RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/how-progressives-enforce-ideological-conformity

Politics today seems to have crawled out of some Hobbesian muck. It is a nasty, brutish little runt wherever it appears, which is almost everywhere. Its act—for these days everything is performance art—is a tragic farce. On the streets, its watchword is riot; on the Internet, abuse; in the academy, the boardroom, and the media, a coordinated equalization of attitudes that borders on the totalitarian. At the highest levels of government, it is too lazy or stupid to persuade, preferring rather to manipulate, bully, spy, and punish.

Hobbesian man is moved by powerful passions of pride and fear. His vainglory and the joy he takes in standing above others give rise to war. The horror of anarchy and the fear of death make him seek peace. The ugly and ubiquitous politics of the Left is now channeling these passions into a massive project of social engineering: the construction of a new Tower of Babel.

Fear and pride raised the old Tower of Babel, built by anonymous wanderers who sought to “make us a name, lest we be scattered over all the earth.” Their anonymity is fitting, for there was then only “one language, one set of words. . . . one people” in the world. The Babylonians formed bricks out of the soil—adamah in Hebrew, the same stuff God breathed life into to make the first human being (ha’adam)—and began to “build a city and a tower with its top in the heavens.” These hard-baked bricks, all cut to the same measure, are images of human beings from whom the breath of individual life and particularity has somehow departed.

Modern attempts to construct the Tower have unfolded before, most notably in the Soviet Union and China. Today an inhumanly univocal tongue, asserting itself as the measure of all things, once again threatens to swallow the rich particularities and multiple languages of individual thought, speech, and creative expression.

The foundations of the new Tower have already been laid. In a recent interview, the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei was asked if he thought that Donald Trump was an authoritarian. He did not:

If you are authoritarian, you have to have a system supporting you. You cannot just be an authoritarian by yourself. But certainly, in the United States, with today’s condition, you can easily have an authoritarian. In many ways, you’re already in the authoritarian state. You just don’t know it.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/11/22/fake_white_house_is_a_fitting_home_for_fake_president_146769.html

News last month that President Biden makes electronic appearances from a pretend White House brought to mind another president whose image was carefully crafted to assuage the American people that all was well even when things were at their most dire.

No, I’m not referring to Franklin Roosevelt, although his facade of the strong, virile man was as much of an invention as Biden’s carefully crafted persona as a reasonable moderate who would unite our country.

Instead, to fully comprehend the essence  of the invented Joe Biden, we must visit the paranoid fantasies of one of our greatest writers — Philip K. Dick, whose 1964 novel “The Penultimate Truth” imagined a future where the leader of the Western world was in fact nothing but a simulacrum programmed to reassure the masses that their sacrifice of toiling underground for decades was noble when in fact it was the equivalent of the turkey’s sacrifice on Thanksgiving. Given a choice, the turkey would have politely declined. 

I’m hardly the first columnist to suggest that Biden is parroting lines written for him in an effort to convince the American public of their need to sacrifice for the general good, but his banal bromides have an unmistakable Orwellian feel: “Lockdowns are freedom,” “inflation is wealth,” “moms and dads are domestic terrorists.” But when it was revealed that Biden got his COVID vaccine booster shot in a fake White House, it became easy to picture his presidency as some political variant of “The Truman Show,” or as I propose, a Philip K. Dick novel.

Dick was the mid-20th century’s answer to Kafka — an author in search of the ultimate truth who taught us that the truth mostly consisted of disappointment and deception. So too might we conclude about the puppet presidency of Joseph R. Biden. Even the majority of those who accept the legitimacy of his presidency can have a hard time believing in the legitimacy of his leadership.

According to Donald Trump adviser Stephen Miller, “The reason Biden uses this bizarre virtual set for televised meetings — and not an actual room like East Room, Cabinet, Oval, Roosevelt, Sit Room, etc. — is because it allows him to read from a script directly from a face-on monitor (& w/out teleprompter glass that can be seen on camera).”

That doesn’t in itself make Biden an ersatz president. Lots of politicians are nothing but empty reflections of what their handlers put in front of them, but in his case there is ample evidence aside from the fake White House that he is a product of the imagination of those around him, a figurehead whose policies and even his press conferences (“I’m not supposed to take any questions”) are scripted by others.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/20/the-right-outcome-for-rittenhouse-but/

I do not have much to add to the cataract of commentary about Friday’s Kyle Rittenhouse verdict. Like all sane people, I applaud the young man’s acquittal on all charges. 

There seem to be essentially three sorts of responses to the decision. One is “Hallelujah, justice was done, let us chalk up the victory, and move on. The System™ works.” 

A second response, about which I’ll say a bit more below, is the standard-issue, angry woke identity politics response. According to this narrative, Rittenhouse is a “white supremacist” who acted as a vigilante when Kenosha, Wisconsin exploded in violence in August 2020, following the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a black man. According to this script, Rittenhouse wantonly murdered two people in cold blood—Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26—and grievously injured a third, Gaige Grosskreutz, 27. This charge was the specialité de la maison of the so-called mainstream media and the Democratic establishment up to and including Joe Biden. 

In the aftermath of the verdict, the meme was supercharged by all the usual suspects. Rep. Jerry “the Waddler” Nadler (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, was among the first to suggest the U.S. Justice Department bring federal charges against Rittenhouse since the state charges didn’t stick. I’m sure the ghoulish Merrick “the Moderate” Garland is considering it if only he can peel off enough agents from harassing parents attending school board meetings for the task. 

For his part, Biden, though acknowledging his disappointment that the 18-year old wasn’t going to be thrown in prison for the rest of his life, did at first say that the trial vindicated the judicial process and that “the jury system works.” Aides soon began walking that back, however, perhaps in preparation for the Nadler gambit of trying the boy twice. 

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/20/no-more-summits-for-joe-biden/

Joe Biden on Monday finally got the summit he had long sought with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Biden officials and many in the mainstream media credited the three-and-a-half-hour virtual summit with reducing tensions between the two nations by promoting dialogue and diplomacy. 

But in fact, Biden should not have skipped his bedtime. The optics of him again appearing as an extremely weak and indecisive president, contrasted with the strong leader of a U.S. adversary, were so bad that White House officials should avoid any more bilateral meetings like this in the future.

It was clear that Xi came to the summit prepared to intimidate Biden and dominate the discussion. He bullied Biden with accusations against U.S. and Taiwanese officials for stirring up tensions with China over Taiwanese independence. Biden said very little in reply.

For his part, Biden took a much softer approach. He emphasized easing tensions and constructing “guardrails” in U.S.-China “competition,” urging China to act responsibly and sought more cooperation and diplomacy. 

Biden read a laundry list of U.S. grievances prepared by the State Department concerning human rights, arms control, Taiwan, regional security, and other issues. But he showed no urgency about any of them or expressed any serious U.S. policy to address them. 

Biden again failed to demand Chinese cooperation in investigating the origins of the coronavirus in a Chinese biolab, which thus far has killed more than 767,000 Americans. 

Although Biden said the United States “strongly opposes unilateral efforts to change the status quo or undermine peace and stability,” he endorsed the U.S. “One China” policy. He also didn’t complain about China’s recent provocations against Taiwan, flying large numbers of fighter planes and bombers into its Air Defense Identification Zone, practicing invasion tactics, and erecting mock-ups of U.S. aircraft carriers for Chinese air force pilots to practice attacking American warships.