Another champion for Classic Liberalism has emerged in Britain, Kemi Badenoch, the new leader of British Conservatives. See comment below. She understands the threat to Western liberal democracies from the new authoritarianism that is Woke Progressivism. Also good comment from Marc Morano of Climate Depot with links to Elon Musk’s change of mind on the “climate crisis” crusade to destroy Western societies.
Karnick on Stockman
Mike Benz, in his Joe Rogan interview, touched a bit on the history of the expansion of the “US Empire”. I was reminded of Benz’s comments when I read this below from S. T. Karnick’s latest (Dec. 9, 2024) “Life, Liberty, Property: #86”. What got my attention- If this information below from Stockman is correct, then the world-spanning expansion of the US empire, since the end of WW2, may not have been entirely, as we were told, the proclaimed great battle for freedom against Communist totalitarianism, a noble legacy to be celebrated. It appears that the worldwide expansion of “US influence” across past decades may be exposed now as something that was infected by the base impulse to world domination. Again, see the detail that Benz presented to Rogan.
Once again, the Rogan/Benz discussion…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrJhQpvlkLA&t=2s
Karnick says this, commenting on Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s plans to cut government spending significantly. He refers to Former Congressman David Stockman who now posts articles at Substack and specializes in “identifying potential spending cuts and explaining them in detail”:
Karnick says, “Stockman’s latest installment deals with defense spending. The former OMB director bases his cuts on a fundamental principle: dismantling “America’s elephantine Warfare State” to conform with the principles of the nation’s founding: “Thomas Jefferson’s wise admonition urging, ‘… peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none’” (emphasis by Stockman). This would return the nation’s defense apparatus to its proper goal of dealing with objective external threats, Stockman notes.”
Karnick states that Stockman makes a persuasive case that “even the aggressive Cold War against Communism was unjustified”.
Stockman argues that with Soviet archives now publicly available, there is nothing “to validate the cold war axiom that the Soviet Union—along with the affiliated menace of Maoist China—was hell-bent on world military domination, starting with western Europe, Japan and then extending to the lesser lands all around them.”
We don’t know for sure (the issue of the classification of too many state secrets) what the US intelligence community knew, post-WW2, about Soviet plans. But with spies and other “assets” scattered throughout the Soviet state apparatus during that time, it seems probable that the US likely knew the communist threat was not as great as the narrative that we were propagandized with over past decades.
Maybe this is my cynicism from revelations of so much state lying to us over past years, cynicism due to how populations have been endlessly propagandized to gain public support for endless interventions in foreign countries (i.e. Glen Greenwald’s points), to overthrow even democratically elected governments. All, apparently, to gain access to resources for US companies, as Benz outlines.
Stockman concludes: “Indeed, what the Soviet archives actually show is not the deliberations of a menacing Colossus, but the record of a chronic struggle to hold together with economic bailing-wire and bubble-gum a lumbering communist state that didn’t function and couldn’t last.”
Makes one suspect the communist threat was perhaps exaggerated to validate the expansion of US Empire, something driven, in part at least, by the base impulse to domination. Not entirely the claimed “noble battle for freedom and democracy”. Or perhaps some mixed version of that.
We can justifiably hold pride in our countries and their history (“exceptionalism”) only when they clearly and consistently promote the principles, systems of law, and representative institutions of Classic Liberalism. And the US has been exceptional in many ways on that file. Its those behind-the-scenes shenanigans of corrupt elites that keep messing things up for the rest who sincerely want Classic Liberalism.
More coming on bits from Benz.
“What goes on in your mind…” (Ringo Starr on Rubber Soul), Wendell Krossa
Just to probe Mike Benz a bit more (his interview with Joe Rogan), to use his comments as a takeoff point.
Many of us are trying to understand why our fellow liberals went all in on the Woke Progressivism and DEI campaigns with associated drives for mass censorship, banning and cancelling disagreeing others, criminalizing dissenting others, and even imprisoning of opponents.
Benz outlines the developing totalitarianism of state elites who have been pushing their new version of democracy as the “consensus of state institutions”. That is no democracy. It is crass elite manipulation of commoners. All part of the complex of institutional control that is enforcing the elite/commoner divide in society, a project that is coming mainly from the formerly “liberal” side of Western societies. Its not just in the US, even though, as usual, the US provides such graphic illustration of what is going on.
I share Michael Shellenberger’s interest in the psychopathology of the people behind the above “left-wing authoritarianism” programs, the mental/emotional deformity that is infecting so many liberals today. See a summary below of his recent article on this- “Democrats Can’t Course Correct Because The Illiberal Radical-Left Runs The Party: And they don’t play by the normal rules because politics is their religion.”
Liberals who have become caught up in the Woke Progressive movement are not bad people. And maybe, as Sage Steele commented recently on Gutfeld, we are talking about the “extreme left”. But something is not right mentally with many liberal’s inability to see or appreciate the harm that their policies and programs of the last decade have caused at-scale to societies.
As RFK has said, referring to his formerly liberal Democratic party, what was only decades earlier the anti-war party, is now the pro-war party. What was only decades ago the pro-free speech party is now the pro-censorship party. What was only decades earlier the generally Classic Liberal and pro-democracy party is now the anti- democracy party where many liberals/Progressives now argue, for example, that the First Amendment is a problem that gets in the way of their complete domination of public discourse. Hilary Clinton affirmed this Democratic antipathy to free speech, recently saying, “We lose total control without social media content moderation”. “Content moderation” as code for censorship.
Add the liberal obsession, across Western liberal democracies, with climate apocalypse and decarbonization that is destroying societies through the irrational “war on carbon”. Note the seriously declining state, for example, of Britain and Germany into de-growth, de-development ruin, due to hysterical levels of eco-zealotry.
Why has the former liberal side of our societies become so highly illiberal, anti-democracy, and willing to embrace the destruction of our societies?
What prevents many liberals today from recognizing that they have abandoned the Classic Liberalism that protects all individuals equally, that promotes true inclusion and diversity? I pause to exchange the pathological “equity of outcomes” for the established society-improver of “equality as according to merit-based criteria”, not equality of outcomes. Collectivist equity, in contrast, ruins economies and societies by not protecting private property rights.
To understand what has happened to North American “liberalism”, it helps to consider again Kristian Niemietz’s explanation that “Emotional satisfaction, not rational thinking, and despite contrary evidence, dominates our choice in beliefs.”
OK then, where did that “emotional satisfaction” go wrong and why?
I have pointed to possible insights from the primitive past where the earliest mythical pathologies were beaten into human minds and that continued across multiple millennia to become deeply embedded as “archetypes” of the subconscious. Hence, moderns (inheriting that collective subconscious) on hearing certain repeated themes, like apocalyptic, find themselves responding positively at an emotional level despite contrary evidence of no apocalypse looming. It’s an intuitive resonance thing. Certain themes and narratives just feel right, good, and true. Hence, people embrace them without rational thought and evaluation, and contrary to evidence.
Fortunately, that inherited subconscious, and its archetypes, is not an immutable reality but can be countered with better alternative themes and narratives.
As Shellenberger notes, Democrats/liberals are still not ready to change, largely due to new generations emerging from universities, indoctrinated by Woke Progressivism. These new generations have gone on to populate the Democratic party, state agencies and bureaucracies, social and news media, and politics, and so on.
This Woke Progressive deformity has proven to be the great threat to democracy, the “enemy within”.
Shellenberger on the psychopathology of illiberalism
“Democrats Can’t Course Correct Because The Illiberal Radical-Left Runs The Party: And they don’t play by the normal rules because politics is their religion”, Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag, Dec. 8, 2024
https://www.public.news/p/democrats-cant-course-correct-because
Shellenberger says, “In the wake of Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris, Democrats need to abandon Wokeism and return to their essential, non-racialist working-class nature, say many of the Party’s thought leaders. “I believe the answer is that the Democratic Party should embrace commonsense moral values,” wrote Matthew Yglesias, “and move away from academic fads and deliberate tent-shrinking while redoubling their commitment to ideas that have been pillars of Democratic campaigns for decades.””
He continues, stating that the Democrats must return to commonsense approaches to the increases in public disorder, the climate extremism, anti-white racism, censorship, open borders, etc.
Shellenberger acknowledges that it appears future leaders of the Democrats are not shifting toward such moderation or reform but are side-tracking to “technical solutions”.
The real problem with the party is that it has been overtaken by “illiberal radical-Left ideology for over 10 years”. This radical leftism, says Shellenberger, has pushed for open borders, climate extremism, enforcing racial hierarchies in every major social institution, pushing transgender medicine on children, and rampant language policing.
He adds that Democrats have also embraced Bernie Sanders progressive economic agenda and rejected the “party’s neoliberal agenda of the 1990s and early 2000s.” He says that Sanders added the radical racialist Woke ideology to his democratic socialism in line with AOC’s progressivism. Biden then embraced this progressivism in his administration. This Woke radical leftist Progressivism has become the central ideology of Democrats today.
“The bottom line is that the Democratic Party today is an illiberal, radical-Left party, one that is fundamentally opposed to our liberal democratic Enlightenment civilization, which the base of the party, and the people who control it, view as irredeemably stained by indigenous genocide, slavery, barbaric capitalism, and ecological catastrophes.”
The Democratic Party shift toward radical progressive leftism is largely due to the entrance of radicalized millennials graduating from universities that indoctrinate students with such ideology. These graduates now form much of the base of the party.
And this, says Shellenberger, explains the Democratic Party’s shift from liberalism to illiberalism.
Shellenberger then probes more of the psychopathology behind this- “Left-wing authoritarianism… high in narcissism.”
The Leftist ideology and associated psychopathology better serves the interests of the “professional-managerial class” that dominates the Democratic Party, according to Shellenberger. This ideology demands “a much larger role for the state in the economy and society, which is in the direct interests of the people who work in public institutions including schools, universities, and government agencies…. Enabling addiction, crime, and homelessness expands the services provided by the state. And DEI and radical Left policies in race justify a significant expansion of the administration, both in public institutions and private companies.”
Meaning, consequently- Big government, Big regulation, Big taxation to support the Leviathan. Therefore, meaning more state intervention in citizen’s lives, more control, less rights and freedoms of individuals. More elite domination of commoners to serve elite interests, policies, and programs.
Shellenberger further probes the psychopathology behind this leftist illiberalism dominating Democrats today.
It is accompanied, he says, by severe punishment of fellow liberals and moderates that dissent from the Woke dogmatism. That punishment of any dissent, diversity, and drive for control is cultic and exhibits “Cluster B psychiatric disorders including narcissism, psychopathy, and histrionic disorder, entitlement, grandiosity, reality impairment, lack of empathy for opponents, dramaticism, and emotional dysregulation’, says Shellenberger.
It is all so contrary to the American Classic Liberal tradition of “freedom, equality of opportunity (not outcomes), democracy, individualism, and rule of law.”
He ends that the American political baseline is common sense, and the hope is for a return to such ideals and values.
See full article at link above.
Another note on the anti-sacrifice protest of Historical Jesus, Wendell Krossa
Sacrifice has long been essential to elite control in societies. The long-functioning “fear=control” formula of totalitarians.
From the mists of antiquity there emerged to shape early consciousness the myth of forces behind all the elements of the natural world. With anthropomorphism of those forces, the myth progressed to belief in spirits behind all the elements of the natural world, eventually gods.
And because those elements of the world were often destructive as in natural disasters (i.e. storm/flood, heat/drought, earthquake, etc.) ancient logic concluded the spirits were angry with human sins/errors. Early shaman/priests, claiming special knowledge of the metaphysical realms, then concocted responses to pacify the angry gods, notably offerings/sacrifices. Often bloody. Scholars suggest varied explanations for the blood sacrifices, such as the belief in an early justice that demanded eye for eye, life for life. Take this substitution life for mine.
Add to this the early belief that humans were created to serve the gods, to do the work of the gods, and to feed the gods. Hence, offerings. And that had the element of human bribery- i.e. offerings to gain benefits from the gods such as abundant rain, good crops, success in hunts, etc.
In the above traditions, early elites learned to claim monopoly on knowledge of the secrets related to the unknown realms and forces behind life. Secret, special knowledge that validated their control of society.
My point…
The early Hebrews were memorable for the protests of their prophets against the sacrifice industry. Notably Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and others, who all proclaimed that God despised blood sacrifices and desired, instead, mercy, love, and generosity toward others. But the protest tradition of the prophets was buried by the Jewish priesthood that maintained the sacrifice industry to control commoners.
The Hebrew sacrifice industry was validated by the same old threat theology noted above, where sacrifices were the essential element to salvation schemes. Such was the elite/commoner divide of the time where elites dominated populations with religious fear-mongering and elite proposals to save whatever purportedly needed saving.
Historical Jesus emerged centuries later to resume again the prophet’s protest against sacrifice. He validated his revolutionary protest with a stunning new theology of a non-retaliatory God who wanted no more “eye for eye” justice that demanded punishment, payment, appeasement, or atonement.
The new God of Jesus did not demand sacrifice, but desired only love.
Jesus’ struggle was essentially against the dominating elites who used threat theology to control commoners and to burden them, an impoverished agrarian people, with the severe economic burden of offerings and sacrifices. Add the mental/psychological deformity from threat theology that manifested in pathologies like “demon possession” and related psychosomatic illnesses.
I’ve noted before the contemporary illustration of the residents of the Andes, impoverished people who cannot afford the excess costs, but who spend days devoted to attending ceremonies, rituals, and making offerings to their deities. Time and resources that would be better spent on improving their economic condition.
In the literature on the history of sacrifice, often academics will emphasize the “offering” aspect of sacrifice, framed as some sort of jovial harmony between human and god, where people apparently seek help/benefits from the gods. The authors appear hesitant to emphasize the appeasement or atonement element in sacrifice, the felt need to pacify angry deity and thereby prevent personal harm. Not sure why that hesitancy to affirm the atonement of wrathful God mythology. Its Christianity.
I would argue that the element of appeasing anger was very prominent across history and that is evident in the fact that the belief that there were gods behind all the elements of the natural world was a concurrent dominant belief. And as those elements were often destructive- i.e. natural disasters, disease, accidents, and predatory cruelty (e.g. the Old Testament God punished Jews through wars of conquest by outsiders)- so survival depended on pacifying the destructive deities behind such things.
Christianity was then built entirely on the basis of this “appeasement/atonement of divine anger” theme. Paul repeatedly in Romans, his main presentation of the Christian gospel, establishes the fundamental theme of a wrathful God punishing human sin, a God that must be appeased with blood sacrifice. He then presents Jesus’ bloody death as the cosmic sacrifice to appease divine wrath and thereby provide the basis of salvation for true believers who meet the condition of belief in his Christ salvation myth.
Bloody sacrifice to appease divine wrath is the fundamental core of Christianity.
Again, these good comments from Harold Ellens quoted by Zenon Lotufo in “Cruel God, Kind God”:
“There is in Western culture a psychological archetype, a metaphor that has to do with the image of a violent and wrathful God (see Romans, Revelation). Crystallized in Anselm’s juridical atonement theory, this image represents God sufficiently disturbed by the sinfulness of humanity that God had only two options: destroy us or substitute a sacrifice to pay for our sins. He did the latter. He killed Christ.
“Ellens goes on by stating that the crucifixion, a hugely violent act of infanticide or child sacrifice, has been disguised by Christian conservative theologians as a ‘remarkable act of grace’. Such a metaphor of an angry God, who cannot forgive unless appeased by a bloody sacrifice, has been ‘right at the center of the Master Story of the Western world for the last 2,000 years.”
Not sure why academics play up one feature of the sacrifice industry and play down the other element. I saw firsthand in tribal groups how prominent the element of appeasing angry spirits was. That element dominated the reason for offering sacrifices.
Note: Historical Jesus presented the way out of this personality-deforming mythology, the way of profound liberation of mind, spirit, and life. It was in his stunning new theology of an unconditionally loving God. No conditions, none.
Sources on sacrifice: See for example, “Human sacrifice in history and today”, Nigel Davies. As well as numerous essays on the history of sacrifice. Google “essays on the history of sacrifice” and poke among those.
Another tacked on to this sacrifice comment:
Again, honor the man Historical Jesus for who he actually was and what he actually taught. He gave us the single most profound insight ever offered to humanity, an insight on the true nature of God as unconditional reality, an insight that went to the very core of what had gone wrong with human narratives and consciousness across previous history, what had enslaved human spirits to life-deforming fear, anxiety, shame, guilt, despair and depression, nihilism and violence.
Historical Jesus rejected all threat theology and associated religious conditions and demands that formed the basis of elite power and control of commoners. He presented and advocated the most profound liberation movement ever.
Make AI safe? Make AI Classic Liberal. Wendell Krossa
And, tossing this in once again, why not make AI safe by programming it with Classic Liberal principles? There will most likely be resistance because a Classic Liberal AI prevents elites from gaining power and control over public information and thereby controlling and dominating others (the free speech/censorship issue).
Classic Liberal principles, systems of common law, and representative institutions obligate all of us to protect the freedoms and rights of every person, equally.
Right now, AI has been proven corrupted and the people asked to correct the corruption are still committed to their ideological domination of public information. They will simply return in some more devious way with more behind-the-scenes manipulation of information providers.
Note current exposures of behind-the-scenes elite manipulation with corrupted algorithms and AI. Hear, for example, from Joe Rogan guest Robert Epstein, a specialist on Google’s manipulation of search results to favor one side of society (offer search requests more exposure to positive reports) and diminish exposure to the other side (or offer search requests mainly negative reports). “Shadow banning” or diminishing “virality”, or whatever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Azu8XnZdxeA
Another good one from Eric Worrall
“Claim: President Trump is the product of the Climate Doom Loop: Apparently Trump should have told voters how climate change drives inflation”, Eric Worrall, Dec. 10, 2024.
While Worrall’s article deals with some “doom loop” in geopolitics that detracts from more activism on climate, it’s the closing comments of Worrall that got my attention for their refreshing frankness on the nothingburger nature of global warming.
Worrall says that “A quick glance at Earth’s paleo history shows us how unlikely it is that climate change will ever be an issue we need to care about, on any reasonable timescale…. For starters, the Earth is currently way too cold, not too hot. We are all locked in the Late Cenzoic Ice Age, an ice age which began 34 million years ago, and shows no signs of releasing its grip. The Earth has thrived in much warmer conditions than today, and with much higher CO2 levels than today. There is substantial evidence the biomass carrying capacity of the Earth has been substantially degraded by the current ice age, compared to previous warm epochs.”
He says that in the ice age we are currently experiencing, ice is a far greater threat than warming. More people die from cold every year than die from warming.
The lady from Nigeria gets it. The threat to democracy is the “enemy within”. Go Kemi, go.
She has firsthand experience, growing up in Nigeria, of the “great destroyer of societies”- socialism.
“How Liberalism Got Hacked: The new leader of Britain’s Tories says that ideologues have smuggled authoritarianism into the West. She has a plan to fix it”, Kemi Badenoch
https://www.thefp.com/p/kemi-badenoch-how-liberalism-got-hacked?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
The new British leader of the Conservatives, Kemi Badenoch from Nigeria. In the quote below she nails the problem with Britain, the US, Canada, and other Western liberal democracies. She is so right- the great threat to democracy today is the “enemy within”, Woke Progressivism that has rejected Classic Liberalism for a neo-collectivism, a neo-totalitarianism that works to re-establish the elite/commoner divide in our societies.
This from Free Press:
“As Badenoch sees it, she is fighting not just for her party or her country, but for a way of governing and a kind of society that is under threat across the West. “Liberalism has been hacked,” argues Badenoch in a speech of hers we are publishing today.
“She describes “classic liberal values—not left-wing progressivism, but the classic liberalism of free markets, free speech, free enterprise, freedom of religion, the presumption of innocence, trusted institutions within the rule of law, and equality under the law” as “a precious inheritance.” And those values, she says, “have been hacked by ideologues operating on the inside. But if we can spot their trick, we can stop them from destroying the freest societies in the history of the world.”
This from the opening of her speech (rest is behind paywall):
“I joined the Conservative movement in a very unusual way. I didn’t study politics or government at university. I’m not a lawyer. I’m an engineer. I like to know how things work—and I love to fix things that are broken.
“Growing up, I saw a lot that needed fixing. I was born in 1980 in London, but I grew up in Lagos, Nigeria. And Lagos was a place where almost everything seemed broken.
“I was lucky to be born into a relatively wealthy family and had a decent education, but things changed. I learned quickly what it means to be poor as I watched my family’s income and savings inflated away by destructive government policies. They didn’t call it socialism—but it definitely was. There were times where I had to do homework by candlelight. At other times, when the state-run water company broke down, we had to dig for fresh water in a borehole a mile away.
“There was no freedom of choice, either. The military government decided what school your child went to. It decided which businesses could or could not operate. It decided who to arrest without trial, and who deserved state-sanctioned murder.
“So, I know what freedom looks like because I have witnessed life without it.
“Classic liberal values—not left-wing progressivism, but the classic liberalism of free markets, free speech, free enterprise, freedom of religion, the presumption of innocence, trusted institutions within the rule of law, and equality under the law—all of those were missing when I was growing up as a child under military rule. And those values—that precious inheritance—are right now under grave threat here in the West.’
This from Wattsupwiththat.com
Marc Morano of Climate Depot responds to a Washington Post article titled- “How Elon Musk backed away from his climate crusade- ‘Once one of America’s outspoken voices on the threat from climate change, Musk now argues these existential risks have been overstated’”, Dec. 11, 2024
Morano includes some very helpful links:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/12/10/elon-musk-climate-change-worldview-trump
“Climate Depot’s Morano: “First, RFK Jr. and now Elon Musk! The world has lost two of the most prominent climate activists post-COVID lockdowns. We welcome Elon Musk into the climate red pill group.” See…
Related links:
This is especially notable…
More links at Morano’s full article: