Author: Keith Preston

All Posts by Keith Preston

Joe Rogan World Vs. NPR World Reply

American Decline, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right

Of all the political conflicts I have ever studied, anywhere in the world, or from any time in history, there are none which I have found to be nearly as ridiculous as the American “culture wars.” Culture warriors, whether red, blue, white, black, pink, green, or purple, generally strike me as overly privileged losers and crybabies who throw tantrums if they can’t have their way 100% of the time. The US culture wars primarily take place within the middle to upper-middle classes, and the “warrior” weenies are people who are collectively in the global 1%. Ezra Pound was absolutely correct when he proclaimed the United States to be one big insane asylum. Europeans, Russians, Third World nationalists, and Islamists are very wise to want to keep American influence out of their societies.

By Rod Dreher

The American Conservative

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Is a Lunatic Right Wing SCOTUS That Bad? Reply

Law/Justice

Actually, contra milquetoast weenie social democrat David Pakman, it really isn’t that bad. The hysteria exhibited by “progressives” over the Supreme Court demonstrates the totalitarian nature of their ideology. Essentially, what they want is for the Supreme Court to be a nine-person “junta for life” that rules a continent-wide nation and imposes “progressive values” by decree, like a Roman Caesar, absolute monarchs, Platonic philosopher-kings, or Iran’s Guardian Council. However, a much more serious critique of Republican jurists can be made as they tend to be deferent to executive power and defensive of full-blown police state provisions such as the Patriotic Act. “Progressives” are correct to oppose these Federalist Society jurists, even if they do so for all the wrong reasons.

Why New York’s in a Depression and Texas Isn’t Reply

Economics/Class Relations, Health and Medicine

The “culture wars” are largely an intra-class rivalry within the middle class, but class divisions are rapidly becoming the “new sectionalism” pitting poor regions against affluent ones and those with declining economies against those with rising ones

By Conor Sen

Bloomberg

In the first few months of the Covid-19 pandemic, the conventional wisdom was that economic recovery hinged on controlling the disease. For a while, that appeared to be the case, with the economies of most states feeling similar levels of pain as consumers, businesses and public officials took measures to slow the spread of the virus.

But as August state employment data show, recovery is happening faster in states whose economies are less tied to in-person services, not states that have performed better on controlling the virus. As we await the rollout of vaccines, we should expect better virus control to improve the economic fortunes of any community. But we should also expect states with economies that rely more on logistics, manufacturing and construction to outperform economies heavier on services, no matter what their public health performance is.

The best way to see this is to compare the unemployment rates of states that have done some of the best and worst jobs of containing the spread of the virus over the past couple of months.

Since the pandemic began, states in the Northeast have consistently done the best job of containing the virus through a mix of policy measures and adherence to wearing masks (and possibly, in the case of a few hard-hit communities, partial herd immunity). Yet of the 10 states with unemployment north of 10% in August, half are in the Northeast — Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island.

When thinking about states that did a poorer job of containing the virus over the summer, those in the Sun Belt such as Arizona, Texas, Florida, and Georgia come to mind. All experienced a surge in cases in June and July that strained hospital capacity, and some had to reverse course on economic reopening plans and take measures such as shutting or restricting the operations of bars and indoor restaurants. Yet in August, Arizona’s unemployment rate was 5.9%, Florida’s was 7.4%, Georgia’s was 5.6%, and Texas’ was 6.8%.

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No Job, Loads of Debt: Covid Upends Middle-Class Family Finances Reply

Economics/Class Relations, Health and Medicine

The economic impact of the pandemic has been to proletarianize the middle-class and lumpenproletarianize the working class, while further concentrating wealth into the proverbial 1%. Fortunately, the traditional lumpenproletariat has demonstrated the proper response to such events. Keep those pig pens burning and keep those Wal-Marts looted.

By AnnaMaria Andriotis

Wall Street Journal

Until mid-March, Alysse Hopkins earned a comfortable living in Rockland County, N.Y., representing clients in foreclosure cases and personal-injury lawsuits.

In a good year, the 43-year-old lawyer and her husband, Ian Boschen, 41, together brought in about $175,000, the couple said—enough to cover the mortgage, two car leases, student loans, credit cards and assorted costs of raising two daughters in the New York City suburbs.

After the coronavirus halted many foreclosures and closed courts, her work dried up. Unemployment benefits have helped, Ms. Hopkins said, but the family is running low on savings and can’t keep up with $9,000 in monthly debt payments including mortgage installments. “It frustrates me to not be able to earn a living,” she said. “I have a law degree, almost 20 years of practice.”

Millions of Americans have lost jobs during a pandemic that kept restaurants, shops and public institutions closed for months and hit the travel industry hard. While lower-wage workers have borne much of the brunt, the crisis is wreaking a particular kind of havoc on the debt-laden middle class.

Debt didn’t present a major problem before the coronavirus. The job market was booming and median household incomes were rising, allowing families to keep up with payments.

American families with nonhousing debt making over $98,018 a year in pre-tax income owed an average of nearly $92,000 of such debt in 2016. That’s up 32% from 2004, adjusted for inflation, according to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a nonpartisan nonprofit research group.

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The Pandemic is a Test Run Reply

Health and Medicine

The death cult that wants to suppress humanity has issued their warning: the lockdown of the world in the name of the global scamdemic is not the end of this madness. It is only the beginning. Join James for this week’s edition of #PropagandaWatch as he dissects the latest attempt to leverage the climate scam on the back of the COVID scam, and how both of these distractions are being used to indoctrinate the public into the death cult.

How conservative Catholics became supreme on GOP’s court Reply

Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Religion and Philosophy

Did the Know-Nothings know something after all?

By Ronald Brownstein

CNN

President Donald Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett continues the GOP’s remarkable streak of selecting Catholic jurists for the Supreme Court and underscores the enduring impact of the alliance between conservative Catholics and evangelical Protestants, which has transformed the Republican coalition.

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A Marxist Joins the Libertarian Party Reply

By Nick Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

“Libertarians regard the state as the supreme, the eternal, the best organized aggressor against the persons and property of the mass of the public”

-Murray Rothbard
“In Reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another.”
-Friedrich Engels

So a Marxist walks into the DMV and joins the Libertarian Party… No, that’s not the set up to an impossibly wonky dad joke, that’s the the story of my life, or at least it was last summer. It was a simpler time. A time before COVID, when the cops were only brazenly shooting Black children in the back every other week. That sunny day in July, I put on my best crack-whore-red lipstick and my biggest Jackie-O sunglasses and made my way down to the local Department of Motor Vehicles to renew my license with a special side mission motivating me to actually show up before the last possible second this time. After strutting past the usual throngs of sullen teens and sexy foreigners with the riff from “Rebel Rebel” on repeat in my skull, I approached an angry little man in a clip-on tie, took a horrific picture, swallowed a mouth full of stomach acid when the little prick misgendered me, and became the first self-declared Marxist in Pennsylvania history to join the Libertarian Party. I got a bumper sticker and everything, and I have every intention of voting for Jo Jorgensen this November.

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America is the Holy Roman Empire of the 21st century Reply

American Decline, History and Historiography

This is an insult to the memory of the Holy Roman Empire.

By Ryan Cooper

The Week

Germany is today a first-rank power: rich, strong, and efficiently governed. But just over 200 years ago, most of its current territory was a shambolic mess — part of the Holy Roman Empire, which even at the time was recognized as an anachronistic political fossil. More than a thousand years old at that point, the empire was a patchwork of hundreds of different duchies, electorates, principalities, kingdoms, church lands, and so forth, some of them just a few dozen acres (Liechtenstein is one of these relics which still survives), with an exceptionally complicated and illogical tangle of legal institutions overlaying them all. Surpassed by history, the confederation was ripe for the picking by an opportunistic tyrant.

The United States today bears an uncomfortable similarity to that doomed empire. The American Constitution is the oldest in the world still operating, and has been obviously out of date for well over a century. Half the basic mechanics of government are either malfunctioning kludges or a gross betrayal of its own founding principles. Countries that fail to maintain themselves to this degree often do not survive.

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Moderate Murder: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix Reply

Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy

Caitlin nails it again.

By Caitlin Johnstone

Medium

Kill millions in concentration camps and they’ll call you a monster. Kill millions with bombs and they’ll call you a moderate.

A species that is hurtling toward extinction has no business promoting slow incremental change.

Claiming a country attacked America’s democracy is like claiming they attacked America’s leprechauns.

America has slaughtered millions of human beings since 9/11 to facilitate global domination and the people who live there are saying this election is unique because this president is actually bad.

The only way to believe Trump is uniquely evil as a president is to believe that American lives matter far, far more than non-American lives. To believe it, you have to be an American supremacist.

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The True Story Of Gloria Steinem, From The CIA To ‘The World’s Most Famous Feminist’ Reply

Culture Wars/Current Controversies, History and Historiography

The more I study US political history in the 20th century, the more I come to the view that Antony Sutton was correct that the rise of communism and fascism internationally was made possible only with the assistance of Western capitalism. And the more I come to the view that postwar domestic opposition movements, such as the New Right and the New Left, were merely controlled opposition and/or fronts for the intelligence services. Is it any coincidence that both William F. Buckley and Gloria Steinem were former employees of the CIA or that Herbert Marcuse was an employee of the CIA’s predecessor, the OSS? This raises the question of to what degree surface-level opposition movements of today are being instigated or manipulated by external forces?

By Natasha Ishak

All That’s Interesting

Before Gloria Steinem was the face of second-wave feminism, she was an anti-communist operative for the CIA and went undercover with Playboy to expose their misogynistic practices.

Gloria Steinem is a journalist and activist who rose to prominence as the stylish frontwoman of the women’s liberation movement in 1970s America.

As she turns 86 in 2020, the soft-spoken orator remains one of the most recognized feminist leaders today. Here’s how she became the face of second-wave feminism.

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The Worst Purges Come From the Right Reply

History and Historiography, Left and Right

One of the problems with “movement conservatism” of the Buckley-Goldwater-Reagan axis was that it was never anything more than a means of providing ideological cover for the military-industrial-complex and American empire-builders, which is why the isolationists have always been the main group that has been unwelcome in “conservative” circles, followed anti-cosmopolitans who are offensive to the uber-imperialist neocons.

By Paul Gottfried

Chronicles

Recently C. Bradley Thompson responded obliquely to my critical comments in Chronicles about his book and subsequent observations on the American Founding. Contrary to Thompson’s asides on Facebook and Twitter dismissing my criticism, I did read some of his tome, The Revolutionary Mind, and even commented on it—but I found its discussion of our state-builders so tendentious and unscholarly that after a few chapters I gave up. His attribution of recognizably Randian, agnostic, or atheistic views to the Founders was a bit much.

In any case, my critical analyses of Thompson’s writings are supposedly reducible to “smears” and even more ominously, to my identification with what he called the “TradCon reactionary Right.” Those on Thompson’s right remain unfit to mention, let alone deserve serious discussion from the conservative establishment, which supposedly praises Thompson as a brilliant researcher. Who am I to belittle anyone who has earned an interview on “The Dave Rubin Show” and whom National Review treats as a clubbable thinker?

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Our Democracy in Peril Reply

Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism

Notice that the Voice of the CIA/Deep State/Bezos is arguing that the problem with Trump is that he is a bad manager of the state and the empire, which somehow imperials “democracy” (the official euphemism for domestic oligarchic rule and global imperialism). In other words, what they actually dislike are the beneficial things about Trump, i.e. the fact that he undermines the perceived legitimacy of the state.

Editorial Board

Washington Post

After he is nominated at a pared-down Republican convention next week, President Trump will make this argument to the American people: Things were great until China loosed the novel coronavirus on the world. If you reelect me, I will make things great again.

Seeking reelection in the midst of the worst public health crisis and sharpest economic downturn of our lifetimes, this may, realistically, be the only argument left to him. But, fittingly for a president who has spoken more than 20,000 lies during his presidency, it rests on two huge falsehoods.

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Woman charged with attempted murder for driving through protesters Reply

Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Fourth Generation Warfare

Another fourth-generation warfare incident?

ABC News

A California woman has been charged with attempted murder after driving through a group of dueling protesters during a “Caravan for Justice” event Saturday afternoon.

The dueling protests held in Yorba Linda, about 35 miles east of Los Angeles, quickly boiled over into animosity as Black Lives Matter demonstrators clashed with Donald Trump supporters.

“Approximately 30 minutes after the protests began, we began to receive reports of physical altercations occurring between the two protest groups, including at least one individual who was pepper-sprayed by another protestor,” the Orange County Sheriff’s Department said in a statement.

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Which Is Better For The Progressive Movement? A Trump Or Biden Win? Reply

Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism, Left and Right • Tags:

I don’t consider myself to be a “progressive.” My outlook transcends the progressive/reactionary and/or socialism/capitalism false dichotomies. But Kim is always such a refreshingly rational and lucid commentator. This analysis is spot on.

The main disagreement that I have with Kim is the same one that I have with all reformists, which is their view that the electoral system is a real political contest as opposed to a mere theatrical production that’s intended to convey an aura of legitimacy on an oligarchy.

1 killed, several wounded in shooting at large biker gathering in Iowa Reply

Fourth Generation Warfare

Another faction fight in the brewing civil war?

By Nicole Acevedo

NBC News

An Iowa gathering of over 100 people from motorcycle clubs turned deadly early Saturday morning with a shooting that killed at least one person and left several others wounded. Police in Waterloo, a city about 55 miles northwest of Cedar Rapids, said they responded to a “shots fired report” at about 3:17 a.m at a site where the bikers were gathered. Upon arrival, officers found about a dozen people who had been injured or shot, said Waterloo Police Chief Joel Fitzgerald at a press conference Saturday morning. It appeared that “some kind of confrontation” at the location escalated into a shooting, he said.

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What to Know About Amy Coney Barrett’s Views Reply

Law/Justice

All the constitutional views of someone like Barrett really mean is that the states should have more prerogative to make laws as opposed to the feds. Not exactly the Enabling Act. Although these conservative jurists are often too deferent to the executive on a federal level, and obviously have a less than an anarchist interpretation of the Bill of Rights.

By Adam Liptak

WASHINGTON — Judge Amy Coney Barrett, President Trump’s pick for the Supreme Court, has compiled an almost uniformly conservative voting record in cases touching on abortion, gun rights, discrimination and immigration. If she is confirmed, she would move the court slightly but firmly to the right, making compromise less likely and putting at risk the right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade.

Judge Barrett’s judicial opinions, based on a substantial sample of the hundreds of cases that she has considered in her three years on the federal appeals court in Chicago, are marked by care, clarity and a commitment to the interpretive methods used by Justice Antonin Scalia, the giant of conservative jurisprudence for whom she worked as a law clerk from 1998 to 1999.

Breonna Taylor protest updates: Golf balls thrown at Louisville protesters, L.A. protester hit with officer’s riot shield Reply

Fourth Generation Warfare

Combat American-style.

By Joshua Bote, Matt Mencarini and N’dea Yancey-Bragg

USA TODAY NETWORK

LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Protesters demanding justice for Breonna Taylor continued to flood cities throughout the United States, three days after a grand jury declined to indict three officers directly connected to Taylor’s death.

In Louisville, 22 people were arrested late Friday night for violating a 9 pm. curfew, has been in place since Wednesday. Many were charged with unlawful assembly and failure to disperse, all misdemeanors.

At one point, golf balls were thrown at Louisville protesters leaving the First Unitarian Church where they had gathered as “sanctuary” after curfew.

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In the Navajo Nation, Anarchism Has Indigenous Roots Reply

Anarchism/Anti-State, Race and Ethnicity

One point that I have consistently tried to make is that “anarchism” is not merely something that was dreamed up by Enlightenment philosophers or 19th-century radicals. While it wasn’t until Proudhon that people started calling themselves “anarchist” (Joseph Dejacque was the first to use the term “libertarian”), there are many philosophical, cultural, ethical, religious, and ethnic traditions extending all the way back to antiquity or to the earliest human cultures that are solidly anarchist in content if not in name.

By Cecilia Howell

The Nation

About an hour west of the New Mexico–Arizona border, an expanse of highway, sky, and sagebrush-spotted terrain ends in sandstone cliffs. The red-orange walls drop down into Canyon de Chelly, the only national park operated on land still owned by the Navajo Nation. This summer, as the per capita rate of coronavirus cases in the Navajo Nation surpassed New York state’s, Kauy Bahe, 19, found himself standing on the canyon’s edge as he delivered food to a Navajo elder and her family as part of a mutual aid effort.

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How to cure people afflicted with conspiracy theories Reply

Culture Wars/Current Controversies

You mean “conspiracy theories” like believing in some mythical “social contract,” or in the benevolence of the state, or that the United States is a “democracy,” or that the endless wars waged by the USA are for “freedom” or “human rights,” or that the police are there to “serve and protect,” or that corporate oligarchs are merely hard-working go-getters, or that the media is merely about keeping the public informed, or that the scientific/medical establishment is politically and ideologically neutral? Yes, we definitely need to cure folks of these conspiracy theories. I generally prefer flat-earthers and lizard people-believers over system-believers.

By Thom Dunn

In the summer of 2016, I began working on a play about an addiction support group for conspiracy theorists called How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart. It had one public staged reading in May of 2017, then ultimately decided to turn it into a novel, which I finished and sent off to my agent on New Year’s Day 2020.

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White supremacist killed in shootout with deputies in California Reply

Fourth Generation Warfare

Some more fourth-generation war. A civil war in the modern United States would be one of history’s biggest messes. It would be like the Lebanese civil war in the 1970s and 1980s with dozens of factions pitted against each other, only it would be worse because a large number of people would be involved, and with more sophisticated weaponry.

By

New York Daily News

A California man was killed in a shootout with deputies in Templeton, Calif., the San Luis Obispo Sheriff’s Office said in a statement Thursday evening.

On Friday, the sheriff’s department identified the man as 38-year-old Christopher Michael Straub of Templeton.

According to Tony Cipolla, a spokesperson for the department, Straub was a “known member of a white supremacist gang,” and he was being investigated by the Sheriff’s Gang Task Force when the shooting occurred.

Straub “had a significant criminal history,” according to Cipolla. He had previously been booked 28 times in jails across the state, including two incarcerations in state prison.

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