wanted a fake, no powered leader to run their government entities without interfaces.
And asking the Socialists in the world to help them is only asking for trouble.
MollyG, when you run into such brats, you’d best move on, but if you tun into liberals w/ more manners, you may counter with:
“Ok, websites like Slate, Salon, the Intercept,…, but not such Substack folks as Greenwald, Taibbi, Weiss, or such sane Left folks/ sites as Consortium News, Truthdig, Paglia, M. Hudson, or Moskos, or such sane Right folks/ sites as M. Wauck, Codevilla. Kunstler, J.M. Greer, or Sowell?”
Once one gets past the above-listed Lefties, and the others (e.g. Chomsky, Tracey) who got the what-should’ve-been-obvious RussiaGate zoo correct, the Left’s “bench” is rather shallow, compared to the Right’s “bench.
This bench includes J.E. Dyer, Denninger, the Derb, A. Kaschuta, and Gottfried.
Other Righties of, by my lights, major stature, include M. Anton, J. Curry, J. Krein, Craig Pirrong, and Heather McD.
Righties of, in my view, lesser overall stature include sundance, Sailer, A. Chua, A. Fekete, and FoFoA.
Typo correction of my first post above: “if you Run into liberals….”
And, of course, we have harder-to-pigeonhole folks, esp. of the IDW, e.g. B. Weinstein, Haidt, H. Pluckrose, Jas. Lindsay, and Peter Boghossian.
And, more specialized folks (e.g. on nutrition, finance), like N. Teichholz, Gary Savage, and C. Kresser.
And, legal specialists, the liberal Dersh, the Righty Wm. Jacobson, and the harder-to-pigeonhole Turley, all of whom earned stripes as *non-hacks* in the RussiaGate etc. matters.
That’s true. Nina Teichholz has done very good work and doubtless saved more lives than Friend Fauci through her nutritional journalism. One can only imagine her likely politics when it comes to other things though. One begins to feel some sympathy for Stalin having to stay up late at nights deciding whether to Babel or Shostakovich the more interesting cases.
Another (quite minor) typo above: Heather MacD, not McD.