Politics of the People's Republic of Maryland Explained

from the Dagger

From Del. Pat McDonough:

Most people would characterize Maryland as a Democrat-controlled state. They would be wrong. There is much more to the real political complexion of Maryland politics. The Democrats who reside in Dundalk, Middle River, and many counties have no connection to the type of Democrats who reside in Montgomery County. The Montgomery Democrats are philosophically “radical liberals.” They support big government, big spending, increased taxes, benefits for illegal aliens, gay marriage, and every other agenda on the left wing shopping list. Unfortunately, they control the balance of power in Maryland.

Maryland is now the “bluest” state in the nation, along with California. The Montgomery and Prince Georges County delegations to the Maryland General Assembly are running the show in Annapolis. The rapidly growing voter registration numbers in those two Washington, D.C. suburban counties create a tsunami of radical Democrat votes on Election Day. That huge wave washes away votes from the rest of the state.

The tyranny of the “super majority” rules the Maryland General Assembly. Although the GOP minority punches way above their weight with aggressive floor strategies, intelligent speeches and common sense amendments, all of their efforts are in vain. The “super majority” never seriously considered compromise or cooperation. It is the “radical blue” way or the highway.

The dynamic of the voting power in Maryland probably ensures there may never be another statewide Democrat office holder from Baltimore after O’Malley, Cardin, and Mikulski have moved on. The Baltimore area voters have become captive step-children to the massive voting power of the Washington, D.C. suburbs. Baltimore’s “radical blue” Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake presides over an urban landscape beset by murder, muggings, economic stagnation and a dim future. She suffers no real opposition, except possibly from another “radical blue” political challenger. The diversity of electoral politics or public policy is non-existent in Charm City.

All doubt about this growing power was removed when the 7 questions on the ballot achieved a solid victory created by a deluge of votes from the D.C. suburbs. The problem is compounded by the fact that the two major press organs dominating Maryland, the Baltimore Sun and The Washington Post, both reflect the “radical blue” philosophy in their editorial and reporting practices. They are enablers, not objective journalists.

The consequences of this “radical blue” monopoly ensures that the people of Maryland will continuously be subjected to government debt, increased regulations and taxes, assault against business, uncontrolled spending, and a march toward the cliff. Maryland’s Triple A bond rating is already on the “watch list” and our state is considered at the top of the most business unfriendly places in the nation.

How do we overcome this growing disaster? It will not be easy since many of our most productive citizens are voting with their feet.

Good-bye millionaires, hundred thousandaires, small business owners, retirees, and other productive citizens who are becoming reluctant refugees from their beloved state. They still love Maryland, but the “radical blue” politicians find them to be only useful as ATM machines. Unless Washington, D.C., Montgomery, and Prince Georges Counties are thrown together to become the 51st state, there are few solutions available.

In the wonderful movie, “The Wind and the Lion,” the character, “Raisuli, the Magnificent,” played by Sean Connery, in despair uttered these words, “All is lost, things are spinning out of control, and nothing is as it should be.” Marylanders understand your pain, Mr. Raisuli.

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.

Bernie's "Trustee State" vs "Trust Busting" (Incl. Gov trusts): The False Promises of the Sanders Campaign...

...and why Bernie is really a Neo-Progressivefrom AEI

Hillary Clinton:

“I am a Progressive who gets things done.”

Bernie Sanders:

“I do not know any Progressives who collect $15 million for their SuperPacs from big corporate donors. That is not a Progressive thing to do.”

From a historical perspective, Bernie and Hillary are both progressives. Yet the ideological divide between them, and the constituencies they represent, could not be more profound. It would be easy to misconstrue the back and forth between them over the definition of “progressive” as nothing more than campaign banter — the level of debate is certainly prosaic enough. But the political battle now underway in the Democratic Party has roots much deeper than most people realize, revealing a rift in the Progressive Movement that dates to its birth in the early 1900s.
The debate then was over “bigness” — specifically the emergence of industrial giants known as “trusts” — and it was fresher and hence even more politically potent than today. As business historian Thomas McCraw put it, the big corporations that rose up out of the Industrial Revolution “seemed to be mutations, the consequence of some sinister tampering with the natural order of things … powerful new political forces which must be opposed in the name of American democracy.”

For more than 50 years — from before the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887 until the culmination of the New Deal in the late 1930s — this debate occupied politicians at all levels and from both parties, and played a defining role in presidential politics. Who can forget the political cartoon depicting Teddy Roosevelt wielding his “big stick,” not at foreign adversaries but at American corporations — the oil and railroad trusts? The quest to reign in big business was the motivating principle and central purpose of the Progressive Movement.The early Progressives were united in their concern about big business, but the agreement ended there. The movement was deeply split between two wings: the radicals, who (echoing Jefferson a century earlier) thought bigness was an evil to be fought on principle, and a more pragmatic wing (more in the mold of Hamilton) who saw the rise of big corporations as inevitable and even positive — a phenomenon not so much to be resisted as to be accommodated and even promoted.

The principal combatants in this political and intellectual battle were no slouches. The radicals were led by Louis Brandeis, plaintiff’s lawyer, muckraker, and ultimately Supreme Court Justice. Brandeis famously bemoaned “the curse of bigness,” and opined that “If the Lord had intended things to be big, he would have made man bigger — in brains and character.” Brandeis inspired William Jennings Bryan (who favored a Federal law capping the size of corporations) and served as chief economic adviser to Woodrow Wilson (who nationalized big chunks of the economy during World War I) until Wilson put him on the high court in 1916.

Opposing Brandeis for the accommodationists or pragmatists was Herbert Croly, founder of The New Republic and author of “The Promise of American Life” (1909). Arguing that “the huge corporations have contributed to American economic efficiency,” Croly promoted a reform agenda that included legalizing and empowering labor unions and strengthening the regulatory state — that is, rationalizing the emergence of Big Business by promoting the rise of Big Labor and creating Big Government. Croly’s views initially were embraced by the (Teddy) Roosevelt wing of the Republican Party, and, 30 years later, by Teddy’s distant cousin Franklin, who mostly resisted calls to break up big companies or nationalize significant chunks of the economy and instead promoted the growth of government while trying (without success) to grow the industrial economy.

The New Deal thus constituted what seemed until lately to be the permanent triumph of the accommodationist wing of the Progressive Movement. With the arguable exception of George McGovern in 1968 (arguable because McGovern was first and foremost an anti-war candidate and only secondarily a radical progressive), the radicals have never come close to controlling the Democratic Party, let alone the White House.

What about Barack Obama? He certainly campaigned as a radical, and as President he has often talked like one — but his policies are mainly accommodationist. Indeed, his two biggest domestic accomplishments — Dodd-Frank and ObamaCare — promote and favor big banks, big insurers and big pharma rather than, as radicals preferred, breaking them up or nationalizing them.

Now comes Bernie Sanders, democratic Socialist and radical progressive, pitted against the ultimate accommodationist, Hillary, the “Progressive who gets things done,” for whom accepting $675,000 from Goldman Sachs for a few speeches seems perfectly natural. A radical candidate couldn’t have hoped for a better foil, but the energy behind the Sanders campaign flows from deeper wells than simple revulsion of the Clintons. It is grounded in legitimate dissatisfaction with the economy, driven by a sincere belief in the radical progressive agenda, and fueled by resentment of Obama’s perceived betrayal.

Given the depth of the divisions, it’s hard to see either candidate re-uniting the two wings of the Progressive Movement. Inspired by Obama’s rhetoric, the radicals are now irrevocably committed to the transformation he heralded but did not deliver: socializing health care and higher education; breaking up the banks; punishing big business for sins real and imagined; taxing — really taxing — the top one percent. Harkening back to Brandeis and Bryant, the Sanders agenda represents the path not chosen by Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, and by virtually every Democrat leader since.

Perhaps FDR will rise from the grave and patch things up. Short of that, it looks like the Progressive Movement is headed for a crack up.

Ever BIGGER GOVERNMENT, as Neo-Progressive presidential candidate Bernie Sanders proposes, can't be the answer America needs!

Bernie Sanders sold his soul to big Labour and big Government.

Why Can't We All Just Get Along?

Slavoj Zizek: "The Need to Traverse the Fantasy" (12/28/15)

A call to mobilize Europe’s radical-emancipatory tradition, and why we need a solidarity of struggles, not a “dialogue of cultures”

Adam Kotsko, a professor of humanities at Shimer College in Chicago, in an email to me, provided the best characterization of the reactions to my latest text on the refugees and Paris attacks:

I notice that the responses always seem to be a referendum on you, almost a Rorschach test for what people think of you. If they think you’re a terrible quasi-fascist, pro-Western ideologue, they find stuff to support that. If they assume you’re in good faith, they can find a more positive reading. But the discussion never gets to the point of actually addressing the issue — it’s almost like ​“what we should do about the issue” is treated as self-evident to all concerned, and the question is whether and how you measure up to this implicit standard (which of course can’t be explicitly stated by anyone).

As for numerous attacks on what I have written, most of them don’t deserve an answer since they simply repeat the position I criticize. What should I say to the claim that I want to use the military to quarantine and throw out the refugees, apart from the fact that it’s a simple lie? Some of the criticism, however, is worthy of reply.

I often hear the reproach that I speak as a European, part of the European elite with whom I am in solidarity, and as such I am treating refugees as an external threat to be contained. To which I can only say: Of course I speak from an European position. To deny this would be a preposterous lie, an unmistakable sign of patronizing fake solidarity.

But which European position? In the same way that there is no one Islam, that Islam also can harbor emancipatory potentials (and I’ve written about this extensively ), European tradition is also marked by a series of deep antagonisms. The only way to effectively fight ​“Eurocentrism” is from within, mobilizing Europe’s radical-emancipatory tradition. In short, our solidarity with non-Europeans should be a solidarity of struggles, not a ​“dialogue of cultures” but a uniting of struggles within each culture.

Merkel’s invitation to accept the refugees — more refugees than any other European state — was a genuine ethical miracle, one that cannot be reduced to the capitalist strategy of importing cheap labor force. What I find more than a little bit weird is the eagerness to criticize Germany for not showing enough openness toward the refugees instead of focusing on those states that adopt the paraoniac anti-immigrant attitude: Poland, Hungary, etc. It’s the same old superego logic; the more we obey the commandment of the law, the more we are guilty. The more Germany acts in a (relatively) decent way, the more it will be criticized. On the top of that, it is deeply symptomatic of our hypocrisy how rarely the European Left insists that the way to defuse the racist fear of refugees is to include refugees in the public debate. Our TV stations and other public media should have been full of refugees describing their plea, talking about their expectations, etc. One should give them the space to speak in public, not just speak on their behalf.

Another often-repeated reproach targets my mention of Western ​“values” and ​“way of life”: How dare I ignore the blatant fact that ​“Western values” are for the Third World people the very ideology that justifies their colonization and exploitation, the ruthless destruction of their ways of life? My answer is that I am far from ignoring it—I’ve written pages and pages on it. What I insist upon is that, in the same way that Islam does not designate one big homogeneous entity, European tradition also provides the resources for radical emancipation, i.e., for the radical self-critique of ​“Eurocentrism,” while calls for a return to some pre-colonial indigenous roots mostly fit perfectly global capitalism.

A more refined version of this reproach points out that egalitarianism, feminism, etc., are not simply part of Western core values but the result of a long struggle against the hegemonic ideology and politics of capitalism. It maintains that the freedom of press, of public speech, etc., is not an ingredient of liberal capitalist societies that arose spontaneously: it was hard won through popular struggles throughout 19th century. When the West boasts of its emancipatory values, one should always bear in mind that we are largely dealing with the logic of ​“if you can’t defeat them, join them.” I cannot but agree with this point, adding that the same struggle goes on today (Wikileaks, etc.).

The last point. In public debates on many campuses from London to Berlin, I am repeatedly told that now is not the time to raise the topic of the incompatibility of ways of life, of the status of women in some immigrant communities, etc. — that now we are dealing with a big humanitarian crisis, hundreds of thousands are fighting for their life, and to bring in cultural issues ultimately just detracts from the key issue. I totally disagree with this logic: It is precisely now, when hundreds of thousands are ariving into Europe, that we should talk about all this and elaborate a formula of how to deal with it.

The reason is not merely that only such a direct approach can help to defuse anti-immigrant paranoia, but a much more ominous fact: Sexuality has emerged as one of the central ingredients of today’s ideologico-political struggles.

Let’s take the Nigerian Boko Haram movement, the name which can be roughly and descriptively translated as ​“Western education is forbidden” — meaning, in particular, any education of women. How, then, to account for the weird fact of a massive sociopolitical movement whose main programmatic item is the hierarchic regulation of the relationship between the two sexes?

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini made clear decades ago why an attack like the Paris bombings that focuses on the ​“dissolute” every day amusements can be considered appropriate. In February 1979, on his return to the Islamic Republic of Iran he said, ​“We’re not afraid of sanctions. We’re not afraid of military invasion. What frightens us is invasion by western immorality.” The fact that Khomeini talks about fear, about what a Muslim should fear most in the West, should be taken literally: Muslim fundamentalists, be they Shiite or Sunni, do not have any problems with the brutality of economic and military struggles, their true enemy is not the Western economic neocolonialism and military aggressiveness but its ​“immoral” culture.

The same holds for Putin’s Russia, where the conservative nationalists define their conflict with the West as cultural, in the last resort focused on sexual difference: apropos the victory of the Austrian drag queen Conchita Wurst (a.k.a. Tom Neuwirth) at the 2014 Eurovision contest, Putin himself said at a dinner in St. Petersburg: ​“The Bible talks about the two genders, man and woman, and the main purpose of union between them is to produce children.” As usual, the rabid nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a member of parliament, was more outspoken. He called her victory ​“the end of Europe,” saying: ​“There is no limit to our outrage. … There are no more men or women in Europe, just it.” Vice prime minister Dmitry Rogozin tweeted that the Eurovision result ​“showed supporters of European integration their European future — a bearded girl.”

There is a certain quasi-poetic uncanny beauty in this image of the bearded lady (for long time the standard feature of circus freakshows) as the symbol of united Europe — no wonder Russia refused to transmit the Eurovision contest to its TV public, with calls for a renewed cultural Cold War. Note the same logic as in Khomeini: not army or economy, the truly feared object is immoral depravity, the threat to sexual difference. Boko Haram just brought brings this logic to its endpoint.
What psychoanalysis tells us

One should not underestimate the complexity and persistence of different ​“ways of life,” and here psychoanalysis can be of some help. Which is the factor that renders different cultures (or, rather, ways of life in the rich texture of their daily practices) incompatible? What is the obstacle that prevents their fusion or, at least, their harmoniously indifferent co-existence?

The psychoanalytic answer is: jouissance. It is not only that different modes of jouissance are incongruous with each other without a common measure; the Other’s jouissance is insupportable for us because (and insofar as) we cannot find a proper way to relate to our own jouissance.

The ultimate incompatibility is not between mine and other’s jouissance, but between myself and my own jouissance, which forever remains an ex-timate intruder. It is to resolve this deadlock that the subject projects the core of its jouissance onto an Other, attributing to this Other full access to a consistent jouissance. Such a constellation cannot but give rise to jealousy: In jealousy, the subject creates/​imagines a paradise (a utopia of full jouissance) from which he is excluded.

The same definition applies to what one can call political jealousy, from the anti-Semitic fantasies about the mysterious practices and abilities of the Jews (which sometimes reach the level of madness, like the claim that Jewish men also menstruate) to the Christian fundamentalists’ fantasies about the weird sexual practices of gays and lesbians. As Klaus Theweleit, a scholar of fascist sociology, pointed out, it is all too easy to read such phenomena as mere ​“projections”: Jealousy can be quite real and well-founded; other people can and do have as much more intense sexual life than the jealous subject — a fact that, as Lacan remarked, doesn’t make jealousy any less pathological. Here is Lacan’s succinct description of the political dimension of this predicament:

With our jouissance going off track, only the Other is able to mark its position, but only in so far as we are separated from this Other. Whence certain fantasies – unheard of before the melting pot. Leaving the Other to his own mode of jouissance, that would only be possible by not imposing our own on him, by not thinking of him as underdeveloped.

To recapitulate the argument: Due to our impasse with our own jouissance, the only way for us to imagine a consistent jouissance is to conceive it as the Other’s jouissance; however, the Other’s jouissance is by definition experienced as a threat to our identity, as something to be rejected, destroyed even.

With regard to the identity of an ethnic group, this means that ​“there is always, in any human community, a rejection of an inassimilable jouissance, which forms the mainspring of a possible barbarism.” Here, Lacan underpins Freud, for whom the social bond (group identification) is mediated by the identification of each of its members with the figure of a Leader shared by all: Lacan conceives this symbolic identification with a Master-Signifier as secondary to some preceding rejection of jouissance, which is why, for him, ​“the founding crime is not the murder of the father, but the will to murder he who embodies the jouissance that I reject.” (And, one might add, even the murder of the primordial father is grounded in the hatred of his excessive jouissance, his possessing of all women.)

The starting point, what I ​“immediately see,” is that I don’t know who or what I am since my innermost core of jouissance eludes me. I then identify myself with others who are caught in the same deadlock, and we ground our collective identity not directly in some Master-Signifier but, more fundamentally, in our shared rejection of the Other’s jouissance.

The status of Other’s jouissance is thus deeply ambiguous: It is a threat to my identity, but at the same time my reference to it founds my identity — in short, my identity emerges as a defensive reaction to what threatens it, or, as we may say apropos anti-Semitism, what is a Nazi without a Jew?

Hitler allegedly said: ​“We have to kill the Jew within us.” A.B. Yehoshua’s provided an adequate comment to this statement:

This devastating portrayal of the Jew as a kind of amorphous entity that can invade the identity of a non-Jew without his being able to detect or control it stems from the feeling that Jewish identity is extremely flexible, precisely because it is structured like a sort of atom whose core is surrounded by virtual electrons in a changing orbit.

In this sense, Jews are effectively the objet petit a of the Gentiles: what is ​“in Gentiles more than Gentiles themselves,” not another subject that I encounter in front of me but an alien, a foreign intruder, within me, what Lacan called lamella, the amorphous intruder of infinite plasticity, an undead ​“alien” monster who cannot ever be pinned down to a determinate form.

In this sense, Hitler’s statement tells more than it wants to say: Against its intention, it confirms that the Gentiles need the anti-Semitic figure of the ​“Jew” in order to maintain their identity. It is thus not only that ​“the Jew is within us” — what Hitler fatefully forgot to add is that he, the anti-Semite, his identity, is also in the Jew. (And the same holds even for a certain kind of anti-racism. The Politically Correct anti-racism depends on what it fights (or pretends to) — on the first-level racism itself, thus parasitizing its opponent: The PC anti-racism is sustained by the surplus-enjoyment which emerges when the PC-subject triumphantly reveals the hidden racist bias of an apparently neutral statement or gesture.)

Another conclusion to be drawn from this intermingling of jouissances is that racism is always a historical phenomenon: Even if anti-Semitism seems to remain the same through millenia, its inner form changes with every historical rupture. French philosopher Étienne Balibar perspicuously noted that in today’s global capitalism, in which we are all neighbors to each other even if we live far away, the structure of anti-Semitism is in a way globalized: Every other ethnic group perceived as posing a threat to our identities functions as a ​“Jew” did for the anti-Semite. The paradox is that, in our specific historical situation, anti-Semitism is universalized. This universalization reaches its apogee in the unique exceptional fact that even the fervent Zionist themselves construct the figure of the ​“self-hating Jew” along the lines of anti-Semitism.

Why Sam Kriss is wrong

I read with interest Sam Kriss’s reply to me. First off, it was dishonest of him to write:

As Zizek himself frequently argues, the primary pathology of the racist is to refuse to see the Jew or the Muslim or the Roma as a person …

So what, then, are we to make of his statement that ​“Muslims find it impossible to bear our blasphemous images and reckless humor, which we consider a part of our freedoms”?

I said no such thing. This is what I wrote:

[F]undamentalist Muslims find it impossible to bear our blasphemous images and reckless humor, which we consider a part of our freedoms.

Do you notice the word that he omitted?

Despite such intellectual sleights of hand, Kriss seemed to engage also with the Lacanian concepts I use, accusing me of misusing them. But then I stumbled upon sentences like the following one: ​“Fantasy is that which structures reality, and even if it’s a symptom, the symptom is always a sign to be interpreted, rather than a cloud that obfuscates.”

Such sentences are strict nonsense, implying a series of false identifications: objet a as the cause of desire is reduced to its role in fantasy (while Lacan elaborated in detail the status of objet a outside fantasy, as well as modes of desiring which remain after we ​“traverse” the fantasy), fantasy is equated with symptom (while Lacan spent long chapters elaborating their opposition), etc.

Since there is no space here to engage in this explanation (every good introduction to Lacan will do the job), I will limit myself to a passage from Kriss’s reply which condenses his double confusion, theoretical as well as political, culminating in his ridiculous notion of fidelity to a fantasy:

In Lacanian terminology, what Zizek identifies as a fundamental disparity between ​‘our’ civilized European way of life and the irreducible foreignness of the migrants would be called an asymmetry in the Symbolic order. (It’s not just Lacanianism that he abandons here — what happened to the Hegelian identity of non-identity and identity?) If this asymmetry does exist, then fantasy is precisely the means by which it can be resolved. If we lack the appropriate signifiers for each other, then the interdicting untruth of fantasy opens up a space for some semblance of communication. If migrants are to live peacefully and happily in Europe, the demand should not be that they give up their fantasy of a better life, but that they cling to it for all its worth.

First, the basic premise of Lacan’s theory is that what my critic rather clumsily calls the ​“asymmetry in the symbolic order” does not primarily occur between different ways of life (cultures) but within each particular culture: each culture is structured around its particular ​“points of impossibility,” immanent blockades, antagonisms, around its Real.

Second, far from ​“resolving” it, a fantasy obfuscates it, it covers up the antagonism – a classic case: the fantasmatic figure of the Jew in anti-Semitism obfuscates the class antagonism by way of projecting it onto the ​“Jew,” the external cause that disturbs an otherwise harmonious social edifice. The statement ​“If we lack the appropriate signifiers for each other, then the interdicting untruth of fantasy opens up a space for some semblance of communication.” is thus totally misleading: it implies that each culture somehow manages to be in touch with itself, it just lacks appropriate signifiers for other cultures. Lacan’s thesis is, on the contrary, that each culture lacks ​“appropriate signifiers” for itself, for its own representation, which is why fantasies are needed to fill in this gap.

And it is here that things get really interesting: these fantasies as a rule concern other cultures. Back to the Nazis: the fantasy of the Jew is a key ingredient of the Nazi identity. The Jew as the enemy allows the anti-Semitic subject to avoid the choice between working class and capital: by blaming the Jew whose plotting foments class warfare, he can advocate the vision of a harmonious society in which work and capital collaborate.

This is also why Julia Kristeva is right in linking the phobic object (the Jew whose plots anti-Semites fear) to the avoidance of a choice: ​“The phobic object is precisely avoidance of choice, it tries as long as possible to maintain the subject far from a decision.”

Does this proposition not hold especially for political phobia? Does the phobic object/​abject, on the fear of which the rightist-populist ideology mobilizes its partisans (the Jew, the immigrant, today in Europe the refugee), not embody a refusal to choose? Choose what? A position in class struggle. The anti-Semitic fetish-figure of the Jew is the last thing a subject sees just before he confronts social antagonism as constitutive of the social body (I paraphrase here Freud’s definition of fetish as the last thing a subject sees before discovering that a woman doesn’t have a penis).

So the first conclusion is that some fantasies at least are ​“bad”: we should definitely not advise the Nazis ​“not to give up their fantasy of a better life (without Jews) but to cling to it for all its worth”… Should we then distinguish between ​“good” and ​“bad” fantasies — say, should we replace racist fantasies with humanist all-inclusive fantasies of global brotherhood and collaboration?

This seems to be the direction of my critic when he writes that ​“the interdicting untruth of fantasy opens up a space for some semblance of communication” — in short, even if a fantasy is not true, this is all we have to maintain at least a semblance of communication.

But is this really the (political) lesson of Lacan’s psychoanalysis? Is fantasy really the last resort of politics? Is Communism ultimately just a fantasy we should cling to whatever the cost? The least one can say is that Lacan’s theory opens up another way, what one may call a politics of traversing the fantasy: a politics which does not obfuscate social antagonisms but confronts them, a politics which aims not just to ​“realize an impossible dream” but to practice a ​“discourse (social link) which would not be that of a semblance” (Lacan), a discourse which touches/​disturbs the Real. Whatever Lacan is, he is not a post-modernist who claims that all communication is, as Kriss puts it, a ​“semblance.”

Exposing the cultural/ acultural anti-racist  hypocrisy - "Who is he to say that he's a nobody..."

Mayor Pete: Red Diaper Baby

from The American Spectator

As “moderate” Democrats rush to disqualify Bernie Sanders, they might want to notice how much their hero Pete Buttigieg has in common with his one-time hero… Bernie Sanders.

So mayor Pete is a Red Diaper baby! This explains a lot … ”

So writes Charlie, a longtime reader of mine and of The American Spectator. Please note that Charlie didn’t call Pete a red, but a red-diaper baby. There’s a difference. And either way, it’s a point that isn’t irrelevant and should be dealt with and laid out carefully.

Charlie sent me that email back in October and urged me to write about the subject. Given Mayor Pete’s surge in the polls, and given my repeated run-ins with the said “red-diaper” background Charlie is referring to, I finally decided to put something together.

Joseph Buttigieg and Antonio Gramsci

As for that red-diaper background, Charlie is referring to the work of Pete Buttigieg’s father, Joseph Buttigieg, who was the world’s foremost expert (certainly the English-speaking world) on the famous Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Joseph, who died in January 2019, was no less than the founder of the International Gramsci Society, a fact hardly a secret and acknowledged warmly on the website of the International Gramsci Society. It’s so unmissable that the first thing that displays when you open the website is Joseph’s photo with a memorial tribute. In fact, as someone who regularly checks that website, I can tell you that Joseph’s photo has been the lead on the screen for a full year and counting. He was very important to them.
Before considering Pete’s possible place in some of that, a few words on Gramsci.

At the age of 35, in 1926, Antonio Gramsci was arrested in his native Italy by Mussolini and spent the last 11 years of his life in prison, where he would write, write, and write — compiling a master volume of 33 Prison Notebooks. Of these notebooks, compiled mainly between 1929 and 1935, two of them, Notebooks 16 and 26, deal explicitly with culture — that is, Gramsci’s Marxist thoughts applied to culture. Those two notebooks are titled, respectively, “Cultural Topics I” (completed in 1933–34) and “Cultural Topics II” (completed in 1935). Moreover, even as Notebooks 16 and 26 deal with “Cultural Topics” I and II, culture is a consistent theme throughout the Prison Notebooks.
Gramsci looked to culture, particularly through his theory of “cultural hegemony.” If the fundamental transformers of the radical Left truly wanted to win, then they needed to first seize the so-called “cultural means of production”; that is, culture-forming institutions such as the media and universities. Gramsci himself foresaw societal transformation coming about by what others have characterized as a Gramscian “long march through the institutions.” (There is debate over who first used the phrase, but most current sources credit West German Marxist writer and student activist of the 1960s named Rudi Dutschke.)

Not until leftists came to dominate these cultural institutions would they be able to convince enough people to support their Marxist revolution. “This part of [Gramsci’s] thesis was like manna from heaven for many left-wing Western intellectuals,” writes Samuel Gregg of the Acton Institute. “Instead of joining a factory collective or making bombs in basements, a leftist professor could help free society from capitalist exploitation by penning essays in his office or teaching students.”

The heirs of Gramsci, like the ideological progeny of Marx and Lenin and the Frankfurt School, insisted on the need to question everything, including moral absolutes and the Judeo-Christian basis of Western civilization. There was no traditional institution off limits to the cultural Left. In fact, so “critical” was the cultural-Marxist left of anything and everything that it would brand itself as “critical theory.”

Critical theory has become common in academic English departments in particular. It was this tendency to criticize everything, to tear down everything, that has made this particular brand of Marxism so dangerous. Accordingly, Gregg calls Gramsci perhaps “the most dangerous socialist in history.”

Again, Gramsci’s massive paper trail, his primary body of work, was the Prison Notebooks. That brings us to Joseph Buttigieg, and even to Pete.

The definitive English translation of Gramsci’s work is Joseph Buttigieg’s translation of his vast Prison Notebooks (Quaderni del carcere), published by Columbia University Press. Joseph Buttigieg produced three thick volumes, each around 700 pages in length. In each of the volumes, Joseph begins with acknowledgments in his preface. And each time, he concludes by giving special thanks to his wife, Jennifer Anne Montgomery, and to his son Pete. Importantly, this seems a little more than the typical sentimental thanks a writer would give to a family member.

In the preface to Volume II, for instance, Joseph finishes, “The greatest debt of all I owe to J. Anne Montgomery and Peter Paul Buttigieg (who also helped with the compilation of the index of this volume) for the countless ways in which they have enabled me to realize this work.”

That seems no minor thing. Pete helped compile the index, which was no small feat. Again, this is a massive three-volume set published by Columbia University Press. Little Pete wasn’t scribbling this thing in crayon during breaks from the Lego table and “Thomas the Tank Engine” episodes. This was a substantial effort that would have involved Pete compiling the names of every leading light of Marxism, socialism, oftentimes atheism, and even anarchism, with names ranging from the obvious likes of Marx and Engels to Mikhail Bakunin and Benedetto Croce — with Marx literally having more citations than any other figure in the index.

Pete’s work here was clearly a help to his old man; his dad said there were “countless ways” that Pete “enabled” him “to realize this work.”

Joseph says the same in the final paragraph of the preface of Volume III of his edited collection of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. In fact, he strengthens his previous acknowledgment: “Above all, I owe an immense debt of gratitude to J. Anne Montgomery and Peter Paul Buttigieg, who have enabled every aspect of my work.”

Sure, our imagination could run wild here, and we could exaggerate Pete’s role to the point of error. After all, writers all the time thank their family with effusive statements like “I could not have done this without them.” Joseph’s acknowledgment should be seen at least in large part in that spirit. But it would also seem a mistake to understate it. I don’t think we can shrug it off as irrelevant.

Pete’s Way Home

So, what does Pete, in turn, write about his father?

As for Pete’s own written work, in 2019 he published his memoirs, titled Shortest Way Home. In that autobiography, he writes quite a bit about his father, who had emigrated to America from the Mediterranean island of Malta. His dad and mom arrived in South Bend, Indiana, in May 1980, their U-Haul pulling up to their new home on College Street, where Pete’s Marxist father had been hired by the English Department at Notre Dame. Yes, Notre Dame had hired a man that Pete himself refers to as a “nonreligious Mediterranean intellectual” and “a man of the left.”

It is hardly shocking that an English department would hire a Marxist. Again, it may surprise readers unfamiliar with the academic asylum to know that the most radical departments in universities are English departments, the modern homes and breeding grounds of the cult of “critical theory.” When you hear of a university celebrating, say, the birthday of Karl Marx, you can bet your wallet the guilty offenders are not in the poli-sci or history or economics departments but rather the English department.

It is shocking, however, that Notre Dame would hire a Marxist, given the Catholic Church’s longtime, strident rejection of communism dating back to at least 1846 (two years before the publication of the Communist Manifesto) with the publication of Qui Pluribus. The Church would alternately denounce communism as everything from a “satanic scourge” and “virulent infection” to a “pestilence” and “filthy medley of errors” orchestrated by “the sons of darkness.” In 1949, the Church issued a papal decree to excommunicate communists and even laity who supported Marxists or read their literature. Apparently, Notre Dame decided to take a different approach. No doubt, Notre Dame, notably under the often-perplexing leadership of Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, who ran the university from 1952 to 1987, here decided to thumb its nose at a century and a half of Church teaching on the subject. Under Hesburgh, the university happily filled its halls with leftist professors. In fact, Pete in his memoirs notes that the Humanities faculty at Notre Dame while his dad was there was “overwhelmingly liberal,” even as “most students were conservative.” He recalls that his dad joined liberal faculty members’ “protests” of the Reagan administration, including speaking out “against the Reagan administration’s covert support for human rights abusers in Latin America during the popular president’s visit to campus.”

Still, one wonders if Notre Dame’s brass knew just how far to the left Joseph Buttigieg was at the time of his hiring in 1980.

Then again, Notre Dame would have known this unmistakably by the 2010s, many years after Joseph published his magnum opus on Antonio Gramsci. What did Notre Dame do then? Incredibly, it made Joseph Buttigieg, internationally recognized Gramscian Marxist, director of the prestigious Hesburgh-Yusko Scholars Program, with, as Pete notes in his memoirs, an office in the “resplendent Main Building, topped by the Golden Dome itself, where the president sits in an oak-paneled office suite.” This is the historic building on campus. Joseph Buttigieg, as director of the Hesburgh-Yusko Scholars Program, got a prized office in a ground-floor corner with an outside window from which (says Pete) Knute Rockne himself once sold football tickets in the 1930s.

The Notre Dame president under whom that happened was Fr. John Ignatius Jenkins, who makes Fr. Hesburgh look like a fire-breathing right-winger.

For those familiar with the implosion of higher education, Christian and secular, Catholic and non-Catholic, and with the outright rejection of the Catholic mission and identity by so many Catholic colleges that long ago stopped being authentically Catholic, the elevation of an overt Marxist–atheist like Joseph Buttigieg to such a position seems rather scandalous. It’s even more troublesome in Notre Dame’s case because Notre Dame is not only the most famous Catholic college in America but, in Notre Dame’s defense, also remains a fairly authentic Catholic college, albeit shakily clinging to the Magisterium despite some rocky leadership. Many conservative and faithful Catholics like to dump on Notre Dame and criticize it for not being really Catholic, but that’s unfair. In truth, there are many solid Catholics there, including on faculty. It’s very mixed. But even then, to promote someone as radical as Pete’s dad to head the Hesburgh-Yusko Scholars Program is really alarming.

Bear in mind that it was Fr. Jenkins who scandalized the Notre Dame faithful by awarding Barack Obama an honorary degree in 2009, in direct and flagrant violation of the Catholic Church’s explicit instruction that pro-choice politicians not be granted such awards. Jenkins regaled not only Obama but also Joseph Buttigieg: “Joe was a superb scholar, an inspirational teacher and a pioneering leader as the inaugural director of the fledgling Hesburgh-Yusko Scholars Program,” Jenkins said in January 2019.

That Jenkins statement came at the time of Joseph’s death and was thus expected to be kind. Still, the press release stood as a good example of Jenkins’ and the university’s ignoring if not sugarcoating Buttigieg’s real beliefs. Jenkins never once dared use the word “Marxist” or “communist.” The Notre Dame president benignly told his campus community that Buttigieg had been an editor and translator of “Gramsci, the Italian philosopher, writer, and politician.”

Heck, sounds like a cross between Dante and Aquinas — eh, Fr. Jenkins?

Jenkins rattled off Joseph Buttigieg’s many positions of prominence at Notre Dame: director of the Hesburgh-Yusko Scholars program, director of the university’s Stamps Scholars Program, faculty member in the English department, fellow in the university’s Nanovic Institute for European Studies (odd placement for an English prof), and fellow in the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies.

Joseph Buttigieg was a veritable rock star at Notre Dame.

For the record, I know this is the world of academia we’re dealing with here. If yet another university wants to pad its universities with “critical theorists,” well, hey, that’s what they do. But the point here is that one should never expect such a far-left pedigree of a leading professor at America’s most famous Catholic university, and, more important to my focus in this article, Pete’s dad was on the extreme left.

Alas, Fr. Jenkins, of course, has another motive with such a statement. He’s speaking to university alumni and donors. In no way would he boldly ask well-off alumni to fork over dollars to support a program run by a Gramscian Marxist. They are to be coddled and even duped. At least the comrades at the website of the International Gramsci Society have the integrity to characterize Joseph accurately.

Faith and Education

Speaking of the Catholic faith, Pete touches on this as well in his memoirs.

In his teen years, says Pete, he actually learned the Catholic Church’s doctrine on matters like sexuality and abortion, both of which stand fully in contrast to Pete’s own views. He learned the Church’s teachings not at home but at St. Joseph High School in South Bend, where he was sent at the age of 14. That being the case, his radicalism on these issues today cannot be blamed on a failure in Catholic education. They surely must have come at least in part from home. His father earlier in life had been Catholic — a Jesuit — but left the faith. His mother was a Methodist who took a liking to the Episcopal Church, which is the direction where Pete eventually went.

Pete seemed to have never religiously identified with a particular church or denomination until he went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, which led him to Anglicanism and the Episcopal faith when he returned to the United States. He married (another man) as an Episcopalian, one of the first faiths to sanction same-sex marriage. Pete has been a member of the Episcopal Church for at least the past decade.

Prior to Oxford, Pete’s father further influenced his leftism by encouraging his son as a freshman at Harvard to take a course with Sacvan Bercovitch, a left-wing literature professor. If the name “Sacvan” seems strange, so is its genesis: Bercovitch, notes Pete, was “a son of Canadian Jewish radicals [who] had named him after the anarchist martyrs Sacco Vanzetti” — two heroes to the communist Left. “Sac” for “Sacco” and “Van” for “Vanzetti.” Hence, “Sacvan.” (Can you imagine?) Pete quickly became Sacvan’s research assistant.

We can see his father’s hand through all of this. Pete was the sole radical son of Joseph.

Bernie Sanders: Young Pete’s Inspiration?

Beyond his memoirs, maybe the most telling item to yet emerge from young Pete’s past writings is a stunning essay he wrote in high school that won the teenager nothing less than the annual Profiles in Courage award bestowed by the JFK Library. Take a million guesses at who the young Pete nominated for his Profile in Courage? Incredibly, he actually profiled Bernie Sanders, and specifically pointing to Sanders’ socialism. It’s stunning to see. Look at what Pete wrote in that essay:

One outstanding and inspiring example of such integrity is the country’s only Independent Congressman, Vermont’s Bernie Sanders.

Sanders’ courage is evident in the first word he uses to describe himself: “Socialist”. In a country where Communism is still the dirtiest of ideological dirty words, in a climate where even liberalism is considered radical, and Socialism is immediately and perhaps willfully confused with Communism, a politician dares to call himself a socialist? He does indeed. Here is someone who has “looked into his own soul” and expressed an ideology, the endorsement of which, in today’s political atmosphere, is analogous to a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Even though he has lived through a time in which an admitted socialist could not act in a film, let alone hold a Congressional seat, Sanders is not afraid to be candid about his political persuasion.

After numerous political defeats in his traditionally Republican state, Sanders won the office of mayor of Burlington by ten votes. A successful and popular mayor, he went on to win Vermont’s one Congressional seat in 1990. Since then, he has taken many courageous and politically risky stands on issues facing the nation. He has come under fire from various conservative religious groups because of his support for same-sex marriages. His stance on gun control led to NRA-organized media campaigns against him. Sanders has also shown creativity in organizing drug-shopping trips to Canada for senior citizens to call attention to inflated drug prices in the United States.

While impressive, Sanders’ candor does not itself represent political courage. The nation is teeming with outspoken radicals in one form or another. Most are sooner called crazy than courageous. It is the second half of Sanders’ political role that puts the first half into perspective: he is a powerful force for conciliation and bi-partisanship on Capitol Hill. In Profiles in Courage, John F. Kennedy wrote that “we should not be too hasty in condemning all compromise as bad morals. For politics and legislation are not matters for inflexible principles or unattainable ideals.” It may seem strange that someone so steadfast in his principles has a reputation as a peacemaker between divided forces in Washington, but this is what makes Sanders truly remarkable. He represents President Kennedy’s ideal of “compromises of issues, not of principles.”

That’s the thinking of an extremely unusual high schooler who obviously was raised with some really radical ideas.

This was the year 2000. Bear in mind that absolutely no one in America was even thinking about Bernie Sanders at this point, apparently with the exception of a young Pete (and no doubt his father). If you had surveyed 300 million Americans in the year 2000 and asked them to choose their person for a Profile in Courage, not a damned one would have named Bernie Sanders. No way. Not one. Except Pete Buttigieg. One wonders if the leftists at the JFK Library awarded Pete strictly on novelty alone. (For the record, John F. Kennedy would roll over in his grave to see that a Profile in Courage award was giving to a young man from St. Joseph’s High School in South Bend, son of a Notre Dame professor, praising a socialist. But then again, JFK long ago rolled over in his grave at the leftward lunge of his family.)

To think that a kid from South Bend would pick the obscure socialist “Independent” from Vermont is unusual. Young people today wouldn’t know this, but the notion that Bernie Sanders in 2000 could one day be a presidential candidate let alone leading the Democrat pack is utterly unthinkable.

That Pete would pick Bernie is just bizarre, and so richly ironic given that the two now top the Democratic field — and that Pete is being portrayed as the Democrats’ vaunted “moderate” alternative to Bernie in 2020.

Red-Diaper Upbringings

There’s no question that this, too, shows the household influence of a Marxist father. But the most lasting impact surely came on the cultural front.

Remember that Joseph Buttigieg’s primary interest as a Marxist, like Antonio Gramsci’s, was cultural. And his son Pete is very much a cultural leftist, a cultural radical. If Mayor Pete is the “moderate” in the Democrat bunch, it would be (at best) on perhaps certain matters of national security, foreign policy, economics, government, but it’s most certainly not on cultural issues. He’s an extremist on abortion (see here and here, among others) and, obviously, on the full swath of so-called “LGBTQ” issues. He’s also a radical in his interpretation of Scripture and religion.

Joseph Buttigieg and Antonio Gramsci and the Gramsci Society applied Marxism first and foremost to culture rather than traditionally to class and economics. It would be no surprise at all if Pete, perhaps following his father, was more “moderate” on certain economic and government issues and yet was an extremist on cultural issues. That’s precisely where the Gramsci school has been.

And yet, having said that, this is not to say that Mayor Pete is today a Marxist or a Gramscian Marxist or a cultural Marxist at all. But it is to say that Mayor Pete surely would have been exposed to and influenced by those ideas through his father. Who wouldn’t?

Much of this reminds me of a young Barack Obama — likewise influenced by Marxists as a young man, from Frank Marshall Davis (an actual member of Communist Party USA) to his far-left mother — who would in his 40s run for the presidency as something fresh and new, not daring to mention those radical roots and how they might have helped shape him. And just like Obama, Pete will be protected from talking about those roots by a loving media, leaving conservatives alone to raise the matter and to be vilified for doing so. (Well, at least they can’t call us racists this time around — but I’m sure “homophobe” will do.)

Like so many people who grew up in Marxist households, Pete could easily today be a non-Marxist but still carry with him certain residual effects of a leftist upbringing. This is true of so many political figures. Look at the last two Democrat presidential nominees: Obama had the radical influences of Davis and his mother; Hillary Clinton was heavily influenced by a left-wing, social-justice youth pastor and also by the teachings of Saul Alinsky, which she studied.

People are products of their environments. That’s common sense. But it’s a common-sense reality that liberals will want to reject and scream about when it helps explain — or exposes — the extremism of people on their side. People like Mayor Pete.

Mayor Pete is a red-diaper baby. There have been thousands if not millions of them in America over the last hundred years. Books have been written about them or by them. I know a bunch of them personally: David Horowitz, my friend Mike Shotwell, the excellent historian of communism Ron Radosh, all of whom have written candidly and at length about their leftist upbringings. Sympathetic voices such as Judy Kaplan and Linn Shapiro have done books with titles like Red Diapers: Growing Up in the Communist Left, profiling dozens of red-diaper babies (Carl Bernstein is one of those profiled in their book), most of which ended up becoming non-Marxists. People ought to be capable of discussing these things rationally and without anger and overheated emotion, including where and how those upbringings influenced people’s later political–ideological views and where they did not.

And that’s where we stand right now with Mayor Pete. A fair question for someone to ask him would be where and how his father’s Gramscian Marxism influenced his political–ideological views and where it didn’t. My guess, however, is that those questions will not get asked of Mayor Pete by a sympathetic liberal media, just as they weren’t ever asked of Obama by a sympathetic liberal media. Instead, that media will lash out at those who dare to ask those questions.

No, this doesn’t mean that Pete is a commie, a closet member of Communist Party USA, or that he, say, served as a presidential elector to the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (as Bernie Sanders did). But it surely helps explain Pete’s obvious cultural radicalism, which no doubt was something he would have first observed under the red-diaper roof of his father.

The Speech that was Banned in Britain

Dear Friends, dear Britons, dear lovers of free speech.

I assume you all are lovers of free speech because you have come to Speakers’ Corner.

You might not understand all the fuss happening today around this speech. Honestly, I don’t understand it either.

My name is Martin Sellner. I am an Austrian patriot, and at the moment, I’m sitting in a detention cell in Colnbrook Bypass near Heathrow. My smartphone was taken and my girlfriend Brittany was separated from me. I currently don’t know where she is. We will be deported on Sunday.

Five minutes ago, they unlocked our cells and my fellow inmates are gathering in the prison wing. They are mostly illegals and eastern European criminals.

What brought me into this situation? What was my crime?

My crime was that I wanted to be here with you, to speak at Speakers’ Corner.

But let’s start with the beginning. I was invited by UKIP to present my movement at an event last Autumn. I represent Generation Identity — a patriotic European youth movement that is raising awareness about mass immigration and Islamisation.

Far-left people call us right-wing, people who want to shut free speech down call us ‘fascist’, and folks who hate their own culture call us ‘racist’.

In reality, we are just a group of young patriots fed up with the system, the mainstream press and lying politicians. We use peaceful activism to make our voices heard, and contrary to our friends on the radical left, who are probably swarming you right now, we never wear masks.

From Paris to Rome, from Vienna to London, we fight peacefully but without compromise for our freedom, our homelands, and our identity!

This is what I wanted to speak about in Autumn. But the conference was cancelled due to threats from the radical left. The venue would not take the risk. So they rescheduled it for March, this time keeping the venue secret — but again the terror of the left prevailed, and the venue dropped out.

But this time I did not want to let them win! It was about principles! (Also, our flights were already booked.)

My last refuge was Speakers’ Corner. I remembered my mother telling me about that special place when I was a child. It seemed almost magical to me. A place where everyone, without exception, could just stand on a box and start to speak to those who wanted to listen. I have always loved this tradition of Speakers’ Corner, which seemed very British to me.

But I came only to see that this tradition — the tradition of freedom of speech in the United Kingdom — is dead.

Your Country is blocking you from challenging ideas from the outside. This is a disgrace to our democracy!

I should be speaking in neat, warm a conference room right now, and you should be sitting in comfortable chairs. Instead, I’m in my cell and you are on the street in a standoff with the enemies of freedom of speech.

And this is very telling! Today there is a war going on for our freedom of speech. This war is being fought on the streets, by you!

Every man and woman showing her face today, standing shoulder to shoulder, is standing up against a new totalitarianism that has been growing for far too long. You can be proud of yourself. You might not even agree with me on every point — you are simply giving a statement that I should have the right to speak my mind freely.

I would love to be among you now. They prevented me from it. They locked up the speaker, but I know that the speech will find a way through the iron bars. It will find a way to you and you are going to hear what you government so desperately wants to protect you from.

Those words which they consider more harmful to you then rape gangs or terrorists who are let into your country again and again.

I’m going to tell you something nobody has told you before. It’s the biggest, most obvious secret of our media our politicians and our powerholders: People of Britain, you are being replaced.

There has always been immigration in your history. People coming in, assimilating. But what’s happening today is different: You are being replaced by massive Muslim immigration.

You see it everywhere: in London, in Manchester, but also already in the little countryside towns. A big replacement is going on.

And let me tell you: your politicians have no plan, no vision and no idea how to deal with the problems that come along. Problems like you have seen in Telford, Rotherham, and on Westminster Bridge.

All across Europe, there is a shadow hanging over our heads. The French are whispering about in the Metro, the Germans murmuring about it when they feel unwatched, Italians look left and right, and if nobody is listening they tell you: “I don’t feel at home anymore in my street. We are becoming foreigners in our own country.”

And again and again I hear: “We are not allowed to talk about it.”

And that’s the bizarre drama of the ‘Strange death of Europe’. We are being replaced, conquered by radical Islam, and we are now allowed to talk about it!

Dear Britons, defenders of free speech. Out of my cell in Colnbrook, I want to ask you something. Be honest and raise your hands.

Who among of you has ever been in the following situation: You grab a beer after work, or you are visiting your girlfriend’s parents for the first time, or you meet other children’s parents at school — and suddenly the conversation moves to politics: radical Islam, immigration.

Who of you in this very moment was faced with the decision between speaking his mind and facing problems, or complying and staying silent?

Raise your hands and be honest.

I will not be able to see the results, but every single hand is too much. This amount of fear should not exist in a society. Speech that has social costs and severe consequences is no longer free. It has a price — and our Government and the Antifa are working everyday to raise that price.

No freedom of speech means no democracy. In front of our very eyes this country is becoming a tyranny, shutting all debates about immigration down, until demographics solves the issue by replacement.

People of the UK. I might be in a cell right now, but you all are in a cell. It’s the prison of fear and silence your governement and the PC tyranny has locked you in since the days of your childhood.

I ask you, I command you, break free!

Patriots of the UK: come out of the closet. Make your dissent visible by visible acts of resistance that inspire others. I know for certain that millions in the UK think like me. Those millions should be on the street now.

We need a coming out of the silent majority, or Britain is lost. We need a free, open and honest debate about immigration, Islam and demographics, so we can sort these problems out together.

And I know that the force is still in you. With your Brexit vote you stunned the world! The will and the life of the British nation is not broken.

Initially, I asked if freedom of speech is dead in the UK. You, every one of you who came today, is a living sign that the tradition of the UK is not dead! You are the livley tradition of your nation, saving its face before history.

People of the UK — remember who you are! Remember your glorious past, you are sons and daughters of knights, kings, explorers, philosophers and artists. Who is the sovereign in this country?

Is it big money?

The mainstream media?

The politicians?

It’s you — the people. You, the silent and invisible majority who said NO during Brexit. You can say NO again — no to Islamisation, no to mass immigration, and no to the great replacement.

And YES to your identity — yes to your security, yes to your heritage and the future for your children.

And all this is impossible without to freedom of speech.

I know, if these words will find their way to the UK and even to Speakers’ Corner, it will be victory for our cause.

If they did, and if you are hearing them now, I tell you: go further on that winning street. Don’t be afraid because we have an ally that is unbeatable: Truth.

The battle, our battle for freedom of speech, has just begun, and Speakers’ Corner will become a symbolic place in that struggle.

When you go home know I want you to bring the spirit of Speakers’ Corner with you. Every single person who raised his hand because he could relate to this moment of fear, when he did not dare to speak his mind.

Promise me: Next time I will overcome my inner fear. Next time I will speak up!

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.

The June 6 Insurrection @ SCotUS

 

18 U.S.C. § 1507 states that anyone with "the intent of interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or with the intent of influencing any judge, juror, witness” “pickets or parades in or near a building.... or residence, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both."

Biden just decided not to enforce these laws in order to allow his leftist allies to intimidate the justices.

Not one of the leftists who have spent years harassing Supreme Court justices with protests outside the court and even their homes has been sent off to prison. Nor will they. Pounding on the doors of the Supreme Court, marching around the homes of justices, and trying to prevent them from coming to court have become basic parts of the activist playbook.

Even after the Kavanaugh assassination plot, leftists are continuing to protest outside his home.

The arrest of Nicholas Roske, armed with a Glock 17, and carrying burglar tools, pepper spray, and zip ties, is just the latest in a wave of leftist violence touched off by the hate campaign against Justice Kavanaugh and other conservative justices. Roske was angry about the Roe v. Wade leaked draft and said that he planned to break into Kavanaugh's house and kill him.

Roske found Kavanaugh’s address on the internet after leftist activist groups doxxed him and other justices while encouraging protesters to intimidate them and their families in their homes.

I&I Editorial Board, "The Democrats’ ‘Insurrection’ Against The Supreme Court"

It’s bad enough that someone in America could become so unhinged by nonstop far-left media propaganda that he’d try to kill a Supreme Court justice. But far worse is the blasé reaction by the Democratic Party and its extreme-left pro-abortion allies to the attempted murder of Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Following his arrest in the early hours Wednesday, Nicholas John Roske told federal law enforcement officials that he intended to kill Kavanaugh. He was, he said, angry that the Supreme Court might soon overturn the Roe v. Wade abortion decision — which, by the way, would only mean that states, not the federal government, would determine abortion laws.

Roske meant business. He was toting a bag that, as the arrest record noted, contained a Glock 17 pistol, ammunition, a knife, zip ties, pepper spray, duct tape, and other items, which he hoped to use to kill Kavanaugh.

Just another deranged lunatic? A one-off by a lone nut? Hardly. It seems the Democrats’ increasingly violent rhetoric in recent years continues to bear its poison fruit.

A mere day before Roske was nabbed, pro-abortion activists firebombed a pro-life CompassCare pregnancy center outside Buffalo, in what the Washington Free Beacon described as “the latest in a series of attacks on pro-life offices and churches since the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade.”

To leave no doubt about who was behind the bombing, the perps left a scrawled message: “Jane Was Here,” a reference to the anonymous “Jane Roe” of the “Roe v. Wade” decision.

But even violent leftists who get caught red handed get off easy under President Joe Biden’s Justice Department, headed by Merrick Garland.

Two radical lawyers, Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman, were found to have handed out Molotov cocktails to other rioters during the 2020 violence, and even threw one of the explosives into a cop car before escaping.

The Justice Department, still under control of the Trump White House, pushed for 10 years behind bars for the duo, along with special “terrorist enhancement” penalties, clearly appropriate for this case.

Didn’t happen. Instead, in a new softened plea deal, Garland last month reduced the amount of time to be served by the terrorists from the original 10 years down to 18-24 months.

No word yet on when those who are illegally being held under charges for the Jan. 6 “insurrection” will be given similar leniency.

It may seem highly coincidental that all this should be coming together on the very day the Democrats began a televised show trial for the Jan. 6, 2021, demonstrations in the nation’s capital.

But, in fact, this is a strategy, taken straight from Marxist “organizer” Saul Alinsky’s “Rules For Radicals.” In that tome, he wrote the following: “Accuse your opponent of what you are doing, to create confusion and to inculcate voters against evidence of your own guilt”

This is precisely what Democratic “progressives” are doing now. As they run sham Jan. 6 “hearings” built on lies and exaggerations, they’ve been engaged in a massive actual insurrection for years now.

Dating back to the summer of 2020, when major cities exploded into violence over the death of criminal suspect George Floyd while in police custody, the Democrats have looked for ways to stir more violence while weakening the criminal justice system.

Just look at the number of radical district attorneys across the country who owe their jobs to contributions from socialist billionaire George Soros. They are now emptying jails and putting murderers back on the streets, with predictable results. This is the real insurrection.

It’s still hard to get Democrats to unequivocally criticize the 2020 riots (Democrats and their leftist media buddies called them “mostly peaceful”) that terrorized citizens, caused more than $2 billion in damage, and led to the deaths of at least 28 people.

But there were plenty who had inflammatory remarks about both the Jan. 6 demonstrations in Washington and the Supreme Court’s new conservative majority.

Most egregious of all were comments by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. In 2020, he set the tone for the current violent threats against the U.S. Supreme Court with what can only be called a direct threat of violence.

“I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh: You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price,” Schumer said. “You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

This speech wasn’t on the steps of Congress; it was right outside the U.S. Supreme Court building at a “protest” over the possibility that Roe v. Wade might be overturned by a conservative high court majority.

In the meantime, Schumer’s followers in the pro-abortion movement continue to violate the law, doxxing and demonstrating in front of Supreme Court justices’ homes in a transparent attempt at intimidation.

“Our 6-3 extremist Supreme Court routinely issues rulings that hurt women, racial minorities, LGBTQ+ and immigrant rights,” the radical “Ruth Sent Us” group’s website explains. “We must rise up to force accountability using a diversity of tactics.”

A “diversity of tactics”? How about breaking the law.

According to 18 U.S. Code § 115, threatening a federal official “with intent to impede, intimidate, or interfere with such official, judge, or law enforcement officer while engaged in the performance of official duties, or with intent to retaliate against such official, judge, or law enforcement officer on account of the performance of official duties, shall be punished” with a fine and/or up to 10 years in prison.

Citing a Homeland Security memo, Axios recently reported that “Law enforcement agencies are investigating social-media threats to burn down or storm the Supreme Court building and murder justices and their clerks, as well as attacks targeting places of worship and abortion clinics.”

So, yes, it’s real.

By egging on the demonstrators and ignoring their illegal behavior, the Democrats have contributed to an atmosphere of violent intimidation. It’s a direct subversion of our constitutional form of government, a blatant attempt to weaken and undermine the integrity of one of the three co-equal branches of our federal government.

Maybe we missed it, but we’ve yet to hear any comments from either House Speaker Nancy Pelosi or Schumer condemning the recent protests or even the lunatic Roske who, quite possibly, was “inspired” by Pelosi’s and Schumer’s intemperate remarks about the Supreme Court’s conservative majority.

Pelosi’s House Democrats this week even blocked a bill that would give Supreme Court justices better protection from potentially violent, unhinged people like Roske. As for Biden, after stumbling through an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel’s show, he warned of a “mini-revolution” if Roe is overturned.

Here’s a modest proposal: How about a “June 8 Committee” to look into the ongoing insurrection against the U.S. Supreme Court, American law enforcement and the criminal justice system?

The "Great" Reset... Centralized Krony Global Corporatism? Government Run Socialism/Communism? or Populist Private Free Market Federated Bourgeois Capitalism?

Slavoj Žižek, 'We Need a Socialist Reset, Not a Corporate “Great Reset”'

Slavoj Žižek writes in Jacobin today that we've been given a choice between a return to the old exploitative normality and a post-COVID corporate "Great Reset" that promises to be even worse. We need a real alternative, a socialist reset that can win justice for all and save the planet from climate apocalypse.

Back in April 2020, reacting to the COVID-19 pandemic, Jürgen Habermas pointed out that “existential uncertainty is now spreading globally and simultaneously, in the heads of medially-wired individuals themselves.” He continued, “There never was so much knowing about our not-knowing and about the constraint to act and live in uncertainty.”

Habermas is right to claim that this not-knowing does not concern only the pandemic itself — we at least have experts there — but even more its economic, social, and psychic consequences. Note his precise formulation: it is not simply that we don’t know what goes on, we know that we don’t know, and this not-knowing is itself a social fact, inscribed into how our institutions act.

We now know that in, say, medieval times or early modernity they knew much less — but they didn’t know this because they relied on some stable ideological foundation which guaranteed that our universe is a meaningful totality. The same holds for some visions of Communism, even for Francis Fukuyama’s idea of the end of history — they all assumed to know where history is moving. Plus, Habermas is right to locate the uncertainty into “the heads of medially-wired individuals”: our link to the wired universe tremendously expands our knowledge, but at the same time it throws us into radical uncertainty (Are we hacked? Who controls our access? Is what we’re reading there fake news?). Viruses strike in both meanings of the term, biological and digital.

When we try to guess how our societies will look after the pandemic will be over, the trap to avoid is futurology — futurology by definition ignores our not-knowing. Futurology is defined as a systematic forecasting of the future from the present trends in society. And therein resides the problem — futurology mostly extrapolates what will come from the present tendencies. However, what futurology doesn’t take into account are historical “miracles,” radical breaks which can only be explained retroactively, once they happen.

We should perhaps mobilize here the distinction that works in French between futur and avenir: “Futur” is whatever will come after the present while “avenir” points toward a radical change. When a president wins reelection, he is “the present and future president,” but he is not the president “to come” — the president to come is a different president. So will the post-corona universe be just another future or something new “to come”?

It depends not only on science but on our political decisions. Now the time has come to say that we should have no illusions about the “happy” outcome of the US elections, which brought such a relief among the liberals all around the world. John Carpenter’s They Live (1988), one of the neglected masterpieces of the Hollywood left, tells the story of John Nada — Spanish for “nothing” — a homeless laborer who accidentally stumbles upon a pile of boxes full of sunglasses in an abandoned church. When he puts on a pair of these glasses while walking on a street, he notices that a colorful publicity billboard soliciting us to enjoy chocolate bars now simply displays the word “OBEY,” while another billboard with a glamorous couple in a tight embrace, seen through the glasses, orders the viewer to “MARRY AND REPRODUCE.”

He also sees that paper money bears the words “THIS IS YOUR GOD.” Additionally, he soon discovers that many people who look charming are actually monstrous aliens with metal heads… What circulates now on the web is an image which restages the scene from They Live apropos Joe Biden and Kamala Harris: seen directly, the image shows the two of them smiling with the message “TIME TO HEAL”; seen through the glasses, they are two alien monsters and the message is “TIME TO HEEL”…

This is, of course, part of the Trump propaganda to discredit Biden and Harris as masks of anonymous corporate machines which control our lives. However, there is (more than) a grain of truth in it. Biden’s victory means “future” as the continuation of the pre-Trump “normality” — that’s why there was such a sigh of relief after his victory. But this “normality” means the rule of anonymous global capital which is the true alien in our midst.

I remember from my youth the desire for “socialism with a human face” against Soviet-type “bureaucratic” socialism. Biden newly promises global capitalism with a human face, while behind the face the same reality will remain. In education, this “human face” assumed the form of our obsession with “well-being”: pupils and students should live in bubbles that will save them from the horrors of external reality, protected by Politically Correct rules.

Education is no longer intended to have a sobering effect of allowing us to confront social reality — and when we are told that this safety will prevent mental breakdowns, we should counter it with exactly the opposite claim: such false safety opens us up to mental crises when we have to confront our social reality. What “well-being activity” does is that it merely provides a false “human face” to our reality instead of enabling us to change this reality itself. Biden is the ultimate “well-being” president.

So why is Biden still better than Trump? Critics point out that Biden also lies and represents big capital, only in a more polite form — but, unfortunately, this form matters. With his vulgarization of public speech, Trump was corroding the ethical substance of our lives, what Hegel called Sitten (as opposed to individual morality).

This vulgarization is a worldwide process. Take the European case of Szilárd Demeter, a ministerial commissioner and head of the Petőfi Literary Museum in Budapest. Demeter wrote in an op-ed in November 2020, “Europe is George Soros’ gas chamber. Poison gas flows from the capsule of a multicultural open society, which is deadly to the European way of life.” He went on to characterize Soros as “the liberal Fuhrer,” insisting that his “liber-aryan army deifies him more than did Hitler’s own.”

If asked, Demeter would probably dismiss these statements as rhetorical exaggeration; this, however, in no way dismisses their terrifying implications. The comparison between Soros and Hitler is deeply antisemitic: it puts Soros on a level with Hitler, claiming that the multicultural open society promoted by Soros is not only as perilous as the Holocaust and the Aryan racism that sustained it (“liber-aryan”) but even worse, more perilous to the “European way of life.”

So is there an alternative to this terrifying vision, other than Biden’s “human face”? Climate activist Greta Thunberg recently offered three positive lessons of the pandemic: “It is possible to treat a crisis like a crisis, it is possible to put people’s health above economic interests, and it is possible to listen to the science.”

Yes, but these are possibilities — it’s also possible to treat a crisis in such a way that one uses it to obfuscate other crises (like: because of the pandemic we should forget about global warming); it’s also possible to use the crisis to make the rich richer and the poor poorer (which effectively happened in 2020 with an unprecedented speed); and it’s also possible to ignore or compartmentalize science (just recall those who refuse to take vaccines, the explosive rise of conspiracy theories, etc.). Scott Galloway gives a more or less accurate image of things in our corona time:

We are barrelling towards a nation with three million lords being served by 350 million serfs. We don’t like to say this out loud, but I feel as if this pandemic has largely been invented for taking the top 10% into the top 1%, and taking the rest of the 90% downward. We’ve decided to protect corporations, not people. Capitalism is literally collapsing on itself unless it rebuilds that pillar of empathy. We’ve decided that capitalism means being loving and empathetic to corporations, and Darwinist and harsh towards individuals.

So which is Galloway’s way out, how should we prevent social collapse? His answer is that “capitalism will collapse on itself without more empathy and love”: “We’re entering the Great Reset, and it’s happening quickly. Many companies will tragically be lost to the economic fallout of the pandemic, and those that do survive will exist in a different form. Organizations will be far more adaptable and resilient. Distributed teams currently thriving with less oversight will crave that same autonomy going forward. Employees will expect executives to continue leading with transparency, authenticity, and humanity.”

But, again, how will this be done? Galloway proposes creative destruction that lets failing business fail while protecting people who lose jobs: “We let people get fired so that Apple can emerge and put Sun Microsystems out of business, and then we take that incredible prosperity and we’re more empathetic with people.”

The problem is, of course, who is the mysterious “we” in the last quoted sentence, i.e., how, exactly, is the redistribution done? Do we just tax the winners (Apple, in this case) more while allowing them to maintain their monopolist position? Galloway’s idea has a certain dialectical flair: the only way to reduce inequality and poverty is to allow the market competition to do its cruel job (we let people get fired), and then… what? Do we expect market mechanisms themselves to create new jobs? Or the state? How are “love” and “empathy” operationalized? Or do we count on the winners’ empathy and expect they will all behave like Gates and Buffett?

I find this supplementation of market mechanisms by morality, love, and empathy utterly problematic. Instead of enabling us to get the best of both worlds (market egotism and moral empathy), it is much more probable that we’ll get the worst of both worlds.

The human face of this “leading with transparency, authenticity, and humanity” are Gates, Bezos, Zuckenberg, the faces of authoritarian corporate capitalism who all pose as humanitarian heroes, as our new aristocracy celebrated in our media and quoted as wise humanitarians. Gates gives billions to charities, but we should remember how he opposed Elizabeth Warren’s plan for a small rise in taxes. He praised Piketty and once almost proclaimed himself a socialist — true, but in a very specific twisted sense: his wealth comes from privatizing what Marx called our “commons,” our shared social space in which we move and communicate.

Gates’s wealth has nothing to do with the production costs of the products Microsoft is selling (one can even argue that Microsoft is paying its intellectual workers a relatively high salary), i.e., Gates’s wealth is not the result of his success in producing good software for lower prices than his competitors, or in higher “exploitation” of his hired intellectual workers. Gates became one of the richest men in the world through appropriating the rent for allowing millions of us to communicate through the medium that he privatized and controls. And in the same way that Microsoft privatized the software most of us use, personal contacts are privatized by our Facebook networking, Amazon book buying, or Google searching.

There is thus a grain of truth in Trump’s “rebellion” against digital corporate powers. It is worth watching the War Room podcasts of Steve Bannon, the greatest ideologist of Trump’s populism: one cannot but be fascinated by how many partial truths he combines into an overall lie. Yes, under Obama the gap that separates wealthy from poor grew immensely, big corporations grew stronger… but under Trump this process just went on, plus Trump lowered taxes, printed money mostly to save big companies, etc. We are thus facing a horrible false alternative: a big corporate reset or nationalist populism, which turns out to be the same. “The great reset” is the formula of how to change some things (even many things) so that things will basically remain the same.

So is there a third way, outside the space of the two extremes of restoring the old normality and a Great Reset? Yes, a true great reset. It is no secret what needs to be done — Greta Thunberg made it clear. First, we should finally recognize the pandemic crisis as what it is, part of a global crisis of our entire way of life, from ecology to new social tensions. Second, we should establish social control and regulation over economy. Third, we should rely on science — rely on but not simply accept it as the agency which makes decisions.

Why not? Let’s return to Habermas with whom we began: our predicament is that we are compelled to act while we know we don’t know the full coordinates of the situation we are in, and non-acting would itself function as an act. But is this not the basic situation of every acting? Our great advantage is that we know how much we don’t know, and this knowing about our not-knowing opens up the space of freedom. We act when we don’t know the whole situation, but this is not simply our limitation: what gives us freedom is that the situation — in our social sphere, at least — is in itself open, not fully (pre)determined. And our situation in the pandemic is certainly open.

We learned the first lesson now: “shutdown light” is not enough. They tell us “we” (our economy) cannot afford another hard lockdown — so let’s change the economy. Lockdown is the most radical negative gesture within the existing order. The way beyond, to a new positive order, leads through politics, not science. What has to be done is changing our economic life so that it will be able to survive lockdowns and emergencies that are for sure awaiting us, in the same way that a war compels us to ignore market limitations and find a way to do what is “impossible” in a free market economy.

Back in March 2003, Donald Rumsfeld, then the US Secretary of Defense, engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophizing about the relationship between the known and the unknown: “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.” What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the “unknown knowns,” things we don’t know that we know — which is precisely the Freudian unconscious, the “knowledge which doesn’t know itself,” as Lacan used to say.

If Rumsfeld thought that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq were the “unknown unknowns,” the threats from Saddam Hussein about which we do not even suspect what they may be, what we should reply is that the main dangers are, on the contrary, the “unknown knowns,” the disavowed beliefs and suppositions we are not even aware of adhering to ourselves.

We should read Habermas’s claim that we never knew so much about what we don’t know through these four categories: the pandemic shook what we (thought we) knew that we knew, it made us aware of what we didn’t know that we didn’t know, and, in the way we confronted it, we relied on what we didn’t know that we know (all our presumptions and prejudices which determine our acting although we are not even aware of them). We are not dealing here with the simple passage from not-knowing to knowing but with the much more subtle passage from not-knowing to knowing what we don’t know — our positive knowing remain the same in this passage, but we gain a free space for action.

It is with regard to what we don’t know that we know, our presumptions and prejudices, that China (and Taiwan and Vietnam) did so much better than Europe and the United States. I am getting tired of the eternally repeated claim “Yes, the Chinese contained the virus, but at what price…” I agree that we need a Julian Assange to let us know what really went on there, the whole story, but the fact is that, when the epidemic exploded in Wuhan, they immediately imposed lockdown and put on a standstill the majority of production in the entire country, clearly giving priority to human lives over economy — with some delay, true, they took the crisis extremely seriously.

Now they are reaping the reward, even in economy. And — let’s be clear — this was only possible because the Communist Party is still able to control and regulate economy: there is social control over market mechanisms, although a “totalitarian” one. However, again, the question is not how they did it in China but how should we do it. The Chinese way is not the only effective way, it is not “objectively necessary” in the sense that, if you analyze all the data, you have to do it the Chinese way. The epidemic is not just a viral process, it is a process that takes place within certain economic, social, and ideological coordinates which are open to change.

Now, at the very end of 2020, we live in a crazy time in which the hope that vaccines will work is mixed by the growing depression, despair even, due to the growing number of infections and the almost daily discoveries of the new unknowns about the virus. In principle the answer to “What is to be done?” is easy ­here: we have the means and resources to restructure health care so that it serves the needs of the people in a time of crisis, etc. However, to quote the last line of Brecht’s “In Praise of Communism” from his play Mother, “It is the simple thing, that is so hard to do.”

There are many obstacles that make it so hard to do, above all the global capitalist order and its ideological hegemony. Do we then need a new Communism? Yes, but what I am tempted to call a moderately conservative Communism: all the steps that are necessary, from global mobilization against viral and other threats to establishing procedures which will constrain market mechanisms and socialize economy, but done in a way which is conservative (in the sense of an effort to conserve the conditions of human life — and the paradox is that we will have to change things precisely to maintain these conditions) and moderate (in the sense of carefully taking into account unpredictable side effects of our measures).

As Emmanuel Renault pointed out, the key Marxian category that introduces class struggle into the very heart of the critique of political economy is that of the so-called “tendential laws,” the laws which describe a necessary tendency in capitalist development, like the tendency of the falling profit rate. (As Renault noted, it was already Adorno who has insisted on these dimensions of Marx’s concept of “Tendenz” that makes it irreducible to a simple “trend.”) Describing this “tendency,” Marx himself uses the term antagonism: the falling rate of profit is a tendency which pushes capitalists to strengthen workers’ exploitation, and workers to resist it, so that the outcome is not predetermined but depends on the struggle — say, in some welfare-states, organized workers forcing the capitalists to make considerable concessions.

The Communism I am speaking about is exactly such a tendency: reasons for it are obvious (we need global action to fight health and environmental threats, economy will have to be somehow socialized…), and we should read the way global capitalism is reacting to the pandemic precisely as a set of reactions to the Communist tendency: the fake Great Reset, nationalist populism, solidarity reduced to empathy.

So how — if — will the Communist tendency prevail? A sad answer: through more repeated crises. Let’s put it clearly: the virus is atheist in the strongest sense of the term. Yes, it should be analyzed how the pandemic is socially conditioned, but it is basically a product of meaningless contingency, there is no “deeper message” in it (as they interpreted plague as a god’s punishment in the Medieval times). Before choosing the famous Virgil’s line on “acheronta movebo” as the motto of his Interpretation of Dreams, Freud considered another candidate, Satan’s words from Milton’s Paradise Lost: “What reinforcement we may gain from Hope, / If not what resolution from despair.”

If we cannot get any reinforcement from hope, if we are compelled to admit that our situation is hopeless, we should gain resolution from despair. This is how we, contemporary Satans who are destroying our earth, should react to the viral and ecological threats: instead of looking vainly for reinforcement in some hope, we should accept that our situation is desperate, and act resolutely upon it. To quote Greta Thunberg again: “Doing our best is no longer good enough. Now we need to do the seemingly impossible.”

Futurology deals with what is possible, we need to do what is (from the standpoint of the existing global order) impossible.