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The New Neo Posted on by

(1) The mystery of woke capitalism. I first really noticed the enormous extent of corporate leftism during the lockdowns, and then I noticed it even more after the Floyd riots and Black Lives Matter.

(2) There’s a lot of angst on the right about these amnesty bill talks between Tillis and Sinema. “Another terrible betrayal!” is the cry. At the moment, though, I think it’s all just theater. I don’t think there’s time to pass it nor do I think there’s the stomach to pass it in terms of Republican senators allowing it to not be subject to the filibuster. But conservative voters have PTSD – and rightly so – on this issue.

(3) But..but…I thought election fraud has never happened.

(4) Jordan Peterson certainly can pack a lot of thoughts into a fairly short statement. This segment that I’ve cued up is 33 seconds long. Have a listen:

(5) In Iran, Khamenei’s sister speaks out against him. I have no idea what influence if any she has, but the article says she has a very long history of criticizing the theocratic government of Iran. She is calling “on the widely-feared Revolutionary Guards to lay down their weapons,” and that highlights one truth of which all tyrants are aware: their power to enforce their iron rule rests on the willingness of rank-and-file police and/or military to enforce their policies. Once the enforcers refuse to do that, the jig is up.

(6) Musk has indicated that Twitter may have put its thumb on the scale in Brazil’s recent elections too.

Comments

Roundup — 35 Comments

  2. The (on this site and elsewhere) oft-discussed “Long March” might not have been suspected by all observers to penetrate, over time, such former bastions of traditional American values as the military, the churches, collegiate and professional athletics, as well as corporate America, yet this has happened in an alarmingly short period. One should not forget that SBK, massive funder of Democrats and beloved by Mad Maxine, appeared on the covers of Forbes and Fortune, nor should one be sanguine that any institution captured by “woke” madness can easily be returned to sanity. On this topic, the writings of the brilliant young Vivek Ramaswamy are well worth reading.

  4. If you don’t have a wall to keep people out of your country, then it becomes necessary to build a lot of little walls within your country, i.e. gated communities.

    Everyday life becomes a whole lot less pleasant for middle class people. Go out for an evening, and you have to give the kid loitering outside the restaurant or theater a few bucks to look after your car. You have to constantly be on your guard for muggings or carjackings. Home invasion robberies are commonplace. If you have a cleaning lady, be careful: theft is the least of your worries. She could have male relatives who are in gangs. But such is life in a 3rd world country.

    If they were doing this only because of cheap labor and future votes it would be merely corrupt. But beyond a certain point you begin to suspect that this is about roughing up the little people, to show them who’s boss. “Oh, you want something done about illegal immigration? Less legal immigration too? Well screw you, you’re going to get a lot more of both!”

  5. Kate wrote: “On Thom Tillis, we certainly have PTSD with him in NC. He runs as a conservative and turns lukewarm at best when he goes back to DC.”

    Kate, as a fellow North Carolinian may I share a Thom Tillis vignette? I had just returned from 3 years in West Africa as the Section Chief of a fairly robust immigration division, and offered to brief Tillis on immigration issues. I thought that as both a subject matter expert and a constituent who voted for him he would appreciate the conversation. He jumped at the opportunity, and I would have what I was told would be about 1/2 an hour. Senators actually can be busy, so I graciously accepted.

    When I arrived at his office on Capital Hill we exchanged pleasantries for a few minutes, and I then began what I thought would be a substantive briefing. He gave me about 90 seconds, then hustled me to his special background for photo ops, and rather quickly rushed me along. He had no interest, actually, in hearing anything about immigration from a frontline diplomat with hands-on experience.

    I don’t know who will primary Tillis in his next election, but whoever it is has my vote.

  8. Education media, social media, big corporations all sucked into Leftism.
    We are probably soon doomed to a one party state until the Bolsheviks start killing off each other for power.
    Wouldn’t put a bet yet on immigration not passing, oh they want to

  9. Woke capitalists are too egotistical to heed Lenin’s warning about selling collectivists rope…

    No greater threat to democracy exists than indifference to electoral fraud.

    Like an arsonist is to flame, those who lust for power are drawn to the ‘opportunities’ that collectivist ideologies provide.

    “one truth of which all tyrants are aware: their power to enforce their iron rule rests on the willingness of rank-and-file police and/or military to enforce their policies.” neo

    Which is why everyone of the bastards should suffer the same fate as the deposed tyrant. A just correction for tyranny must in the aftermath, include mass trials and executions.

    Given the left’s electoral ‘success’ in America, why would they not apply the same ‘techniques’ in every ‘democracy’?

  11. yes, they replaced the burr in the saddle, how many times have we pretended that synema was principled (even for a leftist) it gets rather tiring, she was still initially better that fidel o’ flake, but not by much

  14. I listen to Dr. Peterson’s podcast. They are almost always a blast. Although he is “interviewing” his guests, he regularly stuffs these high density thoughts in between his questions. It is hard not to laugh sometimes at his intensity, but he seems so earnest.

  15. Jordan Peterson’s comment is brilliant and worth printing out for full effect:
    __________________________

    it’s so interesting because the Marxist types
    tend to claim that power motivates
    everything     and I always think of that as
    more of a confession as an observation
    it’s like well your ideology sets you up
    such that you’re tempted constantly to
    use power because you believe that
    people are infinitely malleable and they
    should be made over in the image of your
    ideology and since you believe that
    there’s nothing but power that opens up
    the door for you to use power to obtain
    your whatever it is     you’re attempting to
    do hypothetical Utopia usually results
    in the destruction of many people
    instead which indicates to me that maybe
    that was the point to begin with

  16. He gave me about 90 seconds, then hustled me to his special background for photo ops, and rather quickly rushed me along. He had no interest, actually, in hearing anything about immigration from a frontline diplomat with hands-on experience.

    No candy in talking to you. He’s interested in donors.

  17. is that your final answer

    James suroviecki@ Hunter Biden owns the copyright to his emails (and images). Abandoning the computer in the repair shop did not change that, nor did it give the repair-shop owner a right to the computer’s data. So what was the legal justification for allowing the publication of the emails?

  22. #3. Fetterman, Hobbs, Warnock, Patty Murray, and even Joe Biden; all exceptionally uncharismatic, mediocre candidates. How did they win their elections? Superior messaging? Brilliant TV ads. Scintillating debate performances? Lots of rousing townhalls? Knocking on many, many doors?
    Nope. They kept a low, profile, avoided debates as much as possible, held few townhalls, didn’t knock on people’s doors, had run of the mill TV ads, and generally ran lackluster campaigns.

    So, how did they win? Mass voter hysteria? Their opponents were horrible campaigners? They raised a lot of money? The fix was in?

    Money can’t necessarily buy an honest election. Their opponents were not poor campaigners. Mass hysteria is a possibility. The tastes and actions of voters today seem almost unexplainable to me. But that’s just me. What does that leave? Well of course, the fix was in.

    The question is, how do we overcome it? The American Thinker article doesn’t show any ideas except to try to beat the Dems at their own game and grow a spine. Yeah, that can help. But I think we will need a tech wizard who can ferret out and expose exactly what the Dems are doing. Kinda like Musk is doing with Twitter. Well, it’s a thought.

  23. The question is, how do we overcome it?

    JJ:

    I doubt there is one thing to do. We will do and are doing many things. Which add up. We will find weaknesses. Plus more and more Americans are getting fed up.

    Sure, we can strategize and I’m all for that. But a lot of it comes down to cultural shifts and odd individuals like Trump and Musk.

  24. @ sdferr > “Is Perkins Coie still Twitter’s lawfirm, or has Perkins Coie been fired?”

    Good question.
    Like Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi, I was gobsmacked to learn that Musk didn’t fire Jim Baker on Day One.

  25. So, how did they win?

    There’s a segment of the population who would vote Democratic if they nominated a dead dog in the road. That’s then supplemented with vote fraud. Now, why they vote Democratic is an interesting question.

    IMO, the two parties are aggregations of people of different cultural and psychological dispositions. People who yap about ‘the free sh!t coalition’ are paying no attention to the relative dimensions of different sorts of transfer programs and subsidies. People who yap about ‘the poor’ are also not paying attention to the actual distribution of preferences among the impecunious. People who yap about ‘racism’ are invariably investing positive value in one person’s alienation and antagonism while impugning the character of someone else for their alienation and antagonism (or, more commonly, their imagined alienation and antagonism).

    As we speak, the wealthy and the professional-managerial types are predominantly Democratic. This is now extending into sectors where it hasn’t been seen before – see Gen. Milley and Capt. Clueless at Kroger. Democratic administrations at all levels have been waging assaults on two sectors where the managerial set is most resistant to regime ideology – protective services and extractive industries. It’s a reasonable inference that this segment is animated by cross-national cosmopolitanism and has a Gnostic contempt for ordinary people.

    Also, as we speak, blacks vote overwhelmingly Democratic and their expressed preferences are exceedingly insensitive to specific circumstances. Within the Democratic Party, black voters are given to puzzling preference cascades of a sort which benefited Hellary in 2016 and Biden in 2020. Note that in the 1950s, what data we have indicates that about 30% of voting blacks favored the Republicans, a share in line with that of various other urban ethics. The Republican Party has never been antagonistic to blacks qua blacks, so this seems odd. Of course, partisan Democrats make all sorts of accusations contra Republican politicians and Republican voters, nearly all of them transparent nonsense. It doesn’t seem to occur to people making these accusations that the voting preferences of blacks don’t have much to do with anything white people or Republicans did do or did not do. Here’s a suggestion: it has to do with how black people look at the larger society and what politicians say or refrain from saying which provides emotional validation to the black electorate.

    Another group who vote overwhelmingly Democratic are single women. Some women who are single are so due to where they are in the life cycle, but a great many are single due to dispositions and behaviors which impede the formation of salutary and enduring relationships with men. Of course, there are men who have problems forming such relationships with women, but dissatisfied men in this regard receive no encouragement from any quarter to subscribe to a culture of complaint – not from peers, not from parents, not from any authority figure, not from the purveyors of the kultursmog . There’s a small countercurrent of manosphere writing nearly all found on blogs and produced by amateurs who make their living doing something else.

    The parties differ crucially in their appreciation of American life and the culture of complaint they nurture. Republicans mobilize around fairly obvious and palpable problems which impede people from enjoying mundane life – tax burdens, street crime, and (now and again) the antics of public employees. Politicians, lawyers, purveyors of media, public employees, the professoriate, and the criminal class sum to about 12% of the population. Democrats manufacture client groups each of which require the intervention of guild professionals to protect them from ordinary people living their lives. This includes an escalating and ever changing menu of p’s and q’s imposed on ordinary people, who offend just by breathing and using vernacular English.

  26. Kate. re “On Thom Tillis, we certainly have PTSD with him in NC. He runs as a conservative and turns lukewarm at best when he goes back to DC.”

    ref. Revelation 3:16
    So because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will vomit you out of My mouth.

  28. I am still amazed and greatly disappointed that this is still not understood by so many. https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/12/thought-for-the-day-john-marini-on-trump.php

    There are way, way too many who think that Trump has a cult of followers. And way, way too few who understand that he was the ONLY politician willing to speak the truth about the ongoing destruction of our country.

    Why is this so hard for people to grasp? Why are so many pundits on the right failing to appreciate the plight of so many working class Americans?

    Speaking of PTSD and other psychological problems — I think the biggest problem we face in America today is that the talking class on the right is afraid to acknowledge the very real evil that confronts us and the scope of the war that must be fought. The ostriches on the right think that America will return to the time of Reagan if we just nominate nicer candidates in elections. The problem isn’t stolen elections. It’s that people got upset. The problem isn’t that Democrats have combined with the news media and big tech to create a real Big Brother. It’s that Trump’s tweets weren’t nice. The desire to ignore the awful reality we face must be overwhelming.

    Science (including medicine) is broken. Along with all the rest of academia and our K-12 education system. Expensive and dishonest. Incompetent and corrupt.

    The Big Lie dominates. From BLM and ‘women don’t lie’, to global warming and covid nazis, ‘most honest election ever’, Russian collusion, Hunter’s laptop, to ‘white supremacy is our greatest terror threat’ and J6 insurrection.

    It’s all BS all the time. Everything is a lie. The FBI serves as the Democrats’ gestapo and the CIA as their KGB. The DOJ and liberal judges have entrenched a separate justice system depending on political affiliation.

    Why do so many corporations go Woke? Because the left will wreck them, if they don’t. The right doesn’t punish anyone for anything. It’s not a hard calculation for businesses to make.

    The war is nearly over, the destruction is nearly complete, and the wimps on the right are focused on mean tweets.

  29. BTW — Overton window movement observation

    Until Trump had the guts to call out the news media for being fake news lefty propagandists (remember how outrageous that was?), the wimps on the right weren’t even willing to speak that basic truth. Because of Trump’s courage, at least that simple reality is now generally acknowledged. Only took half a century.

    The greatest single problem facing America is that those who say they love it are cowards. They’re so afraid they can’t even bring themselves to accurately describe what is happening before their eyes. The country is defenseless because its defenders won’t even acknowledge that the fight is real. The defenders are dishonest cowards. They focus on joining everyone else in beating up Trump because there are no repercussions for doing so and their friends on the Left give them pats on the head when they do.

  30. Senator Sinema, (of Arizona), is leaving the Democratic party, + is now declaring herself as an independent.

    From an article I’ve read- it doesn’t sound like she’ll change how she votes in the Senate, which has been mostly for the Democrats’ positions, but- by the numbers, it means that the Democrats [don’t have 51 Senators] in the Congress, anymore.

    Here’s a link:

    https://www.politico.com/news/2022/12/09/sinema-arizona-senate-independent-00073216

  31. Stan: “They’re so afraid they can’t even bring themselves to accurately describe what is happening before their eyes.”

    This. This is what I meant in a previous thread (the one about how the FBI successfully suppressed information about Hunter Biden’s laptop) by “stating a case” to the American people. Has any Republican politician said something like this, or even close to it? “It is clear that the FBI has turned into a homegrown version of the Gestapo or the Stasi. It has interfered in elections, knowingly colluded with foreign intelligence services and assets to undermine a duly elected president, refused to comply with Congressional oversight, and violated the civil rights of American citizens. When it is not malevolent, it is incompetent. When it is not incompetent, it is corrupt. Its continued existence is a betrayal of the Constitution and a threat to the freedom and personal security of ordinary Americans. It needs to be defunded and dismantled.”

    I can’t think of any who have even come close, although I believe Rand Paul and Thomas Massie would be capable of it. They have the necessary bluntness.

    Instead, we have this:

    https://republicans-judiciary.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/2022-11-18-HJC-GOP-to-Wray-FBI.pdf

    That’s good. I hope they follow through and that heads roll. But it’s not nearly commensurate with the national emergency that you and I see and what the times demand in the way of leadership. We need a Lincoln or a Churchill. Instead, we have trimmers.

  32. Hubert:

    You can’t think of anyone who even came close? A 15-second search of mine located this article mentioning some. And that’s just one article found almost instantaneously. There are almost certainly more.

  34. Neo: you’re right, I was wrong (or lazy–lunch break). Jeff Duncan, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, and Rick Scott have said it. Good for them, by the way. I wish they spoke for a critical mass of their colleagues.

    But note this elaboration by Gaetz:

    ‘“The antidote has to be not one more damn penny for this administrative state that has been weaponized against our people in a very fascist way,” said Gaetz.”

    Good.

    “However, in a statement to The Hill, Gaetz said his comments “do not call for defunding the FBI” but for “reformation of the worst elements of the administrative state. Congress should use the power of the purse to achieve that goal.””

    Ah.

    “He added, “Taxpayer money shouldn’t fund any agency that targets its political opponents.””

    So taxpayer money shouldn’t fund agencies that target their political opponents, but he’s not actually calling for defunding the FBI. Just for using the power of the purse to “reform” it. I’m old enough to remember Congress using its power to reform the FBI and other intelligence agencies in the 1970s. It didn’t stick.

  35. huxley @ 1:18 am:

    Well said. Not everything that’s happening is apparent. History has been shaped by “odd individuals as you mentioned.

    Culture shifts and often in response to the excesses of the present. But that takes time. I want results NOW. 🙂

    Art Deco @ 5:23 am:
    Interesting summary of our cultural voting groups. Shows how far we have gone from a society mostly centered on families and the dignity of work and responsibility. I’m too emersed in the family/work-oriented part of our society to understand those other cultural wings.

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