I briefly take up five issues in this blog: partisan pandering on college debt, establishment newspeak, the COVID-19 pivot, the Islamization of the West, and Biden characterizing “MAGA” as “semi-fascist.” I will be back soon with a dedicated blog, likely on the topic of social contagion.
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There’s a marine on Twitter who wants to know which office he needs to go to to get his legs back. He lost them paying for college.
How much tuition could be paid with the money Biden gave the neo-Nazis in Ukraine? Has anybody run the numbers?
Biden is out of touch. Even Democrats are turning on his plan to cancel ten thousand dollars in student debt for each borrower making less than $125,000 (twenty thousand for Pell Grant recipients), a huge swatch of the indebted population (President Biden Announces Student Loan Relief for Borrowers Who Need It Most). Estimates are being widely reported indicating that American taxpayers will pay north of half a trillion dollars over the next decade to pay for what is self-evidently a cynical political move in the face of midterm elections that populist-nationalist movement is well positioned to dominate.
The unfairness of this move betrays the claim that Democrats represent working class families. Working people who didn’t take out student loans or who have already paid off their loans (my wife and I fall in the latter group) will not benefit from the program. In fact, we will be paying to bail out those who took out loans—while many of us out here are struggling to put our own kids through college.
This move does nothing to fix the systemic problems of college financing, the consequence of, among other things, making enrollment in college available to those unprepared to undertake the rigors of academic work, many or whom will seek degrees that provide no useful employment after college, and reduction in state financing of higher education thereby shifting the burden to families and individuals.
Instead of cancelling student debt, the government should invest half a trillion dollars to reinvigorate the nation’s network of trade schools, as well as invest in infrastructure projects that use those trades to rebuild industrial capacity in America, which will provide good paying jobs for our citizens. To ensure that Americans will have those jobs, the federal government must sharply restrict immigration.
At any rate, didn’t Nancy Pelosi say presidents don’t have the power of debt forgiveness? (See “Flashback: Nancy Pelosi Said President Lacks Authority to ‘Forgive’ Student Debt,” National Review. See also Slate’s “SCOTUS Will Probably Kill Student Debt Relief.”)
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Have you heard? Pedophiles are being rebranded. They are now to be known as “MAPs,” or “minor attracted persons,” and recognized as a vulnerable and oppressed minority. Twitter has been one fire since videos of Berkeley police letting a transgender pedophile, Sophia Westfall, grooming who she believed were children (including a one-year-old) go (twice!) after being exposed in a citizen-organized sting operation led by Alex Rosen waiting at a park where children were playing. (Westfall, who identifies as a lesbian, also likes to take clandestine pictures of women in public places.)
Berkeley police tweeted rationalizations about the incident (I am being charitable, they were demonstrable lies). I tweeted the following in response:
Now you know what the “Love is love” line on those “In this house…” yard signs means (“In this House…” The Slogans of Woke Progressivism).
This is how they do it. “They” meaning the power elite. They change the language to disrupt ordinary understanding and shift sympathies—and, since they control institutional life, they can do this (which is why they must be removed from power).
MAPs is an instantiation of Orwellian Newspeak (it joins such euphemisms as “gender-affirming care,” “top surgery,” and “bottom surgery,” i.e., non-medically necessary castration and mastectomy).
Newspeak is the fictional language of Oceania, the totalitarian superstate in Orwell’s 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The Party created Newspeak to bring the masses in line with the ideology of Ingsoc (Newspeak for English Socialism).
In real-life today, the Party is the constellation of cultural and political forces comprising the Establishment, which, in the United States, presents with Democrats as its most visible front. The corporate state is transnational, so there are analogs in Europe, e.g., the Labour Party of Great Britain. (This is not socialism, of course, but corporate statism. Both the US Democratic Party and the UK Labour Party are neoliberal in orientation.)
The language of woke progressivism, which guides public policy, DEI training, etc., is the prevailing Newspeak in western societies (The Bureaucratic Tyranny of DEI). This is how crackpot ideas like critical race theory and gender ideology are smuggled into popular consciousness. This is what they are teaching our children. And they will lie to your face about that. (See The Ethic of Transparency in Public Education—and the Problem of Indoctrination; If QAnon is Not a Deep State Construct, It Certainly Functions that Way; The LGBTQ Lobby Sues Florida.)
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In its pivot to blame Trump for pressuring the FDA on vaccines, the media is now admitting that vaccines are a problem. Take note of this moment. Elites are going to walk back the panic on COVID-19 and wash their hands of their responsibility in sickening and killing scores.
In the article, “Trump White House exerted pressure on FDA for Covid-19 emergency use authorizations, House report finds,” Politico is reporting, “The Trump administration pressured the FDA to authorize unproven treatments for Covid-19 and the first Covid-19 vaccines on an accelerated timeline, according to a House report released Wednesday.” This is how they will pivot on vaccines: blame Trump.
Why do they need to pivot? Haven’t you wondering when the media is going to come around and say, “What’s up with all these young healthy athletes dropping dead?” What about the vast increased in unexplained deaths in the trans-Atlantic sphere? Unexplained deaths surpassed all other causes of death in Alberta, Canada.
I wondered out loud a couple of days ago on Facebook whether elites would even attempt to pivot after they pushed mRNA so hard. They literally mocked those who refused to be injected with spike protein. They celebrated hospitalizations and deaths of the “unvaccinated,” gleefully reporting cases that put those who avoided the shot in the worst possible light while hiding the cases that contradicted the corporate state narrative. And governments mandated the damn thing. I asserted in that thread that the truth will have to be a popular truth, since elites will continue to lie. But I underestimated how clever the elite are. They do need to pivot.
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Good Lord, how did I miss this? Miley Cyrus made a big to-do about this in 2017. Brothers and sisters, you have to keep me up on what’s happening in the pop culture world. Good thing it says “diversity” and not “equality.” I mean, it could have been worse: it could have been inaccurate. (Maybe you have noticed that “diversity” and “equity” have replaced equality as the goals of a “just society,” as determined by the ruling class. Equality is such a liberal value—and liberalism is white supremacist.)
I posted this on Facebook and a friend wondered why they didn’t just come out with a new character. I explained that they needed Barbie to put on the hijab. It’s a political act by the Culture Industry—as well as a marketing strategy to bring new customers to the Barbie franchise. Folks may claim that it is only about latter, but Mattel says openly that the doll, modeled after Olympic fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad, is part of its “Sheroes” series and that the doll serves as an “inspiration for countless little girls who never saw themselves represented in sports and culture.” The goal is to manufacture the perception that Muslim women do not have a presence in American society by visibly “rectifying” their “marginal status” with a doll celebrating a cultural requirement that signals subordination to a patriarchal god. (I have written quite a lot on the subject of the hijab and the problem of multiculturalism. Here’s a sampling: Squaring the Panic over Misogyny with World Hijab Day; The Democratic Party and the Doctrine of Multiculturalism.)
Another friend (whom I have known since kindergarten) remarked that he has never seen a Barbie nun. Good point. Where is Catholic Barbie? Or Pentecostal Barbie? Or Satanic Barbie? A relative then asked when transgender Barbie was coming out. I responded with:
I then shared this from my essay Disordering Bodies for Disordered Minds:
Some doctors believe persons who want to transform their bodies in disfiguring ways should be allow to do so. Such surgery is already occurring in the United States. Align Surgical Associates Inc., a medical firm based in San Francisco, endorsed by, among others, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, the American Medical Association, and the Aesthetic Society, will perform a surgical procedure known as “nullification” on those who wish “to enjoy a relatively smooth genital area,” a “mostly unbroken transition from the abdomen down.” The firm offers this procedure for those who wish to “enjoy a body that looks closer on the outside to the way they feel on the inside.” Some people wish to have no genitals and Align Surgical Associates Inc. will make that happen. For a fee, of course. (The firm’s website has a gallery, if you are interested.)
I learned about Hijab Barbie from a YouTuber named Persy who I discovered upon reading this tweet:
I have blogged extensively about this (see, e.g., Observations from Sweden; Sweden – Caught Between Two Irrationalisms; Avoiding Civil War in Europe; The Courage to Name the Problem). This is what I have been telling readers about this matter in a nutshell: How Islam will take over the West: progressives and social democrats of western countries invite them in—and woke feminists take the students to mosques to try on the hijab to signal their virtue.
What comes with Islamization is not only misogyny and homophobia and a sharply reduced capacity for free thought (and a profound hatred of dogs), but drastically higher crime rates and greater social disorganization. It’s bad for everybody—as every totalitarian ideology is. Let this happen and prepare for clerical fascism.
Ask a truthful Swede what’s in store for the rest of civilization if western nations allow this trend to continue. But recognize that a lot of Swedes are deluded by a pathological displaced humanitarianism and will deny the empirical evidence. The fact is that Sweden is very different now than it was when I first started traveling there.
I weep for the Danes and Swedes. I fear for the West. Not all cultures are adequate for the humanity of the people they colonize (Culture Matters: Western Exceptionalism and Socialist Possibility; Kenan Malik: Assimilation, Multiculturalism, and Immigration). So do borders.
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“In 2020, you and 81 million Americans voted to save our democracy,” Biden told a roaring crowd. “That’s why Donald Trump isn’t just a former president. He is a defeated former president.” Was the crowd roaring? I didn’t see the speech. Biden makes me feel uncomfortable. I don’t like being made to pity a man I loathe. But I can understand how CNN could describe the crowd this way given the headline of the story: “Biden criticizes ‘semi-fascism’ underpinning the ‘extreme MAGA philosophy’ in fiery return to the campaign trail.” Fiery? Biden?
Every time Biden says this all I hear is insecurity. He doesn’t really believe he won. He may not fully grasp everything that went on during 2020 (Too Soon to Call: Developments in the Improbability of a Biden Election Victory; “A republic, if you can keep it.”) , but he surely saw those huge Trump rallies and reflected on his own pathetic events those few times he poked his head up out of his basement. He can’t believe he got more votes than the wildly popular Obama or even Clinton. Of course, maybe he is that egotistical and self-deluded.
Populist-nationalism isn’t “semi-fascist.” This is absurd. This characterization is part of the elite effort to paint popular opposition to transnationalism and woke progressivism as beyond the pale (“A New Kind of American Radicalism”: The Campaign to Portray Ordinary America as Deviant and Dangerous; MDM is the New WMD: DHS Issues a New NTAS Bulletin; Liz Cheney: MAGA is Neo-Marxist). It’s projection—and distraction. The principal advocates of key elements of fascism—the corporate state, technocratic control, and identitarianism—are the Democrats and establishment Republicans (Totalitarian Monopoly Capitalism: Fascism Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow; Biden’s Biofascist Regime; From Inverted to Naked Totalitarianism: The West in Crisis).
Whatever you think about “MAGA” ideology, it’s not fascist (The Social Character of the Trump Moment; The Economic Nationalism of Steven K. Bannon). These are conservatives and liberals working together to resist globalism and the managed decline of the American republic (Bridging the Left-Right Divide to Confront the New World Order). Whatever you think of Trump, he is not a fascist (Scapegoating in the Era of Inverted Totalitarianism). “MAGA” Republicans are building grassroots coalitions that emphasize popular democratic participation and action. They threaten the hold progressives and elites have on our institutions (Why I am not a Progressive). That’s the problem with them. They’re the “deplorables.”
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Breaking: Kevin McCarthy is demanding Mark Zuckerberg testify before Congress following his admission on the Joe Rogan Experience that Facebook censored Hunter Biden’s laptop stories for ten days in run-up to election.
For those of you who aren’t up on this, the FBI met Facebook employees and told them Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian propaganda.” They knew that wasn’t true. Facebook took direction from a deep state operation to protect Joe Biden from information that would have changed the outcome of the election.
The FBI—or some group internal to it—worked for the Establishment to prevent Trump’s re-election. And they are today working to prevent Trump’s return and, more generally, stifle the populist-nationalist movement. The FBI has become the Gestapo of the Democratic Party.
freedom and reason 
What do you think of the James Burnham’s concept of the managerial class as the new power center in politics from the ’40s onward, or Curtis Yarvin’s updated formulation “the Cathedral” to describe the same thing?
Their descriptions seem like the best way to understand what is behind these events.
I mention Burnham’s work here: https://andrewaustin.blog/2020/03/02/was-the-soviet-union-socialist/. This is in reference to this characterization of the Soviet Union as “bureaucratic collectivist,” which I believe is a more accurate description of what the West has become under corporate governance. Burnham famous writes in The Managerial Revolution: “In its own more confused, less advanced way, New Dealism too has spread abroad the stress on the state as against the individual, planning as against private enterprise, jobs (even if relief jobs) against opportunities, security against initiative, ‘human rights’ against ‘property rights.’ There can be no doubt that the psychological effect of New Dealism has been what the capitalists say it has been: to undermine public confidence in capitalist ideas and rights and institutions. Its most distinctive features help to prepare the minds of the masses for the acceptance of the managerial social structure.” There is a lot to this, but he is wrong to say that this is against capitalism. It is just a different form of capitalism. It’s fascism. Fascism is a form of capitalism.