Sore Losers; Against the Great Reset; and the return of the Ministry of Truth
In his Editor’s Column this week, Michael Walsh wrote about last week’s two big Supreme Court victories for the American Right in Bruen and Dobbs, and why the Left are always such sore losers.
Guns N' Roeses
It has long been a dictum of mine that, as far as the progressive Left is concerned, "they never stop, they never sleep, they never quit." After their twin defeats at the Supreme Court last week, regarding two of their most sensitive issues (both of which derive from their devotion to cultural suicide, which is their principal objective), don't expect them to give up easily. They subscribe to their version of Islamism or the Brezhnev Doctrine: once they've conquered moral or physical tparerritory, it can never go back to the way it was. They see themselves as the heroes of their own movies, good red-diaper babies constantly battling the forces of revanchism and irrendentism, which are you. The idea that they're the bad guy never occurs to them.
These are, after all, the same people who refused to accept George W. Bush's narrow presidential victory in 2000 ("selected, not elected"); refused to accept Bush's win over John Kerry in 2004; rained hellfire and brimstone down on poor Sarah Palin, whose only crime was a surfeit of motherhood, and snarlingly turned on her running mate and their erstwhile favorite maverick, John McCain in 2008; and went bonkers over the surprise victory of Donald Trump in 2016, thus triggering the entire "Russian collusion" hoax that started with Hillary Clinton and eventually came to embrace the FBI, the intelligence community, the media, and the judicial system.
In the same way, having outlawed school prayer and, from that beachhead, having driven almost any expression of the Christian faith from the public square—the offending prayer in question read, “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country," which the pestiferous Madalyn Murray O'Hair and her ilk somehow equated with the "establishment" of a religion—they have gone to the mattresses to expunge anything that smacks of Christianity, especially any proscriptions against the form of baby murder that goes by the sobriquets of "choice" and "women's health." To wit: abortion.
About their only admirable trait is their refusal to give up—something that brands them in perpetuity as sore losers, with whom we have to live as long as these United States stay together. The question is, how much longer can this go on?
Beginning last week, The Pipeline presented the first excerpt (which we will be publishing weekly) from the essays contained in our new book, Against the Great Reset: 18 Theses Contra the New World Order. The book will be published on October 18 by Bombardier Books and distributed by Simon and Schuster. It is now available now for pre-order at the links above.
Against the Great Reset: 'Introduction'
PART I: THE PROBLEM
Excerpt from the Introduction: "Reset This," by Michael Walsh
What is the Great Reset and why should we care? In the midst of a tumultuous medical-societal breakdown, likely engineered by the Chinese Communist Party and abetted by America’s National Institutes of Health “gain of function” financial assistance to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, why is the Swiss-based World Economic Forum (WEF) advocating a complete “re-imagining” of the Western world’s social, economic, and moral structures? And why now? What are its aspirations, prescriptions, and proscriptions, and how will it prospectively affect us? It’s a question that the men and women of the WEF are hoping you won’t ask.
This book seeks to supply the answers. It has ample historical precedents, from Demosthenes’s fulminations against Philip II of Macedon (Alexander’s father), Cicero’s Philippics denouncing Mark Antony, the heretic-hunting Tertullian’s Adversus Marcionem¸ and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s Nietzsche contra Wagner. Weighty historical issues are often best debated promptly, when something can yet be done about them; in the meantime, historians of the future can at least understand the issues as the participants themselves saw and experienced them. Whether the formerly free world of the Western democracies will succumb to the paternalistic totalitarianism of the oligarchical Resetters remains to be seen. But this is our attempt to stop it.
So great is mankind’s perpetual dissatisfaction with its present circumstances, whatever they may be, that the urge to make the world anew is as old as recorded history. Eve fell under the Serpent’s spell, and with the plucking of an apple, sought to improve her life in the Garden of Eden by becoming, in Milton’s words, “as Gods, Knowing both Good and Evil as they know.” The forbidden fruit was a gift she shared with Adam; how well that turned out has been the history of the human race ever since. High aspirations, disastrous results.
The expulsion from the Garden, however, has not discouraged others from trying. Indeed, the entire chronicle of Western civilization is best regarded as a never-ending and ineluctable struggle for cultural and political superiority, most often expressed militarily (since that is how humans generally decide matters) but extending to all things both spiritual and physical. Dissatisfaction with the status quo may not be universal—timeless and static Asian cultures, such as China’s, have had it imposed upon them by external Western forces, including the British and the Marxist-Leninists—but it has been a hallmark of the occident and its steady civilizational churn that dates back at least to Homer, Plato, Aeschylus, Herodotus, Pericles, and Alexander the Great, with whom Western history properly begins.
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, assaying the inelegant Koine, or demotic, Greek of the New Testament in Beyond Good and Evil, observed: “Es ist eine Feinheit, daß Gott griechisch lernte, als er Schriftsteller werden wollte—und daß er es nicht besser lernte”: “It’s a particular refinement that God learned Greek when he wanted to become a writer—and that he didn’t learn it better.” Nietzsche, the preacher’s son who became through sheer willpower a dedicated atheist, was poking fun at the fundamentalist belief that the Christian scriptures were the literal words of God himself (Muslims, of course, believe the same thing about the Koran, except more so). If something as elemental, as essential to Western thought as the authenticity of the Bible, not to mention God’s linguistic ability, could be questioned and even mocked, then everything was on the table—including, in Nietzsche’s case, God Himself.
With the death of God—or of a god—Nietzsche sought liberation from the moral jiu-jitsu of Jesus: that weakness was strength; that victimhood was noble; that renunciation—of love, sex, power, ambition—was the highest form of attainment. That Nietzsche’s rejection of God was accompanied by his rejection of Richard Wagner, whose music dramas are based on the moral elevation of rejection, is not coincidental; the great figures of the nineteenth century, including Darwin and Marx, all born within a few years of each other, were not only revolutionaries, but embodied within themselves antithetical forces that somehow evolved into great Hegelian syntheses of human striving with which we still grapple today.
Wagner, the Schopenhauerian atheist who staggered back to Christianity and the anti-Semite who engaged the Jew Hermann Levi as the only man who could conduct his final ode to Christian transfiguration, Parsifal. Charles Darwin, ticketed for an Anglican parsonage but mutating into the author of On the Origin of Species, The Descent of Man, and all the way to The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms. Karl Marx, the scion of rabbis who father converted to Lutheranism and, like Wagner for a time, a stateless rebel who preached that the withering away of the state itself was “inevitable”—and yet the state endures, however battered it may be at the moment.
It’s fitting that the “Great Reset of capitalism” is the brainchild of the WEF, which hosts an annual conference in the Alpine village of Davos—the site of the tuberculosis sanatorium to which the naïf Hans Castorp reports at the beginning of Thomas Mann’s masterpiece, The Magic Mountain. Planning to visit a sick cousin for three weeks, he ends up staying for seven years, “progressing” from healthy individual to patient himself as his perception of time slows and nearly stops. Castorp’s personal purgatory ends only when he rouses himself to leave—his Bildungsreise complete—upon the outbreak of World War I, in which we assume he will meet the death, random and senseless, that he has been so studiously avoiding yet simultaneously courting at the Berghof.
Central Europe, it seems, is where the internal contradictions of Western civilization are both born and, like Martin Luther at Eisleben, go home to die. And this is where the latest synthetic attempt to replace God with his conqueror, Man, has emerged: in the village of Davos, in the canton of Graubünden, Switzerland: the site of the annual meeting of the WEF led by the German-born engineer and economist Klaus Schwab, born in Ravensburg in 1938, the year before Hitler and Stalin began carving up Poland and the Baltics.
Once more into the breach, then: behold the present volume. In commissioning sixteen of the best, most persuasive, and most potent thinkers and writers from around the world to contribute to our joint venture, my principal concern has been to offer multiple analyses of the WEF’s nostrums and in so doing to go poet Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” a few better. Then again, given the surname of the WEF’s chief, perhaps a better, more potent literary citation might be Margret’s little ditty from the Büchner/Alban Berg expressionist opera, Wozzeck (1925): In’s Schwabenland, da mag ich nit—"I don’t want to go to Schwab-land.” Nor, as Hans Castorp’s journey illustrates, should anyone wish to visit Davos-land if he prizes his freedom, his possessions, and his sanity. To the Great Resetters, we are all ill, all future patients-in-waiting, all in dire need of a drastic corrective regimen to cure what ails us.
Tom Finnerty contributed two blog posts for us this week. One of them dealt with the voter-distracting gimmicks the Biden Administration has been dabbling in to make it seem like they’re doing something to counter high gas prices.
Biden Mistakes Demand For Supply
Earlier this week, the president called for a temporary suspension of federal gasoline and diesel taxes. Such a move would shave somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 or 20 cents per gallon off of your local fill-up price.
Now, we'd all like to pay less for gas, but this isn't going to work. We've even seen the same play fail not long ago. As Saagar Enjeti recently explained,
On June 1st, New York suspended its motor fuel tax of eight cents a gallon, as well as its four cent sales tax on up to two dollars a gallon. The average price of gas that day was $4.93 cents. Two weeks after what is, in effect, a .16 cents per gallon tax holiday went into effect in the State of New York, the price of gas was $5.04 per gallon!
Fundamentally, the problem we're facing now is one of supply, and that is being choked off both by our limited refinery capacity (which is itself a product of environmentalist policies that make it nearly impossible to build new refineries) and Biden's anti-resource-sector positioning. By goosing demand -- people will drive somewhat more if gas prices are somewhat lower -- Biden's proposal arguably exacerbates the problem.
Finnerty also wrote about the sharp words exchanged between the President of Ireland and a Nigerian Bishop after the former blamed a violent attack in the latter’s diocese on climate change.
Nigerian Bishop to Irish Prez: Cut 'Climate Change' Blarney
David Solway contributed a piece on property rights, or the lack thereof, in the Great White North.
Property Rights? Not in Canada
A few years back, my wife and I were staying at a family-run country inn for a couple of weeks of R&R in the Thousand Islands, a magnet for summer visitors from around the world. Sitting on our balcony, we observed a group of Chinese tourists filing out of a tour bus, several of whom, carrying packed lunches, negotiated the rock perimeter that separated the establishment from the road, strolled across the carefully tended lawn, entered our landlady’s garden gazebo, and made themselves at home.
They proceeded to spread their lunches across the table and fell to amidst convivial chatter, oblivious to the fact that they were on clearly marked private property. Somewhat taken aback, it slowly dawned on us that they had no sense of private property, no awareness that such a concept even existed—the collectivist mindset in a nutshell, or in a gazebo. The inn’s grounds and gardens were, apparently, held in common by the people, to be enjoyed at no expense of personal investment and maintenance.
Ownership of property, as John Locke famously argued in The Second Treatise of Government, which establishes the legitimacy of “original appropriation” and rightful exclusion, is the keystone of the democratic state and the very foundation of personal liberty. Our visitors were plainly strangers to the idea, having been educated and domesticated in a totalitarian nation. What is one to make, then, of a high-placed public official in a liberal democracy who plainly shares an equivalent sensibility?
Responding to questions concerning Bill C-19, currently in its second reading before the Senate, Canada’s Justice Minister David Lametti recently claimed that “You don’t have an absolute right to own private property in Canada.” Among a series of other repressive measures, such as new luxury taxes and Climate Action Incentive payments, the bill would allow the government “to seize and cause the forfeiture and disposal of assets held by sanctioned people and entities, to support Canada’s participation in the Russian Elites, Proxies, and Oligarchs Task force in light of Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.”
The problem is not only that the bill may be in violation of international law. The problem is that the bill can be readily weaponized by the government at any time against its own citizens, thereby stealing their property via a form of nationally-implemented eminent domain, exercised arbitrarily over every facet of citizens’ lives. We can’t say we weren’t warned. In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out that, without safeguards and a sense of “civic virtue,” democracies were prone to elevate tyrannical rulers intent on “penetrating into private life.”
Democracy in Canada is no different. Knowing the authoritarian proclivities of the Tyrant on the Hill, as prime minister Justin Trudeau is colloquially called, it’s a safe bet that the concept of a private self, and of the belief in personal property which anchors it, are not especially cherished by our Dear Leader, except insofar as it applies to him. Trudeau is more than capable of initiating Canada’s “illegal invasion” of his own country. His justice minister has merely expressed the prime minister’s deepest sentiments and controlling agenda.
David Cavana looked into the not-as-dead-as-you-might-have-heard Ministry of Truth.
Stop the 'Ministry of Truth' (Again)
Too few understand the scale of the Left’s attack on America. This lack of understanding stems from a rejection of what our senses are telling us and our refusal to think critically about our nation and the future liberty of our children. The now-renamed federal “Disinformation Governance Board” (more accurately, Orwell’s 1984 Ministry of Truth) the Covid “vaccine,” “climate change,” “transgenderism,” have nothing to do with truth, health, climate or one’s sex.
The Ministry of Truth… is concerned with erasing the truth of the past and present and replacing it with whatever the Party deems “correct.” Those in charge of the ministry decide what “truth” is.
What the Mis-Dis-Mal-information gang does have to do with includes spying on Americans and monitoring elections to ensure removal of any information that might be found in an abandoned laptop, for example, and preventing the investigation of voter fraud.
Federal authorities searched the suburban Virginia home of former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark Wednesday... Clark features heavily in the House Select Committee hearing today that focuses on former President Donald Trump's efforts to push the Justice Department to do his bidding in the weeks before the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
His crime seems to have been believing that the 2020 election had irregularities that might be worth investigating.
In March, President Biden issued an executive order to federalize the mid-terms that all polls show Democrats losing badly. You didn’t think Progressives were going to allow their accelerating fundamental transformation of America to be stopped by a silly mid-term, did you? As the reach of this column by Mollie Hemingway broadens, be assured it will be labelled MDM: Mis-Dis-Malinformation.
Executive Order 14019 ignores that the Constitution does not give the executive branch authority over elections. That power is reserved for the states, with a smaller role for Congress. With H.R. 1 and other Democrat Party efforts to grab more control over elections have thus far failed, Congress hasn’t authorized such an expansion.
Did the labeling of Hunter Biden’s laptop as "disinformation" alter the election outcome? We will never know. What we do know is that 48 percent of Americans believe it did and 16 percent of Biden voters would not have voted for him had they known about it. This is what happens by design when the government monitors and is allowed to label information rather than letting speech and thought survive, or not, in a free marketplace of ideas.
Having told the American people that this attack on speech and thought had been “paused” and Minister of Truth Nina Jankowicz fired, the administration gave the task of truth assignment to the ever-vacuous Kamala Harris, and now, quietly, the Ministry of Truth is back in action.
Why was this clear violation of the primary right of all humans, to use our unique gift of speech to speak our unique thoughts freely – reinstated so quickly? Because the truth of the costs of going green must be hidden until those paying these costs have already been impoverished.
White House national climate adviser Gina McCarthy wants them to censor content on the costs of a force-fed green energy transition, and "We need the tech companies to really jump in,” she said, because highlighting the costs of green energy is “equally dangerous to denial because we have to move fast."
"Highlighting," not lying about, "the costs" is disinformation. It is axiomatic that if free speech and thought enabled rather than hindered the goals of this Administration, censorship would not be on the table. The idea of censoring speech in America is a blatant and unconstitutional attempt to force the public to “choose truth over fact,” raising the questions, “Whose ‘truth’?” and, more importantly, "Who gets to decide?"
And finally, our very own acclimatised beauty Jenny Kennedy comes up with a hashtag.
Diary of an Acclimatised Beauty: Scoring
Thanks for reading, and keep a look out for upcoming pieces by David Cavana, Steven Hayward, and Tom Finnerty, as well as another excerpt from our new book, Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order. All this and more this week at The Pipeline!