A Racial Crossroads, or Wishful Thinking?

Helen Andrews, "The Racial Crossroads"

American race relations are at a crossroads. In the years since our current racial bargain was struck in the 1960s, our country has coped with its contradictions and imperfections by the very American method of muddling through. That has worked for a long time, but soon it won’t work anymore. We will have to choose between one path and another. There are two reasons for this, and they are unavoidable.

The first reason is demographic. Our racial bargain was made for a country that was biracial and almost 90 percent white. It will no longer work for a country where white people are a minority and the non-white population includes multiple races, including some that were hardly present in the United States when the racial bargain was struck. There were fewer Chinese Americans in 1960 than there are Egyptian Americans today and fewer Mexican-born Americans then than Venezuelan-born Americans now.

For Generation Z, the beneficiaries of our system of racial benefits are no longer a marginal 10 percent of the population. They are a demographic majority. Non-white Zoomers—and, to an extent, white women as well—benefit from both demographic predominance and an explicit or tacit boost in any head-to-head competition with white men, which, in combination, means that affirmative action is no longer a matter of white Americans sacrificing the occasional promotion. It means white men in particular are effectively shut out of many prestigious fields and institutions, especially in the lower rungs.

This is both unfair and unworkable. Unfair, because a white Zoomer does not feel toward the son of an Indian computer programmer or the daughter of a Mexican illegal immigrant the same moral obligation he feels toward the descendant of slaves. Unworkable, because the challenge of making every institution match our national demographics becomes more difficult as our diversity gets more diverse. Diversity used to mean making sure there was a black person in the room. Now it means finely calibrating multiple demographics, which requires putting race at the forefront of personnel decisions.

The second reason race relations are approaching a crisis is that our racial bargain was supposed to be temporary. When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, it was quickly agreed that some racial favoritism was justified to compensate for the black minority’s unequal starting point. The temporary nature of this favoritism was crucial to the deal. The imperative to treat citizens equally under the law was the moral claim on which the whole civil rights movement was based. Race-based remedies were only “transitional,” promised one chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and would “fall into disuse once the job is done.”

At the time, it was sincerely expected that black and white outcomes would converge. A study by the Urban Institute in 1971 extrapolated black progress over the previous eight years and predicted exactly when the catch-up would occur for various metrics such as poverty rates, college completion, and infant mortality. The one that would take the longest, life expectancy at thirty-five years, was predicted to reach white levels in 2019.

In 2003, Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor famously wrote, “We expect that twenty-five years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today,” in her decision in Grutter v. Bollinger upholding affirmative action at the University of Michigan. There were a handful of conservatives at the time who would have told her that this was optimistic, based on the available data, but these voices were marginalized as politically incorrect. The conventional wisdom was with Justice O’Connor.

Today, two years away from Justice O’Connor’s twenty-five-year deadline, the conventional wisdom has changed. Everyone can see that the long hoped-for convergence has not materialized. Affirmative action is still necessary to achieve colleges’ desired racial diversity. We have created a black middle class, but blacks from wealthy households on average still have lower SAT scores and lower credit scores than whites from poorer households. Large disparities in violent crime rates still persist, as do disparities in wealth, in part because houses in black neighborhoods still have persistently lower home values.

Both the left and the right have registered the stubbornness of these racial gaps. The recent popularity among liberals of radical authors such as Ibram X. Kendi, who proposed an amendment to the US Constitution prohibiting “racial inequity” and a new government agency to implement it, was a symptom of this disillusionment. As equality of opportunity recedes as a plausible goal for the civil rights regime, having failed to arrive after three generations, there is a growing market for pessimists like Kendi who want to shift the goal to equality of outcome.

So that is the situation we face: The old racial bargain is breaking down, due to a combination of changing demographics and a dawning realization that racial outcomes are not going to converge any time soon. One possible path forward is to throw out the old racial bargain and establish a new one based on equality under the law. The other possible path is to accept permanent racial favoritism at every level of society.

“The old racial bargain is breaking down.”

Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) - White Supremacy Resurgent!

White supremacy comes in all forms. https://t.co/w4qyN2Lip7

— Donovan Richards Jr. (@DRichardsQNS) July 20, 2026

from Google AI:

Black activists criticized DSA Founder Michael Harrington for prioritizing economic "class-first" socialism over distinct civil rights issues. Prominent leaders argued his approach downplayed systemic anti-Black racism. They also condemned his close ties to labor unions during the 1968 New York City teachers' strike, which pitted white-dominated unions against Black community control initiatives.

Core Criticisms

• Class Reductionism: Critics argued that Harrington’s economic focus on abolishing poverty erased the unique, lived experience of racial discrimination. They felt his framework reduced all Black suffering to economic inequality. 
• Institutional Alliances: Harrington aligned closely with conservative labor leaders. Black activists viewed these unions as barriers that blocked Black Americans from jobs and fair housing. 
• The 1968 Teachers' Strike: During this strike, Harrington supported the teachers' union. Many Black activists viewed the union's actions as a direct assault on Black self-determination in local schools.  

The Core Divide

Harrington believed that racial equality was impossible without first changing the capitalist system. He argued that a multiracial coalition, built primarily around the labor movement, was the only way to achieve lasting social change. 

In contrast, Black activists asserted that racism was deeply woven into American society. They argued that focusing solely on class failed to dismantle the white supremacy that existed in all aspects of daily life.

Historical Perspective

Harrington was a civil rights advocate who marched in the South and worked with Bayard Rustin. However, as the 1960s progressed, the Black Power movement emerged. Activists in this movement increasingly rejected the old socialist strategy of making civil rights wait for a broader economic revolution.  

Dr Martin Luther King, Jr to Michael Harrington, DSA Founder:

"Why, Mike, we never knew we were poor until we read your book."

Blue Collar - 4%

Return of the White Socialist Class Essentialist Vanguard?

...or DSA Succumbing to the Neo-Colonial Identitarianism of the Economically Neo-liberal Democratic Party?

Victims of the Capitalism of the World, Unite!

Become a Surplus Salaried Capitalist Toady!

Opportunities to Suck Up to Billionaires are Limited.

Reserve your DEI quota position in the Intersectional PMC Hierarchy today!

ps- Unionized Worker Class Essentialism is for suckers!

White Worker B*tches - "Suck it Up"!

The Self-Enslavement of the Capitalist Miser and His Society-Destroying Fake Philanthropic Liberation

 

from Google AI:

Bataille's concept of sovereignty as it relates to the part maudite

For Georges Bataille, sovereignty is not a legal or political authority, but a radical, anti-utilitarian state of being characterized by freedom, play, and loss. It is defined in opposition to the modern world of work, where life is reduced to a series of means-to-an-end.

The General Economy and 'La Part Maudite'

In The Accursed Share (La Part Maudite), Bataille argues that the universe operates on a "general economy" of overflowing energy. Driven by the sun, life produces an inevitable surplus of energy that must be expelled. Because this excess cannot be fully absorbed by productive growth or reproduction, it becomes an "accursed share"—a surplus destined for waste.

Sovereignty Through Loss

Societies and organisms process this unavoidable excess through either productive expansion (war, colonization) or non-productive expenditure (luxury, sacrifice, art, and eroticism). Sovereignty is achieved only when we embrace the latter. To be sovereign means to exist beyond utility, necessity, and the fear of death. While a "servile" life is entirely dedicated to work, survival, and accumulation, the sovereign individual or society actively asserts its freedom by lavishly and unproductively wasting their excess energy in the "miraculous reign of unknowing".

Key Mechanics of Bataille’s Sovereignty

Bataille explored how this concept manifested historically and anthropologically:

• Sacrifice: The deliberate, symbolic destruction of life or wealth, best exemplified by the Aztec sacrifices or Native American potlatch ceremonies. These acts waste the accursed share to achieve a transcendent, spiritual connection with the sacred.
• Unproductive Expenditure: The pursuit of luxury, art, and eroticism. Because the ultimate end of all "utility" is uselessness, engaging in purposeless spending is the ultimate realization of freedom.

For further reading on how Bataille contrasts "general economy" with modern capitalism, you can explore the full text of The Accursed Share.

Real Sovereignty Disdains Rational Utility! 

It's the SuperEgo NOT the Ego!

Did the New Left Sell Their Birthright for PMC/ DEI Surplus Salaries?

Genesis 25: 19-34 (KJV):

19 And these are the generations of Isaac, Abraham's son: Abraham begat Isaac:

20 And Isaac was forty years old when he took Rebekah to wife, the daughter of Bethuel the Syrian of Padanaram, the sister to Laban the Syrian.

21 And Isaac intreated the Lord for his wife, because she was barren: and the Lord was intreated of him, and Rebekah his wife conceived.

22 And the children struggled together within her; and she said, If it be so, why am I thus? And she went to enquire of the Lord.

23 And the Lord said unto her, Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels; and the one people shall be stronger than the other people; and the elder shall serve the younger.

24 And when her days to be delivered were fulfilled, behold, there were twins in her womb.

25 And the first came out red, all over like an hairy garment; and they called his name Esau.

26 And after that came his brother out, and his hand took hold on Esau's heel; and his name was called Jacob: and Isaac was threescore years old when she bare them.

27 And the boys grew: and Esau was a cunning hunter, a man of the field; and Jacob was a plain man, dwelling in tents.

28 And Isaac loved Esau, because he did eat of his venison: but Rebekah loved Jacob.

29 And Jacob sod pottage (cooked lentils): and Esau came from the field, and he was faint:

30 And Esau said to Jacob, Feed me, I pray thee, with that same red pottage; for
I am faint: therefore was his name called Edom.

31 And Jacob said, Sell me this day thy birthright.

32 And Esau said, Behold, I am at the point to die: and what profit shall this birthright do to me?

33 And Jacob said, Swear to me this day; and he sware unto him: and he sold his birthright unto Jacob.

34 Then Jacob gave Esau bread and pottage of lentiles; and he did eat and drink, and rose up, and went his way: thus Esau despised his birthright.

Soros Realism BOUGHT the Democratic Party!

On Dervy's Guilt-Pride Denialism...

Dervy repeatedly claims that since he feels no "guilt" for America's historical enslavement of African-Americans, he can have no guilt-pride associated with it.  But does he also believe that white Americans like himself have no historical "debt" to black people for their former enslavement?  Does he feel no "obligation" to make restitution (or pay reparations) for their social suffering in the form of social justice?  If he does, Dervy's "guilt/ schuld" is simply manifesting itself to his own mind as a "debt", a debt that is still owed and which must be repaid (with interest).  And this is an obligation that he is proud to acknowledge.  It's what obsessively compels him to behave in the manner of a Woke Social Justice Warrior zealot, and constantly virtue signal the fact that unlike other whites who refuse to acknowledge their social debt, and that he is a loyal ally in Black's quest for restitution.  And Black History Month serves as a perpetual reminder of this historic American debt , a debt that must be repaid, can NEVER be repaid, and NEVER be forgotten!  "Never Forget!"  ...slavery (and white racists)... or in the case of Germany and Jews, the Holocaust and anti-Semitism!  And for this reason alone (acknowledgement of a debt), RACE must perpetually remain an ESSENTIAL feature of American (and German) life.

Slavoj Žižek and Alenka Zupančič, "Debt Inc.: Guilt, Credit, and the Algorithmic Future" (an excerpt)

Debt, Guilt, and Their Ambiguity

As Freud shows, for example, in his analysis of obsessional neurosis (the case study of the “Ratman”), debt plays a key role in this structure: obsessional subjects experience themselves as always indebted to the Other—be it the father, the Law, God, or the analyst. They are trapped in a paradox: on the one hand, they want to pay their debt, to be free; on the other, they endlessly postpone payment, because if the debt were ever settled, the Other’s desire would be extinguished—and that is unbearable. The obsessional solution, therefore, is to keep the debt alive. This gives them a sense of control over the Other’s desire (“I still owe, so the Other still wants (something from me)”), albeit at a very high cost, which can almost completely paralyze life, as we vividly see in the case of the “Rat Man.” Freud extends the fundamental logic of this compulsive structure to the functioning of religion in general, understanding the latter as a kind of “universal obsessive neurosis”: religion is not simply a set of beliefs and intimate faith; it operates as a system of practices and rituals aimed at managing anxiety and guilt in relation to the Other. Since, for Freud, there is at the same time no such thing as a completely non-pathological psychological structure, obsessive neurosis can be understood as one of the possible structures of “normality.”

In a slightly different register—one in which debt also resonates with guilt (as it does directly in the German language, where Schuld means both debt and guilt, though this connection is culturally more universal)—it is interesting to observe how this plays out in classical tragedy, and later in modern tragedy. As Hegel notes in his Lectures on Aesthetics, the force of the great tragic characters of antiquity lies in the fact that they have no choice: they are what they will and accomplish from their birth onward, and they are this with all their being. For this reason, Hegel continues, they do not in any way claim to be innocent of their acts. On the contrary, the greatest offence one can commit against a great tragic hero is to regard him or her as innocent; for great tragic characters, it is an honor to be guilty.[1]

To be guilty—to carry one’s particular symbolic debt—is to be, in the emphatic sense of the term. In this configuration, guilt pertains to being in a double sense: not only are we already guilty by virtue of existing (like in the tragedy of Oedipus), but guilt/debt also serves as the proof—the manifestation—of our being. Roughly speaking, we can see this logic at work later as well, in most of the classical tragedies.

In this respect, one of the most significant shifts that takes place with modernity is the idea that this symbolic debt, which once equaled (and justified) our being, can be taken away from us. In his reading of modern tragedy, as exemplified by Paul Claudel, Jacques Lacan points out that this is precisely what befalls his tragic heroines—particularly Sygne de Coûfontaine from the Coûfontaine trilogy.

“We are no longer guilty just in virtue of symbolic debt. … It is the debt itself in which we have our place that can be taken away from us, and it is here that we can feel completely alienated from ourselves. The ancient Ate doubtless made us guilty of this debt, but to renounce it as we can now means that we are left with an even greater misfortune: destiny no longer applies.”[2]

This possibility that arises with modernity is a possibility of a more radical alienation, which can lead to something like the sacrifice of the sacrifice itself: we can be asked or expected to sacrifice everything we have for a cause, but the next level, so to speak, is when we are then asked to sacrifice/betray this cause itself, the very thing for which we were willing to sacrifice everything. In this case, we don’t just lose everything we have; at the horizon looms the loss of everything we are.

In all these examples, debt functions as our attachment to the Other, who also bestows upon us our being. Yet we can also look at this from the other side: although the relation is not simply symmetrical, the Other too seems to depend on our debt—or guilt—for its own existence and prosperity. This, for instance, is something Nietzsche repeatedly exposed in his writings, taking Christianity as the model par excellence of this dynamic

Christianity, and particularly its Catholic strain, devised a complex system for forgiving and atoning for our sins, while simultaneously maintaining our debt to the Father and the Son who made such forgiveness possible. A sin that is forgiven, in this logic, amplifies rather than abolishes our debt.

This is the reason what Nietzsche insisted on the importance of the distinction between forgiving and forgetting: forgiving is a way of sustaining a bond—and with it, a debt. Forgiveness has a perverse way of entangling us even further in indebtedness. To forgive always somehow implies “paying” for the other, and thus turning the very act of injury and its forgiveness into a new kind of “engagement ring.” God forgives our sins by paying for them—by paying for them with his own flesh.

This, for Nietzsche, constitutes the fundamental perversity of Christianity: while forgiving, it simultaneously waves before us the cross—the instrument of torture, the reminder of the one who suffered and died so that we might be forgiven, the memory of the one who paid for us. Christianity forgives, but it does not forget.

One could say that, with the eyes of the sinner fixed on the cross, forgiveness creates a new debt in the very act of forgiving. It forgives what was done, but it does not forgive the act of forgiving itself. On the contrary, the latter establishes a new bond and a new debt. It is now infinite mercy—understood as the capacity for forgiveness—that sustains the infinite debt, the debt as infinite. The debt is no longer brought about by our actions; it is produced by the act of forgiving those actions. We are indebted for forgiveness.[3] This is the reason why Nietzsche counters the concept of forgiving with the concept of forgetting (“a good example of this in modern times is Mirabeau, who had no memory for insults and vile actions done to him and was unable to forgive simply because he – forgot”).

Christianity thus invented a singular way of maintaining and amplifying our debt—through the Savior paying for it, and through the Church forgiving our sins in His name. At the same time, for doctrinal reasons, the Catholic religion long struggled with—and resisted—the idea that today appears as an entirely natural precondition of debt, or its internal moment: namely, interest. More precisely, it resisted the monetary expression of the increase of debt, which it nevertheless very much practiced on the symbolic level.

Credit means that when we receive or borrow something—especially when we borrow money—our debt grows with time, and we must return more than we were lent. We pay for the time during which the Other holds us “in credit,” and we pay, so to speak, for the very access to debt. The notion that money could generate (more) money—that value could emerge from nothing but time—stood in deep conflict with theological orthodoxy. For this reason, in the Middle Ages only non-Christians (Jewish, and later Lombard or Florentine bankers) were permitted to lend at interest, often acting as intermediaries. Of course, this also meant that Christians could use them to lend money at interest without themselves being held accountable—thus giving rise to the classical antisemitic topos of the usurious “Jew.”

Why Arguing with Leftists (and Zionists) is a Waste of Time

 

Gary Gindler, "From Lenin to Marcuse to Anti-Zionism"

Zionists are outside "the group" therefore all bets are off in opposing them.

In early 1907, Vladimir Lenin published accusations that some Menshevik organizations were “selling seats in the Second Duma to the Cadets” (Constitutional Democrats).  In other words, he accused the Mensheviks of colluding with a liberal bourgeois party rather than letting workers’ candidates run.  The Mensheviks filed a formal complaint, prompting Lenin to face slander charges before a Party Court (Control Commission).  The trial took place just before the opening of the Fifth (London) Congress of the Russian Communists (Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, RSDWP), and Lenin delivered a lengthy oral defense.

In his defense speech, Lenin clearly delineated the boundaries of permissible and non-permissible behavior during the communists’ political debates.  He maintained that polemics inside a party must remain within certain bounds — personal insults, “poisoned weapons,” and exaggerations are undesirable because they harm party unity.

However, for polemics against a political enemy (or former party members who break away from the party), these limits no longer apply.  There are no formal “party rules” constraining communists in such discussions.  Lenin says, “Such wording is calculated not to convince, but to break up the ranks of the opponent, not to correct the mistake of the opponent, but to destroy him, to wipe his organization off the face of the earth” (Lenin [1907], 1977, p. 425).

In other words, while debating a political enemy, communists do not seek to uncover the truth.  Lenin proposed that communists must conduct polemics that are not designed to affect or convince their opponents.  That is simply because the communists strive to destroy the opposition.  Truth be told, the communists’ polemics are aimed not at their opponents, but at a larger audience.  Lenin advocates for “destroying the enemy organization, by rousing among the masses hatred, aversion, and contempt for this organization” (p. 428).  Thus, communists are expected to provoke disgust in the audience toward their opponents, potentially even before the public fully understands the communists’ arguments.

Finally, Lenin discussed the hypothetical case of the Bund (Jewish non-Zionist socialists of the Russian Empire) seceding from the RSDWP.  He states, “Could anyone then seriously raise the question of the impermissibility of pamphlets calculated to instill in the Bundist working masses hatred, aversion and contempt for their leaders, and describing these leaders as bourgeois in disguise, as those who had sold themselves to the Jewish bourgeoisie and were trying to get their men into the Duma with the latter’s assistance, etc.?” (p. 429).  The conclusion is that Jews (or any other Party subset) must be treated with the utmost respect if they follow the Party line.  However, once they are out, all bets are off.

This line of thought is the logical continuation of the left’s worldview, adapted for “civilized” political debate.  In fact, Lenin proposed the principle of asymmetric tolerance and asymmetric civility: Tolerance (and debate norms) applied only within a defined “community of the correct line.”  Outside this defined community, polemics become a tool for political annihilation rather than physical destruction.  In ten years, however, when the Bolsheviks came to power in Russia, intolerance also entered the physical domain.  Basically, Lenin’s instrumental view prioritizes revolutionary efficacy over universal decorum.

There are notable conceptual parallels (rooted in the broader Marxist-Leninist tradition) between Vladimir Lenin’s approach and Herbert Marcuse’s essay, “Repressive Tolerance” (1965).  Both thinkers advocate for the selective application of liberal and democratic principles to advance revolutionary goals.  Both justify intolerance or harsh rhetoric toward perceived enemies of “liberation.”  This shared logic reflects a commitment to vanguardism, where an enlightened minority guides (or suppresses) the masses against “reactionary” forces.

Marcuse was explicit that such actions might involve suppressing speech that sustains “reactionary” power structures, creating space for “progressive” change.  Marcuse insisted on the “withdrawal of tolerance before the deed, at the stage of communication in word, print, and picture.  Such extreme suspension of the right of free speech and free assembly is indeed justified only if the whole of society is in extreme danger.  I maintain that our society is in such an emergency situation, and that it has become the normal state of affairs” (Marcuse 1965, pp. 109–110).

There are several key features of the Lenin-Marcuse approach that led directly to cancel culture, Jewish persecution, and double-standards applied uniquely to Israel.  First, the selective application of norms for “Us vs. Them.”  Second, vanguard elitism.  Thirdly, they provide a rationale for suppressing opposition.  These features stem from a common Marxist heritage, but Marcuse — a critical theorist from the Frankfurt School — adapts them to the post–World War II West.

As a result, Lenin and Marcuse created a framework in which the modern dialogue about Jews and Israel — particularly on the left — became highly asymmetrical, moralizing, and often exclusionary.

When the Soviet Union turned against Zionism after 1948 (especially after 1967), this Leninist model shaped the entire discourse.  Zionism was redefined as a hostile ideology, equated with racism, imperialism, and colonialism, and therefore outside the bounds of permissible debate.  Soviet media, academia, and propaganda were mobilized not to argue with Zionists, but to discredit and delegitimize Zionism entirely — an “exterminative polemic” in Lenin’s sense.

That shaped the official language: Zionism was portrayed as an “aggressive racist ideology,” not a legitimate nationalistic movement of Jews.  Jewish voices who dissented inside the Soviet Union were treated not as dialogue partners, but as traitors or agents of imperialism.  In other words, Lenin’s asymmetric rule for polemics provided the intellectual permission structure for non-dialogue, for campaigns aimed at destroying the very legitimacy of the opposing view.  That is why, to this day, the left demonizes Zionists and humanizes anti-Zionists.  The international left makes sure that every Israeli victory is a defeat.

Israel is increasingly classified as an oppressor — a “settler-colonial state” and an “apartheid regime.”  Therefore, speech defending Israel is treated as harmful, reactionary, and illegitimate — not simply wrong, but dangerous.  The result: deplatforming campaigns, boycott movements, and a rhetorical climate in which Zionist perspectives are considered outside the boundaries of acceptable discourse.  It comes off as a modern echo of Marcuse’s call for “intolerance toward movements from the right.”  It is classic Marcusean logic: tolerance is conditional on emancipatory potential, not on neutral procedural fairness.

Together, Lenin’s polemical ruthlessness and Marcuse’s selective tolerance create a potent framework for anti-Jewish and anti-Israel rhetoric.  If the former supplies the aggressive language (e.g., “Zionist genocide” as an unquestionable truth), the latter justifies silencing counterarguments as “repressive.”  This hybrid profoundly shaped leftist movements from the 1970s onward, evident in Europe’s radical left (where anti-Zionism spills into antisemitism) and U.S. campuses, where BDS campaigns invoke Marcusean intolerance to delegitimize Israel.

In today’s polarized debates — post–October 7, 2023 — these ideas underpin calls to deplatform Zionists, blending revolutionary zeal with cultural gatekeeping, often at the expense of a nuanced dialogue on Jewish self-determination.  This Lenin-Marcuse approach entrenches itself in leftist echo chambers, where Lenin’s “extermination” of dissent meets Marcuse’s “liberating” suppression.

References

Lenin, V. ([1907] 1977). Speech for the Defence (or for the Prosecution of the Menshevik Section of the Central Committee) Delivered At the Party Tribunal. In Collected Works (4th ed., Vol. 12, pp. 421-432). Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Marcuse, H. (1965). Repressive Tolerance. In B. M. Robert Paul Wolff, A Critique of Pure Tolerance. Boston: Beacon Press.1:23 PM 3/18/2026

 Of course Zionists, Christian and other, also use these same tactics against Free-Thinkers like Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Megan Kelly, Glenn Greenwald, et al.  They parochially treat their ideas as Anti-Semitic (and not Universal) and therefore dangerous and, much like the Academic and Campus Left, de-platform freethinking speakers whenever possible.

 

"Entryism" par Excellence!

Selected Notes on Puerto Rico's History: From Spanish Possession to US Commonwealth

from Google AI:

As a result of the Spanish-American War (1898) and the subsequent Treaty of Paris, the United States acquired control over the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico. Spain relinquished sovereignty over these territories, marking the U.S.'s rise as a global power with overseas possessions. While Cuba gained independence, it was under U.S. influence.

The U.S. Senate approved the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico in 1952 to grant the island greater local autonomy—including the right to draft its own constitution—while maintaining U.S. sovereignty, aiming to neutralize rising independence movements and deflect international criticism of American "colonialism". This new status served to provide self-government by consent while keeping the island under the territorial clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Key reasons for the creation of the Commonwealth (Estado Libre Asociado) included:

Political Self-Determination: Championed by Puerto Rico's first elected governor, Luis Muñoz Marín, the arrangement allowed for a local constitution, a popularly elected governor, and a legislative assembly, fulfilling demands for self-rule without full statehood. 

International Image & Communism: The move provided a "convincing answer" to charges of imperialism and colonialism, bolstering the U.S. position in the United Nations during the Cold War by showing a, "non-self-governing territory" achieving self-government.

Economic Strategy: It helped manage the economic situation and allowed for continued, stable, and close economic relations with the United States.

Legal "Compact": Congress enacted Public Law 600 in 1950, which authorized the process, establishing a "compact" between the U.S. and the people of Puerto Rico.

While it granted a "full measure of self-government" in internal matters, it maintained the ultimate authority of Congress over the island.

In 1952, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico adopted the flag officially, changing the triangle's color from azul celeste (sky blue) to a dark navy blue to match the United States flag. This political move was intended to align the flag with the U.S. and strip it of its original association with revolutionary, pro-independence movements.

Key Reasons for the 1952 Puerto Rico Flag Color Change:

Political Alignment with the U.S.: The change to dark blue was designed to make the flag "resemble the U.S. flag," signaling a closer relationship with the United States. 

Removing Radical Symbolism: The original flag, featuring a light blue triangle, was designed in 1895 and associated with pro-independence, anti-colonialist sentiment, and was once illegal to fly.

Distancing from Past Conflict: By adopting a navy blue, the newly established Commonwealth government aimed to distance the flag from its rebellious history.

Flag Normalization: The 1952 adoption allowed the public to display the flag legally after decades of it being forbidden by the U.S. colonial government, but with the modified, darker color.

The original azul celeste (light blue) color, representing independence, continued to be used by pro-independence advocates, while the navy blue version was used by the government and those favoring statehood. In 1995, the Commonwealth government officially returned to a lighter shade of blue, though not as light as the original revolutionary, for official use.

Wes Moore (D- MD) for President in 2028!

 Mike McDaniel, "Wes Moore: another Democrat serial fabulist?"

What is it with Democrat politicians? Lies are arguably the currency of politics, and politicians of every party engage in them from time to time, but there are some politicians who truly excel in fabulation, and just as the dead almost universally vote Democrat, the most prolific liars are arguably on the Democrat side of the political divide.

During the 2024 presidential race, Americans discovered that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was a serial fabulist as lie after lie was relentlessly exposed, so many even the Democrat Party media propaganda arm was forced to report them. Walz’s few attempts at damage control were disasters, eventually leading to his “I’m a knucklehead” admission during his debate with JD Vance.

Why Democrats would engage in such easily disproved, serial lies is a matter for psychologists to debate. What is fodder for articles like this is the fact of those lies, this time by Maryland Governor Wes Moore.

Maryland governor Wes Moore, now considered a serious prospect for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, got his big break in 2006. Fresh off a one-year deployment to Afghanistan, President George W. Bush awarded Moore, then 27, a White House fellowship, a prestigious, year-long internship during which he served as a special assistant to then-secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. It put Moore on the path to ultimately becoming Maryland's governor, and he won the fellowship—in the turbulent years after 9/11—claiming to be a "foremost expert" on radical Islam thanks to his academic work at Oxford University.

On his application, Moore claimed to have received an Oxford master's. He claimed his master’s thesis "earned him praise as one of the foremost experts on the topic." Moore’s application listed his graduation date as 2003, but an attached resume listed it as 2004. Moore’s staff provided only a “degree confirmation” from Oxford which claimed Moore completed his “graduate studies” and was awarded the degree without being issued a formal certificate. That confirmation said Moore graduated in 2005. So, some 20+ years later, Moore hasn’t received a “certificate?”

Moore also claimed to have been a doctoral candidate after he received his master’s, but:

"...he and Oxford declined to provide the name of his academic adviser or any evidence he was enrolled as such. Oxford also “declined to verify Moore’s doctoral candidacy claim.”

Such things aren’t difficult. Either Moore was enrolled as a doctoral student—there aren’t all that many of them—or he wasn’t. Either he had an academic advisor or he didn’t.

Moore claimed his thesis—which he could not provide a copy of--was titled: The Rise and Ramifications of Radical Islam in the Western Hemisphere. Oxford says it was: Radical Islam in Latin America in the late 20th Century and its Middle Eastern Roots. Bad memory or an attempt to represent a significantly different focus more in line with his supposed international scholarly fame?

The issue could be resolved with a copy of the thesis, but:

A senior librarian told the Free Beacon she couldn't find "any trace" of Moore's paper, because he never submitted it.

"I can see on his record that he has not submitted his thesis to the Bodleian, so they wouldn't have a record of it," Oxford deputy communications chief Julia Paolitto told the Free Beacon. "MLitt students are required to submit their thesis to the Bodleian in order to confer their degree at a ceremony, however as Mr. Moore has never had a ceremony this is not a requirement he would have needed to fulfil."

Oh. Therefore…

So long as Moore is unable to find a copy of his thesis and submit it to the Bodleian Library, he cannot walk at an Oxford graduation ceremony and obtain his formal master's certificate.

And that’s not all. In his application, he claimed to have received a Bronze Star in Afghanistan. Not so. He claimed to have been inducted into the “Maryland College Football Hall of Fame,” which has never existed. He also claimed to have been born in Baltimore. He wasn’t. How does anyone get any of that wrong?

As to Moore’s claim to acclaimed international expertise in a narrow niche of Islamic scholarship, genuine scholars in that exclusive field have never heard of him. Moore also claimed to have written four articles in that field, but his office couldn’t locate them, nor could they be found in any academic database.

It’s becoming almost an entry requirement for Democrats seeking high office to be serial liars. Whether that’s an under-the-radar Democrat Party requirement or merely a character flaw remains unknown. However, should Moore win the 2028 Democrat nomination, the debates are going to be Tim Walz interesting.

How Anti-Racism Promotes Tribal Narcissism (which is today intersectionally expressed in terms of its' victimology to white racism)

 

Nick Fuentes, The White Man's Al Sharpton?

Tucker Carlson, The White Man's Oprah?

Chapters: 

0:00 What We Can Learn From the Reaction to Nick Fuentes 

46:49 Introducing Nikki Haley's Son Nalin 

48:21 How Nalin Escaped Con Inc. 

54:16 What Really Is America First? 

57:13 The Economic Problems We're Not Allowed to Talk About 

1:00:52 The Debt Problem 

1:06:26 Why Is Gen Z So Anti-War? 

1:11:13 How Does Gen Z Feel About Immigration? 

1:19:59 Is Gen Z Getting More Radical? 

1:20:27 Is There a Growing Divide Between Men and Women? 

1:25:03 The Rise in Christianity Among Young Men 

1:34:35 Will Nalin Ever Run for Political Office?

---

“There is no such thing as collective guilt or collective innocence; guilt and innocence make sense only if applied to individuals.”

–Hannah Arendt, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship"

How white people virtue signal their Guilt-Pride:  "I'm anti-racist, and I'm calling out white (but never any other colour) racists! See, I'm a good white person.  It's the Groypers like Nick Fuentes and his followers who are racists!  It's Trumpers and Republicans and Tucker Carlson!  And all men are misgynists, but not me because I'm calling out Groyper and Trumper misogyny..."

JLP Explores White & Anti-White Race Essentialism and It's Historical Victimology Driven Guilt-Pride Roots

What a 'Whiteness' Cordyceps Infection Looks Like and What Uninfected Black Elite Minds MUST Eradicate!

Big Progressivism vs Radical (small) Progressivism

Aggregate Efficiencies Uber Alles

Refilling Our Hallowed Halls without Any Hollow Men

Daniel McCarthy, "Trump Gave Americans a Choice, Not an Echo"

His critique is not against America as a whole—but against its leadership class.

The American Enterprise Institute is an unlikely place to be reminded of why Donald Trump was necessary ten years ago, and is no less needed now. But a comment by Yuval Levin on a recent AEI panel succinctly brought out the difference Trump has made. Criticizing today’s populist, Trump-led Republican Party, Levin said, “The Right has to ground its approach to the public in a more conservative message, in a sense that this country is awesome. It is not a festering burning garbage pile—that is a strange way to talk to the next generation, and it’s not true, even a little bit.”

Trump has never used the words “festering burning garbage pile,” but he’s used similarly strong language to describe America’s condition in this century under administrations other than his own. Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” implies that America hasn’t been great lately, although he and his voters can change that. Whenever Trump alludes to what Levin calls “a festering burning garbage pile,” he’s referring to the poor leadership our country has suffered from in the not-too-distant past and the results of its misgovernance.

But that’s not what Levin or other AEI types hear. To them, Trump’s criticisms of the ruling class sound like criticisms of the country. It would be unfair to guess that Levin simply believes the nation’s elite and the institutions they run are what counts as the country itself, but there are precedents for such a view. In traditional monarchies and aristocracies, the rulers are the embodiment of the realm. Our Declaration of Independence was quite radical in breaking away from that understanding, asserting that the people are the realm, and all its institutions are answerable to them, not the other way around.

Levin and other intelligent non-populist conservatives know this, and they’re well aware of the failings of the pre-Trump Republican Party, and the country’s political establishment as a whole. But knowing and feeling are different things. Much of what survives of the pre-Trump conservative movement even now feels that the virtues rather than the vices of the old elite (and the institutions with which they are almost synonymous) ought to be emphasized.

For reasons that are easy to understand, many temperamental conservatives have an abiding fear of demagogues and an irreverent public. However corrupt or incompetent Ivy League-educated leaders may be, they should not be criticized too harshly—likened to flaming rubbish, for example—lest Ivy League education itself be stripped of its mystique. That mystique is part of the decent drapery of republican life, instilling a proper attitude of deference among the public toward those who have the education and lifestyle preparation to lead them.

From the moment he came down the escalator a decade ago, Trump upended this system. He pays no heed to the norms that distinguish America’s leadership class from the rabble the way noble bloodlines distinguished leadership in traditional hierarchical societies. Trump draws strength from the weakness of America’s elites and the widening public awareness of their vices. This is why he is again and again rewarded for violating the very norms the elite considers sacrosanct, even to the point of winning the Republican nomination and then the White House last year despite a slew of criminal convictions and many more pending charges.

In three consecutive elections, Trump has not merely offered voters a choice of leaders but a choice between systems of government. The capaciousness of our republican Constitution is such that within its framework more than one kind of regime is possible. The “informal regime” can be considered the regime of society as well as government, or a regime that in operation reflects the real dispensation of authority within the country.

Most Americans have sadly little familiarity with even the letter of the written Constitution, and even most educated Americans have never entertained the thought of an informal regime. Indeed, much of the country’s elite (think about the typical Atlantic writer, for example) suffers paroxysms of panic over Trump’s words and actions because its members conceive of the informal regime under which they’ve lived their whole lives—and under which people like themselves flourish—as being the only natural outcome of the written Constitution. To violate the “norms” of this regime is to violate the Constitution itself, as far as their understanding can conceive.

It’s rare that voters get to make a choice not just between candidates but between regimes. The greater and lesser George Bush, the male and female Clinton, Bob Dole, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris all represented the same regime and norms. Trump differs from them all not only in policy but in the relationships he represents between the people, elected power, and institutional elites (both inside and outside of government).

Trump at last gave the American people a choice of regimes, with one regime—represented by his enemies, not just in the general election but in the Republican Party, too—operating on aristocratic presumptions and the other being a reassertion of popular self-government, including its characteristic parrhesia and even vulgarity. Crude materialists who understand power only in terms of wealth struggle to interpret Trump, because he and many of his associates obviously belong to the same affluent class as his enemies. Yet just as Christ said the poor will always be with us, so too does every regime, formal or informal, have its rich men. The regime is not defined by the existence of a wealthy group; it’s rather about relationships and authority, and that is what Trump has changed.

This change was necessary because the old regime had already destroyed its own legitimacy. It performed poorly for millions of ordinary Americans, but beyond that it had also grown arrogant. Its norms were not a limitation on its power or abuses but rather a gag stifling criticism from within or below. The new regime that’s in the making will have its own defects and will be in need of various corrections, but the test of a regime lies precisely in its ability to correct itself. The old elite had lost that ability and would hardly have had the will to exercise the capability even if it had still been there.

Trump is not a revolutionary who has overthrown a healthy order. Rather he, like the American revolutionaries of 250 years ago, has given the people a chance to be healthy again by ridding themselves of a debilitating regime. Americans had been tricked into living under an aristocracy within the form of a democracy.

Thomas Jefferson had hoped that voters would freely and democratically choose natural aristocrats as their leaders. Instead what happened in recent decades was that an aristocracy against nature established itself as an authority that could rule through a multiplicity of institutions regardless of voters’ choices at the ballot box. Universities, nonprofits, the media, the permanent federal bureaucracy, judges, political professionals within both parties, and other interlocking, ideologically aligned (broadly “liberal”) components could forestall any challenge—until Trump came along. He gave the people a radical choice, and they sided with him against the aristocracy.

If the elite really had consisted of the natural aristocrats in whom Jefferson placed his faith, the people might not have felt the need for a Trump. The aristocracy that confronted them, however, was an aristocracy of privilege, one consisting of haughty mediocrities, not natural geniuses or public-spirited heroes. Replacing one of these aristocrats with another, or one of their cabals with a different cabal, would have made no difference. What the people needed was an alternative to the entire system—and Donald Trump gave them that alternative.

Guardians of institutional prestige such as Yuval Levin—men of conservative temperament who see the need for a well-formed elite within a popular regime—shouldn’t abjure Trump, however. Only by making America more democratic again, more populist, can it be made more aristocratic in the sense the Founders intended. The people have to want an aristocracy, and they will only want one that serves them faithfully, selflessly, and competently.

Trump has to restore the people’s power over the elite before the elite will feel the need to reform. That will save America’s institutions, not destroy them.

MAGA: The Rise of the Counter-Elites

The Counter-Elites Are on the Left AND Right (not just MAGA).  The Establishment Elites are the UniParty Neo-liberals (from the Brookings and Hoover Institutes)

New York City is Ground-Zero for Post-WWII Establishment Geriatric  Neoliberalism.  And if Neoliberals can't win there, they'll never win ANYWHERE again.

The Rise of the Neo-Left Counter-Elites

Are the Democrats Going the Way of the Whigs?

Bernie Sanders, "Will the Democrats learn from Zohran Mamdani’s victory?"

Too many Democratic party leaders would rather be the captains on a sinking Titanic than change course

The Democratic party is at a crossroads.

It can continue to push policies that maintain a broken and rigged economic and political system and ignore the pain of the 60% of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck. It can turn its back on the dreams of a younger generation which, if we don’t change that system, will likely be worse off than their parents.

It can continue to depend upon billionaire donors and out-of-touch campaign consultants and spend huge amounts of money on dumb 30-second ads that fewer and fewer people respond to.

It can ignore the tragic reality that tens of millions of Americans are giving up on democracy because they don’t see their government understanding their struggles and the realities of their lives or doing anything about it.

Or it can learn the lesson that the Zohran Mamdani campaign taught us on Tuesday.

And that is:

Have the courage to address the real economic and moral issues that face the majority of our people, take on the greed and power of the oligarchy and fight for an agenda that can improve life for working families.

Some may claim that Mamdani’s victory was just about style and the fact that he is a charismatic candidate. Yes. He is. But you don’t get a Mamdani victory without the extraordinary grassroots movement that rallied around him. And you don’t get that movement and thousands of enthusiastic people knocking on doors without an economic agenda that speaks to the needs of working people. The people of New York and all Americans understand that, in the richest country on earth, they should not have to struggle every day just to put food on the table, pay their rent or pay their medical bills. These are the people the Democratic consultants don’t know exist.

Mamdani has been criticized for his “radical” and “unrealistic” economic policies:

Demanding that, at a time of unprecedented income and wealth inequality, the rich and large corporations start paying their fair share of taxes.

Demanding that, when many New Yorkers are no longer able to find affordable housing, there should be a freeze on rent hikes.

Demanding that, when commuting to a job takes a big toll out of a worker’s paycheck, public transportation should be free.

Demanding that, when many low-income and working people are unable to access good-quality food for themselves and their kids, publicly owned neighborhood grocery stores should be created.

These ideas, and more, are not radical. They may not be what billionaires, wealthy campaign contributors and real estate speculators want, but they are what working people want. And maybe, just maybe, it’s time to listen to them.

Mamdani’s victory was not about “star power”. It was very much about people power, about revitalizing democracy and opening the door for ordinary people to gain control over the decisions that impact their lives.

Importantly, he did not run away from the moral issue that is troubling millions in New York and around the country: the need to end US military support for a rightwing extremist Benjamin Netanyahu government in Israel that is obliterating the people of Gaza and starving their children. Mamdani understands that antisemitism is a disgusting and dangerous ideology, but that it is not antisemitic to be critical of the inhumane policies of the Netanyahu government.

The lesson of Mamdani’s campaign is that it is not good enough just to be critical of Trump and his destructive policies. We have to bring forth a positive vision and an analysis of why things are the way they are. It is not good enough to maintain a status quo that is failing most Americans. At a time when hope is in increasingly short supply, people must have the sense that if we work together, if we have the courage to take on powerful special interests, we can create a better world – a world of economic, social, racial and environmental justice.

Will the current Democratic party leadership learn the lessons of the Mamdani campaign? Probably not. Too many of them would rather be the captains on a sinking Titanic, rather than change course.

Then again, it doesn’t matter what they think. The establishment threw everything they had against Mamdani – millions in Super Pac money, endorsements from “important people”, a hostile media – and they still lost.

The future of the Democratic party will not be determined by its current leadership. It will be decided by the working class of this country. Increasingly, people understand that our political system is corrupt and that billionaires should not be able to buy elections. They understand that we should not have an unprecedented level of income and wealth inequality; that we should not be the only wealthy country not to guarantee healthcare for all; that we should not deny young people the right to a higher education because of their income; that we should not have a major crisis in affordable housing; that we should not have a minimum wage that is a starvation wage; that we should not allow corporations to illegally prevent union organization – and much, much more.

The American people are beginning to stand up and fight back. We have seen that in the many Fighting Oligarchy events that we’ve done around the country that have drawn huge turnouts. We have seen that in the millions of people who came out for the No Kings rallies that took place this month in almost every state. And yesterday, we saw that in the Democratic primary in New York City.

We’re going forward. And no one is going to stop us.

Bernie's problem?  Mamdani's voters were college educated white and minority elites, not working class whites and minorities.   His message is selling to a mass market, not an elite one.  And the working class brand has already been captured by the populist Right.  

The Democratic Party brand is a Luxury Values brand.  EV's, Green Energy, and a mandated less-Productive elite and cheaper wage reducing imported unskilled and non-voting Labour.  THAT is Bernie's market.  The elite market.

The Era of Democratic Party Rule by a 20% Radical Left Minority is Finally Ending

They've raised their presence above the Just Noticeable Differential Threshold and will be eradicated for it by moderate/ centrists Democrats that are no longer intimidated through cancellation by them.  The repercussion is that the old Democratic Party will become an unpopular centrist neoliberal party, and the radical Left will establish a new populist-Left party.

The War Hawks Seize Europe and Fly Towards the Rocks of Ruination...

...the Voice of Radical Humanism Responds.

Europe lays between Scylla and Charybdis.  Can it steer a Middle Course?  Who will become its' Odysseus?

Meanwhile, on June 14 America will Celebrate the 250th Anniversary of the American Army in Washington  DC. 

The Brave New Left will Protest everywhere BUT Washington DC on the same day.   

What, no Presence on the Field of Battle?

Organizers (of No Kings Day) expect 1,800 rallies will take place on Saturday for “a nationwide day of defiance” in every state and major city across the country—except Washington, D.C., as to avoid clashes with the Army’s 250th anniversary celebrations, which will be held that day in the nation’s capital.

Why are Democrats protesting against Martin Luther King's holiday?  Atavism?  I wonder?

The Post-WWII Open Society: Fertile Fallacies Destroying Noble Lies

A "Consensus" that is Losing its' European and American Consensus

Excerpt from video above:

Fallibility, and specifically what Soros calls "Radical Fallibility", which posits that all human constructs, ideas, institutions, and ideologies are inherently flawed, deficient. In history we end up with self-reinforcing but eventually self-defeating cycles. Belief creates reality, but eventually collapses because it's deficient. It fails to reckon with certain elements of reality.

Radical fallibility underpins the concept of an Open Society, whereas Closed Societies think they know the truth, or at least some grand truth. So far, so reasonable, even if we disagree.

But it gets deeper. Soros writes:

"Radical fallibility is the cornerstone not only of my view of the world, but also of my personal identity. And as such, it is reflected in my behavior. It has guided my actions. If there is anything original in my thinking, it is this radical version of Fallibility.

Even though all mental constructs are flawed, some of them are fertile. Fertile fallacies are the equivalent of bubbles in financial markets. This lies at the core of my own radical version of Fallibility.

My working assumption allows me to operate with fertile fallacies. I apply them to the outside world, and to my own activities, Opening up Closed Societies.

And Soros gets personal when describing this:

"Radical fallibility is for me not only an abstract theory, but also a matter of deep personal conviction. As a fund manager's, predominant feelings I operated with were uncertainty, and fear. I had moments of hope, even euphoria, but those emotions made me insecure. Worrying made me feel safer. So the only genuine joy I experienced was when I discovered what it was that I had to worry about. I could never acknowledge my successes, it might stop me from worrying.

There's no spiritual contemplation, no rest in a positive assertion or identity, or vision of beauty. Happiness makes the believer in radical fallibility feel unstable. Safety is in fear.  This constant seeking after anxiety, after sources of worry, characterizes how many people live, but he made it into an ideology. This is similar by the way, to the Frankfurt school thinker Theodore Adorno's negative dialectics, so-called. 

And like "The Age of Fallibility" of the Frankfurt school, Soros critiques Enlightenment Reason. In particular, he values free expression over truth, or thinks of free speech and other rights not as a good way to get to the truth or to do objective good, but as a way to find "fertile fallacies". As he puts it:

"It is high time to subject Reason, as construed by the Enlightenment, to the same kind of critical examination that the Enlightenment inflicted on the dominant external authorities, both Divine and temporal. We have now lived in the Age of Reason for the past 200 years. Long enough to discover that reason has its' limitations. We are ready to enter the Age of Fallibility."

And he does think his moral relativism will lead to specific principles:

"The freedom of thought and expression, and the freedom of choice, can be directly derived from our fallibility. Since the ultimate truth is beyond our reach, we must allow people to think for themselves and make their own choices. I derive human rights from being a thinking agent."

So where does authority or the exercise of power come in? Well, it's not enough to avoid the Closed Society, you also have to avoid total chaos. You need to have some control:

Instead of a dichotomy between Open and Closed Societies, I now envision Open Society occupying a precarious middle ground, some that would impose a Closed Society, others that would lead to the disintegration of Society.

Similarly, Soros rejects both capitalism and communism. So while:

The Open Society, like Democracy, is a way of living together, not a blueprint for solving particular social problems, so not a Closed Society. The concept of Open Society is not empty, it's not social disintegration. Indeed, I believe that it now needs to be redefined to include more than just freedom from officially imposed orthodoxy.

But how can recognition of our Open Society, as "Faith in Fallibility", serve as the basis of a whole social order? Can we promote a belief in our own fallibility to the status we normally confer on a belief in ultimate truth? 

The answer, I think, requires a profound change in the role we accord our beliefs. Historically, beliefs have served to justify specific rules of conduct. Fallibility ought to foster a different attitude. 

But in the ultimate analysis, a belief in the Open Society is a matter of choice, not of logical necessity. A belief in our fallibility is a highly sophisticated concept. Much more difficult to work with than more primitive beliefs such as my country, or company, or family... right or wrong."

Now practically, Soros does promote creating an Open Society alliance, kind of like a UN 2.0, but he describes it in pretty minimalistic terms. Anyway, the thinking here is relatively basic. Break down old certainties, because they are believed to be false, but avoid the complete breakdown of society whose institutions and behaviors were actually based on those old certainties that you want to breakdown.

How? Well, if you go down this route, you end up I think resorting to naked power. Because you have no real positive values to give people other than this "faith", as he calls it, this choice to just believe in Fallibility and in the Open Society as a consequence. But Soros doesn't mean that there aren't any bedrock realities, any basic facts. There are:

The fact that our understanding is imperfect does not mean that there is no ultimate truth. On the contrary, the lack of adequate knowledge implies the need for an element of faith."

"My insistence on the importance of the objective aspect of reality is a matter of personal belief. Indeed, it has a curious resemblance to a religious belief. The objective aspect of reality, as I have constructed it, has many of the attributes of God. My commitment to the objective aspect of reality plays the same role in my thinking as religion does in other people's. In the absence of perfect knowledge we need beliefs. I happen to believe in Harsh Reality, while other people believe in God.

Speculation can't change certain economic fundamentals. For example, there are certain clear material realities we cannot alter.

In the early '90s Soros made a lot of money speculating on the British pound. And he did this because he thought there were real underlying weaknesses. But his speculation made it worse. But Soros can justify that because it exposes a weakness of the system of the Closed Society, or relatively Closed Society. It's a traumatic lesson for people on the truth of fallibility. This is a bit like saying getting AIDS is good because it exposes your immune system's weaknesses. But there you go.

By the way, Steve Bassant, Trump's Treasury Secretary was part of Soros's team at the time.

Open Societies are NOT founded Upon Noble Lies, as are Closed Societies.  No, they are founded upon Fertile Fallacies, that create Economic Bubbles, and yield Crass Profits to currency speculators like George Soros 

Who ignore 'experts' like Lindy and don't consider Risk Concepts like Anti-Fragility.

Rejoice Peasants! It's almost Carnaval Again! Or...has it already ARRIVED???

Friday, February 28 to Wednesday, March 5

Ed Simon, "Who Still Needs the Carnivalesque?"

The Lord of Misrule looms over a new Puritanism

Following several decades of Reformation, with the Church of England emerging from the schism of Henry VIII and then onto the various religious settlements of his children—the austere Protestantism of the reign of his son Edward VI, the Inquisition-friendly Catholicism of his daughter Mary I, and the via media realpolitik Protestantism of his other daughter Elizabeth I—the Lord of Misrule was endangered. The Lord of Misrule, known by the similarly evocative title of “Abbot of Unreason” in Scotland, is one of those totemistic archetypes of the Middle Ages, a fragment of halcyon Merry Old England, along with maypoles and Morris dancing. During the Christmastide season, a layperson would be chosen or elected as a kind of jester-ruler over the festive and feasting commonfolk, a motley fool who mocked piety, subverted hierarchies, and challenged faith and state in a barely-approved anarchic display of pent-up antinomian energies. Similar to the court fool, Malcolm Jones describes the Lord of Misrule in The Secret Middle Ages: Discovering the Real Medieval World as among the “most important cultural figures of the late Middle Ages . . . a paradoxical figure who, at his most servile, merely entertains the society which patronizes him with empty, puerile buffoonery, but who, at his most heroic, challenges the very assumptions on which that society is founded.” He is, then, a dancing, farting, squawking, drinking, blaspheming challenge to the status quo, who the Medieval Church begrudgingly turned a blind eye to, but with scholars long arguing about just how radical the position actually was; whether the Lord of Misrule promised something that was revolutionary, or was mere pressure gauge. By the Elizabethan Age, an increasing Puritanism throughout the Church made the vaguely-pagan ritual even more suspect, so that the polemicist Philip Stubbes would rail in his 1583 Anatomy of Abuses against this “heathen company” with their “pipers piping, their drummers thundering, their stumps dancing, their bells jingling, their handkerchiefs swinging about their heads like madmen, their hobby horses, and other monsters skirmishing.” What Stubbs objected to, with this panegyric, was the carnivalesque.

For Medieval peasants existing in uneasy stasis with the Church, the carnivalesque was a means of subversion for the former and a tool for inculcating pliancy in the latter.

Everybody who spends the better part of a decade in a graduate humanities program has the mental fingerprint of their own favored critical theory terms firmly embedded and frequently regurgitated, shibboleth to the initiated and annoyance to everybody else. Those lacquered rebels with their leather jackets have Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism,” the serious young women and men who smoked American Spirits have Deleuze and Guattari’s “rhizomes,” the cultural study theory-heads in black turtlenecks retain Pierre Bourdieu’s “habitus,” and the Ren-Faire Crew of Comus are burdened with Mikhail Bakhtin’s “carnivalesque.” I didn’t go to Ren Faires, but I still fell in love with a critical term that evoked roasted chestnuts and stewed lamb, belled hats and checkered pants, warm ale, and spiced wine. If not invaluable, certainly romantic. A term that’s both noun and adjective, that can describe how in the seventeenth century a man like the noble Richard Evelyn’s retainer Owen Flood could be invested with “full power and authority . . . to break up all locks, bolts, bars, doors and latches, and to fling up all doors out of hinges.”

Bakhtin is a theorist who has had a succession of afterlives, a figure much like Walter Benjamin who is forever germane, in part because he combines erudition with the aphoristic, a mystic more than a critic. The Russian Bakhtin was the sort of scholar who turned the manuscript of his lost history of the bildungsroman into rolling papers for his tobacco as the Nazis blockaded Moscow. Associated with the quasi-scientific linguistic movement known as the Russian Formalists, Bakhtin’s innovative, unconventional, eccentric, and often useful literary scholarship animates works such as Toward a Philosophy of the Act and The Dialogic Imagination, which went untranslated into English until the 1980s and 90s, by Vadim Liapunov and the team of Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, respectively. Working at the same time as the Anglophone New Critics, Bakhtin far surpassed them in coining critical neologisms. From his pen came such terms as “chronotope,” “heteroglossia,” and “polyphony,” but no concept derived from Bakhtin has been quite as evocative and contested as “carnivalesque,” from his study Rabelais and his World, completed in 1940 and published in 1965, his dissertation on the seminal French Renaissance writer, a consideration of grotesque Medieval subversions at the dawn of modernity. What Bakhtin defined as the “principle of laughter and the carnival spirit . . . [which] destroys this limited seriousness and all pretense of an extratemporal meaning and unconditional value of necessity. It frees human consciousness, thought, and imagination for new potentialities.”

For Bakhtin, living under the at-best drab uniformity of Soviet bureaucracy and at worst the totalitarian nightmares of Stalinism, the carnivalesque was simultaneously a way of describing the ribald, lusty, and earthy rituals coming to an end in Rabelais’ century as well as identifying a mode of critique that could serve to challenge the conventions of authoritarian social structures, both in the Middle Ages and his own day. His was a methodology of collective joy and mocking humor, of promiscuous pleasures and wanton excess intended to turn the world upside down, what Terry Eagleton described in The Ideology of the Aesthetic as a “cackle of obscene laughter, as a vulgar, shameless materialism of the body—belly, anus, genitals—[which] rides roughshod over ruling-class civilities.” Part of the brilliance of Rabelais and his World was that Bakhtin was purposefully agnostic on whether or not the carnivalesque was revolutionary or not; if when somebody like Richard Evelyn allowed his servant to knock the door off its hinges, did that gesture towards genuine utopian possibility, or was it simply a way of letting the lumpenproletariat blow off some steam so that the aristocrats didn’t end up underneath an ax-blade? The other possibility, as Bakhtin considers, is that the carnivalesque allows for both. Nor were questions of cultural subversion and appropriation unique to Bakhtin’s purview. It’s not dissimilar to how Royal Caribbean cruise line licensing Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” in a television ad is both a neutering of proto-punk power and the smuggling of a song about heroin addiction onto primetime television. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, among Bakhtin’s greatest readers, argue in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression that it “actually makes little sense to fight out the issue of whether or not carnivals are intrinsically radical or conservative, for to do so automatically involves the false essentializing of carnivalesque transgression.” At the risk of misinterpreting Stallybrass and White, there is no definite tiebreaker in the carnivalesque’s stalemate between heavenly revolt and mere bread-and-circuses, for the simple reason that sometimes it’s one and sometimes it’s the other, though which is which can often be hard to discern.

Stallybrass and White note that carnival is not simply “a ritual feature of European culture but . . . a mode of understanding, a positivity, a cultural analytic.” Strangely, however, the carnivalesque doesn’t seem to enter much into our discourse today, even though the question of whether or not something like the Lord of Misrule was authentically rebellious remains intrinsic to questions of authentic resistance. For Medieval peasants existing in uneasy stasis with the Church, the carnivalesque was a means of subversion for the former and a tool for inculcating pliancy in the latter. The Reformation disrupted this negotiation, as the new Protestant Religious authorities and the Catholic Magisterium overseeing the Counter-Reformation began to decree that rituals such as the carnival crowning of a Lord of Misrule were more trouble than they were worth. Throughout Europe, particularly the north of Europe where the stultifying Protestantism of John Calvin held sway, such practices become rare or extinct. Protestantism ushered in another totalizing worldview allergic to the slovenly delights of the carnivalesque, and that was capitalism. “From an emerging capitalist perspective—relentlessly focused on the bottom line,” argues the sadly departed Barbara Ehrenreich in Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, “festivities had no redeeming qualities.”

All of those feast days and hangovers may have had negligible impact on the irregular planting and harvesting schedule of your average yeoman farmer, but as countryfolk crowded into cities and industrial capitalism developed, the carnivalesque wasn’t just a threat to organized religion, but the factory system as well. If the Calvinist work ethic made capitalism possible, the staid Protestant austerity has long outlived its usefulness. The satiation of appetites, the unleashing of libidinal energy, and the unhampered celebration of the grotesque is where modern commercial capitalism thrives. Modern festivities have many redeeming qualities to the businessmen who operate them, the landlord who leases the property for them, and the advertiser who promotes them. Carnival exists in neutered form today; there’s a Christmas tree at the office park, but the landlord leases the space for it; the line between life and death might be thinner on All Hallows’ Eve, but it also makes executives at Hershey’s and Mars richer. Reading Rabelais and His World raises the question of what could be considered carnivalesque today. Where else do we see these particular subversions, what Eagleton described as the “mobile, pluralized, disarticulated body . . . which disowns all instrumentality in the name of sensuous repleteness . . . revolutionary consummation of that logic, as the body’s libidinal practice explodes the languages of reason, unity, and identity.”

The king knows that it’s better to pretend to be the Lord of Misrule himself, the better to keep the peasants in line.

Silicon Valley has long been the City on a Hill for a particular type of commodified dissent that tames the carnivalesque in the service of neoliberalism. The clarion call to “Think Different” inaugurated our current epoch of surveillance capitalism, algorithmic omnipotence, and billionaire “rebels” in the form of Thiel, Bezos, and Zuckerberg. Writing in Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from The Baffler, Thomas Frank astutely noticed (twenty-five years ago, no less) that the counterculture’s “frenzied ecstasies have long since become an official aesthetic of consumer society, a monotheme of mass as well as adversarial culture.” While it’s true that the earliest days of the digital revolution grew out of a certain set of countercultural commitments, a kind of Esalen-Institute-meets-The Whole-Earth-Catalogue creed, the utopian hacker ethos of a shared internet commons has long since given way to a new Gilded Age, where the robber barons hope we don’t notice that they’re not any different from Carnegie, Frick, and Rockefeller.

Northern California naturally imbued the industry with a particular style that’s long been superficially carnivalesque in its appearance; nowhere is that evidenced more than in the one-time liturgical ritual of Nevada’s Burning Man. With its crunchy bohemian performance art displays, the declared intent of upending hierarchies and expanding consciousness, the sacraments of MDMA, ayahuasca, and ibogaine, and even with its own court sophist in the form of the not-so-sadly departed Neo-Sufi Hakim Bey intoning about “Temporary Autonomous Zones,” Burning Man commodifies the carnivalesque, with 2020 tickets starting at the low price of $475. This is rather far from English festivals and special occasions even well into the eighteenth century, which historian E.P. Thompson discussed in his study of cultural change Customs in Common as a period after “weeks of heavy labour and scanty diet” when suddenly “food and drink were abundant, courtship and every kind of social intercourse flourished, and the hardship of life was forgotten.” The hippie vibes aside, the vaguely libertarian politics of the whole thing has long attracted participants like Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, and Eric Schmidt of Alphabet, with another annual resident of Black Rock, Nevada named Elon Musk declaring that “Burning Man is Silicon Valley.” Lest there be any doubt about how rebellious Burning Man is, when Grover Norquist attended in 2014 he gushed in The Guardian how it was an example of “radical self-reliance” in action. Now the king knows that it’s better to pretend to be the Lord of Misrule himself; the better to keep the peasants in line.

Furthermore, since Frank made his observation that the GAP, Starbucks, and Apple repackaged a Beat and hippie anti-conformity ethos into campaigns to sell jeans, coffee, and computers, a far more noxious revanchist-carnivalesque has taken hold, the ultimate dialectic result of capitalism’s brilliantly vampiric logic in terms of coopting the means of legitimate resistance. If in the 1960s you had leftists like Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies acting as carnivalesque merry pranksters against the drab, conservative ethos of the era, then today the seeming spirit of that rebellion has been repackaged by Joe Rogan and the alt-right. The spirit of iconoclasm, heresy, and blasphemy is now a reactionary force rather than a progressive one. This is the stereotype that has liberals and leftists as puritanical scolds, concerned with correct speech, proper thought, and acceptable action, while the formerly buttoned-up conservative is the freak of the political moment, the true inheritor of the carnivalesque willing to upset the balance, subvert hierarchy, and challenge the status quo. Now, instead of selling computers and coffee, the carnivalesque is used to promote ethnonationalism, misogyny, and transphobia. It’s fantastic marketing. And I’m not the first to notice that the right seems to at least be having more fun; in Harper’s, novelist Walter Kirn bemoans the “great liberal switch . . . to sanctimony,” how today much of the left seems defined by “Rigidity. Stridency. Shrillness. Self-righteousness.” There’s something to recommend in his observations, particularly his condemnation of the most uptight aspects of very online liberal culture, but his conclusion is overly aesthetic. While valorizing the progressives of his youth who could be a little weird, who turned him onto the poetry of Robert Bly and the novels of Richard Brautigan, he invests a bit too much into taste rather than principles. It’s true that, from the furry and freaky QAnon shaman to the Proud Boys, there’s something that might appear countercultural on a purely superficial level, but a fascist who smokes weed is still a fascist. What Kirn’s aesthetic argument misses is that in the past fifty years the things which the counterculture rebelled against, those adversaries that put them in the tradition of the Medieval and Renaissance carnivalesque, no longer hold the same residual religious enchantments that they once did. Now the last vestiges of any authentic Christianity have been replaced by the new totalizing faith of free market industrial capitalism (and this of course includes the prosperity gospel of evangelical Christianity as well). Fucking, drinking, drugging, and telling dirty jokes may have been rebellious in the twilight of the Hays Code when Hollywood movies still couldn’t depict sex scenes, especially between unmarried adults, but today the raucous laughter of the carnivalesque is ad copy, not revolution. Ad copy for authoritarian ideas laundered under the guise of rebellion.

Supposedly drawn from the Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, the right-wing propagandist Andrew Breitbart’s central axiom was that “Politics is downstream of culture.” Whether the carnivalesque is actually radical or not depends on where you are situated in that flood path. For a vulgar-materialist left, such a contention is nonsensical, a non-starter. This is the position of materialist leftists whom Stallybrass and White call “politically thoughtful commentators that interpret the ‘licensed release’ of carnival” as being “simply a form of social control of the low by the high and therefore serves the interests of that very official culture which it apparently opposes.” In one sense the evolution of the revanchist-carnivalesque would seem to confirm that appraisal—all of those Pepe the Frog memes and right-wing podcast warriors ginning up transgression for the sake of reaction rather than revolution. Bakhtin not only admitted that it was ambiguous as to whether the carnivalesque was genuinely utopian or simply palliative, but also neglected to clarify just how emancipatory its politics necessarily were. The ecstasy engendered by the carnival can also be channeled into the violence of the pogrom; the individual liberation within the collective that happened at rock concerns and love-ins was also apparent in the fascist rally. “The widespread occurrence of mocking rituals would almost suggest some human, or at least plebeian, instinct to playfully overthrow the existing order—whether as a way of harmlessly letting off steam or, at some level of consciousness, rehearsing for the real thing,” writes Ehrenreich. Good or bad, left or right, anarchic or authoritarian, the carnivalesque was most of all dangerous. When Breitbart claimed that by posing a cultural assault, individual factions could gain political hegemony, he was stating his actual beliefs. More importantly, he also happened to be correct. If the left has ceded the carnival to the right, we’ve already capitulated the war, with many of us not even realizing it.

The carnivalesque has always been at its core a theological construct, a method of religious critique. Knowing which faiths deserve our opprobrium makes all the difference in how effective such a rebellion shall be. When Medieval society crowned an Abbot of Unreason, that daring act of blasphemy paradoxically depended on an acknowledgment of the sacred; heresy and the divine mutually reinforcing and always dependent on one another. To similarly mock Christianity today is toothless because even with the dangerous rise of fascistic Christian Nationalism, we must take stock of who the real gods of this world are. Adam Kotsko in Neoliberalism’s Demons: On the Political Theology of Late Capital writes that our contemporary normative economic thinking “Aspires to be a complete way of life and a holistic worldview . . . [a] combination of policy agenda and moral ethos.” Just as the Roman Catholic Church was the overreaching and dominant ideology of Western Christendom in the era when the Lord of Misrule poked at the pieties of both pope and prince, now our hegemonic faith is deregulated, privatized, free-market absolutist capitalism. If secularism means anything at all it’s not the demise of religion, but rather the replacement of that previous total system with a new one in the form of neoliberal capitalism.

Here’s the thing though. All of those modern forms of the so-called carnivalesque which I’ve enumerated—whether in the form of Silicon Valley tech-utopianism or its darker twin of shit-posting pop-fascism—only offer the illusion of subversion while actually acting as High Mass for the new faith of our world. That so many of the New Atheists of a half-generation ago have gravitated towards a toxic politics—call it the Dark Enlightenment, neo-reaction, or the alt-right—isn’t surprising, for in their own bourgeois way that inchoate movement which was promulgated by grifters like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett never challenged the gods which actually deserved the iconoclast’s hammer. Mocking a reductionist’s idol of “god” is no real heresy, just as rankling at the values of that other eclipsed faith of liberal humanism is not actual rebellion. The revanchist-carnivalesque, in its casual racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, antisemitism, islamophobia, and with its mocking cruelty, is far from the spirit of what Stallybrass and White described as a “potent, populist, critical inversion of all official words and hierarchies in a way that has implications [for] A populist utopian vision of the world seen from below and a festive critique, through the inversion of hierarchy.” Far from that, the revanchist-carnivalesque, whether in the form of a right-wing comedian pretending that their stand-up is “telling truth to power,” or the tenured academic claiming that they’ve been “canceled,” or the tweeting politician inveighing against “wokeism” may take on the mantle of the carnivalesque; they may affect the pose of the iconoclast, their offensiveness may ultimately be similar, but rather than upending the hierarchy they are at the top of the hierarchy, Lords of the Realm pretending to be Lords of Misrule.

Whither the carnivalesque in the age of Twitter and Facebook, the woke and the anti-woke and the anti-anti-woke, of cancel culture and consequence culture?

So, what’s still useful in Bakhtin? Whither the carnivalesque in the age of Twitter and Facebook, the woke and the anti-woke and the anti-anti-woke, of cancel culture and consequence culture? More than anything it’s remembering that just as the Medieval carnivalesque challenged the faith of its centuries, so too must we develop a mode of cultural resistance commensurate with the gods that reign during our own era. It is imperative to remember that the only methods of resistance are religious because the only things worth resisting are also religious. As soon as, with eyes unclouded by a mystifying rationality, we can identify late capitalism for what it is—a malignant, cannibalistic, rapacious, occult faith—the better we can craft our own spiritual, mystical, and religious revolts against it; the better we can develop impiety against this sect which deserves it, heresy leveled at this denomination that’s earned it, blasphemy directed towards this church that warrants it. “Under capitalism, money occupies the ontological throne from which God has been evicted,” writes Eugene McCarraher in The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity, and with that principle firmly in mind, a new carnivalesque to answer its imitation revanchist version comes into focus, with the knowledge that mocking bourgeois values matters little when what really deserves our scorn are different gods, such as the Market, the Invisible Hand, and the Golden Calf of Wall Street. Since in its critique of religion the carnivalesque was always a sacred ritual in its own right, so now must an invigorated carnivalesque level target the shrines and relics and altars of today’s dominant religion.

What made the Abbot of Unreason powerful was that there was an awareness that the system they were up against was sacred, even if it wasn’t good. A similar consciousness is needed today, for what oppresses us is sacred, at least to those who lord over us. To mock the rituals of the state and Church during the Middle Ages acknowledged the charged power and holy aura of those things; to be able to mount an effective campaign against capitalism requires a similar acknowledgment. That’s always the problem with much anti-capitalist discourse—vulgar materialism prevents the well-meaning from understanding that what we’re facing is a transcendent faith and that the only way of resisting it is by recourse to a different and better religion. The Lord of Misrule no longer need target kings and priests, better to mock bosses and landlords. Perhaps this seems like a desire that’s both not enough as well as too much, but in a culture where the exorbitantly wealthy billionaire class with its privatized power occupies a position that no Medieval ruler could have imagined, the faux-carnivalesque toothlessness of a podcaster or stand-up comedian targeting the marginalized is abundantly apparent.

What then would a new carnivalesque even look like, if it’s not to be found at Burning Man or on Twitter, in a comedy club, or the Dark Web? In the past generation so-called “culture jamming” was one method, though of limited utility. Today, the inspiring movement for unionization and the anarcho-medievalist r/Antiwork movement, along with the Great Resignation, is another. Despite the pandemic, the authoritarianism, and the war, there is room for hope at this moment. But what the carnivalesque finally offers isn’t seriousness, but joy. Joy is a revolutionary act. As Stallybrass and White note, “Here, between the merry and the mad, the sensitive soul marks out its own spiritual superiority, not by despising the tavern and the popular festive scene, but by discovering a special transcendental quality to the rough music and through it an intuition of the divine where others fine but coarse pleasure.” If our enemies are having fun, we must have more fun; if they’re laughing, then we laugh louder; we drown their music out with our own ferocious drumming, we obscure their jackboot marches with ecstatic dances, we answer them with the derision, mocking, and snark that they so abundantly deserve. Our puritanism serves nobody but our enemies. As Ehrenreich summarizes Bakhtin himself, “carnival is something people create and generate for themselves.” Capitalism offers us the industrial ready-made, but the carnivalesque we build with our own hands. While we wait for the millennium to come, best to remember that the path of puritanical seriousness is the path of defeat, better to put upon thine head the jester’s hat and the mottled pants of the Lord of Misrule and to try and turn the world upside down again.

So enjoy the Carnival while it lasts.  Musk & Thiel's (PMC Right's) truly oppressive Technofeudal Phase of "The Society of COMPLETE Algorithmic Control"  is still yet to come 

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