MP3: https://soundcloud.com/luke-ford-666431593/kris-kobach-surges-into-the-lead
* New York: Did Trump Save Protégé Kris Kobach in Kansas?
* Daniel Horowitz: Why there’s no better time for a budget fight than now — BEFORE the election
* Documenting Hate: Charlottesville
* John Michael Greer: The Kek Wars, Part Four: What Moves In The Darkness
Stan Adams writes: At my first office job (in college), I continued my childhood habit (instilled in me by my mother and grandmother) of giving small Christmas gifts to all of my co-workers.
One of my female co-workers looked at the gift and said, “Um … you do know I’m Jewish, right? I don’t celebrate Christmas.”
I said, “Well, think of it as a Hanukkah gift.”
“Hanukkah is over.”
“Well, it’s just a seasonal gift.”
“There’s no such thing as a seasonal gift.”
“Just think of it as a nice gesture.”
“It’s not a nice gesture. It’s a Christmas gift, and don’t try to pretend that it’s something else.”
“Well, then maybe I should just take it back.”
“No, it’s all right. I’m not overly offended. I’ll keep it.”
(She never did say “Thank you.”)
The next year, I didn’t bother with the gifts. I was tempted to give that particular woman a card saying “Happy Kwanzaa, you f**king c**t,” but I didn’t.
* Speaking as a traditionalist, not an alt-righter, we don’t have an ethnic animus towards Russians. When they were part of the evil empire USSR, we opposed them due to ideology. Now that they dropped that ideology and have begun to re-Christianize, we feel no need to regard them as our enemy.
Historically we seem to have gotten along with them up until the time the Bolsheviks took over. They gave us a sweet deal on Alaska, prevented Europeans from intervening in our Civil War and they even provided a job for John Paul Jones.
There seems to be some similarities between Americans and Russians. We both occupy vast land masses that we took from other peoples. We both have a historical characteristic of being hard and tough. Though we do have differences, there is much common ground we probably have. And now that communism has been swept away, we should be exploring it. But the geniuses that run our nation like it is the board game Risk, have other ideas. They are still stuck in the past and have not correctly identified the real threat, the global South.
* “The alt.right love for Russia (and the left’s new hatred for it) are complete mysteries to me.”
The continued Boomer obsession with Russia is a complete mystery to me as well (too many Ian Flemming books?). As I have pointed out before, Russia is just a country – like any other country that has interests and objectives (except our own because we don’t seem to have to coherent policy in anything). Their actions are neither mysterious nor unpredictable.
* Russia’s anti NATO strategy is to promote territorial disputes which effectively preclude membership. Besides Georgia, Russia has taken that approach in Moldova and Ukraine.
The mindless expansion of NATO is inexcusable. As far as Russia’s resistance – I’m fine with it. Anything to create a buffer.
I’m with George Kennan on this.
Anon writes: Having developed a new interest in learning history I picked up Will Durant’s majestic 11-volume Story of Civilization from the first half of the 20th century. I gave up on it in the first pages of volume 1, chapter 1:
“There are no racial conditions to civilization. It may appear on any continent and in any color: at Peking or Delhi, at Memphis or Babylon, at Ravenna or London, in Peru or Yucatan. It is not the great race that makes the civilization, it is the great civilization that makes the people; circumstances geographical and economic create a culture, and the culture creates a type. The Englishman does not make British civilization, it makes him; if he carries it with him wherever he goes, and dresses for dinner in Timbuktu, it is not that he is creating his civilization there anew, but that he acknowledges even there its mastery over his soul. Given like material conditions, and another race would beget like results; Japan reproduces in the twentieth century the history of England in the nineteenth. Civilization is related to race only in the sense that it is often preceded by the slow intermarriage of different stocks, and their gradual assimilation into a relatively homogeneous people.”
Seriously?
The brilliant Native American philosopher and activist Vine Deloria Jr. offered an important hint in his most influential work, God is Red. He pointed out that in the wake of the Reformation, Western spirituality lost track of a crucial variable—the spiritual importance of place. To most spiritual traditions, and to Native American traditions even more than most, specific places on the land have their own unique spiritual properties and powers, which are not dependent on the people who happen to live there. He went on to argue that much of the reason why modern American society stumbles so blindly from one preventable disaster to another is that we have not yet learned to relate in a sacred manner to the powers of place, the spirits of the land on which we live—and that those powers remain the ones that native peoples reverenced.
… The changes that matter very often focus around one person who becomes the focus of change, and who proceeds up the river of our national life, encountering one crisis after another and somehow overcoming each one of them, until death or retirement ends the tale—and by the time that happens, the world has changed decisively and nothing will ever be the same again.
That’s the archetypal pattern I see unfolding in American life right now…
I think it’s safe to predict that no future attempt to stop Trump in his tracks will get any further than the ones we’ve already seen. The efforts to hit Trump over the head with an investigation or stab him with media tirades will doubtless continue—in fact, with an eye toward the legends, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Mueller investigation is still lumbering ineffectually onward for a long time to come, and I’d be amazed if there’s the slightest decrease in the sniping from the media and the official intelligentsia—but none of it will affect the outcome. At the beginning of 2025, when Donald Trump hands over the presidency to his successor, he’ll look back on a long string of crises that never quite managed to derail him. By that time, furthermore, the nation and the world will have changed irrevocably.
With an eye to the first two parts of this series of posts, it’s not too hard to see the new realities taking shape on the far side of the Trump era. The drastic pruning of federal regulations, the end of one-sided free trade agreements that encourage the offshoring of working class jobs, and the end of the tacit encouragement of mass illegal immigration and the resulting downward pressure on wages and benefits—all core policies of the Trump administration—represent a dramatic rebalancing of economic power in American society away from the managerial aristocracy. The realities of politics being what they are, that will bring about an equally dramatic rebalancing of political influence. We’re already seeing a lively socialist insurgency threatening the Democratic Party establishment, and a less dramatic but equally far-reaching influx of populist candidates into the GOP is also well under way. Despite all the shrill denunciations of the mainstream media and the official intelligentsia, There Is An Alternative—in fact, more than one—and that in itself shows that the enforced consensus of the last forty years is shattering around us.
