Voters don’t decide anything. The lawyers do. Politicians are irrelevant. The only people who count in Israel today are the unelected attorneys who run the country.
Not just Israel.
Attorney General William P. Barr at the Federalist Society
Richard Fernandez: I don’t know enough law to meaningfully comment on Barr’s argument, but its breadth and mere existence are every bit as provocative as knocking the hat off the pole. This is the dread moment that may pass unnoticed–or otherwise.
Full transcript here and a good Twitter summary by Josh Blackman.
Through the scorched earth, no holds barred war of resistance, the left is shredding rule of law and undermining rule of law.
— Josh Blackman (@JoshMBlackman) November 15, 2019
The Werewolf Extinction
Part II: How the World to the Dark Tower Came
“The last week has been eventful, even by Age O’ Trump standards”
Here’s a fun test: can you name something – anything – major in the last two decades that our best and brightest have not screwed up?
I’ll wait.
Gaslighting is their default move because gaslighting is all these losers have. It’s not like they can sit back and let you read their CV of achievements. Iraq, Obamacare, their annoying millennial kids…all disasters. The members of America’s current ruling class are King Midases of failure. Everything they touch turns to suck.
So, because they have no other way to deal with the damning evidence of their utter incompetence, our elite instead tries to convince us that we are crazy for noticing just how lame they are. That’s called “gaslighting,” the straight-faced denial of what’s happening right in front of you that tries to leverage your politeness and deference to convince you that it’s not the elite that’s rotten. You’re just crazy for noticing, you crazed crazy person of craziness.
I, Napoleon
A very worthwhile interview: Douglas Murray with Dave Rubin
Help clear the minefield by passing it on.
Dan Crenshaw With Joe Rogan
Good interview.
The Deterioration of Law Enforcement
It seems so long ago that there were guarantees which came with certain behavior.
If you ran from the police, you were likely to get spanked like a disobedient child.
If you fought with the police, you were booked via an ER visit.
If you killed a policeman, hmmm.
These guarantees had no effect on the behavior of decent people, but they struck fear in the hearts of predators. These guarantees, though they seem unnecessary, provided order instead of chaos. They kept the wolves in far fewer numbers and at far greater distances from the flock.
Those guarantees and those days are gone. The men who imposed those guarantees are quiet and vanishing. Those same predators are no longer fearful. They are bold. Hell, even the insipid, sarcastic, smartphone-wielding, cop-hating twerps aren’t scared anymore.
The Road To Serfdom
Professor of Economics Lawrence H. White at Hillsdale College (2015).
Come Back Pizzagate, All Is Forgiven
Gotta give it to @scrowder on this one. pic.twitter.com/YuSAayoU4J
— Neon Revolt (@NeonRevolt) August 17, 2019
Related at Belmont Club.
Gramscian Damage
The Soviets had an entire “active measures” department devoted to churning out anti-American dezinformatsiya. A classic example is the rumor that AIDS was the result of research aimed at building a ‘race bomb’ that would selectively kill black people.
On a different level, in the 1930s members of CPUSA (the Communist Party of the USA) got instructions from Moscow to promote non-representational art so that the US’s public spaces would become arid and ugly.
Americans hearing that last one tend to laugh. But the Soviets, following the lead of Marxist theoreticians like Antonio Gramsci, took very seriously the idea that by blighting the U.S.’s intellectual and esthetic life, they could sap Americans’ will to resist Communist ideology and an eventual Communist takeover. The explicit goal was to erode the confidence of America’s ruling class and create an ideological vacuum to be filled by Marxism-Leninism.
From 2006, an essay that deserves wide distribution.
Via Instapundit.
Naval Ravikant with Joe Rogan
AI, politics, social media, big tech, diseases of abundance, the Big Bang — this is a great interview. Make a pot of coffee.
We’re fed up with BDS, Louis Farrakhan and Women’s March
Ambassador Dani Dayan addresses the Jerusalem Post’s annual conference in New York.
Never again.
Historical Amnesia
“The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.“
Apologize For What?
Caroline Glick
“… In the course of my talk, which was wide-ranging, I discussed President Trump’s position on Israel and Jews and the meaning of nationalism.”
Grab a coffee. (h/t Joe)
America’s Cold Civil War
Until the 1960s, most liberals believed it was inevitable that their living Constitution would replace the conservative Constitution through a kind of slow-motion evolution. But during the sixties, the so-called New Left abandoned evolution for revolution, and partly in reaction to that, defenders of the old Constitution began not merely to fight back, but to call for a return to America’s first principles. By seeking to revolve back to the starting point, conservatives proved to be Newtonians after all—and also, in a way, revolutionaries, since the original meaning of revolution is to return to where you began, as a celestial body revolves in the heavens.
The conservative campaign against the inevitable victory of the living Constitution gained steam as a campaign against the gradual or sudden disappearance of limited government and of republican virtue in our political life. And when it became clear, by the late 1970s and 1980s, that the conservatives weren’t going away, the cold civil war was on.
Camille Paglia Interview
Adams With Shapiro
An hour in conversation. Grab a coffee.
“In the midst of this death rattle has come a group of thinkers”
That night, my son tried to explain the thing to me, but it was a buzzing in my ear, and I wanted to talk about something more interesting. It didn’t matter; it turned out a number of his friends—all of them like him: progressive Democrats, with the full range of social positions you would expect of adolescents growing up in liberal households in blue-bubble Los Angeles—had watched the video as well, and they talked about it to one another.
Jordan Peterson At Oxford Union
h/t Larry