Curtis Yarvin (from his peculiar personal perspective in the hyper-intellectual Alt-Right) explains why our elite institutions (which he aptly calls “the Cathedral”) are currently so truly, horribly awful, and hints darkly at what must be done to effectuate reform. Not a terribly practical program, alas! but still a fun read.

An oligarchy inherently converges on ideas that justify the use of power.

I notice more people using this label, which I coined a long long time ago, and have always had ambivalent aesthetic feelings about. I used a capital C, but I see more of the miniscule and I think it’s better.

“The cathedral” is just a short way to say “journalism plus academia”—in other words, the intellectual institutions at the center of modern society, just as the Church was the intellectual institution at the center of medieval society.

But the label is making a point. The Catholic Church is one institution—the cathedral is many institutions. Yet the label is singular. This transformation from many to one—literally, e pluribus unum—is the heart of the mystery at the heart of the modern world. Read the rest of this entry »

Today is the 214th birthday of Robert E. Lee, General-in-Chief of the Armies of the Confederate States, and one of the greatest American military commanders ever to pull on boots. This photograph, taken in late February-early March 1864 by Julian Vannerson, is among my favorites. Lee is shown in the Confederate colonel’s coat he habitually wore and the photograph certainly supports the diarist Mary Chesnut’s description of the General as –cold, quiet and grand.

—–

On Robert E. Lee:

“He possessed my unqualified confidence, both as a soldier and a patriot.” Jefferson Davis, 1881.

Glenn Reynolds admires the new Banana Republic America as exemplified in the post-Stolen-Election 2021 Caudillo Inauguration.

THIS IS NORMAL: FBI vetting Guard troops in DC amid fears of insider attack. “U.S. defense officials say they are worried about an insider attack or other threat from service members involved in securing President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration, prompting the FBI to vet all of the 25,000 National Guard troops coming into Washington for the event.”

This is what happens when you define half the population as enemies of the state.

And nothing says “normal, legitimate election” like a swearing-in behind 12 feet of razor wire and 25,000 troops that you’re not sure you can trust.

RTWT

Remember lovely, isolated, once rock-ribbed Republican Vermont? Trust fund Bolsheviks and retired stock brokers from Connecticut and Taxachusetts poured in, fleeing their home states’ left-wing mismanagement and spendthrift taxation.

But, no sooner did they arrive than they began lobbying for new services and progressive ways. Now everybody’s crazy Jewish communist uncle is Vermont’s senator and Brattleboro is famous for Nudism.

The politics of Austin, Texas have a distinct resemblance to those of Berkeley, California, and California refugees have wrecked all of Eastern Colorado.

Mark Pulliam finds that they are all over the place in Eastern Tennessee these days, and warns that they are probably coming to your rural red state, too.

As a resident of a small town in east Tennessee, I regret to report that wokeness is everywhere, even in the brightest-red areas of Republican-majority states. My town is home to a small, 200-year-old, Presbyterian-affiliated liberal arts college that appears to be an island of sanity in higher education. But it’s not, and neither is the rest of the town.

When we relocated here from Austin, my wife and I imagined the school was comparable to Hillsdale College, except nestled in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. My wife and I quickly learned the reality is otherwise when a supposedly faith-based lecture we attended on campus was devoted to the teachings of Karl Marx rather than Jesus Christ. The lecturer, who teaches “religious studies” at Skidmore College, is the daughter of the host school’s equally-leftist campus minister.

We were also chagrined to learn that the local public library—in a county that voted for President Trump in 2020 by a margin of 71-27 percent—maintains a curated “antiracism” reading list that includes controversial fare such as Ibram Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist,” Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility,” and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me.”

Ignoring the blight homeless people inflict on library users across America, the local library also provides office space to a newly formed organization serving the homeless, with which the library works as a partner, even engaging in “street outreach.” The library staffer leading this initiative is—predictably—a graduate of the local leftist college. Indoctrination works.

Even though the area is overwhelmingly Republican, the local paper (owned by a national chain headquartered out of state) is unfailingly and obnoxiously left. The editor admits that one of his “life’s greatest disappointments” was being interviewed by The Washington Post and getting turned down for the job. The local paper is a WaPo wannabe, albeit relying heavily on Associated Press reportage. It consistently boosts leftist ideas, locally and nationally.

Due in part to the paper’s favorable coverage, a leftist activist who chaired the local Democratic Party and founded the radical organization Indivisible East Tennessee was recently elected to the ostensibly nonpartisan city council. The local Republican Party belatedly—and reluctantly—supported the center-right candidates in a four-person race for two seats. Supported by Soros-funded organizations from outside the state, the Democrat eked out a second-place finish by a few hundred votes, establishing a leftist toe-hold in an otherwise solidly conservative county.

Complacency is a problem for east Tennesseans. They are so used to Republicans winning elections that they falsely assume victory is automatic. It is not.

RTWT

HT: Bird Dog.

Edward Hopper, “American Locomotive” advertisement (1944).

We’re all familiar with Hopper, the world-famous painter of “Nighthawks”, but how many of us remember his prominence as a commercial illustrator working in advertising (above) and earlier career illustrating pulp fiction?

From the July 18th, 1918 issue of Adventure.

Daniel Crown discusses these in an earlier LithHub article.

HT: Vanderleun.

John Hinderaker notes that all the gaslighting and censorship we see is not the typical behavior of people enjoying the conviction of innocence.

Democrats are making extraordinary efforts to suppress all discussion of whether Joe Biden actually won the 2020 presidential election. In fact, they go even farther: they want to suppress all discussion of the extent to which voter fraud occurred. That naturally makes me want to write about voter fraud, and who really won the election.

First, this question: why are the Democrats so hysterical in their insistence that fraud not be mentioned? One reason is obvious. Joe Biden will take office under a cloud, since close to half of all Americans doubt that he really won the election. The Democrats want to stamp out such doubts to preserve Biden’s authority as president.

But there is a second reason that may be more important. The Democrats want the lax voting procedures that prevailed in 2020 to continue in the future. They know that efforts will be made in many states to improve ballot integrity, and they want those efforts to fail. By rendering all discussion of voter fraud out of bounds, they hope to forestall reforms that would make it harder for them to cheat, or enable cheating, in the future.

So, did the Democrats steal the presidential election, or not? I don’t know the answer to that question. No one does. A number of statistical analyses have been done, which on their face suggest large irregularities. I wrote about one such analysis, by John Lott, here.

Beyond that, major questions remain unanswered. In several key swing states, there were midnight dumps of 100,000 or more votes, virtually all of which were for Joe Biden, something that can’t normally happen. Those dumps may have made the difference in the election. I have seen no attempt by any Democrat to explain or justify them. Maybe I’ve missed it, and maybe they somehow reflected actual ballots cast, but the burden of proof is on those who seek to justify such anomalies.

Even greater doubts about the election arise from the deliberately loose procedures that governed voting. Something like 69 million mail-in votes were cast, and until two months ago, everyone agreed that mail-in voting is highly susceptible to fraud. But the laxity in 2020 went far beyond the risks inherent in mail-in votes. I put it this way: I don’t know whether the Democrats stole the 2020 election, but I do know that they tried hard to steal it.

Once again I am forced to bring to everyone's attention that the Karachi police have combined rollerblades with automatic weapons to create the absolute worst of law enforcement ideas. I cannot stress enough that there's a reason nobody else has tried this. https://t.co/KvKhksUDzh pic.twitter.com/l8a58wFJpi

— Mitchell Prothero (@mitchprothero) January 15, 2021

(click on image to get to larger version) From The Navarro Report Volume 3.

The wonderful thing about being on the right side of history is that we can encourage big tech censorship without any fear that it might one day be used against us.

— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) January 8, 2021

Big tech censorship is a right-wing myth.

If you don’t like our rules, just build your own platform.

Then when we delete that, just build another one.

Then when we delete that, just build your own corporate oligopoly.

I really can’t see the issue. 🤷‍♀️ https://t.co/8DO8vUvSfy

— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) January 11, 2021

The radical fanatic Thaddeus Stevens delivering the final speech closing the debate in the House on the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson. When conviction failed in the Senate, by one vote, it is reported that Stevens was carried from the Senate in his chair –- looking “black with rage and disappointment.”

Today, democrats in the House of Representatives, carried away by partisan fanaticism, will take advantage of their possession of an ephemeral voting majority to impeach the president they hate for a second time.

Like periodic epidemics of contagious disease, it seems that residents of the territories of today’s United States are subject as well to periodic outbreaks of madness and fanaticism.

A notable case occurred in the neighborhood of Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. Enormous fatalities, over 600,000 deaths, roughly two and half per cent of the entire population succumbed 1861-1865 to a truly devastating plague of self-righteousness, intolerance, and sectional animosity. Secondary infections lingered for years, most notably causing the takeover of the federal Congress by a majority of hydrophobic madmen.

The radical Congress came into conflict with a maladroit president, the poorly-educated, but stubborn, willful, and choleric, Andrew Johnson, whose own temper was generally exacerbated by his drinking habits. Johnson, a stubbornly Pro-Union Southerner, was disinclined to support the punitive Jacobin agenda of the Northern radicals in control of Congress, and the Revolutionary Congressional mob rapidly lost patience with the unwelcome restraint of an uncooperative Chief Executive. They enacted unconstitutional constraints on Johnson’s powers of appointment, and when he proceeded to defy their edict, provoked the ultimate sanction in their power: impeachment.

Even at its worst, 19th Century America was far better than today’s, and when push came to shove, Kansas Senator Edmund Ross won an honored place in American History (and a chapter of his own in John F. Kennedy’s (ghost-written) book Profiles in Courage by casting the deciding vote to acquit.

Non-Marxist historians shudder when they contemplate the morals and character of the radical leaders of that unhappy period, and the philosopher feels a deep sense of gratitude for human mortality that quietly moved the American Republic out of military dictatorship and Jacobin directorate, peaceably and almost imperceptibly, into mere ordinary Gilded Age Political Corruption.

Obviously, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi do not spend time worrying about what American historians a century from now will say about them. But they should.

Obviously, democrats are playing the Reichstag Fire game: opportunistically inflating the gravity of an incident and mendaciously assigning grave culpability to political opponents to justify an illicit power grab.

As their first step, they are hoping to impeach, convict, and thereby bar Trump from running again in 2024.

Their characterizations of the Capitol Hill protests as a “coup” and an “insurrection” are ridiculous, and hypocritical considering left-wing democrats’ notorious support for months of urban rioting and violence last year.

Their assignment of responsibility to Trump for individual misbehavior on a minor scale in the course of a generally peaceful protest is preposterous.

Donald Trump will be leaving office in one week, and democrats are so vindictive, so shameless, and so atrociously irresponsible as to try this.

The radical Republican attempt to impeach Andrew Johnson was such a humiliating failure that nearly a century and half went by before any House majority was bold enough to try using it again. Impeaching (the guilty) Bill Clinton failed. Impeaching Trump the first time failed.

When this disgraceful episode is finished, a second try in the last hours of a departing administration will in all probability deservedly fail again.

After this, it will be a very, very, very long time before any House majority makes fools of themselves by playing partisan games with the most dangerous and important emergency clauses of the Constitution.