sumi

[sumi @Sumijoti]

@ConceptualJames Unless this is his Winston Marshall moment.

[sumi @Sumijoti]

@RealKeriSmith Couldn’t agree with you more, Keri.

[sumi @Sumijoti]

@SenMikeLee Yes. I’d like to be able to choose.

[Classic__Liberal 🌲🇺🇸 @ClassicLibera12]

What is an American?

An American is a person who understands that reality exists independent of any Authority’s manmade will, and that human beings are born with a nature that includes the capacity for reason and moral choice.

An American recognizes that rights are pre-political, existing before and above any Man or government of Men, and that man, though capable of great virtue, is a flawed and limited being who must be restrained by laws and by his own conscience.

An American trusts that truth can be discovered through honest inquiry and open debate, and that knowledge grows when it is tested against experience and the counsel of others.

An American holds that life, liberty, purpose and the dignity of the individual are not granted by governments but are part of the order of the world. To be an American is to live with the conviction that freedom is not a license to do whatever one pleases, but a moral trust that demands self-restraint, respect for the rights of others, and a duty to safeguard and strengthen liberty for future generations.

An American lives under covenant.

To be an American is not only to claim rights but to accept obligations, a bond that unites all Americans and the generations who will inherit it. This covenant is not written only in constitutions or laws, but in the moral conscience that binds free people to respect truth, justice, and the dignity of their fellow man.

It is a pledge that liberty will be preserved not by force alone, but by virtue, restraint, and common purpose.

The American covenant is thus a trust: that each generation will take up the duty of self-government, keeping faith with those who came before and preparing the ground for those yet to come.

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

All successful societies are, at the least, based on truth and justice. Identity politics is the enemy of both, thus of society at its very foundations.

Truth is universal, not particular. If something is true for one, it is true for all. That's what true means. Identity politics denies this and says that truth is contingent upon factors relevant to identity.

Justice is blind (to identity), or it is not just. Identity politics is designed to create exceptions to the blindness of justice and therefore undermines justice.

[Insurrection Barbie @DefiyantlyFree]

We are a Christian nation, but for the opposite reason the authoritarian Christian Nationalist crew, and even more comically the integralists, think we are.

What makes us a Christian nation is that the founders placed a jurisdictional boundary between church and state. Not to protect the state from the church, but to protect the church from the state and more importantly to preserve the free conscience of man.

It is a jurisdictional boundary between the spiritual kingdom and the temporal one.

And it’s not something the founders invented from thin air.

It came from Christ Himself.

The coin bears Caesar’s image. But man bears God’s image.

The coin is Caesar’s. The soul is God’s.

Our founders accomplished politically what even the Reformers could not. They translated the Christian distinction between temporal and spiritual authority into a constitutional structure. They made the principle that your conscience is not the property of a king, pope, bishop, magistrate or political majority part of our national covenant.

That achievement was imperfect at first. Some states retained religious tests and establishments. But the federal Constitution refused to nationalize any of them. Article VI prohibited religious tests for federal office, and the First Amendment denied Congress jurisdiction to establish religion or prohibit its free exercise.

And it rested upon a profoundly Christian understanding of the limits of human authority.

God alone is sovereign. Civil power is delegated, not absolute. Government can restrain evil, punish violence and protect the innocent. It cannot regenerate the human heart. It can compel outward conformity, but it can never produce faith. It can manufacture hypocrites, but it cannot manufacture Christians.

The church was protected from political control because the Gospel was too important to become an instrument of the state.

The authoritarian Christian Nationalist gets this backward. He believes America becomes more Christian when Caesar acquires greater power over religion. But Christianity teaches us the opposite. It teaches us that Caesar is Christian only when he recognizes that he is not God.

The integralist gets it backward too. He treats the separation of civil and ecclesiastical jurisdiction as an abandonment of Christianity, when that distinction begins with Christ Himself. He would prove Christianity’s political authority by dismantling one of Christianity’s greatest contributions to the political order: the denial that any human institution possesses total jurisdiction over man.

America’s Christian character is not found in giving the government power to proclaim a favored theology and punish dissenters. It is found in a covenantal order that recognizes Creator-endowed rights, limits civil authority, divides power and leaves the conscience where it belongs: accountable directly to God.

That doesn’t mean all religions are true. It means civil government lacks the authority and competence to decide religious truth by force.

America is a Christian nation because its constitutional order embodies the Christian truth that power is limited, faith cannot be coerced and Caesar has no rightful claim on the soul.

The Christian state is not the state that seizes God’s authority.

It is the state that kneels before God by remaining within its own.

[sumi @Sumijoti]

@BlackLabelAdvsr Why smear Josh Howerton? He doesn’t belong in your list

[Phil Magness @PhilWMagness]

There's a deeper problem with Vance's historical narrative here.

He claims that the Industrial Revolution caused a crisis of "inequality" that made the rich even richer, and sparked a backlash in the form of Marxist political responses.

This is false on two counts:

1. The Industrial Revolution drastically *reduced* inequality. It displaced medieval serfdom where wealth was concentrated among the nobility and the masses were poor. And as the Industrial Revolution progressed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a new middle class emerged, meaning the income distribution spread more widely than at any point in history up until then. This is just an empirical fact that Vance is wrong about.

2. Industrialization did NOT cause Marxist political revolutions in response. In fact, almost all of Karl Marx's predictions about the course of industrial development turned out to be wrong. Marx predicted a coming immiseration of the working classes as capital concentration reduced laborers to subsistence and exploitative extraction...which in turn triggers the revolution. By the early 20th century, it was so obviously clear that this was not happening that Marx's followers began to "revise" his theories to account for the failed predictions. That only changed after 1917 when the Bolsheviks imposed Marxism at gunpoint after staging a violent coup in Russia, one of the least-industrialized powers on earth at the time. The Bolsheviks tried to spread their revolution in Europe in the years that followed, but it failed every time.

[CJ the palmer worm; wife,mother, researcher. @thepalmerworm]

🇺🇸⚖️🇨🇦
America did not ‘make’ men equal. It constituted government on the prior recognition that men are created (by their Creator) equal. Equal before the Rule of Law. Canada never gave its constitutional order the same antecedent jurisdictional floor. Canada inherited a different account of where governing authority begins. In contrast, America has a unique constitutional architecture because political authority has deliberately been placed downstream of recognition (plus upholding and defence) of what the human person already is.

That’s not to say that British or Canadian constitutionalism denied natural law, human nature, Christianity, common-law liberties, or moral limits upon government. Quite the contrary; many of those things were culturally and intellectually presupposed. However, presupposing them is constitutionally different from making their recognition the express antecedent constitutive grammar from which legitimate governmental jurisdiction is derived.

And this is where crown parliamentary supremacy must be understood - along with American Founder Justice James Wilson’s outright rejection of the Principle of Supremacy (Parliamentary Supremacy) which Blackstone/Pufendorf upheld and which James Wilson expressly stated must be rejected by the American Legal System because it was incompatible with the popular sovereignty of American Constitutional Republican governance. It’s what distinguishes America from the crown nations re: sovereignty. Canada never performed the prior jurisdictional transfer that America performed in 1776.

Canada did not insert an American Declaration underneath its Charter. It constitutionalized rights without first constitutionalizing the American constitutive grammar concerning the antecedent ontological subject possessing those rights. That is the defensive significance of America’s Declaration of Independence which is deliberately misrepresented when public intellectuals, academics and Influencers attempt to reduce it to ‘inspiring rhetoric’, ‘political philosophy’, or eighteenth-century ‘ideology’. All of which is rhetorical posturing and fails to articulate the fact that the Declaration performs a specific and foundational jurisdictional operation. It puts something beyond government’s (and corporations’) constitutive control. It is where the chain of legitimate jurisdiction begins.

Yes, Canada eventually placed Parliament beneath the Constitution (1982?). However, America had already placed its Constitution beneath the jurisdictionally antecedent account of the human person. This is key re: defence against ideological and political warfare.

[sumi @Sumijoti]

@Designsage @ConceptualJames Definitely gives off staged vibes

[Dan Burmawi @DanBurmawy]

Before I left Islam, I was debating a Sudanese Christian who challenged me to name one good thing about Muhammad. Just one.

I thought: easy. We Muslims practically worship Muhammad as the greatest man who ever lived.

So I tried to recall good qualities, honesty, compassion, mercy, love, anything, any single story, and I couldn’t remember one.

So I went to Google and typed: “the qualities of the Prophet.”

Islamic websites came up, and I thought, good, now I’ll have plenty of examples for this guy.

I opened them and was stunned: even the Islamic websites offered no good qualities in the sense he’d challenged me to find.

They praised his courage in spreading Islam, his fighting of Allah’s enemies, his physical strength, and his strictness.

Not one of the qualities the man had asked for.

Even the famous mercy at Mecca, sparing the people who had supposedly persecuted him, turned out to be for strategic reasons.

And when I started digging into the Quran and the sira for myself, I found that he married a child, he took Safiyya, a Jewish woman, the same day he killed her father, her brother, and her husband, trading his companion Dihya seven other captives for her, and posting a guard by the tent in case she tried to avenge them while raping her.

He had the men of the Jewish tribe beheaded, down to boys checked for pubic hair.

He raided trade caravans and took other tribes’ treasures.

He lied and broke truces he asked for.

He slept with all of his 9 wives the same night.

He killed anyone who mocked him.

He recruited raiders with the promise of other cities’ women.

And when his own fighters hesitated to touch married captives, because their husbands were alive and watching, Muhammad told them it was fine because allah said so.

Even the pagans of Arabia had higher morality than he did.

Every one of these acts was stamped with Allah’s approval.

He even married his adopted son’s wife by divine decree.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

I left Islam when I met this disgusting man, a man who turned his qualities into a religion, transmitted it to every generation of Muslims since, and made himself the ceiling of their morality.

This is the man Mamdani wants you to learn from.

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

At the risk of offending a ton of people completely unjustifiedly, allow me to offer an explanation for why so many young people seem to be gravitating toward Catholicism (and Orthodoxy) now.

There are a few moving parts, but I'll hit the biggest one first.

Need for (Patriarchal) Structure

My guess about the primary reason this is happening is that the last ten years of Woke, which were formative for the age cohort we're mostly talking about here, were completely destabilized between Woke, Covid, TDS, social media, and all the rest. It's not even like being on a foundation of sand but more like being in churning water to have come of age in this situation.

The Catholic (and Orthodox) Church offers something that looks and feels very solid. That structural solidity is incredibly appealing to people who don't feel like they have any and can't find it anywhere, including in secular institutions, their own deracinated traditions, or Protestant churches. The primary reason for these conversions is this offer of structure and solidity to people who feel like they don't have any and are absolutely desperate for it.

Add to this the fact that everything Woke is tinged with feminism. Feminism is the "receptor" through which the Woke mind virus was able to infect our society, so everything Woke is toxically feminine. A specifically patriarchal order increases the appeal of the Catholic (and Orthodox) Church here.

Older Is Better

Another aspect to this psychological uprootedness problem is that newer things, like classical liberalism's liberty and self-government, Reformation theology and Protestantism, etc., are easy to blame for the structural problems they experience. This is a very common way of thinking among right-wing people and is the functional basis for lots of things we've seen in history (including Nazism, Fascism, and, today, Duginism).

The general psychological feeling is that things are bad because they have gone bad due to forces of decay, corruption, and rot, but there's a more pristine, if not primordial (and perennial...) past that can be renewed. In fact, you'll find a lot of the Woke Right guys saying they are renewalists, not reactionaries. Corruption of a pure source over time, thus falling away from what is True and Good, is the predominant sociological explanation for problems.

In this mindset, the older and closer to the root something is (or is perceived to be), the more solid, pristine, and uncorrupted it is. When you feel like everything is corrupted and falling away into oblivion, this is very attractive.

The Catholic (and Orthodox) Church sell themselves as being roughly 2000 (or at least 1500) years of unbroken tradition that connects to the ultimate pristine source, which is the rock of Peter and the throne Jesus Himself allegedly gave him. You cannot get closer to the pristine source than that within Christianity as one's chosen tradition. (The validity of the claim is not litigated here; the point is that it is made and widely believed.)

Our young, uprooted souls crave not only the structure of the Traditional Church but also its claim to authenticity in unbroken tradition to a pure, pre-corrupted source.

Rebellion

Young people rebel against their parents. Many of our previous generation rebelled by becoming Woke. Many in our current generation are refusing Woke and, indeed, rebelling against it too. What shape would rebellion against their parents take within this set of contraints?

We're talking about converts, and they come from two kinds of people when converting to Catholicism (and Orthodoxy): secular and Protestant. Converting to Catholicism (for the above reasons) also satisfies the youthful desire to stake out individual ideological ground away from one's parents and to join a movement of one's peers, which are also doing this in something like numbers. They won't go Woke or reject religion like the Millennials did, so they go Trad (pseudotraditionalist) and find a path for that in the Catholic (and Orthodox) Church.

High-Church, Low-Church

The usually way of describing the organization of the Catholic (or Orthodox) Church in comparison to the Protestant organizational approach is "high church" versus "low church." This is extremely relevant to the idea of structure and anchoring in older (pristine, perennial...) t/Tradition.

In the "high church," there is a clear hierarchical priest class and structure above the laity, a formal liturgy, a predictable ritualistic structure, and, whenever possible, exalted architecture with strong regularity from parish to parish. There's a relatively high degree of formality and structural discipline. Like what you're getting or not, you can bet on what you're getting.

In the "low church," by contrast, every man is a priest and every pastor is a congregant; that is, there is very little designating difference between the clergy and laity. There is little or no formal liturgy, little or no predictable ritualistic structure, little or no consistency or even exaltation of architecture (indeed, the church is the gathering of the people wherever it happens much more than a building they gather in). There's no discipline to tradition, and some of it can be quite disconnected, "enthusiastic" (charismatic, emotional), nakedly corrupt (prosperity gospel) or bonkers.

This difference cuts both ways (I'm not litigating one over the other here; just explaining a phenomenon), but the "low church" feels decidedly casual and even "lib'ral" by comparison to the "high church." This might be well and good in its ways, but it is both unappealing and unsatisfying to young people in the wash of our times seeking solidity, structure, hierarchy, predictability, discipline, etc.

Cult of Confession

In Robert Jay Lifton's very insightful and admirable work Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of "Brainwashing" in China (1961), he describes the Maoist situation in the newly formed People's Republic as exhibiting a peculiar psychological environment. Part of that environment he describes with the term "cult of confession."

The cult of confession situation Lifton describes is that there's a prevailing moral orthodoxy, let's call it, and people are all keenly aware of how they fall short of it. "There is the demand that one confess to crimes one has not committed, to sinfulness that is artificially induced, in the name of a cure that is arbitrarily imposed," he writes. This demand creates an incredible psychological pressure that needs release, what he calls a "purging milieu." Confession is expected to be done publicly and to induce struggle and transformation.

Here is what I am NOT SAYING with this: I AM NOT SAYING CATHOLICISM IS A CULT OF CONFESSION ENVIRONMENT.

Here is what I AM SAYING here: Young people under the yoke of Woke have grown up in this psychological pressure cooker and have similar need of release and relief, even when they resist the Woke pathway, and the Catholic confessional structure offers an alternative mechanism to "scratch the itch" without caving in to Wokery.

Interestingly, the method by which young people actually "confess" in the Woke/Maoist sense is by open and willful rejection of Woke policies (being "based," in the most debased, edgy, antisocial sense possible). I would wager this increases their sense of need to do a Catholic-style confession, even if they don't see their transgressive "basedness" as morally sinful. Transgression itself creates this urge, and normal confession would assuage the psychology.

Protestantism does not offer a formalized structure for this process, leaving it to be ultimately personal and perhaps relational. There is no ritualistic and symbolic process of purging and renewal. Secularist approaches leave you to wrestle with your conscience entirely on your own. These are undesirable by comparison to the lost.

Capitalization and Psyop

All of these forces above are understood and are being taken advantage of by two powerful forces at once to bring people into the Catholic (or Orthodox) Church (leaving aside peer behavior, pressure, and fad). These are the Church itself, which is happy for the recruitment, especially now, and manipulative information warfare operators (in the "Woke Right") who have other purposes for driving and exploiting these conversions.

That is, there's not one but two (or more) deliberate recruitment drives happening, taking advantage of the above circumstance, for their own purposes, which are not commensurate. Those recruitment drives are succeeding and bringing people into the Church.

Now, while the Catholic (or Orthodox) Church itself will be happy to take advantage of this situation of lostness, etc., to fill its pews, which might be fine enough as it is (I know Protestants won't agree, but I'm neutral here), there's a second one happening that's more political or even worse than it is genuinely religious.

The objective of the second of these drives, the "Woke Right" one, involves bringing (young) people into the Church specifically to manipulate that conversion and their new (relatively zealous and untrained) beliefs for political ends that suit their goals.

These two things are not the same. One is acceptable (except to Protestants, maybe); one is nefarious. Both are happening. You're not supposed to talk about the second one or the people involved will accuse you of "hating Catholics" and turn a lot of Catholics (in the first camp who don't know what's going on here) against you.

A Dark Secret

While the political objectives of this second, nefarious campaign (hiding under the first, neutral/good one) are themselves wicked, they're also informed and connected to something worse, a resurgence of "Traditionalism" with a capital T, which poses as "traditionalism" without one. This is also connected to specific evil political movements, most notably that of Aleksandr Dugin and his surrogates.

Lowercase-t traditionalism refers to favoring tradition: faith, family, nation, history, etc., as we usually think of it as conservatives. Edmund Burke was instrumental in laying out these ideas very clearly in the late 18th century and became known as the father of modern philosophical conservatism as a result.

Capital-T Traditionanlism is a form of (New Age) occultism. It is not lowercase-t traditionalism and trades off its respectable name. It holds that there is a primordial (pristine), perennial Tradition, with a capital T, that is the true source of all genuine faith and all rightly orthodox religions, including Orthodox Christianity, Shia Islam, Hinduism, some Buddhism, some Taoism, and very distinctly not Protestant Christianity. Pre-modern Orthodox Judaism is sometimes allowed, but nothing newer.

In capital-T Traditionalism, all these authentic orthodox belief systems are outward manifestations, forms, or shells of the true underlying Perennial Tradition that is the true religious source of all spirituality. It is New Age turned upside-down and inside-out.

The way capital-T Traditionalism works is by bringing people into a sufficiently orthodox tradition and having them bore to the core of it by getting extremely serious about it, adhering to it and its traditions rigidly, and then being "initiated" by a "master" who reveals the truth of Tradition to you (occultist initiation). Once this happens, you no longer "convert" when you change outward faith traditions but "settle" in the one that fits you best.

This occultist crackpottery was begun by a French lunatic in the 19th century named Rene Guenon, who is considered foundational to Aleksandr Dugin and much of the philosophical Woke Right, who sometimes invoke him specifically and by name, intentionally and knowingly. Guenon "settled" on a form of Islam before outlining his thoughts on this inverted form of occultism. Steve Bannon is also at least partially a self-identifying Traditionalist in the line of Guenon, for what it's worth, although he's (outwardly) a Catholic.

Interestingly, Catholicism is not considered one of the valid traditions that reveals Tradition in strict Traditionalism, although Orthodoxy is. The Traditionalist Catholics (TradCaths) don't tend to agree with this, seemingly, but it gets very murky there, at least as far as I've pulled it apart. It is, however, a stepping stone in that direction.

My claim here is that within the Woke Right nefarious recruitment agenda (though not its totality) is the objective to lure young Americans away from classical liberalism, Americanism, and Protestantism and toward Traditionalism and its occult Tradition. Not all will qualify for "initiation," of course. Luring them, as outlined above, to Catholic conversion constitutes a definitive first step in this process and a kind of signifier for deeper recruitment and initiation. (That is, some of these kids who are converting will be sufficiently zealous and whackjob to initiate, and so conversion serves like a first step in a sieve process for finding them for eventual cult recruitment from amongst the suitable and groomable.)

Yes, I'm dead serious that I think this is happening and happening on purpose.

I also think it is directly tied politically to getting them to accept the radicalism and political outlook of Aleksandr Dugin, which is fully structured off the Traditionalist mindset. Convert them, initiate them, turn them into Duginites; that's a process that I am claiming is happening actively and deliberately within a broader recruitment campaign.

Foreign Objectives

The bridge eventually toward Orthodoxy, which might pass through (Trad) Catholicism, has at least one nefarious component nested within what more broadly might be mostly the kind of normal shift/recruitment outlined above: Russian influence operations.

The Russian government is connected directly to the Russian Orthodox Church in the sense that it effectively controls it while destroying pretty much all other Christianity completely. This is known as the Russian Patriarchate.

Part of this recruitment drive is to invite young people to convert to (or toward) Orthodoxy in order to soften their attitudes toward Russian "Christianity," which is to say the Russian Patriarchate, which is to say Moscow, Russia, Putin, and even Aleksandr Dugin, merely in a political way, absent the (silly and dark) Traditionalism angle.

It is effectively undeniable that within all of this, the Russian government is running this kind of influence operation through religion and "Christianity," which is a kind of code word because their approach only truly respects the Russian Patriarchate as an extension of the Russian government and its ambitions.

While this politico-religious object is openly hostile to Catholicism in reality, most Westerners (especially "Trad" youth) have no idea about that. They see Russia as a, if not the, great protector of Christianity as a Western (cough) foundational value system, and stepping in this ignorance in the direction of the structured Church while also awash in pro-"Christian" Russia propaganda softens them considerably to Russia, Putin, and Dugin, etc. It doesn't matter that reality is incompatible because influence campaigns work on beliefs, often held in significant ignorance.

A Hidden Schismatic Campaign

As a final note, I think one other nefarious recruitment element is happening, which is a schism within the Catholic Church itself. You might have noticed the pope, and the previous pope, were super Woke. This is, in the view of many, a consistent feature in Catholicism since Vatican II (1962-1965), during which many traditionalist (and Traditionalist) Catholics would hold that the Church kind of lost its way (not for all bad reasons).

Denying the legitimacy of the popes and Church is no minor affair in Catholicism, so it doesn't happen openly much. The belief that the sitting pope is not the real pope because of some corrupt process in selection, etc., is called Sedevacantism, which roughly means that the Throne of Peter is actually vacant because the pope is a fraud pope. You can't really just accuse this openly, even if you believe it, which introduces a lot of weirdness that I think is clearly happening. That is, I think a lot of the TradCaths are closet Sedevacantists.

These people, whether closeted Sedevacantists or not, would generally like to either undo Vatican II or at least get rid of Woke popes, which would require something like revolution within the Church. They do not have the numbers for this, not even close, especially not in the Church hierarchy. Therefore, they need to recruit young radicals in large enough numbers to be able to achieve that goal.

I think part of the Woke Right recruitment drive to TradCath-ism, outlined on the terms above, is directly meant to recruit trad-radicals from disaffected Protestant situations in order to have their intra-Catholic revolution when they can get the numbers. Bold claim, but I'm almost positive it holds up.

This is not identical to the Duginist program but likely overlaps strongly.

Bottom Line

Young people in our country and throughout the West are badly deracinated, churning in cultural and social uncertainty, and they're attracted to Catholic (and Orthodox) conversion to find solidity, patriarchal structure (daddy energy), connection to "uncorrupted" tradition, etc. Some are also rebelling, seeking, etc.

For reasons that are both legitimate in some ways and very unfair and illegitimate at other times, the secular classical liberal and Protestant circumstances are portrayed as incapable of satisfying those perceived needs.

The Catholic (and Orthodox) Church is recruiting accordingly, which is fine.

Bad actors of the Woke Right type, whether for merely political, Traditionalist, or secret Sedevacantist reasons, or other reasons besides, are also recruiting accordingly, though for wicked purposes. These are hiding behind the Catholic Church's recruitment drive very successfully, and you'll find that out if you name or identify it (my comments might attest to this soon...).

Both classical liberalism and the Protestantism that it is not-trivially born from are not structured in a way that addresses these needs, which are higher than usual in our present circumstance. Both churches and bad actors are taking advantage of that situation. This explains most of this recruitment, which also becomes a momentum-carrying fad phenomenon (social contagion, as it were).

That's what I think explains this trend.

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

When I look at how the Woke Right rose in the exact perfect timing with the exact perfect methods to prevent sane republicanism and the Republican Party to become a strongly majority party for a long time to come, thus enabling the rise of the openly Communist and Islamist DSA, I think about how sophisticated our Enemy really is and how badly they have us positioned.

The Republican Party should be dominating at like 70% right now, but the Woke Right has prevented any such thing from being possible. The DSA should be terrified to emerge, but the Right is in shambles because of them. This was all calculated. They are two hands of the same Beast: the Left and the Right Hand of the Left.

Instead, we are fasting, praying, and humiliating ourselves, or merely scrambling, that Providence pull us through another impossible scrape. By faith we have come this far, though, and by faith we will cover the next mile and cross its chasms.

[Insurrection Barbie @DefiyantlyFree]

1. Closed border
2. Low taxes
3. Low regulation
4. A society built on meritocracy not the DEI
5. Everyone needs an ID to vote.
6. No foreign money in our education system. At all from anyone.
7. A truly nonpartisan focus on curbing foreign malign influence operations online
8. A ban on transgender surgery for children
9. An education system that’s not infested with American hating Marxists
10. A reworking of the IRS code to break up the NGO industrial complex that runs our life
11. Deterrence against our enemies
12. An immigration system that doesn’t reward people who hate America and work everyday to subvert it
13. Judges that follow the plain letter of the law and not invent it
14. A smaller more accountable administrative state
15. A commitment from Congress to eradicate as much waste fraud and abuse as possible
16. A foreign policy that is based on reality whereby theocratic radical Islamic states are curtailed.

It’s not complicated. It doesn’t require postliberalism.

It’s what Trump has already done and is currently working on doing.

If all the subversive POS would stop running propaganda campaigns on social media all day everyday…. We could get there.

[Creative Deduction @CreativeDeduct]

The intellectual case against Marxism was won more than a century ago. The most rigorous and devastating blows came from the Austrian School of economics – but the strange part is that hardly anyone is taught the winning arguments.

Carl Menger’s subjective theory of value, developed in the 1870s, undermined the labour theory of value on which Marx built his entire system. Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk then delivered a systematic demolition of Marx’s economics, exposing the contradictions in the theory of surplus value and the so-called transformation problem. Ludwig von Mises went further still, demonstrating that rational economic calculation is impossible under socialism because without private property and market prices there is no way to allocate resources efficiently. Friedrich Hayek later extended this into the knowledge problem: the information required to run a complex economy is dispersed and cannot be centralised. And Murray Rothbard showed how Marx misunderstood the nature of capitalism by replacing voluntary exchange and entrepreneurial creation with a false theory of exploitation based on labour value and class conflict.

These were not minor objections. They struck at the theoretical foundations of Marxism and, in the case of Mises and Hayek, correctly predicted the chronic waste, shortages, and eventual collapse of socialist economies. History confirmed their arguments on a civilisational scale.

Yet in universities, media and political debate, these critiques remain marginal. Marx is still widely taught as a serious economist and social theorist. His errors are softened, historicised, or treated as interesting starting points. The Austrian responses are rarely given equal weight. Students can pass through entire programmes in the social sciences without encountering Böhm-Bawerk’s critique or Mises’s calculation argument in any depth.

This neglect is not accidental. It reflects a deeper intellectual preference for theories that pathologise markets and legitimise expanded state power. The result is a public discourse that continues to recycle Marxist categories long after their economic foundations were shown to be unsound. The cost of that selective memory is still being paid.

[sumi @Sumijoti]

@Lalisalisa2025 @ChameleonCat2 @RyanMorseWx Um…that is EXACTLY my point. The rest of the world is on standard time. Only Americans are crazy enough to presume that permanent DST is going to be better.
Btw…have you experienced permanent standard time? I have. Lived it, and loved it.

[Gina Milan @ginamilan_]

This young girl does GRWMs on TikTok and never talks politics.

She just posted a video sounding the alarm on what’s happening with Islam in America right now — and how terrifying it actually is.

She said she had no idea any of this was going on… and neither do most people her age.

That’s why she felt she had to speak up.

It’s honestly refreshing to see someone from her generation finally use their platform for something real instead of the usual nonsense.

Every single minute is worth watching.

[Nick Freitas @NickJFreitas]

"Why do prices keep going up?"

I'd be happy to explain why prices keep going up...Inflationary monetary policy.

"Why do we have inflationary monetary policy?"

Well, there are a lot of reasons, but the primary one is that politicians really like to spend money, because it's an easy way to buy votes. The problem is politicians don't make money, so they have to get it through one of 3 primary ways...

1. They can tax...which is how they get most of it, but there is a point where taxation has diminishing returns because taxing someone too much leads to a lack of productivity or avoidance strategies.

2. They can borrow...which is one of their favorites because it allows them to kick the can down the road when it comes to actually paying for things; the problem is that at some point the government's credit isn't very good, and people don't want to voluntarily loan them money anymore.

3. They can print it...which is what we have been doing for a long time now. It's especially damaging because when the government prints a bunch of money to spend, it doesn't immediately cause all the prices to go up, so when the government spends the money, they are getting close to the full value of the dollar at the time that it is spent...it is only after the new paper dollars have started to circulate without a corresponding increase in supply that more dollars are competing over the same amount of goods and services and thus the prices go up, because the value of each dollar has gone down through money printing ie. "inflationary monetary policy."

Eventually the inflation gets so bad that they have to stop printing and spending, but that only decreases inflation; it doesn't end it, so prices don't go down to where they were; they simply stop increasing at the previous rate.

"Well, why don't they fix it?"

Because it would cause the economy to significantly, albeit temporarily, tank, and then whatever party was not in charge would blame the party that was in charge, and the citizens suffering the most from inflationary monetary policy would punish the party that stopped the inflationary monetary policy.

"So what's the answer?"

Well...the American people could start getting a lot more educated and concerned about the dangers of fiat currency combined with an ever-expanding welfare state and economic central planning, or the system can keep going until it reaches a critical mass, collapses, and we go through a lot more pain than would have otherwise been required...

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

The only correct discourse on the $20 burritos is that nothing like Covid can ever, ever, ever happen again from our government, and the Democrats who drove so much of the inflation cannot be in power again. Gratitude to President Trump for his successes would be nice too.

We all knew this inflation was going to hit and hit hard. We all know where it actually came from. That's why it's so damned galling to see this political chicanery and these attacks against Trump and Republicans when we know exactly where it came from, along with all the lying the post-liberal "Right" is doing to drive the narrative.

It's irritating to hear this line coming from Communists like Hasan Piker and infuriating to hear it from so-called conservatives as though they're being electorally prudent, in-touch, and empathetic. It's bewildering to hear this, among so many other talking points, echoed by radicals on both Left and Right at the same time almost like it's coordinated, this just being the latest example until, say, tomorrow or so.

The narrative they're trying to force on us isn't just disingenuous, manipulative, and agitating (as Lenin used the word), it is to the Left's advantage, pushing all of public discourse onto their home turf. Again, this all while we knew it was coming and we knew who caused it: and it wasn't us.

So why's it happening?

[Handre @Handre]

The Cash for Clunkers program, which Congress passed in June 2009 and burned through its $3 billion budget in under two months, destroyed functional wealth on a national scale, and somehow they called it "stimulus."

The mechanics were simple: trade in a working car, receive up to $4,500 toward a new one, and watch government employees pour sodium silicate into the old engine to make it seize permanently. Around 700,000 vehicles got crushed. These were not rusted-out death traps. The eligibility rules required the trade-in to be drivable and insured. You were watching the state systematically annihilate usable capital because Keynesian demand theory told it that destruction generates recovery. Frederic Bastiat explained why this is wrong in 1850, in an essay short enough to read on your lunch break. Congress ignored it.

The ripple effect hit people the government never mentioned in its press releases. Mechanics lost repair work. Used-car dealers watched their inventory evaporate. Low-income buyers who depend on the sub-$5,000 market faced prices that jumped roughly 10% in the years after the program. Free market economists call this "seen versus unseen." Politicians only showed you the gleaming new Chevy Malibu driving off the lot. They never showed you the single mother in Akron who needed a $3,000 Corolla and found nothing affordable left on the lot.

Even the environmental justification collapsed under basic scrutiny. A 2009 study by Resources for the Future calculated that the program cost between $237 and $365 per ton of carbon dioxide reduced. The voluntary carbon credit market at the time priced a ton around $10 to $20. The government spent up to thirty times the market rate to achieve an environmental outcome the market was already pricing far more efficiently.

This is what central planning always does. It takes your money, destroys real assets, and transfers wealth from the poor to auto manufacturers and their financiers. The program's designers received awards. The Akron mother paid higher prices. The engines sat crushed in junkyards. Nobody in Washington answered for any of it.