I know that I occasionally make some of the older-guard folks among The American Spectator’s staff uncomfortable at times when I say that I don’t want to be known as a conservative but rather as a revivalist (and I’m not just saying that because I literally wrote the book on revivalism). My take is that conservatism — not the ideological framework or set of values conservatives espouse, mind you; those are pretty good, if perhaps in need of a little recalibration for the 21st century, but instead the collection of entities making up that which is currently known as the conservative movement — hasn’t performed as well as we’ve needed it to.
In this, I know that I’m out of step with The American Spectator’s editor, Paul Kengor, who wrote very eloquently last month about the lasting legacy of Ronald Reagan and how the lessons Reagan imparted to us are timeless. Paul has never upbraided me on my take, and in fact we haven’t had a full-on discussion on the subject.
Perhaps this is something that will be covered in a future segment of The Spectacle Podcast, or even at The Weekend Spectator.
But in any event, my gripe is not with Reagan. It’s with the people who squandered his legacy within the Republican Party. I call them Bush Republicans, among other not-so-complimentary things…
You’ll forgive me. I just drifted off for a second, thinking about Jesse James. Yes, it’s been a long week.
But here’s the thing: as inadequate and duplicitous as I find the Bushie crowd, many of whom have defected to Team Kamala after losing face and credibility with those of us on the right, they aren’t the problem in America.
They’re just not the right champions. They’re poor allies, to be sure. But they aren’t the enemy.
The enemy is, and always has been, the Left.
1. Daniel Greenfield’s Brilliant Essay Is a Must-Read
On Wednesday at FrontPage Magazine, Daniel Greenfield put up one of those think pieces that, once you’ve read it, you’ll no doubt refer back to time and again. Its title is “All America’s Problems are Leftist Problems,” and Greenfield isn’t kidding:
The problem with solving problems is that once they are solved, no one needs the solver anymore. The better kinds of problems are recurring problems that ensure customer retention, employing plumbers, locksmiths and police officers, but the best kind are the completely unsolvable problems.
And those are the only kinds of problems that the Left wants to solve.
Given enough human ingenuity and technological development, most problems can concievably be addressed and that is why the Left has to contrive to make them unsolvable by either causing the problem (homelessness), defining it in such a way that it is inherently unsolvable (equity), defining the inappropriate problem while obscuring the actual problem (gun violence) or inventing fake problems (global warming) that can never be solved because they don’t exist in the first place.
Why create unsolvable problems? They’re a virtually infinite source of money and power.
The Left came into being by defining inequality as its signature problem. Since inequality is a factor of human nature and every attempt to solve it involves creating more inequality, it was the perfect unsolvable problem. But the primal leftist error was defining inequality in social and economic terms. Growing technology and social mobility made both social and economic inequality managable even as leftists were building up a full head of steam, toppling governments and setting off revolutions.
He notes that the success of the capitalist free enterprise system meant that members of the working class who were willing to work would generally rise into the bourgeoisie, and thus the Left’s revolutionary vanguard would then have to be people unwilling to work.
Which is exactly what the modern Left has become.
Oh, they’re willing to work when the work is politics — or more to the point, the pursuit and exercise of political power over their fellow man. Making widgets or cleaning gutters? Not so much. But it turns out that an economy in which all can prosper has much more use for widgets and clean gutters than it does power-mad busybodies constantly on the lookout for opportunities to tear down a free society, which is why the Left has been at war with America for a century.
And Barack Obama gets credit for conquering the Democrat Party in the name of the radical Left, who were generally relegated to the low levels of that party before he broke through and unseated the genteel East Coast liberals who’d formerly run it. And now, eight years after having left office, Obama is still the most influential figure in American politics.
Are we better off as a result? Of course not. Greenfield offers a very easy, very true, explanation for why:
The Left’s problems are unsolvable because they are misstated to align with a simple ideological formula which always assumes that all problems are caused by those with power, that power is defined in economic terms and that the solution to those problems is the transfer of power away from those with money to leftists who will use the money to solve all the problems that they caused.
In short, industries are to be broken up and transformed into governmental organizations.
Whether it’s changes in the weather, school shootings or drug addicts lying in the street, the formula demands variations on the same solution. An industry, real estate, firearms manufacturers or oil companies, are scapegoated, followed by demands that the industry be regulated, banned and otherwise subsumed by the government. None of this has any hope of changing the amount of bums on the street, crazies in schools or the temperature outside, but it does transfer massive amounts of wealth and power from one group to another. And that is all that the Left ever really does.
The one thing that the Left will never do is solve a problem. It however excels at creating them. If there is a problem out there, it will do everything within its power to make it worse by rejecting the obvious root causes and insisting that all the efforts must be directed at its ideological formula which very often has the added side effect of juicing whatever the root cause is. Faced with crime, it insists on freeing criminals, with homelessness, it subsidizes it, with school shootings carried out by suicidal fame-hungry teens, it talks of them endlessly and makes them as famous as they could ever hope to be.
If this comes off as pejorative, it isn’t. Let’s remember that virtually every hard leftist in America is a student of critical theory and its offshoots, and critical theory was dreamed up by the Frankfurt School gang, who were Soviet influence-operation agents, for a specific purpose: to destroy Western society and make way for the great proletarian revolution to come.
So getting Americans to obsess about unsolvable problems and thus make us interminably miserable, demoralized, to use another key term, is a win. We’re weakened by all of it, and that makes us exploitable.
Read the whole thing. You won’t regret it. Well, maybe some of the trolls in the comments will.
2. So CBS Is Now Literally Putting Words in Kamala’s Mouth…
We noted last week the words of radio host Buck Sexton, who said that no matter how much you despise the legacy corporate propaganda media in this country, it isn’t enough. Well, that was true even before what 60 Minutes did.
Kamala Harris gave the show, and interviewer Bill Whitaker, one of the worst presidential-candidate interviews anyone has ever seen. It was a performance that rivaled Joe Biden’s demented showing in the presidential debate with Donald Trump, which led to his ouster for sheer incompetence.
And the producers of 60 Minutes decided, either out of pity or partisan affinity, to minimize the damage and edit out some of the worst of it. We’ll let John Nolte take over:
Harris sat down with 60 Minutes late last week. Prior to the Monday broadcast, CBS did what news outlets usually do: whetted the public’s appetite for the full interview by releasing early excerpts.
In the original excerpt, Bill Whitaker of 60 Minutes asked Harris about the Biden-Harris administration’s lack of influence over Israel, specifically Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “Does the U.S. have no sway over Prime Minister Netanyahu?” asked Whitaker. Here was Word Salad Kammy’s hilarious answer:
The work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by, or a result of, many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region.
I don’t know about you, but she lost me in the middle thing.
Naturally, as this answer sped around the InterWebDotNetz, the ridicule was fierce. And so, being the good dogs they are, CBS decided to save Kamala. When she was asked the very same question on Monday night’s 60 Minutes broadcast, like a political miracle, gone was the word salad! Here’s the new answer:
We are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.
She didn’t answer the question, but she did sound more decisive, which means…
That rather than show the American public the truth, CBS, instead, chose to edit Harris into what they wanted her to be, which is presidential. In other words, CBS lied and deceived the public.
When you consider that CBS isn’t even the worst of the terrible broadcast news outfits — that title clearly goes to ABC — it’s nothing short of incredible how deep the rot goes.
This can’t continue. The legacy corporate media has to be starved out of existence so that something new and better can fill the vacuum that would result.
3. Winning Sides Don’t Act Like This
Ever heard of Aisha Mills? Me neither, but she’s a Democrat “political strategist” whom apparently CNN has made into a talking head.
I won’t say she’s a DEI hire. But I can’t really say how else she got that gig.
Maybe you can explain it to me after you’ve seen this clip…
Here is the full segment… pic.twitter.com/txVnr0OvbO
— m o d e r n i t y (@ModernityNews) October 10, 2024
She actually managed to claim that Donald Trump is out to get her because she’s a black lesbian. And CNN actually put that on their air.
And as idiotic as that is, CNN isn’t as much a clown show as CBS News and ABC News are.
Amazing, isn’t it?
4. Zelensky Thinks Trump Is Going to Win
At least, that’s my interpretation of this:
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Wednesday that the current state of play on the battlefield had created an opportunity for steps to end Russia’s more than 2-1/2-year-old invasion no later than next year.
Addressing the third Ukraine-South East Europe summit in the Croatian city of Dubrovnik, the Ukrainian leader said Kyiv was counting on the support of its important allies including the United States.
“In October, November and December, we have a real chance to move the situation towards peace and long-term stability,” he said. “The situation on the battlefield creates an opportunity to make this choice — a choice in favour of decisive action to end the war no later than 2025.”
Zelenskiy did not spell out how and why he perceived such an opportunity. Russian forces now hold just under 20% of Ukraine, in its east and south.
He’s demanding that his allies and suppliers turn him loose to rain missiles down on Russian targets, which essentially was the Nazi “buzz-bomb” strategy over England in the waning days of World War II. But Zelensky’s timeframe indicates that he sees January as something of a deadline for all of this to happen.
Hmmm. Wonder why.
You’d consider it pretty shameful that Joe Biden hasn’t lifted a finger to end this war through negotiation, as ending it would be perhaps the only real foreign policy achievement he could still attain.
Next year that war is going to end. It’ll end either because a favorable peace deal will be brokered by an American president interested and invested in bringing peace to Europe, or because Ukraine is utterly exhausted, the unserious leaders of the West have lost interest, and moved on to something else, and the Russians are finally able to dictate terms to the Ukrainians.
The former scenario is better.
5. Is the Rest of the Polling Catching Up to Rasmussen?
Mark Mitchell’s latest podcast, released Thursday afternoon, was a reiteration of what he’s been saying for a while — which is that Kamala Harris is running behind Donald Trump, and her own campaign knows it.
Rasmussen currently has Trump up on Harris in the national popular vote by 2 points, 48–46. But unlike most other pollsters, Mitchell is actually willing to recognize that polling is inherently biased toward the Left.
What he doesn’t come out and say is why. I talked about that in a post at The Hayride on Thursday; it’s response bias, which is driven by the fact that older white female leftists voraciously participate in polling, while people who are younger, more male, and further to the right really don’t. As a pollster, you have to call a whole lot more younger, more male, and more Republican folks to get responses sufficient to generate a real sample than you do the old-lady Democrats.
And because of that, it’s really hard to get accurate poll results. There’s also the fact that, as Mitchell says, most of these media polls exist to do the bidding of left-leaning legacy corporate newspapers and TV channels.
Mitchell isn’t impressed by any of it. He’s looking at the numbers, and he’s always seen this as a solid Trump win. And while this week’s narrative is that Harris is fading, Mitchell says this is simply the media propaganda polls trying to adjust their sampling in order to become accurate before Election Day.
We’ll see if he’s right, but it certainly doesn’t look like Harris is the one with any momentum right now.
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