That was very eloquent, Donald. You're four years older than me, and even though you grew up on the opposite coast, so much of what you write has been my own experience. When trying to describe the changes in America in the last fifty years, I often say it feels like living on another planet.
I always was a populist, with leanings toward the right. However, because all of my boyfriends were ten years older than me, I got sucked into the hippy world. I felt comfortable in that world, but often ended up having political arguments with my friends, usually about hypocrisy and their trust in CERTAIN parts of the "establishment"...I noticed the default to regulations was there, simmering just under the surface...but never in a million years did I think these radical changes would happen.
By the time the mid 1980s rolled around, it became clear to me that the hippy movement was morphing into something else. The hippies were leaving "the land" in droves. They didn't like all that hard work. I also noticed how so many gravitated towards starting their own businesses.Their talk about socialism was but a thin veneer, as they embraced capitalism in a gung-ho manner. The disgust set in when my former boyfriend (born 1948) became a cheerleader for Gulf War I, when I could clearly see it was a psy-op. I don't do social media, but I was curious how the folks I used to hang out with were dealing with the scamdemic. So I created a fake account to spy on them. It looks like they have all morphed into the new "progressives". Dumb as ever, still not thinking for themselves, and their ranks decimated by recent deaths ...leaving me to speculate they all eagerly took the Jonestown jab.
Jan 16, 2023·edited Jan 16, 2023Liked by Donald Jeffries
Outstanding as always Don! Perhaps these few paragraphs from Common Sense will shock you and your readers. Keep in mind, when Paine wrote it and he said of the situation that it never happened before...we cannot make that claim now. We can only turn away from the history left behind by Paine. Only people who have no idea what their legacy really is, will silently fear these words. God bless you Don! I think you have made me find an older post on the subject.
Yours in liberty (and I have some chair oil if you need it)
Vince
"The present state of America is truly alarming to every man who is capable of
reflection. Without law, without government, without any other mode of
power than what is founded on, and granted by courtesy.
Held together by an unexampled concurrence of sentiment, which is
nevertheless subject to change, and which every secret enemy is endeavoring
to dissolve. Our present condition, is, legislation without law; wisdom without
a plan; a constitution without a name; and, what is strangely astonishing,
perfect Independence contending for dependance.
The instance is without a precedent; the case never existed before; and who
can tell what may be the event? The property of no man is secure in the
present unbraced system of things. The mind of the multitude is left at
random, and feeling no fixed object before them, they pursue such as fancy or
opinion starts.
Nothing is criminal; there is no such thing as treason; wherefore, every one
thinks himself at liberty to act as he pleases. The tories dared not to have
assembled offensively, had they known that their lives, by that act were
Only my friend Vince would post a pertinent excerpt from "Common Sense" here. Thomas Paine was one of my early heroes. He was treated harshly by his own country, including George Washington. Obviously, we need a lot more "Common Sense" in our mad, mad world. Thanks!
I have many family members who are Democrats but do not recognize the party or its tenets. But they also will not vote against it. Others identify themselves as a 'liberal' but then disavow what the left is doing.
I think the two parties right now are to support the ideals of America and the Constitution OR embrace identity politics.
Your usual excellence shines through, Don. I recall classic liberals like George McGovern (a combat veteran of World War Two who was vehemently anti-war), Birch Bayh, and Gaylord Nelson. These men fervently believed in using the power of government to reign in the rapacious mega corporations and financials institutions that left unchecked would rip society asunder. There are none like them today. The devolution of the right wing/left wing paradigm into the control cage, mind-fuck that it is today is clearly the result of cold calculation and clever planning by the Cryptocracy. Just like Nikita Khrushchev, former head of the Soviet Union's communist party quipped to former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, (quote/paraphrase)-"We really should merge. We're both working for the same people", the so-called left and right today are definitely working for the same masters, in exchange for crumbs from their table. May they all rot in Hell.
I appreciate that, Hereticdrummer. Yes, I liked Bayh, and really liked Frank Church and Fred Harris. Most of the (even then) minority of honest politicians were liberal Democrats then. Thanks!
—“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is…in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
That's a good way to put it. The ACLU announced a few years ago that they were getting away from that whole "civil liberties" thing. You know, the key part of their organization's name. Instead, they plan to focus more on "climate change" and "racism." Thanks!
Jan 17, 2023·edited Jan 17, 2023Liked by Donald Jeffries
That definition of Liberal was timely. I've always maintained I am a Liberal, as I always have been for fifty years myself. It's been so long since I could say that without eliciting bemused stares from everyone around me, that I'd become hazy on why I was a Liberal, or how. When I was a young boomer, with much dark brown hair on my head, and on my chest, but not my back, and I was doing my best to get as much of the Rock and Roll and sexual revolution under my belt as fast as I could, I was committed to being "willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one's own; open to new ideas. 2. relating to or denoting a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.”
As recently as 25 years ago, I was still identifying as Liberal progressive seemed to be my thing even. I was a regular on Kurt Vonnegut's In These Times. That felt like my scene. Except it was a rather sparse place, a common refrain then, Progressive seemed self-explanatory and a Liberal path.. but there where progressive thinking should have been gathering, it was a ghost town? A few people including a dedicated Pentagon shill for Depleted Uranium, but no movement I could find to fill a greyhound bus. I was expecting the internet wouldn't be so empty. Some more years before I began to hear Progressives mentioned again. Now it was somehow that thing represented by the Hildebeast, and the Kenyan, who I supported, because he wasn't George Bush and because it seemed like worth a try. So many other jobs have been outsourced, why not have a Kenyan for President?
He definitely was born in Kenya. The birth certificate, or extract I think, was the shoddiest bit of forgery I'd ever seen until then. There have been worse since, but that crumby excuse for a fraudulent document was the shape of things to come. I've never ceased to be amazed at the shoddy psyops the US intel agencies specialize in. It's always so shallow and ridiculous. If there was a jolly background tune and exaggerated sound effects, it could be keep up with Loony Toons. Then as now, when we see other things forged, not just documents but everything from elections, pandemics and threats to the environment , geopolitics, competition sport, we're treated to such shabbily assembled BS that it has seemed for ages as if they were expressing contempt for the stupidity of one group, while rubbing their lies and manipulation in the faces of the other. Always turning up the volume of division.
I think time is running out for a bigga badda boom. Whatever form that takes, it's the next big goal to be overcome in my life. I'm sick of this place. The rock and the majority of the critters on it are treasures, they are precious and so much variety. I have loved the earth and so very many animals I've met. They've taught me more about humanity though, than I have gleaned from the humans. if not for them, I'd be here at 60, with no idea what love is, why I was here, how to live in peace and harmony with different people with different worlds. Humans have been inconsistent enough that I have never had better than some companion animals and accidental companion animals which crossed paths with me.
The dominant species is really wearing me down though. I'm well and truly ready to get off the ride. Just this little gig I want to see through to the other side, or ride it out of here. I am curious, and I am an adrenaline junky Aries, with a lot of preparation and just such a thing in mind. Survival. Now I am free to fight the good fight, without dependents and maybe contribute some useful stuff to what may end up being the remains of our civilisation, to be reborn. The hippy now become an old white haired wizard or story teller, like Moses I will gather the children and teach them good things like this and try to impart the simple rules which could be observed strictly to ensure nothing so grotesque as what our civilisation has become should ever rise again. I fear that serfdom, willful ignorance, tribalism and violent disputes may be a more core characteristic of these primates so don't trust anybody else to do this and try my best to not let it have any aspects which could be construed as religion. I'll teach them to be proper Liberals. Then I shall wander off into the desert, and disappear. I shall be Legend. Without the zombies. I've had enough low level zombies the last few years, I am over them.
And pot, I will make sure that Liberals which will be everyone, until they reach half their lifespan. Then they MUST become conservatives. Which will just mean, old Liberals. Weed has been our friendly green companion, for all history, we shouldn't be tossing green babies out with the bath water. Pot was the best part of being a Liberal boomer. If young people must smoke pit to be Liberal, then we can keep them stoned and unable to get up to much mischief and protesting. Basically waging immature war on their society every few years, for the sake of doing it, no mind what it is.
By the same token, the now recycled Old Liberals who now identify as Conservatives, shall inherit the good drugs. So we can stay one step ahead of the youngsters and have better parties because we can. This is my semi complete plan for mankind's future. Not as grandiose as the Rockefeller Institutes ones but it is way cooler.
You have led an interesting life, Rabbitnexus, as I think I've told you before. When you said you were a "regular" with Kurt Vonnegut, did you know him? I consider him the last great American novelist. Thanks for sharing your always incisive thoughts.
Jan 17, 2023·edited Jan 17, 2023Liked by Donald Jeffries
It's about time someone older than the age of 40 reminded us that liberalism once stood for a heck of a lot more than gender theory and critical race theory!
Modern liberalism has shown its true colors. There are and were always a minority who really did set out to change the world for the better. But they have been drown out by those who get off on doing little more than shaking up the status quo — a pursuit of influence for the sake of power, hence the desire to micromanage every facet of our lives (for our own good of course!).
For decades, the "leave me alone" and "live and let live" crowd better known as Conservatives instinctively recoiled from the social engineering ambitions of their Leftist counterparts. They sensed that it wasn't about making a better world but rejecting that which came before them, no matter how great the price of that progress. No amount of progress is enough. Pushing the envelope is the whole point and too often the ONLY point, hence why liberalism disproportionately favors the young and the naive.
Let's examine the "how" of pushing the envelope for a moment:
Are we really to believe that pedophilia should be redefined as "Minor Attracted Persons"?
Are we really to believe that children should make life-long decisions about their gender identity in the most permanent way possible — surgical alteration — and that States such as California should become sanctuary States for unaccompanied transgendered youth who have been allegedly been scarred for life by the word "No" from a parent who, for all we know, may be more medically or financially-inclined than "trans-phobic" to object to surgical "affirmation"? (And what of the Left's knee-jerk assumption that most parents are anti-trans to begin with?)
Are we really to believe that in a country where literacy rates were nothing to brag about before the pandemic that educators should seize upon the opportunity afforded by the pandemic — during which time children fell even further behind in their education — to pack more than the three "Rs" into the school day? (Didn't teachers used to lament that they didn't have time for the extraneous demands of administrators?) And why IS it so important to convey non-normative gender identities to children so young that they're still fascinated by the tooth fairy, Easter Bunny and Santa Claus?
Whatever else a child may identify as, is it even a school administrator's business? Is the Left really arguing that children and their families should have no privacy? If public schools cannot endorse something as intimate as a religious belief system, why is it okay to delve into the most intimate details of gender/sexual identity — and then object to those who characterize such preoccupations as "grooming"? Beyond that, didn't Liberals used to say children don't need the help — if they identify as something other than hetrosexual it is because they were "born that way"? If so, what's the point of cramming 100+ different genders down their throats before they hit grade 8? What became of "self discovery"? How is it an "organic" choice for a child to identify this way or that way if the adults around them are trying to mind-jack them before they can read and write their own names?
The woke wave of the past 5-10 years are the projections of fundamentally insecure adults who apparently believe that if they do NOT teach gender identity and critical race theory to elementary students, children will grow up to be homo/trans-phobic, xenophobic bigots! For one, this is a horribly negative and depressive way to think. Second, when does the Left wake up to the demographic reality that the "white majority" is about to become a minority? Then what? Do decades worth of minority-majority sociology studies go out the window because it won't be convenient to apply such concepts to a "white privileged" minority? Pray tell: How do States such as California, where Caucasians have been a minority for years, exhibit the ongoing problem of white privilege? What decade does the Left think we are living in?
Scarier still, what does the evolution of "woke" look like? If the operating theory, "change for the sake of change" holds true, what is to stop Western countries from adopting the belief that not only should minors be "empowered" to vote — but even to marry before they are "of age" by traditional Western standards? (The key word being "traditional". The next generation of Liberals will no doubt argue that if children can surgically affirm their identity before they hit puberty, legal statutes dealing with under-aged minors are too restrictive, if not xenophobic towards cultures that allow children and adults to intermarry!)
With so much of the heavy lifting achieved by the greats of the Civil War, underground railroad and Civil Rights eras — from Abraham Lincoln to women's suffrage, Rosa Parks and MLK — what we are observing from the 21st Century Left is an inciting of senseless cultural battles for the sole purpose of re-imagining the glory days for a generation now far, far removed from the "lived experience" of genuine reformers. In the 21st Century, social justice pursuits need not be a "good idea" — it need only be THE idea of the moment. And for too many, ill content to celebrate the achievements of their generational predecessors, change for the sake of change is plenty good enough.
"Above all, one does not enter alliances with people for whom no treaty is sacred;
because they do not move about this earth as men of honor and sincerity but as the representatives of lies and deception, thievery and plunder and robbery.
The man who thinks he can bind himself by treaty with parasites is like the tree that believes it can
form a profitable bargain with the ivy that surrounds it." Mein Kampf
When Hitler was elected in 1933, the Talmudic Frankfurt School fled to the Ivy League.
You mentioned Reagan. He was hounded, as Governor, for having hired homosexuals - which he denied. I was thinking of this when I read about Trump's recent well publicized party of homosexual Republicans.
What a contrast. My father worked in Gov. Reagan's office during that controversy. Reagan had appointed him to a task force & my father organized a get-away for the task force at a friend's very posh Lake Tahoe home. Drew Pearson got wind of this and published an article stating that the get-away participants were all homosexuals. My father told us that this was true, as he could hear footsteps up and down the halls and doors opening/closing all night. He was frightened that the Press would drag him into it. Today, he'd probably have bragging rights. lol
I grew up in the sixties near Berkeley Ca. I loved the hippies, peace, love, flower power. I had no idea what political party they were aligned with. Protesting a bogus war seemed cool too. I guess that’s a very liberal view or is it conservative?
Up until the Iraq war, the Left was reliably anti-neocon. Bush-Cheney were derided as "warmongers". Nevertheless, a political sea change was set in motion with the 9/11 attacks. Even reliably liberal rags such as the NYT rallied behind the war effort — downplaying the word of inspectors who took issue with the Bush administration overstatements (lying) about the presence of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in Iraq and Iraq's alleged connection to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
To really understand how the Left became hijacked, however, it is necessary to understand the influence of historian and neoconservative think tank icon Robert Kagan. In a 2014 interview in the NYT, Kagan said that he welcomed Hillary Clinton's run for president in the hope she would support a more "interventionist" foreign policy than Obama did. Indeed, during the 2016 election it was Hillary Clinton who proposed a "No Fly-Zone" over Syria that would essentially, in the words of Gen. Joseph Dunford, have precipitated a direct conflict with Russia. Needless to say, the piece goes on to concede that the neoconservative brand had been sullied by the Left's repeated attacks on Bush-Cheney and that Kagan now preferred to call it "liberal interventionism". Instead of "nation building", liberal interventionism emphasized "humanitarian intervention" as a means to obtain much the same level of support for war efforts as the Right granted in the name of spreading democracy.
Kagan successfully rebranded and rebooted neoconservatism into the Democrat party and nothing has been the same since. The old Left would have roundly condemned the Military-Industrial Complex and the actions of the so-called deep state. The New Left is an apologist for that same establishment. Taken together with the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision, in which there is functionally no way to prevent millions of dollars of foreign money from flooding into our political system through SuperPACs, we aren't looking at the same America we were looking at even 10-20 years ago. The old Left opposed globalization for its role in diminishing the earning power of the working class. The New Left seems more intent on the plight of non-citizens than securing the safety, economic opportunity and academic standing of American citizens.
I don't think the generation who came of age in the 1990s and early 2000s appreciates that they have drifted so far out of keeping with what the Left once stood for (chief among them the ACLU and their robust defense of all manner of speech). Figures such as Glen Greenwald and Matt Taibbi represent the last of the old guard — yet their classical liberal values are foreign to modern MSNBC audiences and social media users under the age of 30. The New Left is either full-out Marxist — the harsh economic and social lessons of the Soviet Union, Cuba and China largely lost upon them — or hopelessly adrift in a social/media landscape in which groupthink informs one's political "values" on a minute-by-minute, news-narrative-by-news-narrative basis.
When one considers the state-of-the-art weaponry at the immediate disposal of our overlords, it may as well be 300 million "thank you, SIR! May I have another?!"
What is a bogus war? That there would need a lot of explaining and it would probably be like trying to tell a bunch of kindergartners there's no Santa Claus.
Betting this just may be the best dissertation I shall come across all year....
Tracks my thoughts of the last three or so years to the tee.
I was an 80's somewhat long haired young man raised with a republican fairly conservative father. When it came to law school and the reading of Supreme Court opinions wherein constitutional rights, particularly in criminal cases,. were carved away with exuberant exception, I started to lean farther to what I presumed was the Left. Throughout the next couple of decades, I was deemed the 'liberal' by friends and family, admittedly coming to despise the 'conservatives' of the Bush era(s).....what were they conserving? (little to nothing in my opinion -- certainly not our 'rights' and definitely not our money, and most surely not our young men who were shipped off to the desert).
My father, a boomer and successful business man (of Starving Artists --- oil painting and frames sales at the hotel banquet rooms...interesting times, considering writing a book about such) always said you move republican and conservative as you get older, but I could not stand these phony conservatives, especially in light of 911 and the desert wars; and after all, the democrats supported my one and only business since age 25. So I remained an outlier in our circle.
Fast forward to the spring of 2020 and everything you speak of Don, and I quickly fall far to the Right, I think, definitely far away as possible from the nonsense of the new Left and their incessant push to fall in line.
Recently, I wonder ---Do I just oppose whomever is seemingly in power at the time? This may in fact be the most apt description.
Whatever the case may be, last year my father and I unfortunately agreed, the best times around here are in the past and we were fortunate to have a nice ride thru them.
Lastly, I do not believe any one can accurately describe what the future holds.... only a creeping feeling that it ain't good with prayers for better.
other than reading articles on Rense.com, I never knew what was out there. Following what I refer to as the Big Shift in spring of 2020, I slowly came to realize there were many other interesting and very intelligent individuals to read on the Net
I saw how some of these folks go on and on about dire and dramatic calamities upon us that really don't seem to ever materialize, i.e. the Situation Update guy, not mentioning names and a smart guy, but quite a drama queen. this seems somewhat counter-productive, especially when the sky does not fall.
however, I am starting to worry that the effects of the vaxxxes are kicking in, just not as fast as some of these folks foretold (some seemed to say the streets would be empty by now).....
I am taking more and more calls from clients that either have cancer or a family member that does, and we all know what they have in common.
there is no left or right. its all manufactured nonsense to paint one ideology as bad and elevate the other side as good. sheeple only see in black and white. you are being conditioned. red or blue same difference.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. A very common French phrase; If you have trouble using google to translate seek help from a 8 year old child.
That was very eloquent, Donald. You're four years older than me, and even though you grew up on the opposite coast, so much of what you write has been my own experience. When trying to describe the changes in America in the last fifty years, I often say it feels like living on another planet.
I always was a populist, with leanings toward the right. However, because all of my boyfriends were ten years older than me, I got sucked into the hippy world. I felt comfortable in that world, but often ended up having political arguments with my friends, usually about hypocrisy and their trust in CERTAIN parts of the "establishment"...I noticed the default to regulations was there, simmering just under the surface...but never in a million years did I think these radical changes would happen.
By the time the mid 1980s rolled around, it became clear to me that the hippy movement was morphing into something else. The hippies were leaving "the land" in droves. They didn't like all that hard work. I also noticed how so many gravitated towards starting their own businesses.Their talk about socialism was but a thin veneer, as they embraced capitalism in a gung-ho manner. The disgust set in when my former boyfriend (born 1948) became a cheerleader for Gulf War I, when I could clearly see it was a psy-op. I don't do social media, but I was curious how the folks I used to hang out with were dealing with the scamdemic. So I created a fake account to spy on them. It looks like they have all morphed into the new "progressives". Dumb as ever, still not thinking for themselves, and their ranks decimated by recent deaths ...leaving me to speculate they all eagerly took the Jonestown jab.
I appreciate the kind words, Kris. Sounds like we have a lot in common. Thanks!
Outstanding as always Don! Perhaps these few paragraphs from Common Sense will shock you and your readers. Keep in mind, when Paine wrote it and he said of the situation that it never happened before...we cannot make that claim now. We can only turn away from the history left behind by Paine. Only people who have no idea what their legacy really is, will silently fear these words. God bless you Don! I think you have made me find an older post on the subject.
Yours in liberty (and I have some chair oil if you need it)
Vince
"The present state of America is truly alarming to every man who is capable of
reflection. Without law, without government, without any other mode of
power than what is founded on, and granted by courtesy.
Held together by an unexampled concurrence of sentiment, which is
nevertheless subject to change, and which every secret enemy is endeavoring
to dissolve. Our present condition, is, legislation without law; wisdom without
a plan; a constitution without a name; and, what is strangely astonishing,
perfect Independence contending for dependance.
The instance is without a precedent; the case never existed before; and who
can tell what may be the event? The property of no man is secure in the
present unbraced system of things. The mind of the multitude is left at
random, and feeling no fixed object before them, they pursue such as fancy or
opinion starts.
Nothing is criminal; there is no such thing as treason; wherefore, every one
thinks himself at liberty to act as he pleases. The tories dared not to have
assembled offensively, had they known that their lives, by that act were
forfeited to the laws of the state."
Only my friend Vince would post a pertinent excerpt from "Common Sense" here. Thomas Paine was one of my early heroes. He was treated harshly by his own country, including George Washington. Obviously, we need a lot more "Common Sense" in our mad, mad world. Thanks!
Excellent assessment of the "liberal".
I have many family members who are Democrats but do not recognize the party or its tenets. But they also will not vote against it. Others identify themselves as a 'liberal' but then disavow what the left is doing.
I think the two parties right now are to support the ideals of America and the Constitution OR embrace identity politics.
It is a confusing time, with the old political labels becoming largely meaningless. Thanks!
Your usual excellence shines through, Don. I recall classic liberals like George McGovern (a combat veteran of World War Two who was vehemently anti-war), Birch Bayh, and Gaylord Nelson. These men fervently believed in using the power of government to reign in the rapacious mega corporations and financials institutions that left unchecked would rip society asunder. There are none like them today. The devolution of the right wing/left wing paradigm into the control cage, mind-fuck that it is today is clearly the result of cold calculation and clever planning by the Cryptocracy. Just like Nikita Khrushchev, former head of the Soviet Union's communist party quipped to former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, (quote/paraphrase)-"We really should merge. We're both working for the same people", the so-called left and right today are definitely working for the same masters, in exchange for crumbs from their table. May they all rot in Hell.
I appreciate that, Hereticdrummer. Yes, I liked Bayh, and really liked Frank Church and Fred Harris. Most of the (even then) minority of honest politicians were liberal Democrats then. Thanks!
Theodore Dalrymple:
—“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is…in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
Sounds like an eerily accurate prediction of our present situation, Timmy75. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for this.
The ACLU went AWOL, and so did most of the writers organizations. What a world.
That's a good way to put it. The ACLU announced a few years ago that they were getting away from that whole "civil liberties" thing. You know, the key part of their organization's name. Instead, they plan to focus more on "climate change" and "racism." Thanks!
That definition of Liberal was timely. I've always maintained I am a Liberal, as I always have been for fifty years myself. It's been so long since I could say that without eliciting bemused stares from everyone around me, that I'd become hazy on why I was a Liberal, or how. When I was a young boomer, with much dark brown hair on my head, and on my chest, but not my back, and I was doing my best to get as much of the Rock and Roll and sexual revolution under my belt as fast as I could, I was committed to being "willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one's own; open to new ideas. 2. relating to or denoting a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.”
As recently as 25 years ago, I was still identifying as Liberal progressive seemed to be my thing even. I was a regular on Kurt Vonnegut's In These Times. That felt like my scene. Except it was a rather sparse place, a common refrain then, Progressive seemed self-explanatory and a Liberal path.. but there where progressive thinking should have been gathering, it was a ghost town? A few people including a dedicated Pentagon shill for Depleted Uranium, but no movement I could find to fill a greyhound bus. I was expecting the internet wouldn't be so empty. Some more years before I began to hear Progressives mentioned again. Now it was somehow that thing represented by the Hildebeast, and the Kenyan, who I supported, because he wasn't George Bush and because it seemed like worth a try. So many other jobs have been outsourced, why not have a Kenyan for President?
He definitely was born in Kenya. The birth certificate, or extract I think, was the shoddiest bit of forgery I'd ever seen until then. There have been worse since, but that crumby excuse for a fraudulent document was the shape of things to come. I've never ceased to be amazed at the shoddy psyops the US intel agencies specialize in. It's always so shallow and ridiculous. If there was a jolly background tune and exaggerated sound effects, it could be keep up with Loony Toons. Then as now, when we see other things forged, not just documents but everything from elections, pandemics and threats to the environment , geopolitics, competition sport, we're treated to such shabbily assembled BS that it has seemed for ages as if they were expressing contempt for the stupidity of one group, while rubbing their lies and manipulation in the faces of the other. Always turning up the volume of division.
I think time is running out for a bigga badda boom. Whatever form that takes, it's the next big goal to be overcome in my life. I'm sick of this place. The rock and the majority of the critters on it are treasures, they are precious and so much variety. I have loved the earth and so very many animals I've met. They've taught me more about humanity though, than I have gleaned from the humans. if not for them, I'd be here at 60, with no idea what love is, why I was here, how to live in peace and harmony with different people with different worlds. Humans have been inconsistent enough that I have never had better than some companion animals and accidental companion animals which crossed paths with me.
The dominant species is really wearing me down though. I'm well and truly ready to get off the ride. Just this little gig I want to see through to the other side, or ride it out of here. I am curious, and I am an adrenaline junky Aries, with a lot of preparation and just such a thing in mind. Survival. Now I am free to fight the good fight, without dependents and maybe contribute some useful stuff to what may end up being the remains of our civilisation, to be reborn. The hippy now become an old white haired wizard or story teller, like Moses I will gather the children and teach them good things like this and try to impart the simple rules which could be observed strictly to ensure nothing so grotesque as what our civilisation has become should ever rise again. I fear that serfdom, willful ignorance, tribalism and violent disputes may be a more core characteristic of these primates so don't trust anybody else to do this and try my best to not let it have any aspects which could be construed as religion. I'll teach them to be proper Liberals. Then I shall wander off into the desert, and disappear. I shall be Legend. Without the zombies. I've had enough low level zombies the last few years, I am over them.
And pot, I will make sure that Liberals which will be everyone, until they reach half their lifespan. Then they MUST become conservatives. Which will just mean, old Liberals. Weed has been our friendly green companion, for all history, we shouldn't be tossing green babies out with the bath water. Pot was the best part of being a Liberal boomer. If young people must smoke pit to be Liberal, then we can keep them stoned and unable to get up to much mischief and protesting. Basically waging immature war on their society every few years, for the sake of doing it, no mind what it is.
By the same token, the now recycled Old Liberals who now identify as Conservatives, shall inherit the good drugs. So we can stay one step ahead of the youngsters and have better parties because we can. This is my semi complete plan for mankind's future. Not as grandiose as the Rockefeller Institutes ones but it is way cooler.
You have led an interesting life, Rabbitnexus, as I think I've told you before. When you said you were a "regular" with Kurt Vonnegut, did you know him? I consider him the last great American novelist. Thanks for sharing your always incisive thoughts.
It's about time someone older than the age of 40 reminded us that liberalism once stood for a heck of a lot more than gender theory and critical race theory!
Modern liberalism has shown its true colors. There are and were always a minority who really did set out to change the world for the better. But they have been drown out by those who get off on doing little more than shaking up the status quo — a pursuit of influence for the sake of power, hence the desire to micromanage every facet of our lives (for our own good of course!).
For decades, the "leave me alone" and "live and let live" crowd better known as Conservatives instinctively recoiled from the social engineering ambitions of their Leftist counterparts. They sensed that it wasn't about making a better world but rejecting that which came before them, no matter how great the price of that progress. No amount of progress is enough. Pushing the envelope is the whole point and too often the ONLY point, hence why liberalism disproportionately favors the young and the naive.
Let's examine the "how" of pushing the envelope for a moment:
Are we really to believe that pedophilia should be redefined as "Minor Attracted Persons"?
Are we really to believe that children should make life-long decisions about their gender identity in the most permanent way possible — surgical alteration — and that States such as California should become sanctuary States for unaccompanied transgendered youth who have been allegedly been scarred for life by the word "No" from a parent who, for all we know, may be more medically or financially-inclined than "trans-phobic" to object to surgical "affirmation"? (And what of the Left's knee-jerk assumption that most parents are anti-trans to begin with?)
Are we really to believe that in a country where literacy rates were nothing to brag about before the pandemic that educators should seize upon the opportunity afforded by the pandemic — during which time children fell even further behind in their education — to pack more than the three "Rs" into the school day? (Didn't teachers used to lament that they didn't have time for the extraneous demands of administrators?) And why IS it so important to convey non-normative gender identities to children so young that they're still fascinated by the tooth fairy, Easter Bunny and Santa Claus?
Whatever else a child may identify as, is it even a school administrator's business? Is the Left really arguing that children and their families should have no privacy? If public schools cannot endorse something as intimate as a religious belief system, why is it okay to delve into the most intimate details of gender/sexual identity — and then object to those who characterize such preoccupations as "grooming"? Beyond that, didn't Liberals used to say children don't need the help — if they identify as something other than hetrosexual it is because they were "born that way"? If so, what's the point of cramming 100+ different genders down their throats before they hit grade 8? What became of "self discovery"? How is it an "organic" choice for a child to identify this way or that way if the adults around them are trying to mind-jack them before they can read and write their own names?
The woke wave of the past 5-10 years are the projections of fundamentally insecure adults who apparently believe that if they do NOT teach gender identity and critical race theory to elementary students, children will grow up to be homo/trans-phobic, xenophobic bigots! For one, this is a horribly negative and depressive way to think. Second, when does the Left wake up to the demographic reality that the "white majority" is about to become a minority? Then what? Do decades worth of minority-majority sociology studies go out the window because it won't be convenient to apply such concepts to a "white privileged" minority? Pray tell: How do States such as California, where Caucasians have been a minority for years, exhibit the ongoing problem of white privilege? What decade does the Left think we are living in?
Scarier still, what does the evolution of "woke" look like? If the operating theory, "change for the sake of change" holds true, what is to stop Western countries from adopting the belief that not only should minors be "empowered" to vote — but even to marry before they are "of age" by traditional Western standards? (The key word being "traditional". The next generation of Liberals will no doubt argue that if children can surgically affirm their identity before they hit puberty, legal statutes dealing with under-aged minors are too restrictive, if not xenophobic towards cultures that allow children and adults to intermarry!)
With so much of the heavy lifting achieved by the greats of the Civil War, underground railroad and Civil Rights eras — from Abraham Lincoln to women's suffrage, Rosa Parks and MLK — what we are observing from the 21st Century Left is an inciting of senseless cultural battles for the sole purpose of re-imagining the glory days for a generation now far, far removed from the "lived experience" of genuine reformers. In the 21st Century, social justice pursuits need not be a "good idea" — it need only be THE idea of the moment. And for too many, ill content to celebrate the achievements of their generational predecessors, change for the sake of change is plenty good enough.
Thanks for the detailed, thoughtful analysis, SocialCritic.
Frankfurt School.
"Above all, one does not enter alliances with people for whom no treaty is sacred;
because they do not move about this earth as men of honor and sincerity but as the representatives of lies and deception, thievery and plunder and robbery.
The man who thinks he can bind himself by treaty with parasites is like the tree that believes it can
form a profitable bargain with the ivy that surrounds it." Mein Kampf
When Hitler was elected in 1933, the Talmudic Frankfurt School fled to the Ivy League.
" Then said all the trees to the bramble
come thou and reign over us.
And the bramble said unto the trees,
if in truth ye appoint me king over you
come and put your faith in my shadow;
and if not, let fire come out of the bramble
and devour the cedars of Lebanon. Judges 9:14, 15
Outline of Biblical usage... "Lebanon=whiteness"
Strong's Hebrew concordance
Food for thought. Thanks!
You mentioned Reagan. He was hounded, as Governor, for having hired homosexuals - which he denied. I was thinking of this when I read about Trump's recent well publicized party of homosexual Republicans.
What a contrast. My father worked in Gov. Reagan's office during that controversy. Reagan had appointed him to a task force & my father organized a get-away for the task force at a friend's very posh Lake Tahoe home. Drew Pearson got wind of this and published an article stating that the get-away participants were all homosexuals. My father told us that this was true, as he could hear footsteps up and down the halls and doors opening/closing all night. He was frightened that the Press would drag him into it. Today, he'd probably have bragging rights. lol
Wow, I appreciate you sharing that personal anecdote, Printer. Thanks!
And a wider bung hole.
Don... One of your best! Thanks for your voice...
Thank you, TnDoc!
I grew up in the sixties near Berkeley Ca. I loved the hippies, peace, love, flower power. I had no idea what political party they were aligned with. Protesting a bogus war seemed cool too. I guess that’s a very liberal view or is it conservative?
Up until the Iraq war, the Left was reliably anti-neocon. Bush-Cheney were derided as "warmongers". Nevertheless, a political sea change was set in motion with the 9/11 attacks. Even reliably liberal rags such as the NYT rallied behind the war effort — downplaying the word of inspectors who took issue with the Bush administration overstatements (lying) about the presence of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in Iraq and Iraq's alleged connection to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
To really understand how the Left became hijacked, however, it is necessary to understand the influence of historian and neoconservative think tank icon Robert Kagan. In a 2014 interview in the NYT, Kagan said that he welcomed Hillary Clinton's run for president in the hope she would support a more "interventionist" foreign policy than Obama did. Indeed, during the 2016 election it was Hillary Clinton who proposed a "No Fly-Zone" over Syria that would essentially, in the words of Gen. Joseph Dunford, have precipitated a direct conflict with Russia. Needless to say, the piece goes on to concede that the neoconservative brand had been sullied by the Left's repeated attacks on Bush-Cheney and that Kagan now preferred to call it "liberal interventionism". Instead of "nation building", liberal interventionism emphasized "humanitarian intervention" as a means to obtain much the same level of support for war efforts as the Right granted in the name of spreading democracy.
Kagan successfully rebranded and rebooted neoconservatism into the Democrat party and nothing has been the same since. The old Left would have roundly condemned the Military-Industrial Complex and the actions of the so-called deep state. The New Left is an apologist for that same establishment. Taken together with the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision, in which there is functionally no way to prevent millions of dollars of foreign money from flooding into our political system through SuperPACs, we aren't looking at the same America we were looking at even 10-20 years ago. The old Left opposed globalization for its role in diminishing the earning power of the working class. The New Left seems more intent on the plight of non-citizens than securing the safety, economic opportunity and academic standing of American citizens.
I don't think the generation who came of age in the 1990s and early 2000s appreciates that they have drifted so far out of keeping with what the Left once stood for (chief among them the ACLU and their robust defense of all manner of speech). Figures such as Glen Greenwald and Matt Taibbi represent the last of the old guard — yet their classical liberal values are foreign to modern MSNBC audiences and social media users under the age of 30. The New Left is either full-out Marxist — the harsh economic and social lessons of the Soviet Union, Cuba and China largely lost upon them — or hopelessly adrift in a social/media landscape in which groupthink informs one's political "values" on a minute-by-minute, news-narrative-by-news-narrative basis.
The US is up for grabs. Any takers? We have 300 million guns and we will shoot at you.
Who would buy us? We're kind of a nation of lemons at this point. Thanks.
When one considers the state-of-the-art weaponry at the immediate disposal of our overlords, it may as well be 300 million "thank you, SIR! May I have another?!"
I also have a high powered sling shot and I'm fairly accurate with it.
Right on again, SocialCritic. Thanks!
It would confuse today's Liberal anyway.
What is a bogus war? That there would need a lot of explaining and it would probably be like trying to tell a bunch of kindergartners there's no Santa Claus.
As the great Smedley Butler said, "War is never about enemies. It's about opportunities for profit."
Every war the United States has entered in my lifetime. I was born in 1960. I typically stick to my lifetime but it goes back much further.
I have lots of issues with the hippies, like the great Eric Cartman. But they did fuel the only large antiwar movement in our history. Thanks.
I never knew Kurt no. I swapped a couple of emails with him once but nothing more. I was an admirer though.
You've expressed/explained it all so clearly.
Thanks!
Betting this just may be the best dissertation I shall come across all year....
Tracks my thoughts of the last three or so years to the tee.
I was an 80's somewhat long haired young man raised with a republican fairly conservative father. When it came to law school and the reading of Supreme Court opinions wherein constitutional rights, particularly in criminal cases,. were carved away with exuberant exception, I started to lean farther to what I presumed was the Left. Throughout the next couple of decades, I was deemed the 'liberal' by friends and family, admittedly coming to despise the 'conservatives' of the Bush era(s).....what were they conserving? (little to nothing in my opinion -- certainly not our 'rights' and definitely not our money, and most surely not our young men who were shipped off to the desert).
My father, a boomer and successful business man (of Starving Artists --- oil painting and frames sales at the hotel banquet rooms...interesting times, considering writing a book about such) always said you move republican and conservative as you get older, but I could not stand these phony conservatives, especially in light of 911 and the desert wars; and after all, the democrats supported my one and only business since age 25. So I remained an outlier in our circle.
Fast forward to the spring of 2020 and everything you speak of Don, and I quickly fall far to the Right, I think, definitely far away as possible from the nonsense of the new Left and their incessant push to fall in line.
Recently, I wonder ---Do I just oppose whomever is seemingly in power at the time? This may in fact be the most apt description.
Whatever the case may be, last year my father and I unfortunately agreed, the best times around here are in the past and we were fortunate to have a nice ride thru them.
Lastly, I do not believe any one can accurately describe what the future holds.... only a creeping feeling that it ain't good with prayers for better.
I appreciate the kind words, jwslaw. That probably describes me- opposing whoever is in power. Thanks!
Really come to enjoy reading your materials
other than reading articles on Rense.com, I never knew what was out there. Following what I refer to as the Big Shift in spring of 2020, I slowly came to realize there were many other interesting and very intelligent individuals to read on the Net
I saw how some of these folks go on and on about dire and dramatic calamities upon us that really don't seem to ever materialize, i.e. the Situation Update guy, not mentioning names and a smart guy, but quite a drama queen. this seems somewhat counter-productive, especially when the sky does not fall.
however, I am starting to worry that the effects of the vaxxxes are kicking in, just not as fast as some of these folks foretold (some seemed to say the streets would be empty by now).....
I am taking more and more calls from clients that either have cancer or a family member that does, and we all know what they have in common.
Citizen Free Press is a pretty good source for alt news and information.
There is an article there today about the actor Sam Neill. He is just another victim
of the pandemic of natural coincidences unrelated to the vax. , diagnosed last year with
a rare blood cancer. Unlike high profile celebrities he has cultivated a beautiful aesthetic lifestyle on a New Zealand farm.
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Ffilm%2F2023%2Fmar%2F17%2Fsam-neill-cancer-memoir-interview
I appreciate the kind words, jwslaw. Thanks!
there is no left or right. its all manufactured nonsense to paint one ideology as bad and elevate the other side as good. sheeple only see in black and white. you are being conditioned. red or blue same difference.
Those labels are essential to partisan politics. Thanks.
La plus ca change, la plus c'est la meme chose.
What? English please.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. A very common French phrase; If you have trouble using google to translate seek help from a 8 year old child.
Grow up