This is a deeply stupid thing to believe, and if you believed it in the 20th century I had nothing but mockery for you.
Today I am compelled to much more sympathy with people who have come to believe that. It’s still objectively stupid, but I understand how they got there. It’s an interaction between a low-trust, polluted information environment and the cheater-detection module wired into human brains.
If you pose people a logic problem phrased in two different ways, one of which is “spot the cheater” and one of which is not, they’ll do substantially better on the first version. We are social animals who survived by forming trust networks, and for millions of years spotting the cheater was a life or death matter.
Now put yourself in the shoes of a person of average intelligence — not very good at following complex arguments or extracting generative patterns from large masses of evidence. This person has gradually become aware over the last quarter century that public information sources are saturated with lies. The media is corrupt and partisan, corporations deceive to boost their profits, education is ideologically captured, and governments constantly peddle vast falsehoods to gain compliance.
In this environment, and given the capacity limitations of the average human, the cheater-detection module goes into overdrive. The least bad strategy is to try to spot the worst liars and then believe the opposite of everything they say.
“The moon landings were faked” has to be understood as a symptom not of individual insanity, but of governing institutions and elite classes who have repeatedly burned up their long-term credibility for short-term gains.
This trend had been building for a long time, but undoubtedly culminated with the series of colossal lies, blunders, and “we’ve always been at war with Eastasia” reversals around COVID.
I wish I knew a way back from this. I’m not sure anything less than the abolition of secrecy could do it.
ESR, Twitter, 2024-10-27.
January 31, 2025
QotD: “Did you know the government faked the moon landings?”
January 30, 2025
The MAGA movement as “America’s Thermidorian Reaction”
Fortissax lays out the case for Canada remaining separate from the United States, in what he says is the longest single article he’s written. It is indeed a long piece, from which I’ve selected a small portion that helps identify the US MAGA movement as something other than just pro-Trump activism:
“Canada’s national identity is rooted in Order, as expressed in its national motto, Peace, Order, and Good Government, conceived by Sir John A. Macdonald. This stands in contrast to the United States, whose core value is Liberty, reflecting its liberal and individualist foundations in the pursuit of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
The MAGA movement, as explored in my colleague and fellow Canadian Endeavour’s article, can be understood not as a counter-revolutionary or genuinely reactionary force, but as America’s Thermidorian Reaction — a movement within the post-WWII liberal order to purge its own radical excesses. Endeavour draws parallels to the French Revolution, where the Thermidorian Reaction was not a restoration of the monarchy but a moderation of the Reign of Terror’s extremism, and to the Soviet Union’s Destalinization, which sought to distance the regime from Stalin’s radical policies without abandoning communism.
Similarly, MAGA does not aim to dismantle the liberal framework established during the cultural revolution of the 1960s, marked by the Civil Rights Act and Hart-Celler Act, but instead seeks to address the instability caused by the radicalization of this framework during the “Great Awokening” of the 2010s. Its faith in “colourblind meritocracy” is rock solid. Just as the Thermidorians and Khrushchev’s regime sought to preserve their respective systems by eliminating destabilizing elements, MAGA represents an attempt to recalibrate the liberal order by challenging excessive ideological commitments like open borders, identity politics, and globalist policies.
While MAGA appeals to traditionalist sentiments, it ultimately operates within the boundaries of the same liberal system it critiques, lacking the philosophical depth to present a true alternative. Trump’s 2016 campaign was fueled by widespread dissatisfaction with the establishment and a sense of cultural alienation among, working-class European-Americans. As an outsider candidate, Trump faced opposition from both political parties and the media but managed to channel populist anger into an unexpected victory. However, his presidency revealed that he posed less of a threat to the system than many anticipated. Trump’s administration implemented some reforms but fell short of disrupting the liberal order, leading many elites to reframe him as a tolerable alternative to the increasing instability caused by radical left-wing movements. The 2024 campaign differs significantly from Trump’s earlier runs because he has garnered support from influential elite factions. Figures in Big Tech, such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, and segments of the Zionist lobby, see Trump as a tool to stabilize the system without fundamentally altering it. While Trump continues to appeal to his populist base, his elite backers are likely to exert more influence over his presidency than grassroots supporters.
The Four Agendas of America’s Elite
Endeavour outlines four major agendas driving the U.S. political landscape, which often overlap but also compete for dominance:
- The Anti-White Agenda (Wokeism)
This agenda promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) as core principles, advocating for identity politics, demographic transformation, and the demonization of traditional Western cultural norms. Organizations like the NAACP, SPLC, and Open Society Foundations champion this cause.
- Managerialism
Focused on centralized control, managerialism, coined by James Burnham, expands bureaucratic oversight in both public and private sectors. The COVID-19 pandemic epitomized managerial overreach, as policies enforced compliance on an unprecedented scale. Key proponents include BlackRock, the World Economic Forum (WEF), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
- The Zionist Lobby
Primarily concerned with ensuring unwavering U.S. support for Israel, the Zionist agenda overlaps with wokeism in promoting leftist social causes but diverges when these causes conflict with Israeli interests. Organizations like AIPAC and the ADL straddle this divide.
- Big Tech
Initially aligned with wokeism, Big Tech has begun to push back against its most radical elements due to its impact on innovation and competence. Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter (now X) symbolizes this shift, as does growing discontent with DEI mandates within the tech sector.
While these agendas are not inherently unified, they collectively uphold the liberal framework established in the 1960s, even as they compete for dominance within it. I’ve defined these forces in the past as left-liberalism vs right-liberalism, which I covered here: MAGA & Wokism
Parallels to Historical Thermidorian Reactions
MAGA’s role is likened to historical Thermidorian Reactions, where moderates sought to rein in revolutionary excesses to stabilize their regimes. For example:
- The Thermidorians ended Robespierre’s radical Reign of Terror, easing persecution and executions while maintaining the republic.
- Khrushchev’s Destalinization moderated Stalin’s authoritarian rule but preserved the communist system.
Similarly, MAGA seeks to temper the radicalism of woke managerialism without challenging the core tenets of the liberal order. The “Great Awokening,” characterized by intensified DEI policies, identity politics, and cancel culture, parallels the Reign of Terror and Stalinist purges in its ideological zeal. Trump’s 2024 campaign represents an attempt to dial back these excesses and restore a degree of moderation.
Challenges Facing the Thermidorians
Despite its goals, MAGA faces significant hurdles in moderating the system:
- Demographic Shifts: The growing influence of progressive, non-white voting blocs entrenches leftist policies.
- Institutional Entrenchment: Managerial bureaucracies are staffed with ideologues deeply committed to woke principles, making reform difficult.
- Superficial Reforms: Even if MAGA eases censorship and curbs DEI mandates, it is unlikely to reverse structural changes such as demographic transformation or the Civil Rights Act.
Endeavour contends that MAGA’s moderation of woke managerialism may improve short-term conditions but will not address deeper contradictions in the liberal order. For example:
- The Zionist lobby’s support for both Israeli ethno-nationalism and woke policies in the U.S. creates unsustainable contradictions.
- Universalist egalitarianism remains fundamentally flawed, and attempts to reform it, like Gorbachev’s Perestroika in the USSR, may inadvertently accelerate systemic collapse.
While MAGA may temporarily stabilize the United States, it will not fundamentally alter the trajectory set in motion during the cultural revolution of the 1960s. The deeper issues of demographic change, cultural alienation, and institutional decay remain unresolved. Trump’s vision—and likely that of most within the MAGA movement—is rooted in nostalgia for the 1980s and 1990s, a romanticized era cherished by many baby boomers. This idealized vision imagines a time when race was purportedly invisible, the black middle class thrived, and patriotism unified Americans across racial lines. This narrative conveniently ignores the darker realities of that period, including the L.A. race riots and the rise of militant groups like the Black Panther Party. At the same time, this Thermidorian Reaction is being leveraged to solidify control over America’s imperial vassals, with the Anglosphere serving as its primary appendages and European nation-states as key dependencies. Populist movements across Europe echo rhetoric nearly identical to that of MAGA, with many receiving direct or indirect support from individuals and entities affiliated with the movement. Figures like Elon Musk have actively amplified some of these efforts, like promoting the Alternative für Deutschland party and bolstering independent actors aligned with MAGA’s agenda, thereby expanding its influence across the Western world. Not ideal, but a means to an end for sure.
QotD: Michael Moore
But most folks are nicer than that.
And so you can’t help noticing that, for a champion of the little guy, he goes to an awful lot of time and effort to make the little guy look like a chump. Moore has no interest in digging deep into his subjects when all the fun’s to be had on the surface of American life — the squeaky receptionists, the bored security guards, the bland PR women, the squaresville company guy in the suit, the State Police trooper with the infelicitous phrasing, the bozo in the pool hall … His vision of America as a wasteland of gun kooks, conspiracy theorists and perky brain-fried mall clerks will doubtless have them rolling in the aisles in Paris this weekend. In my corner of New Hampshire, there were only four other moviegoers in the theater. But Moore, a great favorite with the BBC, now does his shtick with an eye to the non-American market.
Mark Steyn, “Bowling for Columbine”, Steyn Online, 2002-11-30.
January 29, 2025
German democracy in its death throes as extremely extreme extreme right gets an anti-immigration bill up for a vote
The situation in Germany appears critical, as the extreme right Christian Democrats (CDU) seem to be moving closer to working with the extremely extreme extreme right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) to pass an anti-immigration bill:
Despite everything, the cordon sanitaire against the Evil Hitler Nazi Fascist party known as Alternative für Deutschland really appears to be crumbling. CDU Chancellor candidate Friedrich Merz has set in motion a chain of events he can no longer control. This coming Friday, there is every chance that anti-migration legislation will pass the Bundestag and become law with the help of AfD votes – an eventuality that was unimaginable even seven days ago.
As I reported in my prior post, Merz said last week that he was open to passing anti-migration bills with AfD support. His statement was remarkable, because it violated the most important tabu in German politics, namely that against achieving any outcomes with votes from the AfD. This tabu excludes the political voice of opposition voters and insulates the traditional party system from political change.
Almost from the beginning, there was messaging confusion from within the CDU about Merz’s statement. The reversals, re-reversals, doublings down, and contradictions that have flowed from Merz and his party over the weekend are highly significant. They suggest a panicked CDU leadership that is in disarray, eager to stem the tide of defections to the AfD and desperate to weaken the negotiating positions of the leftist SPD and Green parties. The cordon sanitaire is a wedge driven straight through the right that allows an ever more unpopular left to punch far above their weight and maintain their vice-grip on German migration policy. It was intended to wall out the AfD, but as the AfD has grown stronger, it has only walled in the CDU. Remarkably, the CDU seem to have finally figured this out.
Merz responded to the growing cries of outrage from the left at first predictably – by backtracking. He insisted he wanted not the AfD but the “political middle” to support his anti-migration legislation. In a strange statement on Saturday, he announced that “We have sent the SPD, the Greens and the FDP all the texts that we want to pass next week” so that “We can … agree on how we will vote next week.” He added bizarrely that “The AfD is not receiving these texts.” These “texts” leaked almost immediately; they turned out to be resolutions calling on the Green and SPD government to tighten border security and increase deportations.
January 28, 2025
AI, the iPhone, and other tech whizzery are not the most important inventions ever
Freddie deBoer reacts to so, so many technically illiterate hot takes about this or that latest bit of techno-woo bling being given accolades as “the most important invention”:
Years ago, I think in 2010, Business Insider invested a great deal of hype and hoopla into a list they developed of the one hundred most important inventions of all time. I have tried and tried to find a link, including via the Internet Archive, but no dice; I’ll chalk it up to linkrot, the endless deterioration of the web over time, Business Insider‘s paywall, and their convoluted publishing history. You’ll have to take my word for it that, in a list that was released with great fanfare, they rated the iPhone as the most important invention of all time. Not antibiotics, the plow, or alternating current, not anesthesia or the lightbulb, but the iPhone, which took a bunch of things that already existed (cellular telephone service, email on the go, a touchscreen) and put them in one remarkably profitable package. The Business Insider list isn’t alone in putting the iPhone so high on ranked lists of human achievement. There’s plenty you can find, including a British survey that put the iPhone at number eight, ahead of the internal combustion engine, or this New York Times podcast which puts the iPhone at number three, although the list seems to be partially tongue in cheek. There’s a lot you could ask about such a choice, including epistemological questions inherent to putting a cellphone above the electricity-generating technologies that power it. But my visceral response to this kind of thinking — and even aside from ordinal lists of importance, the smartphone-supremacy attitude is very common — is to say, wow, these people must really enjoy shitting in the yard.
Plumbing — bringing fresh water from one place to another and disposing of human waste via engineering — goes back to antiquity, and you occasionally find claims of affordances like flush toilets in ancient times. Today, modern people in most developed parts of the world have constant access to free-running clean water and toilets that can remove physical waste to a secure processing facility or holding unit, with heated water on demand a very nice extra. That’s largely a 20th-century and forward phenomenon. There were pretty sophisticated sewer systems in Victorian London, the White House got running water in the Jackson administration, and as usual major metropolitan areas in rich countries were ahead of the game generally. But it wasn’t until the 1920s or so that indoor plumbing became a true mass phenomenon, again only in wealthy countries, and it was perfectly common for a soldier coming home from World War II in 1945 to be coming home to a house with a well and an outhouse. It wasn’t until the 1960s that a majority of American homes had indoor plumbing, which means that the beginning of the Space Age overlapped with a period where most Americans couldn’t wash their hands whenever they wanted to. And, as cool as NASA and launching satellites and orbiting the Earth and traveling to the Moon are, their practical impacts on human life pale in comparison to modern plumbing.
So when I read people putting the iPhone as the pinnacle of human ingenuity, I have to imagine that they’re big fans of shitting in their yard. Because if faced with a choice, they’ve indicated that they’d choose their smartphone over their toilet! And that’s quite a choice. It might be worth doing a little reality check in that regard by spending a month without one and then a month without the other. So you see how life feels without your smart phone for 30 days, and then you see what it’s like to not be able to access indoor plumbing for 30 days. You have to piss and shit outside. You have to walk to a well, if you can find one, to get (hopefully clean) water, and then you have to heat it up on your stove if you want it hot. You can’t shower, and taking a bath would be a remarkably laborious process that still left you with tepid water. And this isn’t just a question of comfort but a question of essential hygiene, by which I mean medically-relevant hygine — cholera, typhoid, gastrointestinal worms, scarlet fever, hepatitis, and many more diseases were massively harder to avoid before mass indoor plumbing. I don’t know you, personally, but I feel considerable confidence in suggesting that your desire to avoid those diseases is greater than your attachment to Instagram.
That’s the shitting in the yard test, or the indoor plumbing test, for those who prefer to avoid vulgarity. The test requires you to compare the hype about a particular tech product up against the actual brick-and-mortar changes wrought in the great period of human advancement that began sometime in the late 19th century and ended sometime in the late 20th; the modern flush toilet is just a particularly relevant example. Is Zoom really a bigger part of your life than food refrigeration, a technology that has saved untold millions of lives over the decades by dramatically reducing deaths from foodborne illness? Is cloud storage really a bigger deal than infant vaccines, which save six lives a minute? Does Android Auto really rate when compared to the airbag? You can call these questions obtuse, and some do, but they are natural and necessary things to think about in an era of obsession with artificial intelligence. (By which people mean LLM/neural net-based artificial intelligence, which is a whole other thing.) When you say that AI is the most important invention in human history, you’re making some really, really powerful claims. And yes, you have to then justify saying that AI is more important than, for example, the transistor, self-negating claims that deny the importance of technologies that make large language models possible. But you also have to justify saying that AI is more important than, like, the bowl. By which I mean, bowls. To put food in. To eat out of. Try and spend the rest of your life without ever using another food container and get back to me about whether ChatGPT is more important. Food containers are inventions!
“Like Sulla, [Trump]’s been taking names, and he has a list”
So-called “Sulla” (probably from the time of Augustus) after a portrait of an important Roman from the 2nd century BC.
From the Glyptothek collection via Wikimedia Commons.
The comparison of Trump to the man who prefigured Julius Caesar in the final years of the Roman Republic is, we should all passionately hope, more rhetorical than realistic. Sulla came to power in Rome after being, in his view, illegally removed from his rightful position, and he came wading through the blood of his enemies. He then created a brand new position for himself, using the old and disused title of “dictator”, but piling on far more power than any earlier dictator had held (the irregular election was held in hearing distance of where Sulla’s army was busy executing many of his captured enemies). He used his power to reconfigure and codify the rules by which the Republic was run, to “restore the Republic” to what he imagined was a purer, better nation. He set a precedent that would be followed a generation later by Julius Caesar and the end of the Republic was clearly in sight.
Trump has come again to power, from which he believes he was illegally removed, although he has not been wading through the blood of his enemies. He has been using the powers of his position very actively, but thus far seems to be staying within the bounds of the Constitution (mostly). On his Substack, Glenn Reynolds says that the second Trump presidency will be much worse for his political opponents than if he’d won his second term in 2020, and I think that’s the right analysis:
Well, if you follow me here, you probably don’t need to be told how fast Trump is moving. But I have a few other thoughts here that didn’t fit the column. The main point is that the Democrats’ over-the-top rule-breaking, norm-busting attacks on Trump have backfired bigly. I like to use the Tolkien quote, “oft evil will shall evil mar”, and that happened here for sure.
A second consecutive Trump term would have been better, from my perspective, than Biden’s sham administration, obviously. But it certainly would have been better for the Democrats than this second non-consecutive term. Trump spent the past four years not only planning his comeback, but planning what he would do after his comeback.
In his first term he was too busy running to plan, and he was naïve about how Washington and the federal government – and the Republican Party – actually work. Not so much anymore. I’ve seen people – to continue the Tolkien reference – compare him to Gandalf the White coming back after battling the Balrog, and that’s not a bad analogy.
Then there’s this one, which pretty much sums up what I’m saying here. Like Sulla, he’s been taking names, and he has a list.
And there’s this:
It really is. Trump could get carried away with this stuff at some point, but at present he seems to be settling all family business in a very measured way. Where the opening months of the first Trump Administration were confused – Omarosa in the White House? – this time around he’s realized that personnel is policy, and he’s clearly done a lot of thinking about who his personnel will be. And it’s no coincidence that he’s put a lot of people who were victims of various government agencies in charge of those same agencies. Not much danger of them going native, I think.
A second consecutive Trump term would have delayed the advance of the left/Democrat agenda, and pushed it back in some minor ways, but would probably have ultimately been no more than a bump in the road for that agenda. This Trump term will likely burn it down.
What Britain desperately needs is common-sense pointy stick controls
Britain’s gun laws make Canada look like the wild west, yet the government still wants far greater control over objects that can be used as weapons. The conviction of the Southport murderer, who used a knife obtained through Amazon, seems to have given the British government under Kurt Stürmer Keir Starmer an excuse to crack down even further on any kind of device with a sharpened blade rather than the criminals who wield them:
Southport murderer Axel Rudakubana.
Photo released by Merseyside Police.
“Time and again, as a child, the Southport murderer carried knives. Time and again, he showed clear intent to use them,” U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer wrote in a piece for The Sun about Axel Rudakubana, who admitted murdering three girls and injuring others at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class last year. “And yet tragically, he was still able to order the murder weapon off of the internet without any checks or barriers. A two-click killer. This cannot continue. The technology is there to set up age-verification checks, even for kitchen knives ordered online.”
What Starmer mentioned but glossed over is that Rudakubana was three times referred to a program intended to divert people from radicalization and terrorism before authorities lost interest in him. At the time of his arrest, he had a copy of an Al Qaeda training manual, which led him to being charged and sentenced for terrorism. He also possessed the deadly poison ricin that he’d manufactured himself in sufficient quantity to conduct a mass attack.
Rudakubana was a human bomb waiting to go off. But Starmer focused not on officials’ failure to pay attention, but on knives — edged tools that are among humans’ earliest and most important creations.
“Online retailers will be required to ask for two types of ID from anyone seeking to buy a knife under plans being considered by ministers to combat under-age sales after the Southport murders,” reports Charles Hymas of The Telegraph. “Buyers would have to submit an ID document to an online retailer and then record a live video or selfie to prove their age.”
It’s difficult to see how an ID check is going to stand between those planning mayhem and tools first crafted 2.6 million years ago in their most primitive form and still used by people every day. My dentist forges knives in his backyard for fun. One of my nephews turns files into knives on a grinding wheel. Scraping an appropriate material against a stone will give you an edge and a point. ID checks don’t seem like a barrier to people with bad intentions and the ability to make ricin in their bedrooms.
A Case History in Ridiculously Restrictive Policies
This is why the U.K. strikes many Americans as the reductio ad absurdum of policies that demonize objects rather than targeting bad actors. Opponents of authoritarian laws ask: What will the authorities do once they’ve made firearms difficult to legally acquire, and crime continues? Will they ban knives?
The answer from the U.K., which already has restrictive gun laws, is yes, they will ban knives — or at least impose access and carry restrictions and consider forbidding blades to have points. The result has been a black market in smuggled and illicitly manufactured firearms that will inevitably extend to knives. Harmless people are now arrested for having Swiss Army knives in car glove compartment or for possessing locking knives on the way home from jobs that require them. And the country’s crime problems continue to grow.
That’s bad enough, but U.K. authorities, like those elsewhere, also prefer to surveil the entire population to detect anything they could call a danger to public order, rather than focusing on specific individuals harming others.
“There are now said to be over 5.2 million CCTV cameras in the UK,” according to Politics.co.uk. “Surveillance footage forms a key component of UK crime prevention strategy,” but “the proliferation of CCTV in public places has fueled unease about the erosion of civil liberties and individual human rights, raising concerns of an Orwellian ‘big brother’ culture.”
The British government also monitors online activity to an extent that Edward Snowden deemed it “the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy.”
That surveillance turns up comments, jokes, and rants authorities just don’t like. “Think before you post,” the government warns people. “Content that incites violence or hatred isn’t just harmful – it can be illegal.” But the authorities enforce a broad definition of unacceptable material. People have been arrested for dressing as terrorists for Halloween, for making intemperate online remarks, and for just getting things wrong when posting on the internet (they’ll need a big paddy wagon for that one).
January 27, 2025
If you’ve ever thought society is run by psychopaths … you may be right (but you’re not entitled to compensation)
Spaceman Spiff discusses normal people, the mimics who pretend to be normal and often seem to work their way into positions of power and influence (not every mimic is a psychopath, but all psychopaths are mimics), and those who resist the mimics (and therefore also the psychopaths):
There are different types of people we can observe around us. Normals are the great mass of humanity. They don’t think too hard. They just get on with it. This is the majority.
Most Normals seek some confirmation from outside themselves, typically opinions and views from trusted sources. Many seem averse to thinking at all and almost none are independent thinkers in any meaningful sense.
This includes social mores. The majority look towards others for their cues on how to act which makes them easy to manipulate.
Social validation in differing forms is the controlling mechanism. What is the other fellow doing? That is what I must do.
Those doing the controlling are different. Many leadership positions are populated by people who display abnormal traits.
Cluster B disorders in particular are everywhere. Narcissistic, antisocial and histrionic behaviours are visible in many senior levels of society from politics to major charities.
These disordered people largely copy normal human emotions and behaviours. They are acting because they don’t experience life as the rest do.
Everything is a performance which provides enormous advantages to them as they climb their way up, but has the drawback of being fake.
We can call these people Mimics for convenience.
Today’s societies largely reflect the ascendency of Mimics as they seem to run many institutions we rely on, a situation referred to as a pathocracy.
The extreme version of the type is a psychopath, someone lacking conscience or empathy and therefore unable to enjoy the full human experience. Psychopaths are damaged people unencumbered by concerns with morality or social convention, so able to quickly get on in life.
Cluster B types have similar deficiencies that aid them in a myriad of ways and are more common than psychopaths. The end result is the same, leadership positions dominated by those with distorted thought patterns who quickly learn the majority of people prefer to be led and told what to do.
Some can resist
Both Normals and Mimics swim in the same waters. Normals because they are shaped by society and seek its approval. Mimics because they are faking it. They must scan the horizon at all times to ensure they are making it work. Their act is designed to reflect normality and the trophies it can bring so it must be calibrated to what works with an audience.
A need to seek approval draws these groups together. An external dependence they assume is universal if they even bother to think about it at all.
They are forever locked into a world dictated by the views and whims of others.
But there are individuals who can be defined by the fact they are much more self-sufficient. They do not seek external approval and are not subject to the judgment of others.
Everyone who resisted the Covid propaganda would be an example. This includes anyone who initially succumbed to the pressure but quickly worked out something was amiss.
The chief characteristic of this group is resistance to social pressure because they reject the need for external cues to guide behaviour.
The most extreme example of this phenomenon in society are schizoids, those indifferent to praise or criticism, largely motivated by inner drives and impervious to many forms of social stress.
As with the psychopaths, schizoids represent the extreme end of the insulated spectrum, but everyone resistant to today’s aggressive social controls share some schizoid traits to a greater or lesser degree.
We can call these the Resistant, individuals not dependent on external validation and naturally averse to being controlled. Independent thinkers who instinctively insulate themselves from the unthinking Normals who make up the bulk of humanity.
Because of their mental distance from the herd this group are often unmoved by the narratives controlling much of society.
Unlike the Mimics, the Resistant do not seek to control others and it is control that defines the West today, especially the ruling classes who fear the Normals waking up. They must be relentlessly managed via approved narratives lest they make the wrong decisions in life.
Mimics are naturally drawn to control since they are faking it. They run the constant risk of being discovered as fakes. Imposter syndrome rules their actions which drives the vigilance we commonly observe in their sensitivity to criticism and their enraged responses to being challenged. All this to stave off scrutiny.
It is the most broken who can be persuaded their fractured view of life is some grand vision that escapes the rest of us. Such people are everywhere and they are comically easy to control by appealing to their need for superiority which is why control is so attractive to them in turn. They assume it is a universal phenomenon.
Those who shun control are then a threat to their identity, hence the aggressiveness with which the independently minded are pursued. They cannot be left in peace, a very striking observation of today, the zeal with which nonconformists are targeted even when minding their own business.
Davos is so over, even the high-priced escort girls are giving it a miss this year
Elizabeth Nickson enjoys a nice, rich dish of schadenfreude as the “elite” of the Davos gab-fest dimly begin to realize that their high times are over:
It was a great ride while it lasted, hey, lefties? But it’s over now. You have been left in the screech forward of history. That stink? It’s the burning wreckage of your “ideas”. All you weasely little people like the slender tight-mouthed beta-males at the Biden White House, or the cross-dressing central banker Mark Carney who is laughably trying to be Prime Minister of Canada after bankrupting not one but TWO countries, are history. Like Rory Stewart, the regime apologist in the U.K., who says things like “there’s something really dark and nasty behind the right“. Like Macron, Jacinta Ardern, Trudeau, like the nasty little snake people at Davos right now trying to extract yet more blood and treasure from us. KNEEL and take your SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS OR YOU ARE RACIST.
You sold your birthright for power. You sold us for power. You sold the future for power. When you get to heaven this is what you should say: I failed, I ruined three generations. I need to be broken down into my component parts and remade into a new being, with a new soul. The old one is stained with the killing of innocents. Like the thousands dead from your obsession with psychopathic primitive Muslims, like the child migrants in cartel sex slavery.
All your projects are in ruins. All your toys lie broken. Your failure is one for the Ages. It will be discussed in heaven and hell for millennia. You have bankrupted the world. Even the freaking oligarchs abandoned you. Even the central bankers decided they badly needed growth or they and their heirs will be living underground for the next five hundred years, hunted like the ghastly little demons they worship. Trump means growth. Big big growth.
You probably don’t know who Rory Stewart is, but he is useful as an example. Not for him, the careful measured sentimental meaningless pap that comes out of every leftie politician’s mouth. Nope, he’s a gabber. He loves attention, in fact, he never ever shuts up, so he is their interlocutor, their dark shrunken snobbish soul.
Stewart is a “writer” and a Westminster gadfly, “much loved” in the British way of saying, “he’s so cute”. He advises, he hangs out with Afghan warlords, he speaks at gatherings of the great and the good. He runs for office, he writes editorials. He is a product of the British elite educational system, and the administrative left, which is to say the outfit that until Monday ran the world. And he has an ego the size of his big stretchy mouth.
This is what he had to say about Trump on Monday. Imagine a rich spoiled debutante drawling this and you’ll get his character.
“He’s so lowering.” By which he means he brings down the tone. Like for instance, the interviewer says Trump tweeted at Gavin Newsom they day after the fires, “Congratulations Gavin New Scum.”
Now, of course, that is how I think of Newscum.
[…]
“We need ideas”
“We need a plan for growth”
“We need to explain how we’re going to sort out the economy”
“and society”.
Buddy, your lot has been in power since Thatcher.
Someone said recently that the reason the English do absolutely NOTHING about those raped, sodomized, beaten little girls is that the upper classes view the lower as less than human, so they don’t care. They don’t care about the freezing old ladies in council houses, the fact that women can’t walk down streets safely, or the farmers not being able to feed people.
For these benevolent rulers protected in their rural retreats and policed neighbourhoods, the multicultural ideal is more important than their fellow citizens.
These are the people who have taken the ideas of Marxism, merged them with predatory capitalism, and from their offices and through countless conferences and meetings a year, try to distribute goods “fairly”, as they determine. Which country shall rise, which shall be invaded, whose resources do we want next? What delicious war shall we start?
That’s what they mean when they say “our democracy”. It’s theirs and nobody else’s.
For more than half a century they have focused on impoverishing middle America. Not the upper middle class, no, they’re fine. Like western Europe, they were broken early and are happy servants, mouthing legacy media propaganda like good little serfs with nice houses and a chance for their children to join the betas taking their orders from the grim oligarchs behind the scenes.
January 26, 2025
Andrew Sullivan reluctantly welcomes Trump’s actions to undo Biden’s radical agenda
I have to admit that I didn’t expect to see Andrew Sullivan saying nice things about Donald Trump, and I’m sure it caused him much personal distress to have to write this:
A quick image search turns up plenty of examples of Presidents proudly showing off freshly signed documents. Usually these will be laws passed by the legislators but sometimes (especially in January 2025) it’s rule-by-decree on steroids.
To say I have conflicted feelings after a week or so of Trump’s return to power would be an understatement. Some of his early decisions remind me why I couldn’t vote for him. His decision to pardon even those among the J6 mob who assaulted cops jibes with his own instinctual love of vigilante justice against anyone in his way. That’s why his egregious withdrawal of security detail from John Bolton and Mike Pompeo is so instructive. Trump is no longer fond of these men, so he has all but invited a foreign hostile government to murder them. His embrace of anti-police vigilanteism at home is matched by his removal of sanctions on the violent settlers in the West Bank this week. He’s a thug who loves thugs.
But for all this, a large part of me is exhilarated by this first week. Yes, exhilarated. Liberated even. I wasn’t quite expecting this, but I can’t deny it. I suddenly feel more oxygen in the air as the woke authoritarianism of the last four years begins finally to lift. And let me put the core reason for this exhilaration as simply as I can. On the central questions of immigration and identity politics, what Trump is proposing is simply a return to common sense — a reflection of the sane views of the vast majority of Americans, who support secure borders and oppose unfairness in sports and medical experiments on children. My conservative soul is glad.
Joe Biden brazenly lied when he promised moderation in 2020. Check out my column on his initial flurry of executive orders four years ago this week:
[Biden] is doubling down on the very policies that made a Trump presidency possible. In every major democracy, mass immigration has empowered the far right. Instead of easing white panic about changing demographics, Biden just intensified it.
All Trump had to do was wait. But Biden’s EOs on “equity” were even more extreme, effectively ending any pretense of color-blindness in American law and society. Biden, I wrote four years ago, was:
enforcing the Ibram X. Kendi view that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination”. And he’s enforcing it across the entire federal government and any institution the federal government funds.
It was a direct and proud embrace of systemic race and sex discrimination by the federal government. It was accompanied by a massive shift in the private sector toward illegal race and sex discrimination in hiring, firing, and promotion. This was buttressed by actual mandatory workplace indoctrination in critical race, gender, and queer theory. This was authoritarian brainwashing, accompanied by blatant race discrimination.
Biden also decreed by executive order that the postmodern notion of “gender” would henceforth replace biological sex in determining who is a man or a woman. He mandated that any school or university getting federal funds should remove distinctions between boys and girls — even in sports and intimate spaces. His administration fully backed the medically irreversible transing of children with gender dysphoria, lied about the science, and secretly urged removing all age restrictions on transition — subjecting countless gay and autistic children to the permanent destruction of their future ability to have kids or even an orgasm.
Biden was, in these respects, an unremitting extremist; and almost all Trump is doing this week is unraveling this insanity. The one actually radical act from Trump is rescinding LBJ’s “affirmative action” directive of 1965. Reagan wanted to do this, but he faced bipartisan opposition. One justification of the feds moving from anti-discrimination to being pro-discrimination was because, in LBJ’s words, African-Americans “don’t have their 12 percent” in federal employment, i.e. their proportion in the country at large. Today, African-Americans are almost 19 percent of federal employees — much higher than their population share. The MSM won’t frame it this way. But that’s the truth. And Trump’s EO language suggests he now has a staff shrewd and determined enough to push back. This week was more regime change than shit-show.
It is, however, far too soon to declare the war on left authoritarianism over. It is far from dead; it has replaced Christianity entirely for many, as we saw with Bishop Budde at the National Cathedral this week, or the Oscars giving an unpopular film 13 nominations just so they can give a Best Actress award to a biological man. The Ivy League will do everything it can to keep discriminating against members of “oppressor classes.” The MSM is too far gone to reform itself. If you want proof of that, notice that the NYT has two emphatically “queer” columnists pushing gender woo-woo, and it just fired the only writer in that publication, Pamela Paul, who helped expose the medically baseless transing of children.
Not only will the Trump EOs end the systemic racism in the federal government and its contractors, his people are also aware of attempts to foil color-blindness by their own woke bureaucrats, and will be vigilant. More importantly, the new administration will deploy the DOJ to restore equality of opportunity in the private sector. After so many major corporations have been openly bragging about their race and sex discrimination these past few years, they sure have been asking for it.
German democracy under further threat from extremely extreme extreme right
German voters seem to be under the misapprehension that their votes should have something to do with the composition of the government. Because the voters increasingly cast their votes for the extreme right, government in Germany finds itself under incredible pressure to actually pay attention to the pestiferous voters:
This is a potentially huge story. It could be the beginning of a sea-change in German politics, that is how big it is. At the same time, it could be also be nothing. We’ll have to wait and see.
For those who don’t want to read my ramblings (this will be a longer post), I offer this TL;DR: The cordon sanitaire against Alternative für Deutschland is showing signs of serious rupture. The centre-right CDU are suddenly – without warning – reconsidering their long-standing tabu against cooperating with the “extreme right” opposition. It is this singular tabu that has kept the traditional German party system frozen in amber despite a massive rightward political shift across the West. Should the cordon sanitaire crack even a little, its days are numbered. The simple arithmetic of parliamentary majorities would sooner or later make the most noxious political fixtures of current-year Germany, like the Green Party, broadly irrelevant at the federal level. The German left would be deprived at once of almost all their power.
I am sceptical that this can really be happening. Yesterday, I would’ve expected a change like this in 2029 at the earliest. Many are saying (justifiably) that the CDU should not be trusted, that they will say anything to get elected and that nothing will come of their promises. All that may well be true. Words, however, matter all by themselves: In 2019, tacit cooperation in Thüringen between the CDU and the AfD unleashed an entire national scandal; the press hyperventilated for weeks. Now the federal leadership of the CDU is openly pledging to pass legislation with AfD votes in the Bundestag, and major CDU-adjacent journalists are writing long opinion pieces about why this is just the right thing to do.
This development arises directly from the pressure of mass migration, and specifically from the four recent deadly migrant attacks I have covered in the past year:
- On 31 May 2024, an Afghan migrant to Germany named Sulaiman Ataee killed the policeman Rouven Laur and severely wounded five others in a knife attack in Mannheim.
- On 23 August 2024, at a “Festival of Diversity” in Solingen, a Syrian migrant to Germany named Issa al Hasan killed three people and wounded eight in an apparently Islamist attack for which the Islamic State claimed responsibility.
- On 20 December 2024, a Saudi migrant to Germany named Taleb al-Abdulmohsen drove a rented BMW through the Christmas Market in Magdeburg, killing 6 people and wounding 299.
- On 22 January 2025, an Afghan migrant to Germany named Enamullah Omarzai killed two people and wounded three in a knife attack in Aschaffenburg.
Mannheim, Solingen, Magdeburg and now Aschaffenburg: That is the catalogue of migrant terror pounding like remorseless waves on the brittle outdated politics of the Federal Republic.
These attacks have become a symbol for the entire mess migrationism has wrought. The dead and the wounded count for a lot in themselves, but they have also come to represent the dwindling social cohesion, the stretched financial resources and the erosion of domestic security that accepting entire foreign populations into one’s nation entails. All of it is for nothing, nobody has any solutions and there is no end in sight.
In liberal democracies, policies have to be normie-friendly, and mass migrationism was normie-friendly only until enough migrants crossed our borders to make their presence felt socially and culturally. Mass migration isn’t normie-friendly anymore. It’s become a foul political poison.
Mass migration is also a very hard nut to crack. We have outsourced a great part of our border security and migration policy to highly bureaucratised international authorities and a tangle of high-minded humanitarian legislation that leaves us little room to manouevre. Solving mass migration will require a great deal of political resolve and a willingness to pick fights with globaloid EU pencil-pushers. All of this meant that, until Mannheim, Alternative für Deutschland had a near-monopoly on hardline anti-migration politics. The unrelenting series of attacks by people who have no business being in Germany, together with the collapse of the government and the impending early elections in February, have left the centre-right CDU desperate to stake their own claim to this increasingly central political space. That, and perhaps a healthy dash of the Trump Effect, are the forces currently pushing the traditional party system of the Federal Republic to the brink.
January 25, 2025
“How can an active program of ending censorship; of lauding colour blind appointment on merit; … be Fascism redux?”
As discussed yesterday, one of the many “hitting the ground running” acts of Donald Trump at the beginning of his second term in office has been to issue executive orders to dismantle a lot of progressives’ favourite policies, and many of them are calling it “fascism”:
Trump-the-Presidency 2.0 has already proved to be rather different from the 1.0 version. It is not merely that this time around he won the US popular vote. It is that he has “hit the ground running” with a whole stack of executive orders.
Watching the reaction to this has become — to put it mildly — a somewhat bifurcated experience. Lots of people, who were relieved at his victory, applaud what they see as a return to common sense; a rejection of censorship; a rejection of a politics intrusive into any and all aspects of life.
Conversely, there are also lots of — typically very online — people who see it as Fascism redux, as the equivalent of the end of Weimar Germany being live-streamed. How can an active program of ending censorship; of lauding colour blind appointment on merit; of removing DEI commissars from the US Federal Government; that includes appointment of women and persons of colour to senior positions; be Fascism redux?
The short answer is: it isn’t. The question then becomes, how can it be seen as such? This is where the long-run consequences of anti-discrimination law kicks in.
Anti-discrimination law creates a legal-bureaucratic structure that operates on the basis that the general citizenry is continually hovering on the edge of wrong think (racism) and wrong act (discrimination). The presumption becomes — without all this active effort — racism and discrimination will be unleashed.
This is nonsense. Anglosphere countries have low levels of racism and anti-discrimination norms have become widely accepted. Where there are discrimination issues, they are mostly problems of cultural distance that have a significant element of practicality from differing expectations between groups.
Nevertheless, it is very much in the interests of the legal-bureaucratic structure that anti-discrimination law sets up that propensities to wrong act and wrong think be seen as real, and endemic. Even better, is if the problem is seen as even larger than originally conceived.
So, we get a double expansion. The first expansion is in the range of protected groups. This provides a broadening of the social ambit of the potential wrong thinking (racism, misogyny, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia …) and of the potential wrong acting (who might be discriminated against).
As this moral dimension becomes so elevated—not least because there are so much employment involved, but also as considerable social leverage is created by for those who can set what is, or is not, legitimate action and speech—there is expansion of what constitutes wrong think and wrong act. There is large, indeed expanding, ambit for intellectual and other entrepreneurs to identify new sins of discrimination, new sins of unequal consideration, new ways wrong think propagates, and new ways of signalling one’s rejection of such sins.
It is better still if uttering true things becomes a wrong act, expressing wrong think, for people are prone to do that, to notice things. Of course, if you start trying to shun, shame and punish folk for expressing true things, for noticing things, you are likely to generate quite a lot of resentment. This is useful, for such pushback just further “establishes” the propensity to wrong think and wrong act. Hence Transphobia and Islamophobia becoming such markers of wrong think—there are so many true things to not notice.
There is even a term for someone who notices inconvenient patterns — far right. A term that has become the classic thought-terminating cliché in the service of not noticing.
The stabbings will continue until morale improves
Sebastian Wang discusses the stabbing attacks in Southport, Merseyside last year:
On the 29th July 2024, a man went on a stabbing spree in Southport, Merseyside, killing three children and injuring ten others. The attacker, Axel Muganwa Rudakubana, the son of Rwandan immigrants, was arrested at the scene. By all accounts, the attack was shocking not only in its savagery, but in its attendant circumstances. Witnesses report that Mr Rudakubana shouted slogans as he killed that suggested he was an Islamic terrorist. Almost at once, social media was filled with questions and with speculation. Also, protests began in several northern cities – Manchester, Leeds, and Bradford, for example – where demonstrators blamed the Government and the ruling class for immigration policies that had made the killings both possible and likely.
Instead of considering these protests and promising to address the causes of the crime, the British Government and the legacy media focussed on managing the narrative and silencing comment on the immigration policies that had allowed Mr Rudakubana’s family into the country. Keir Starmer, the new Prime Minister, seemed more worried about potential “violence against Muslims” than the actual brutality of Mr Rudakubana’s attack on English people. “For the Muslim community I will take every step possible to keep you safe,” he said in his first public statement on the killings. On the protests he added: “It is not protesting, it is not legitimate, it is crime. We will put a stop to it“. His focus was not on the victims, but on ensuring that no one questioned the system that had allowed this to happen.
In the days after the attack, several men were arrested for spreading what the government called “misinformation” online. Their crime? Posting details about Mr Rudakubana’s background and motivations — details that turned out to be broadly correct. Despite being right, these men were prosecuted and imprisoned under Britain’s hate speech laws. The most recently convicted, Andrew McIntyre, was sentenced earlier this month to seven and a half years in prison for postings on social media. Peter Lynch, a man of 61, was sent to prison last August for two years and eight months for the crime of shouting “scum” and “child killers” at the police. Last October, he hanged himself in prison. I am told he was seriously “mistreated” in prison. British prisons for many years have been overcrowded. Room was found for these prisoners of conscience after the Government began releasing violent criminals.
The injustice of this is glaring. These men were punished not because they lied, but because they spoke approximate truths the government wanted to suppress. Their imprisonment sends a clear message: in modern Britain, it’s better to be wrong on the side of the Government than right and against it.
A Carefully Managed Narrative
The media played its part in the cover up. At first, Mr Rudakubana was described, without name, as “originally from Cardiff“. It took days before we were told he was a child of asylum seekers from Rwanda. Even then, the coverage was carefully balanced by a picture of him as a respectable schoolboy – not at the beast in human form shown by more recent photographs.
Only much later, when the story had faded from the headlines, did the real facts emerge. Mr Rudakubana was not just a troubled individual. His phone contained materials linked to terrorism and genocide, and his actions appeared to have an ideological motivation. Yet by the time these details came out, they barely caused a ripple. The public had been moved on to the next distraction.
It’s hard not to assume that the British media was fully in on gaslighting the public about the accused murderer, when you compare the photo that almost universally was used in the time before the trial and a more recent image:
Say what you like about Axel Rudakubana, the slaughterer of three English girls under ten years old, but — unlike the British Prime Minister, the Home Secretary, the Liverpool Police and most of the court eunuchs in the UK media — he appears to be an honest man:
It’s a good thing those children are dead … I am so glad … I am so happy.
He has always been entirely upfront about such things, telephoning Britain’s so-called “Childline” and asking them:
What should I do if I want to kill somebody?
Judging from his many interactions with “the authorities” (including with the laughably misnamed “Prevent” programme), the British state’s response boiled down to: Go right ahead!
It seems likely that the perpetrator of Wednesday’s Diversity Stabbing of the Day — the Afghan “asylum seeker” who killed a two-year-old boy and seriously wounded other infants in the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg — is also “so happy”. Like Mr Rudakubana, the “asylum seeker” deliberately targeted a gathering of the very young — in this case, a kindergarten group playing in a municipal park. Like Mr Rudakubana, the “asylum seeker” did not just deliver sufficient stab wounds to kill: he plunged his knife into each target dozens and dozens of times. Like Mr Rudakubana, the “asylum seeker” was well known to the authorities: he had been detained for “violence” at least thrice.
Did these guys also enjoy it? From our pal Leilani Dowding:
For the benefit of American readers, being stabbed in Asda, Argus and Sainsbury’s is like being stabbed in Kroger, Costco and Wegman’s. As you may recall, a DC jury awarded climate mullah Michael E Mann a million bucks because someone unknown gave him a mean look in Wegman’s supermarket. No one stabbed in a UK supermarket will get a seven-figure sum: it’s increasingly a routine feature of daily life — per Sir Sadiq Khan, part of what it means to live in a great world city.
Sir Keir Stürmer and every outpost of the corrupt British state have lied to the public about every aspect of the Southport mass murder since the very first statements by the Liverpool chief constable passing off the killer as a “Cardiff man”. Her officers knew within hours that the Welsh boyo who loved male-voice choirs was, back in the real world, an observant Muslim in possession of the Al-Qaeda handbook and enough ricin to kill twelve thousand of his fellow Welshmen. But they did not disclose this information for months — not until freeborn Britons minded to disagree with Keir Stürmer’s Official Lies by suggesting that this seemed pretty obviously merely the umpteenth case of Islamostabbing had been rounded up, fast-tracked through Keir’s kangaroo courts, gaoled for longer than Muslim child rapists, and in at least one case driven to his death. Does Sir Keir feel bad about the late Peter Lynch? Or does he take the same relaxed attitude to his victims as Axel Rudakubana?
It’s a good thing that that far-right extremist is dead … I am so glad … I am so happy.
Even now, six months on, the organs of the state are still lying — although, with all the previous lies being no longer operative, Stürmer & Co have had the wit to introduce a few new ones. For example:
‘A total disgrace’ that Southport killer could buy a knife on Amazon aged 17, says Cooper
That would be Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary — which is the equivalent of what Continental governments usually call the Minister of the Interior, because that’s where the knives penetrate.
QotD: “Big budget cuts!”
For the simple reason that the budget process in Washington is pervasively dishonest, as I’ve explained in interviews with John Stossel and Judge Napolitano. Here are the three things you need to know.
- The politicians created a system that automatically assumes big increases in annual spending, called a baseline.
- When there’s a proposal to have spending grow slower than the baseline, the gap between the proposal and the baseline is called a cut.
- It’s like being on a diet and claiming progress because you’re gaining two pounds each month rather than five pounds.
Defenders of this system argue that programs should get built-in increases because of things such as inflation, or because of more old people, which leads to more spending for programs such as Social Security and Medicare.
It’s certainly reasonable for them to argue that budgets should increase for these reasons.
But they should be honest. Be forthright and assert that “Spending should climb X percent because …”
Needless to say, that won’t happen. The pro-spending politicians and interest groups like the current approach because it allows them to scare voters by warning about “savage” and “draconian” spending cuts.
Daniel J. Mitchell, “The Media’s Pervasively Dishonest Coverage of Trump’s New Budget”, International Liberty, 2020-02-10.
January 24, 2025
When the law schools went woke
In the New English Review, Bruce Bawer reviews Ilya Shapiro’s book Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites:
As Donald Trump begins his second term as president with a mandate to undo the damage done to the country by leftist ideology, incompetence, and corruption, one of the many stables that most need cleaning up is academia – which is, of course, the source of virtually all of the most misbegotten ideas that have sent America astray.
To be sure, some parts of academia are more desperately in need of reform than others. As a rule, the elite universities, especially those in the Ivy League, are more poisoned by the new progressivism than most state schools, especially those in the heartland. Humanities and social science departments are worse off than STEM departments. And as Ilya Shapiro points out in his important new book, Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elite, the introduction of woke thinking into law schools is singularly damaging.
Yes, writes Shapiro, it’s unfortunate enough if, say, a sociology faculty is selling ideology rather than fact, for it represents “a loss to the richness of life and the accumulation of human knowledge”. But for a law school to head down the same road is far more perilous. For these schools turn out the lawyers, politicians, and judges who will serve as “the gatekeepers of our institutions and of the rules of the game on which American prosperity, liberty, and equality sit”.
And the sad fact, alas, is that in too many American law schools today, a preponderance of students are the products of classrooms in which, as Shapiro puts it, “the classical pedagogical model of legal education” has been abandoned in favor of “the postmodern activist one” – a process that has been underway for decades but that was greatly accelerated during the Covid pandemic and in the wake of the irrational nationwide hysteria over the killing of George Floyd. Hence those students swallow such dangerous notions as critical race theory and its corollary, critical legal theory, and therefore believe that colorblind justice, due process, and freedom of speech aren’t desiderata but tools of white supremacy.
Lawless has its roots in Shapiro’s own hellish encounter with this ideological leviathan. It happened like this: on January 26, 2022, the day that Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer announced his retirement, Shapiro tweeted that the “best pick” for a replacement was Sri Srinivasan, who, if appointed by President Biden, would be the “first Asian (Indian) American” on the Court. Yet because Biden had promised to name a black woman, lamented Shapiro, “we’ll get [a] lesser black woman”. After sending off the tweet, Shapiro went to bed – and awoke in the morning to discover that his comment had caused pandemonium in the legal community, where he was being viciously attacked as a racist and a sexist. Shapiro immediately deleted the tweet and issued an apology for expressing his opinion in such an “inartful” manner.
But that wasn’t the end of it. As it happened, Shapiro, who had just left the Cato Institute, was scheduled to take up a new position at Georgetown University’s school of law in five days. And unluckily for him, the dean of the law school, William M. Treanor, was a wimp of the first order, the kind of craven academic administrator who’s quick to cave to the noisiest and most radical elements. On January 27, Treanor issued a statement in which he represented Shapiro as believing that “the best Supreme Court nominee could not be a Black woman”.
This was the height of disingenuity: it was clear that Shapiro simply meant that Biden shouldn’t limit the pool of possible nominees on the basis of sex or race – a view shared by three-quarters of the American public. But as Shapiro would soon discover, under the current dispensation at woke law schools “what matters is not the objective meaning of a given statement or even its intent but its effect – not the facts but the feelings”.
So it was that Treanor ordered an elaborate and expensive “investigation” by a top-dollar law firm into Shapiro’s tweet – yes, an investigation into a tweet. Ludicrously, it took more than four months – during which Shapiro’s new job was put on hold. In the end, the “investigators” concluded that Shapiro had indeed expressed an offensive opinion but permitted him to start work at Georgetown. Wisely, Shapiro decided that, given everything that had happened, Georgetown would not be a comfortable fit for him – at least not with Treanor at the helm – and chose instead to accept a job offer from the Manhattan Institute, where he works today.
