Category Archives: Political Theory

New Cambridge Study Of Disinformation Is Full Of Disinformation

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The latest effort of the academic-media complex to steer citizens in the direction that the powers-that-be prefer comes in the shape of “The Disinformation Age,” edited by Lance Bennett and Steven Livingston, Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Despite the prestigious publisher, a cursory glance is enough to tell me that this is the usual reverse-engineered history, by which I mean that the authors already know what their conclusions are going to be and are determined to rewrite history to fit them.

Just one small example. The book dwells on the influence of the Koch brothers on the establishment libertarian think-tanks like the Mercator Center and the Cato Institute, NEVER mentioning that that “beltway libertarianism” is only one form of right libertarianism, and not the most radical or convincing by any means. That brand of libertarianism is in fact constantly criticized by anarchist libertarians as well as by minarchists.

What’s more, the Cambridge book has the nerve to source the term “Kochtopus,” coined by the libertarians at Mises.org/Lew Rockwell, to the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, whose use of it came several years later and whose knowledge of the whole history of the Kochtopus is at second-hand, filtered through liberal-left tropes, and filled with suspicious gaps and elisions.

LRC: 2008 March 25 How Libertarian Is the Kochtopus

MindBodyPolitic.com:  2009, April 3,  The Libertarian Kochtopus

New Yorker: 2010:  The Koch Brothers’ Covert Ops

Mayer, a documentedly uninformed and lazy investigator got the whole Kochtopus network notion from bloggers who picked it up from the Ron Paul libertarians, which included me at the time, whom Matt Taibbi, a fellow left-lib journalist, was following, plagiarizing, and misrepresenting.

According to  this Cambridge disinfo guide, “Kochtopus” is the term Jane Mayer “likes to call the network”…. no mention of the piddling fact that dozens if not hundreds of people had analyzed the network and called it that long before she did, all of them with a world-view diametrically opposite hers.

The charge of plagiarism surfaced fairly soon, but the New Yorker did its own misleading pseudo- investigation and came to the unsurprising conclusion that there was no there there.

Not surprising, since Mayer is a prime product of the nepotistic and incestuous media culture.

InfluenceWatch tells us the following:

Mayer’s maternal grandfather was Allan Nevins, founder of American Heritage magazine and winner of two Pulitzer Prizes. Mayer’s great-great-grandfather was Emanuel Lehman, who founded the investment bank Lehman Brothers. [15]

That’s who decides what’s disinformation and what isn’t. Plagiarists and propagandists live in a bubble all their lives, sheltered from any necessity to defend their ideas honestly, and the result is false, empty history.

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Donald Trump Failed To Break The Techno-Managerial Dictatorship

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Scott Gibbons at The Millenial City:

“As I wrote in my book, Trumped by History: The Resurrection of the Great American Middle Class, then suddenly, out of left field came the perennial celebrity Donald Trump. He did not come from within any institution or discipline, and his ideas and platform coalesced rapidly through interaction with various populist personalities, frustration and thought waves. Trump most famously recognized and sanctioned the downtrodden great American middle class and drew those people out of long-term seclusion into increased and open expression of opinion. He resuscitated them and suddenly by just wearing MAGA caps their long suppressed opinions were clear to everyone.

As I wrote in Trumped by History, in bypassing the mainstream institutions and processes, Donald Trump starkly defined the conflict between the middle class and the techno-managerial elite, drawing his supporters fully into the open for the first time since they had lost their social dominance in the 1960s. At the same time, he elicited a virulent opposition to himself personally from establishment conservatives whose ideology was thought in principle to be nearly the same as that of his supporters – revealing both left and right to be the true techno-managerial elite enemy of the great American middle class.”

Gibbons suggests that the Trump presidency failed to dislodge the techno-managerial ruling class and only enriched its own self, thereby leaving its followers even more vulnerable than before.

This is a pessimistic and widely-held analysis that I don’t share, because I never subscribed to the belief that Trump came from no where. I was quite clear-eyed from the beginning about who Trump was. I realized he was a liberal from the heart of the establishment – he was, after all, sent out to sell the financial bail-out to the public. There was his family’s decades-long coziness with mob figures, his ties to the Clintons, and his family ties to the media and to the Jewish establishment. He would never have become that popular without that.

However, to me he represented an opening, a disruption that had the potential to shake things up and move them in an unexpected direction. That potential did not exist with Hillary Clinton.

Trump blew up the place verbally.

And that created a space for the middle class to express itself. Whatever else did not get accomplished by his presidency, that did.

And it can not be undone.

 

 

The Philosopher Of Woke: Immanuel Kant

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It all goes back to Prussia:

Kant argued that we can never perceive reality directly or know what things are “in themselves.” All we can perceive is things as they appear to us, through our eyes, ears and other senses—but those appearances, he asserted, are shaped and distorted by the nature of our senses. He posited that there are basic abstract “categories” built into our minds that impose themselves on our perception, that make things appear to us in a certain way, regardless of what things really are, independent of us. All our perceptions are shaped by “a priori concepts,” concepts formed not from observation and experience but implanted in our very nature, “to which all objects of experience must therefore necessarily conform, and with which they must agree.”

The advantage of this theory is that it allows us to confidently assert that our perceptions will always match our abstract assumptions, because they cannot do otherwise. The price, however, is that this theory cuts us off from reality, trapping us inside a delusion of our own making. There is no absolute truth, only our “perception” of the truth as shaped by who we are.

It’s a winding road from here to wokeness, but I think you can begin to see where it starts: with the idea that perception is more powerful than reality and that it all depends on your own identity.

In the 20th century, Ayn Rand summed up the contradiction in Kant’s philosophy: the idea that “man is limited to a consciousness of a specific nature, which perceives by specific means and no others, therefore, his consciousness is not valid; man is blind, because he has eyes—deaf, because he has ears—deluded, because he has a mind—and the things he perceives do not exist, because he perceives them.”

 

Alfred McCoy: Ukraine War Will Birth New World Order

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On Democracy Now, Professor Alfred McCoy explains why the Ukrainian war will give birth to a new world order.  That is, a new New World Order.

Lila: Perhaps it is in this sense that the predictions since 2015 from various Rabbis that we are living in messianic times and that the moshiach has arrived/is arriving can best be understood. After all, if this new order,  diminishes the United States and NATO, which it seems to be doing,  then the fall of Edom/AntiChrist, associated in the minds of the Rabbis with Western  Christianity/Europe/North America, must be accompanied by the rise of the Messiah, which in this geopolitical reading, is the new NWO, led by Russia and China, ostensibly, with Israel playing a mediating role.

Charles Burris Calls It Quits At LRC

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Update: [March 16, 2022]

Thankfully, Mr. Burris has been resurrected at LRC, where he can continue his zealous education of those with eyes wide shut.

ORIGINAL POST

The conclusion of yet another internecine spat [see here and here and here] at Lew Rockwell results in the departure of Charles Burris, whose writings were more historically informed and  parapolitics-wise than that of many of his colleagues.

I didn’t agree with some of Mr. Burris’ posts, especially ones in which he touted the “Camp of the Saints” while on every other day professing that collectivism of any kind was anathema to libertarianism. I marveled at the cognitive dissonance.

On the other hand, he was fascinated by the Kennedy assassination, power-elite analysis and conspiracy, and wasn’t  a purist too good for the real world, as many of his confreres are.

His support for Governor Noem was the hill on which his blogging life ended. I daresay the angels didn’t like his support for Marjorie Taylor Greene either.

But I did.

I went through something similar while commenting at Robert Wenzel’s site where I often had a pack of libertarians nipping at my ankles and howling at alleged “authoritarianism” or “statism” …terms they  hardly seemed to understand…but used more or less as imprecations whenever someone adopted a position not considered kosher by the libertarian, er, collective..Rothbard cultists…Mises mob…. whatever you choose to call it.

Ah well. I too have ended up tending my garden.

A literal one.

While the curs still waste their efforts circling and nipping at some other poor sod’s socks, my angel mist bamboo has gone from 15 feet to over 40.

Two wind-burned royal poinciana saplings that I wrestled onto the back of a pickup have spread their parasols over the roof of the house and their writhing shade over the blazing sidewalk.

My oyster shell mulch has bleached and crumbled almost to beach sand in the yard.

I quadrupled more than quintupled my investment in money terms and I gained something priceless while doing it, something which still seems to elude so many people on the web:

Perspective.

A sense of proportion.

Thank you for your well-researched writing at LRC, Mr Burris.

 

 

JFK Assassination Obsession Unique To Libertarians?

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Says Charles Burris.

Uh no, Mr. Burris,

I’ve been fascinated by it a long time….and aware that it was not the DEEP STATE but the NWO elites using their tool Johnson who assassinated Kennedy.

Left liberals who worship Kennedy are the premier group obsessed with the Kennedy assassination…….

Because they want to retain the myth of Camelot and understand how it was taken away from them.

Christians or conservatives don’t usually care much for Kennedy in the first place …or for Camelot…and place the cementing of control of the NWO much earlier, some with FDR, others earlier, with Wilson.

Libertarian analysis of this conspiracy ends up mythologizing Kennedy even more, which is hardly something a cultural conservative would want to do.

Besides, the whole analysis of the NWO COMES from Christian writers from a century and more back; their  ideas were imported, repackaged and reattached to a variety of non Christian writers whose view points were more consonant with that of the elites than Christianity.

I have patiently read through a good bit of the Christian literature on the subject and that’s where it emerges.

Still way ahead of you.

Libertarianism is a decent framework for contemporary politics. And any rationalization aka ideology that you can dream up for it after the fact.

It is not a particularly convincing framework to tackle anything else.

The teachings of Christ and the teachings of Murray Rothbard or Mises are incompatible in anything more than a superficial or temporary way.

They provide good cover for Christians who are embarrassed to profess Christianity publicly because it undermines their standing in academic and intellectual circles.

But to be a friend of this world is to hate Christ.

And to love Christ is to hate this world.

Just as one might be what is deemed a great patriot or freedom fighter and even highly moral, for conducting espionage on behalf of your own country, hacking other people’s private information, or perhaps, even more dreadfully, seducing a honey pot on behalf of the white hats, the fact is you cannot be a follower of Christ and do it.

At least, you might do it, but you would not be proud of it. You would look at it as an evil necessity and eat bread and water and flagellate yourself until the stink of it in your soul was gone. And even then you would shudder at the moral AIDS you had contracted and know that your spiritual health had been forever compromised.

Your seduction puts you only one step away from the sexual torturers of Abu Ghraib, who likewise instrumentalized their own genitals into weapons of war. They were uneducated youngsters, with  no one to tell them better. What is your excuse?

That is what undercover operations in the James Bond vs. Pussy Galore genre mean….they reduce genitals into weapons at the level of a Venus fly trap, and transform the human into the insect world.

But a vast number of people go along with such things, because we have all been conditioned by movies in the Cold War genre to accept that white and black hats differ only in their ends, not in the means they employ.

But that is ultimately as soul destroying a belief as the esoteric philosophies that were for many years my own temptation. Very likely more destructive.

Coming out of Babylon involves much greater effort than changing the color of the flag under which we do battle….libertarian or liberal or progressive…

Or American or Russian or Chinese.

It means fighting only for the cross, which is Christ.

Known to the secular world as Truth……

Not for an ideology.

 

 

 

 

 

Trump Impeachment

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Schmuel Klatzkin in The American Spectator:

There is no precedent for a former official being tried and barred from office after returning to private life. It was attempted once, with a secretary of war in Grant’s Cabinet. But since the man was acquitted in the Senate, no precedent was established. But even had a precedent been established, a Cabinet officer is not someone elected by the People.

And what is being proposed now is a trial to be held before the Senate of someone who will be a private citizen. It clearly won’t be for the purpose of removing him from office. More importantly, it will deprive the People of their right to elect a person of their choosing to public office.

Nowhere does the Constitution say or suggest that one can impeach and try someone who is not in office. Nowhere does it grant Congress the power to remove a person’s right to run for office except as part of the process of removal from office.

The Senate has no right to act as a judiciary body to try a private citizen, only to remove someone’s hands from power. And most certainly the Senate was never given the power by the People to tell them they may not elect this private citizen if they so choose.

To hold this trial would be to undo the protection the Framers had set in place in their careful recrafting of impeachment. It would usurp a power that was never delegated to Congress by the Constitution by trying a private citizen before the Legislature and, without benefit of judge or jury, to deprive him and the People of their rights. If a law has been broken, the only place to try a private citizen is in a court of law. The process of trial before the law was firmly and finally removed from the legislative branch by the Framers.

And lurking behind this all is the goal of denying the People the right to have the person of their choosing in office. It is hard to think of any act more undemocratic.

Trump As Coriolanus

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Glenn Ellmers at American Greatness:

“Coriolanus turns the impudence of his accusers back on them. They are the true betrayers of the republic who, by rights, should be expelled. Trump, in my opinion, should use this line: “I impeach you!”—and then spell out the details of the Democrats’ shameful conduct, which has undermined the Constitution.

Let every feeble rumour shake your hearts!
Your enemies, with nodding of their plumes,
Fan you into despair!

These lines—about the melodramatic cowardice of the accusers—seem especially appropriate in light of the hysterical overreaction to the events of January 6. The so-called insurrection is now being used to prepare public opinion for draconian new measures against “domestic terrorism,” and to justify a proposed wall around the Capitol complex reminiscent of a Third-World dictatorship. This, in spite of conflicting and uncertain accounts of what happened, as well as video evidence of Capitol police opening the doors to the protestors, and even engaging in friendly banter with the “Viking guy”—who hardly appears to be leading a murderous coup.

Still your own foes, deliver you as most
Abated captives to some nation
That won you without blows!

This means, “You idiots are just tools of our country’s enemies!” The mob is so consumed with partisan jealousy and bloodlust, they don’t even notice or care that they are weakening the nation, and making themselves patsies for foreign powers. (Of course, it’s possible they do notice, and don’t mind.) Consider, in this context, that the despots in Beijing are surely smiling right now at this spectacle of the United States destroying itself from within, while they don’t even have to lift a finger.

Thus I turn my back: There is a world elsewhere.

It’s not clear what Trump will do with his wealth and influence now that he is out of office. Rumors are circulating that he will start an alternate media empire. This is certainly a more measured response than what Coriolanus did: he joined up with his old war enemy to threaten an invasion of Rome. In the play, that conflict is resolved when Coriolanus’s mother helps to broker a peace. In our time, this farce may still lead to tragedy.

The late professor of political philosophy Harry Jaffa explained that in Coriolanus, Shakespeare shows, “with all the poetic genius that only he could command . . . the inner connection between virtue and republics.” No political stunt can change that.

Shakespeare’s deepest lesson, according to Jaffa, is “the inexorable and inescapable vindictive power of the moral universe.” With control of all three branches of the federal government, the Democrats may imagine there are no limits to their power. But they will never remake the human soul. It may be possible for a while to pretend that passion can replace virtue, and that ideology can replace truth—but this can’t last. Even Washington, D.C. cannot defeat the nature of reality.

Top Scholar Says Trump Impeachment Constitutional

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Volokh Conspiracy, the blog of leading constitutional scholar Eugene Volokh, has cited a piece by another influential scholar, Michael McConnell, that Trump was impeached by the correct body, the house, at the correct time, before his departure from office on January 13.

Therefore, argues McConnell, since the constitution allows ALL impeachments to be tried, Trump can in fact be tried even though he is now out of office.

Another proof that the law and the courts are NOT the answer, but a part of the problem, in America.