Trump's simply a very bad person, declining into senility. Who is backing him?

And by backing him, let's leave MAGA to the end of the discussion, although we'll address it.

Last week we saw Donald Trump at his outright worse.  He delivered a speech in what would normally be prime time, although it wasn't covered on two of the major networks in what seems to have been an extraordinarily late acknowledgement that he's a lying liar who lies and a danger to  humanity.  He's been trying to subvert democracy for years.  The speech this past week was an open declaration of war against the franchise.

This has been oblivious to the point of absurdity now for months and to anyone who cared to pay attention for years.  We've discussed this several times over the past couple of years.  For those of certain age, the rise of Trump has been an almost indecipherable phenomenon, although we've discussed and tried to decipher it quite a few times (and frankly, we've been largely correct).

Where we were wrong, however, is in predicting that the 25th Amendment would be applied to him. . . by now.  We still feel there's a good chance, but its fundamentally different than it was previously. At this point the non fanatic elements around him, such as they are, must be talking.  It could take any number of roads, from a Curragh Mutiny to a type of the Blue Flu.  We'll see.

What's very clear, is that the non MAGA forces, mostly in the Democratic Party, but elsewhere, must, and will, start mobilizing. Trump's a menace to humanity.  And to add to that, the speech fell flat and even m many Republicans have openly admitted that it not only failed to miss the target, the gun was never loaded.  It came across as the pathetic ramblings of a demented old man.

What's crystal clear at this point is that Donald Trump is working right now on stealing the 2026 elections.  He's doing everything he can, with a major effort being the SAVE act which would have the immediate effect of wiping out the ability of huge numbers of Americans to vote.  So far it appears unlikely to pass, although that cannot be assured.  The next step is going to be a direct attack on the polls themselves. Trump will station his SA and perhaps even the military at polling locations he wishes to disrupt and following the election he's going to proclaim the results invalid.

That's not a maybe. This will occur.

Trump's goals are personal.  He's mentally ill and he's never been mentally right.  He was a bully as a child which caused his parents to send him to military school.  He helped his father deride his troubled brother.  His life has been based on greed, greed for money and greed for a certain profile of women.  He's been a frequent failure at business and frankly he's not that smart.  He is a good salesmen, however, and he sold his image and reputation multiple times over the years, finally selling it to viewers of American television stupidly, a sales job that got him into office.  He lost the 2020 election and cannot personally stand to be thought of as a loser.

Stealing the election for him is personal, not political.  

So, with that being the case, why would any sane person support him, and who are they?

The Useful Idiot

Let's start with what's really the case with Trump. Why are people surrounding him willing to put up with him?  Why are they willing to soil themselves with lavish heaps of praise on the man?  Do they really adore and admire him the way they say they do?

Not likely, save for a very limited few.

No, he's a useful idiot.  And he's a useful idiot for two of the camps in his circle.  They are, however, two camps.  And their goals are not the same.

The Francoist

The coat of arms of the Spanish Francoist state.  The motto is "Una Gran de Libre", a Latinized version of the motto in Spanish which was "Una Grande y Libre"; "one, great, and free".

Back in 2024, not long ago, an intern to Harriet Hageman, Gabe Saint, lost his position when his social media contest was discovered.  It included links to Francoist, as well as to Groypers, like Nick Fuentes.

What's this have to do with Trump?

Quite a lot.

Now, Trump wouldn't know Saint from Adam, but the fact of the matter is that a far right Wyoming politicians had somebody on her staff who was effectively a Francoist Groyper, and only the seeming embarrassment of that, at the time, cause Saint to drop off her staff. Saint, however, didn't disappear.  He remained in the background, associated with Charlie Kirk's organization, and popping up every now and then in the far right Wyoming Freedom Caucus camp. 

Now, I bet it'd make hardly any difference at all.

Una Gran de Libre.

Groypers are, to a certain extent, the SA or the Roter Frontkämpferbund.  Some have a grasp of what they're fighting for, but that grasp is on a big scale from fully committed Ernst Röhm's who very much do, to single basement dwelling 20 something men who are mad at the world because they can't get a date.  There's every scale in between.  But the Francoist element has tapped into a real movement, and that movement, small though it is, is National Conservatism.

National Conservatism is very closely aligned, in some quarters, with Christian Nationalism.  It has a real thesis, and it has a real set of intellectuals behind it. Those intellectuals are Rod Dreher (who now seems to be questioning it), Patrick Dineen, and Kevin Roberts, amongst others.

J.D. Vance is a close associate of Roberts. Vance is in this camp.

The thesis is this.

The United States is a Western Nation.  All Western Nations are defined by the Edict of Thessalonica (380 A.D.) accepting Christianity in the Roman Empire.  That makes Western Europeans a Christian culture.  Similarly, the Christianization of Russia in 988 makes that region a Christian culture as well.

So far so good .That is essentially correct.  The United States is undoubtedly a Western Nation and in fact Western European culture is undoubtedly defined to an enormous degree by the Roman Empire accepting Christianity (and it is additionally enormously defined by having been in or under the influence of the Roman Empire).

Beyond that, however, National Conservatives (and Christian Nationalist) do not believe in democracy at all.  The reason varies, with some willing to ground it historically in the  French Revolution and its aftermath which is much less connected with religion of any kind than they think.  The French Revolution was, in the cities, definitely opposed to religion, but it was effectively, at its start, mob rule until Napoleon turned cannons on the mob.  The French revolutionaries were operating effectively on the same ethos as Jim Stark in Rebel Without A Cause.

Not all of the French populace as like that at all. And what was occuring in France had been effectively predicted by the writings of the Agrarian Jefferson about large urban populations.

Anyhow, that experience left some in this camp distrustful of democracy to this day.  In their view, democratic states always turn to mob rule, and they always feature declining morality.  And there is evidence they can site to, starting effectively with the Supreme Court's 1973 decision of Roe v. Wade and carrying it through to 2015's Obergefell v. Hodges.  They feel that "liberalism", meant in the classic sense, and liberal democracy, have failed.

The solution, in their mind, is illiberal democracy. That was the political thesis that Viktor Orban operated on, which explains why Rod Dreher had decamped to Hungary (he's unfortunately returned.  Democracy of this type would sort of exist, but in the same fashion that it did, sort of, in Imperial Germany. There would be elections, but what you could really vote on would be predefined in a way.  Serious cultural issues would never be on the ballot.  Those would have been dictated.  So you could only decide matters in a sort of narrow, non cultural, sense.

You can see a lot of that in the warp and woof of the Trump Administration where these figures have had serious influence.  It explains not on the opposition to the fraud of transgenderism, but also the periodic insistence that everyone have more children, by which is meant those of very direct Western European ancestry have more children.  If you look carefully in the background you'll fine that not only are they opposed to abortion, but also to pharmaceutical birth control (and maybe to birth control of any kind).

Now, some conservatives hold these views as well.  I'm not far from some of them, or I outright agree with some of them. But the real difference here is that as National Conservatives do not trust or believe in democracy, these things would be dictated.

Effectively they are for a Francoist state.  

Trump isn't their Franco.

J. D. Vance is.  But they can't get to Vance, or complete their project of illiberal democracy, directly  It has to be camouflaged.  And Donald Trump is a giant orange clown who serves that purpose.

The Roundheads

The second group surrounding Trump are members of an Evangelical Right movement, the New Apostolic Reformation.  Not all precisely aligned, the generally see the United States as a Protestant nation that has gone badly astray and in need of being taken back over so that Puritanism can be restored.  Many hold to Seven Mountains Dominionism holding that there are seven aspects of society that believers seek to and must dominate, those being: family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government.  If they succeed, and many believe that they will as God has ordained it, the United States will become, effectively, a Calvinist theocratic state.  In that state, only those who closely adhere to a Calvinist world view will really have right, and everything will center around that.  

It's important to note that those holding this view are constantly improperly described as "Christians" or "Christo Fascist".  Most Christians in the United States and the vastly overwhelming number elsewhere do not hold the political or theocratic views that the NAR does by any means.  Indeed, most Christians on earth are Catholics, and the second largest group are Orthodox, with both groups being Apostolic Christians.  Apostolic Christians do not see any country on Earth as ordained with a Christian mission and never have.  NAR adherents are not, we might observe, reading City of God.

They don't, in many instances, even regard Apostolic Christians, who are the original Christians, as Christian.  In this sense they are not only radical, but ignorant.  But as a small radical group, they're reinforced in their ignorance, only tending to lose it when they start to widely associate with other Christians.  

What exactly the NAR would seek is not completely clear as there's enough diversity amongst the Evangelical right to force it to be unclear.  They don't all see things the same way.  But we have major glimpses of it from some of their major figures.  If they had their way, they'd be like the Puritans were in New England, forcing the state to adhere to their religious views.  A lot of what they seek, or rather oppose, is pretty clear, but only where it overlaps with other conservatives.  They're opposed to abortion, transgenderism, and the like.  But there's a lot beyond that.  They generally oppose women being involved in politics and some would remove the right to vote from them.  They don't approve as minorities as not only is this nation to be a Calvinist one, it's to be strictly white one, what it should have been, in their view, had the original 1620 landing formed the complete demographic future of the country.  

When a person realizes what they want, Mike Johnsen's view that he was to be a new Moses makes sense.  He meant it.   

This group does not see Trump as a figure adhering to their movement, but many do see him as divinely ordained.  They believe he's a latter day Cyrus the Great, delivering them but not part of them.  

Trump, accordingly, is their man.

The NAP cannot bring the country into a Calvinist promised land without Trump and they cannot do it within the next two years. They also can't do it with J. D. Vance at the helm.  Vance is a Catholic who hangs around with traditionalist Catholic intellectuals and they don't like Catholics or intellectuals  This is why a figure like Rod Dreher, who helped get us to this disaster, is now worried about the glidepath into what he brought about.  This also helps explain why the 25th Amendment has not been invoked. Vance would actually have the impact of terminating this movement in a major way and they know it.  They need Trump to stay in office.

And by stay in office, I don't mean until 2028, I mean beyond that.

They believe he's protected by God.  They believe that its morally justified to steal the election this year as that's what they need in order to bring their goals about, and they believe that God has decreed that it shall come about.  The wrong people, in their view, do not have rights anyhow.  

Oliver Cromwell, who held very similar views.

Who succeeds Trump in 2032, or even later than  that, is something they aren't focused on.  It's not Johnson.  Moses was not allowed to enter the Holy Land.  It'll be somebody else, after all the corrupt and debased influences of liberalism are put to rest.

Fellow travelers.

Those are the two main forces in Trump's cabinet and orbit.  Vance is the primary National Conservative in the cabinet, with Rubio tilting towards it.  Behind the scenes you have people like Bannon, Fuentes, Bishop Robert Barron, and others.  The NAR is better represented, with people like Johnson being prominent.  The conflict between the two, as noted, is what I think is keeping our prediction of the 20th Amendment from being invoked from occurring. The National Conservatives aren't strong enough to bring it about.

But  there are others who are in the orbit.  That keeps this nightmare going as well.

• The Confederates.

Diehard ignorant racism has always been there, but it actually increased in the first half of the 19th Century, and ultimately of course gave rise to the Civil War.  The losers in that war never accepted the results, and unfortunately a forgiving nature in American culture allowed them to get away with that. Had Radical Reconstruction being carried out, much of what we're enduring right now would not be occurring.  The 1877 abandonment of Reconstruction allowed Southern oligarchs to restore a condition of near slavery over blacks in the South.  The Lost Cause Myth was developed and glorified in the late 19th and early 20th Century.  In spite of the post World War Two Civil Rights movement, people with a Confederate mindset have never given up.

This movement is crude and really only has as its central points a hatred of everyone who isn't lily white and a sense that "liberty" means whatever they say it means.  This group also intermixes with the NAR but it also includes members of other Protestant denominations, often in sort of a ignorant fashion.  The American Civil Religion is strongly represented, in which a person can conceive of themselves as a decent person as long as they're not having gay sex.

Groups like the Wyoming Freedom Caucus have a large element of Confederates in them.  Generally they're better defined by what they hate, than what they actually support.

This group's spark was ignited by two things, one being the election of Barack Obama and the other being the Supreme Court's decision in Obergefell v. Hodges.  I didn't vote for President Obama.  I voted third party.  But I did mistakenly see Obama's election as the sign that the country had made it past its racist past.  It hasn't,  It sparked a renewal of it by those shocked that the country would elect a black man.

I thought and still think that Obergefell was a horrible decision, devoid of legal support, and demonstrating a complete lack of the understanding of the history of marriage and natural law.   Obergefell was the wake up call for National Conservatives and the NAR as well.  But with this group it was more primitive.  National Conservatives basically have the view I just stated as well as a belief that its contrary to Christian beliefs.  The NAR believes the latter as well.  But most Confederates really don't care who you fuck, as long as they're of the opposite sex.

Trump is their man as well, as he's the NAR's man, and because he speaks well of them.  Profound ignorance of history, religion, and culture tend to dominate in this group, and always have.  That makes them easy to command. . . up until a  point.

The line of departure for many of them is when things become really personal.  If they're hurt economically, or if Trump policies hurt locally, they start to awaken.

• Opportunists, the ambitious, and cowards.

Sen. Dr. John Barrasso, who probably doesn't believe most of the crap he's shoveling.

This may seem like a summary of three groups, but it's basically one.

The GOP right now is packed with politicians and figures who have no love for Trump at all, aren't National Conservatives, and who haven't darkened a church door in years.  But they'll express undying loyalty to Trump. 

They don't mean it.

The problem with the political class is that many of them are hyper ambitious, some are lazy, and others are outright cowards.  Many of them combine all three of those characteristics.   Their primary motivation is just to keep their job.

Lots of currently serving Republicans expressed disdain for Trump before it became imprudent to do so.  J. D. Vance is one of them, so is Marco Rubio.  Chances are that neither of them have actually changed their views one bit.  Lindsey Graham sacrificed his dignity by become a Trump apologist, and didn't live long to restore his reputation.  All of these figures profited politically by supporting Trump.

Indeed, the entire current Wyoming Congressional delegation fits this category.  John Barrasso has mastered the art of never giving you a clue of what he's thinking at any one time, so he didn't have to live any statements down, but to people who are close to him, it's well known that he doesn't agree with what's going on even as he acts as the majority whip.  That makes him both ambitious and cowardly.  Cynthia Lummis was open about her disdain for Trump at one time.

And in the current political field, hoping that you fit into the Confederate or NAR groups, lots of local politicians are on the Trump bandwagon when you can strongly suspect that some don't actually support him at all.  Megan Degenfelder has her endorsement by Trump on her signs.  Steve Friess sends out endless flyers with his love for Trump, when what he probably really is would be much closer to Reagan's views, mixed in with some lingering Confederatism.  Reid Rasner, whose flyers have dried up, loudly proclaimed his undying loyalty to Trump while is gadfly reels have gone after Democrats but also the transgendered.  Rasner is a homosexual and there's no real good reason to believe that he believes what he's saying, or that he is what he proclaims to be in terms of his image (gun toten' horse likeing, Frontier type).

Which brings us to a real problem of the political class in general. As it can become a career, and as careerism itself means compromise, something needs to be done to keep it from being a career.

• The besotted and the ignorant.

Finally, some of MAGA is made up of people who are just amazingly ignorant or completely besotted by Trump, the latter of which is completely creepy.

The ignorant are pretty strongly represented in the rank and file MAGAs.  They are extremely poorly informed and believe that Trump is in their camp as he says he is.  Frequently there's something they know they like, or they know that they hate, and based their decision on something very narrow.  Because of very strong prejudices, wants or the like, they're willing to go along with everything else.  They don't really think anything through.  I have friends I see in sporting goods stores who fit this definition.  As long as the Second Amendment is protecting firearms, which in spite of the way they may see is a strong hobby interest for them, they don't care about anything else whatsoever.

And then there's the besotted, the most pathetic of all of Trump's supporters.  They love him because they love being in love with him. He's their Frank Sinatra and they're his bobbysoxers.  He's their Elvis.  He's their Beetles.  They don't look at anything else, as they don't want to.  They don't want to know about Sinatra's personal life or connections with mobsters, they don't want to remember Elvis as sweaty and fat, and they don't want Yoko Ono coming in and messing things up.  They love him, and they always will.

Which says more about them, than him.

Some of these people have, I think, an odd deficit to their lives and this is what they fill it with.  Chuck Gray seems to fill it with Trump and hatred, for example.  Looking at his life, it seems as if there's a big gaping hole he's trying to fill.  Only child of a divorced couple, spends summer in Wyoming, etc.  Anyhow, if  Trump turns out not to be their beloved, they'll be crushed, so they'll go on imagining that he loves them as they need to..

The Cold Civil War and the uneasy alliances.

The US hasn't faced a crisis analogous to this, ever.  The closest we actually come is the English Civil War that was fought from 1642 to 1651, before we were a country, but still part of our overall history.  Indeed, the landing of the Mayflower in 1620 already expressed the tensions that would lead to that horrible event.  Post 1776, the only crisis that's semi analogous is the American Civil War, which has the distinct difference of the pro democracy forces being solidly in charge of the government, as opposed to what we're experiencing now which is the opposite.  Still, lessons are there as well.

The English Civil War saw what we could regard as populist religious zealots seizing control of the government and struggling against the forces of tradition and true conservatism.  The war isn't commonly fully portrayed that way, but it's a fair way to look at it.  Oliver Cromwell was a Puritan religious zealot whose views did not represent the majority of Englishmen.  He succeeded in deposing King Charles and installing himself as Lord Protector over a theocracy so extreme that to this day the location of his head is kept secret.  As hated as he came to be, Mike Johnson, the Huckabees, and Pete Hegseth would all recognize the man as a kindred spirt.

It didn't last, however.  The monarchy was restored in 1660, along with football on Sundays, and the like.  In a lot of ways, while the Parliamentary forces won the Civil War, the harshness of the following regime resulted in an appreciation of what the Puritans were not, and that set the country, including the country's colonies, on to what they later became.  Not only that, but the Puritan figures who were still living were hunted down by restored monarchy.

In the American example, which is different for the reasons noted above, the wrongdoers really weren't hunted down, which preserved the evil we're confronting today.  If the English Civil War suggests that people won't endlessly endure a regime like Mike Johnson wants to install, the American Civil War suggests that after this is over, the perpetrators of an assault on democracy should be marginalized beyond the point of return.

And one final thing.  An attempted revolution with two completely separate sets of goals is unlikely to succeed long term.  The Dineens, Roberts, Drehers and Vances are not going to be able to make common cause with the Johnsons and Hegseths.  And that may be MAGA's Achilles heel.

Johnson, Lee, Hegseth and the like are just as much religious zealots of minoritarian sects as Oliver Cromwell was.  If they get within reach of their goal, they'll begin to enact laws accordingly.  MAGA members of the American Civil Religion will be fine with reversing Obergefell, but they really won't be keen on reversing Griswold v. Connecticut, something already being discussed in right wing circles, let alone Eisenstadt v. Baird.  Defining citizenship by a person's whiteness might be okay with far right populists who regard the country as Puritan, but it's not going to be with people whose predecessors came from Galway, Lebanon, or who founded Santa Fe.  MAGA, at the end of the day, is a ragged tent in which numerous small factions are gathered under the banner of Trump to either use him or be besotted by him.  He won't last forever.

But he'll try to, which makes from now until January extremely dangerous.

Labels: 1870s, 1877, 2020s, 2026, 2026 Election, 2028 Election, 2032, Catholic, Christian Nationalism, Christianity, Curragh Mutiny, homosexuality, Orthodox, Protestant, Reconstruction, religion, Viktor Orbán, Wyoming Freedom Caucus,1640s, 1642, 1650s, 1651, 25th Amendment Watch List, Chuck Gray, Civil War, French Revolution, Kevin Roberts, Moses, Patrick Dineen, Puritans, Rod Dreher, Roman Empire, Stuart Restoration, The Lost Cause, The Madness of King Donald

Blog Mirror and Pondering: Cassie Craven: Welfare Was Supposed To Be Our Job

Let me start off by noting that as a rule, I can't stand Cassie' Craven's op eds.  They tend to be in your face unthinking populist, and I also resent (I'm not kidding) the co-opting of a cowboy hat that obviously doesn't fit.

And frankly I don't much like people spouting off about protecting Wyoming or what Wyoming is or was, when they aren't from here. She's from Nebraska, so that's not far off, but Nebraska is not Wyoming.  

Well, like some other populist things, or NatCon things, I'll confess that as a real conservative, and for htat matter a distributist agrarian, I find myself occasionally disturbed by a one of their members saying something that taps into something I've said myself.  This article by Craven does that:

Cassie Craven: Welfare Was Supposed To Be Our Job

As much as I hate to admit it, and I do hate to admit it, she has a point, although in the typical populist manner, she starts off by saying something cruel to get to the point.  Indeed, it basically takes her 40% of her article to quit being an asshole before she gets to the point that 's worth considering, with this paragraph:

Welfare, in the 14^th century meant one’s good fortune, health and exemption from evil. This changed in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries as public assistance became a role the government took over from the private charities, which had historically helped to ensure that people fared well. Welfare was holistic, community-driven and just as much emotional and spiritual as it was physical.

The shift of society away from the church-based and community associations and toward the government was no good for our fellow man. Adding fuel to the fire were the rapid technological advances that made us distant, isolated, and serotonin-addicted.

This has addled people’s ability to engage in real conversation or romance.

Well, she's correct, sort of .

Craven seems to edge up on the point, actually and then wonder off again, being slightly mean spirited once again.  She never gets to the bigger point which is that a welfare system that creates semi permanent benefits, run by a bureaucracy, creates dependency, and corrupts.  Indeed, that was the huge difference, other than an inability to cover all who really needed help, from modern welfare and pre Great Depression charity.

Support form charitable organizations, and churches, and the like, was always very temporary.  And it tended to come with some requirements.  State funded welfare tends not to, although the GOP has attempted to insert some.  There are work requirements, of course, but it is difficult to tell how much they're winked at as the principles of subsidiarity have not been applied, so there's no real control.  In contrast, I know of a situation in which a Church collects directly for the poor and distributes directly to the poor.  In doing so, they do ask "are you working?"

And there are more uncomfortable truths as well.  Welfare has, ironically, been a major driver in the decline of Western morality, and more particularly, and arguably much more pronounced, American morality.

Prior to the current welfare regime, children were very much the responsibility of both parents, in every fashion.  We've discussed this in the context of the Playboy Philosophy and what not, but what was the case, even into the early 1980s, was that people that had children were normally married, and to a large degree, women who became pregnant out of wedlock either married the father or gave the child up for adoption (or after 1973, aborted).  Moral decay brought on by the Sexual Revolution, aided by pharmaceuticals, started to erode the two parent family however and in our current age that's pretty pronounced.  An African American commentator got in trouble a year or two ago by claiming that some women "married the government", but there's more than a little truth to that.  Kids raised in this environment are more subject to abuse by subsequent "boyfriends" of their mother, and are more likely to  be raised in poverty and declining morality.  It's simply the truth.

That in turn kicks back to society at large.  The American lower middle class tends to wade at least knee deep in a sort of moral sewer even while being horrified by those swimming in it.  This wasn't the case thirty year or more ago.  The trend line isn't good.

So, Cravens has a point.

But how do you end this? She doesn't opine on that, which is the cowardly way out.  Indeed nobody, except perhaps for those deep in the Heritage Society, is doing so.  What Project 2025 did, apparently, is to suggest an increase in work requirements, which was attempted sort of sub silentio earlier this year.  But then, the entire NatCon group in the government right isn't really willing, in general, to admit trying to bring into play any of their policies. They do them all silently while sometimes denying they're doing them at all.

Which is one of the things I really detest about the Trump Administration.  It's dishonest.  They should simply admit, if they think it, that "welfare is contributing to moral decay and we have to do something about it."

Of course, the problem here is that most Americans really don't want to do anything about the things they claim they do.  Bloated Americans who spend Sundays watching the NFL and who are living with their second or third wives or girlfriends might think about going to the megachurch once a month where the pastor is not going to equate their lifestyle with adulterous mortal sin, or preach about the dangers of wealth to their souls, and might bitch about homosexuals and the like even while being just as morally adrift, but they don't really want the responsibility of responsibility.

Of course, save for some, which explains a movement towards cultural conservatism in the young, thereby being proactive in the culture, even if not attempting to be cultural revolutionaries.

Blog Mirror: A Clash of Liberalisms

 

A Clash of Liberalisms

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 99th edition. Sydney Sweeney has great jeans, and genes.

Sydney Sweeney in American Eagle denim, part of the ad campaign causing all the furor.  The outfit itself is very 1970s retro, which is more than a little ironic in context.  Given the commentary, this is posted with the fair use exception.

Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color. My jeans are blue.

Sydney Sweeney in American Eagle ad.

Sydney Sweeney's American Eagle ad shows a cultural shift toward whiteness.

CNBC headline.

Q: Your administration has been very open about the fact that American women are not having enough babies. There was an ad this week. Sydney Sweeney, an actress, was in an ad for Blue Jeans. Does America need to see more ads like that? And maybe fewer ads with people like Dylan Mulvaney on the cover?

Rob Finnerty in an interview of Donald Trump.

First, let us state something plainly.

Sydney Sweeney is hot.

Way hot.

And she looks good in the American Eagle Jeans, which are sort of retro 1970s denim really.  

Really good.

So why are people having a fit?

Well, it's a really interesting tour through the culture, really.

Using attractive women to sell clothing is nothing new.  Shoot, using attractive women to sell anything, is in fact not new.  

So what's the big deal.

Basically, when you get right down to it, the big deal is two things.  First of all, Sweeney is white.  Secondly, this is a return to an obvious sex sells approach to selling that we haven't seen since the early 1990s.

The peak of the sex sells approach was really the 1970s.  Coincident with the rise of feminism was the absolute exploitation of women in advertising.  Calvin Klein really went to town with Brooke Shields, who was sexualized so young in her career that her image, in the movie industry, was basically a near example of child pornography.  But in advertising, he wasn't the only one.  There were in fact advertisements that would outright shock most Americans now as they used young teenage girls in sexualized poses.  It was repulsive. 

That seemed to have run its course by the mid 1980s, but even then, in the 1990s, Playboy model Anna Nicole Smith modeled jeans, in her case Guess jeans.  

The 90s, however, also saw the really fruity elements of the American come into cultural power, and a lot of that gave us, unfortunately, what we have today in terms of a massive right wing populist reaction.  In modeling, left wing media masters insisted that models not be, if possible, smoking hot young women and that instead they should be culturally diverse, and in some cases, fat.

Now comes this, in the midst of a real swing to cultural conservatism, but not culturalism of the Patrick Dineen type, but of the Dukes of Hazzard fan type.

What Sweeney said, quite frankly, is actually completely true. Genes are passed down from parents to offspring.  Genes in fact determine external traits like hair color and eye color.  That is a fact.

And, more than we like to admit, they determine a massive amount of our personality traits.  If you hang around a family gathering and don't find people who have the same deep interests as you do, the same sense of humor, etc., you might wish to check to see if you are in the right place. Sure, some of that might be due to environment, you are all from the same family, but some not.  It's well known that many of the traits that impact our personalities are in fact genetic.

So what's up with the upset.

Well she's white, as are 60.5% of the American population.  That is who you are trying to sell to much of the time. The liberal left just can't have that.

If the same clothing promotion was being done by Anok Yai, the left wouldn't be having a fit, the right would be, and for the exact same reason.

Which is exactly why, if I ran American Eagle, I'd have Anok Yai join in the campaign.

Of course, that isn't the only reason people are enjoying being upset.  They're also upset as the ads openly focus on Sweeney's assets, including having the camera in the jean jacket ad focus on her boobs until she intervenes to instruct the viewer to look at her face.

Well, gentle reader, that portrays reality.  All the feminist reactions in the world are never going to stop men from observing cleavage when its right there.  We're wired that way, and for a reason.

Which brings us to the next point.  In the right wing defense, Trump, in a friendly Fox interview, was asked the bizarre question "Does America need to see more ads like that? And maybe fewer ads with people like Dylan Mulvaney on the cover?" after the pronatalist views of the far right were referenced.

That was weird.  

The US, and for that matter the entire Western World, does not have a demographic crisis like the far right pronatalist like to imagine.  But the suggestion that men are going to look at Sydney Sweeney and suddenly feel aroused and go out and procreate is truly odd.

But even this does give us a glimpse into how modern Western society has really gone off the rails  No man who wants to "transition" is ever going to look like Sydney Sweeney.  Nor will any of them suffer from the Girl Flu every month.  That's reality.

Anyhow.  Givc the woman a break.

Last edition:

The Madness of King Donald. The 25th Amendment Watch List, Third Edition and Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 98th edition. The Perverts and Fellow Travelers Issue.

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist 87th Edition. No, "Liberals" are not flocking to Musk.

It's really interesting to watch the hardcore MAGA mind at work.

The same people who, last month, were all atwitter with Elon Musk now reject him and claim that "Liberals" are flocking back to Musk.

No, they aren't.

For not MAGAites, Must is forever tainted, as he well should be.  What those outside of the Trump orbit are rejoicing in is the fight between Musk and Trump.  That doesn't amount to welcoming Musk back to anything. Rather, it's enjoying the mutual assured destruction between two such damaging personalities.

Trumpites who are claiming a welcoming back are, rather, trying to comfort themselves from the reality that Donald Trump really only stands for chaos, not for Conservatism (which is where I reside), or much else.  If Musk fell out with him, it's because Musk seems to have a slight bit more fiscal sense than Trump, and the majority of Republican Congressman, who are wrecking the nation's finances.  The populists don't seem to appreciate that's happening, and the National Conservatives, which have other goals, don't seem to care.

Last edition:

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist 86th Edition: Oh my. . .

Labels: Donald Trump, Elon Musk, flap de jour, Government, The Madness of King Donald, Weird, Zeitgeist

A Primer, Part 2. How did we reach this lowly, and dangerous state. Soap Poisoning and Grape Nuts. (Written before the election).

We left off the last edition with this:

A warning

And here we get, in a way, to where we are now.

Conservatives in the modern West, and always in the English-speaking West, have democracy as a primary virtue, in spite of being aware that they're never in the majority, although the National Conservative movement, which is reactionary in the true sense of the word (it's reacting to something) is weakening that and looking to a pre Second World War model of European conservatism.

Liberals are always in favor of democracy.

Progressives and Populists really aren't quite often. Sometimes they are, but often they are not.

And Progressives and Populists only are in the forefront of politics in odd, and dangerous, times.

We are in odd and dangerous times.

To put it another way, like Ralphie's dad in A Christmas Story asks about Ralphie's imagined blindness, how did we reach such a lowly state?

Do we have soap poisoning?

Well, sort of.

A little history

We've gone into this before, so we won't belabor it too much, but in large part what we're seeing now is the combined effect of ignoring what was going on in the country on a political and social level.  

As we already noted, populism only rises in strength during times of severe stress. The mere fact that its strong now, and has taken over one of the two parties, means something extremely stressful is going on.  Progressivism is always there in some form, but it rarely takes over either.  The fact that it too is so strong right now indicates something has occured that is fueling it. 

The fact that the two of them are vying for the country right now, and this is going on in other country's as well, means that we are really at some massive tipping point for global politics.

What happened?

Well, we should know. We've been here before.  More than that, Europe has been here before, and gone further down the road than we have.

An American Tale

If we go back to 1900 or so we'll see that Progressives, Populists, Conservatives and Liberals were all significant forces in the US, and in Europe as well.

The 1890s had been extremely strained economically in the 1890s.  Added to that, the late stages of the industrial revolution were taking people off of fields everywhere and putting them in factories, under grim conditions.  Agriculture, which had been the economic backbone of the US, was under severe strain.  Conservatives chalked everything up to the business cycle, which they did not believe should be tinkered with.

This gave rise to the first real liberal movement in the US since the Civil War, although there had been liberals all along.  Calling themselves "Progressives", even though they were not that as we've defined the term, they sought government intervention in the economy to address these ills.  Theodore Roosevelt, in his campaign of 1912, proposed something like Social Security for the first time.  He also proposed treating large corporations as public utilities, a radical, but liberal, proposition.

Progressives of that era were really basically the Socialists. We have a pretty good idea of what they stood for, so we probably don't need to dwell on it. Of note, Progressives of the GOP and Progressive Party, which we've defined as being liberal, campaigned partially on the concept that if they didn't prevail, the Socialist ultimately would.

The Populists, whom as we have noted had their own party at the time, campaigned in 1892 on graduated income tax, a radical proposition in a country that didn't have an established one, direct election of Senators, a shorter workweek, restrictions on immigration to the United States, and public ownership of railroads and communication lines.  As the country fell into a depression, "free silver" became a bid deal with them.  Some of them fell into radical Anti Catholicism, and some became virulently Anti-Semitic. . . sound familiar?

In 1896 the Populist Party united with the Democratic Party, giving us an example of a movement co-opting an established party which had sympathies with it. The Democrats indeed had a strong populist base in the American South, which had seen populist sympathies from before the Civil War and which retains them to this day. Populist William Jennings Bryan ran as the candidate for both parties, and lost.  He did so again in 1900, although by that time the Populist Party as an independent party was declining both because it had captured the Democratic Party, as because the economic crisis seemed to be passing.

Both parties had learned their lesson from two election in a row. The GOP lurched to the left in 1904 and ran Theodore Roosevelt, a liberal.  Alton Parker's campaign went nowhere.  By 1912, however, the Democrats were running a liberal of their own, Woodrow Wilson.  Populism, except in the South, disappeared in the US as a political force, the stress gone.  Progressivism remained, but very much on the back burner.

Both would be back during the Great Depression.  Populists rose up with figures like Huey P. Long and Fr. Charles Coughlin, both of whom posed a serious threat to Franklin Roosevelt's administration.  Long was ultimately assassinated and Coughlin was silenced by the Catholic Church, but the fact is that populist radicalism was alive and well in the 1930s.

So was Progressivism.

Radical progressives found roles in Roosevelt's Administration, demonstrating one of the weaknesses of both parties in believing that fellow travelers are pretty much just like you.  Mainline Communists, Trotskyites and Socialist all found homes in the numerous agencies created in the 1930s.  Attempts to warn the administration fell on deaf ears until really very late, when at least worried Democrats were able to remove Henry Wallace from FDR's final Presidential ticket.  It wasn't really until the late 1940s when it became clear how deep this had gone, at which time the Democratic Party undertook a monumental effort to hide it, something that they were so successful at that it remains largely unappreciated to this day.

Coming out of World War Two the US had the only industrial economy that hadn't been bombed, and accordingly the country had an extremely good economy from the end of the war into really the very early 1970.  It's interesting that in this period the liberals and conservatives moved very much towards a consensus on things, giving us pretty much what might be regarded as a second Era of Good Feelings.  It would be difficult, really, to hold that Eisenhower's administration was much at odds with Truman's, or Kennedy's.  There were difference, but in that era, which was one of low economic stress, the differences weren't large enough to cause severe distractions, in spite of the dangers of the Cold War.  Populism remained in the American South, but without much influence.  Progressives existed, but not until 1968 did they really start to emerge back to the forefront.

And then things fell apart.

It really started with the Courts, although it was not obvious at first.

American society, and politics, following 1945 moved towards the center, but it was a center left where it moved to.  The two Republican Presidents fo the era, Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, would be regarded as being quite liberal today.  Interventions in the economy were accepted.  And brining civil rights to the South, and elsewhere, became a dominant feature of both parties.  Populists, mostly located in the South, were squashed.  Progressives were largely satisfied with the direction of things.   But it all took a lot of court intervention to get things done.

Conservatives and Liberals were fine with this throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and for good reason.  Progress on long dormant things they both agreed upon, such as Civil Rights, was really being made.  But the Courts were, without it really being noticed, drifting increasingly to the left.  At the same time the number of lawyers in the country exploded as the revolution in education following World War Two vastly increased the number of people with university degrees.  Courts, without people really noticing it, began to become effectively a second legislative and second executive branch, without being elected.

Thing began to really fly apart in 1968, as a result of the Vietnam War.  But they came off the rails in 1973 with the Roe v. Wade decision.  Conservatives suddenly realized that they couldn't be heard on social issues that really mattered anymore.  Liberals went asleep to a large degree because now the Courts were achieving for them tasks that they wanted to, without having to do any work for them.  The political consensus that had dominated the 1945 to 1973 era collapsed.  By 1976 Conservatives were moving steadily to the right, and railing against the courts.

At the same time, Southern Populists were a force in the South, but an ineffective one, throughout the 50s and 60s.  Southern Populism being part of the Democratic Party had initially made sense in the 19th Century, and even as late as Woodrow Wilson's Presidency, but it stopped being natural during the Liberal administration of Theodore Roosevelt.  It was kept together as a marriage of convenience as the Republican Party remained associated with the Southern defeat in the Civil War and the GOP, for its part, remained the party of civil rights into the 50s and 60s.  By 1968 Southern Populists were seething over desegregation and busing.

Rust Belt populism was just beginning to rise.  Solidly Democratic in the 40s, 50s and early 60s, as the economy became more strained in the late 60s and the Democrats moved increasingly to the left, they began to rebel against their party.  It'd grow much worse in the 1970s as the Great Recession started to change American heavy industry forever.

The now more conservative Republican Party was well aware that conservatism in and of itself, while increasingly popular to sections of the electorate, remained in the background enough not to be able to come into power on its own.  People were unhappy with the economy and the distress brought about by inflation, the loss of the Vietnam War and social changes brought about by court action, but they weren't so unhappy that they were willing to take a radically new direction, or they didn't' think they were.  The election of Jimmy Carter over Gerald Ford was as much about competence, which Carter proved not to have, as anything else.  Conservative Ronald Reagan, however, saw an opportunity to recruit Rust Belt and Southern Populists into the Republican Party, and did so for his 1980 campaign.

Reagan had the first conservative US administration since Herbert Hoover, but it was never purely so.  Reagan was an actor and a compromiser, who brought in elements that he didn't really believe in so that htey could be used.  Hoover had never done anything like that.  The conservative Republicans thought they could control the imported populsits, and at first they proved correcdt.  Indeed, following Reagan the next two Republicans were more Nixon like than Reagan like.  But the populists having come over, did not leave.

Nor did their concerns get addressed.  By the 1980s the economy was fundamentally changing in the wake of the 70s.  Heavy industry was not returning, "good" blue collar jobs were evaporating.  Ethnic enclaves in urban areas were smashed.  The progressivism of the late 60s and 70s felt free to attack long standing social matters. The liberals in the Democratic Party went to sleep and Democratic politicians appealed increasing to Progressives the way that conservatives had to Populists.

The breaking point proved to be a court decision again, that being the Obergefell decision.  I warned it would have that impact at that time, but it was such a shock to core beliefs of conservatives and populist that a reaction by both was inevitable.  The populists reaction carried along with it rage over a host of issues they'd been ignored on, many of them essentially economic, but some of them social.  Because the social issues were there, conservatives did what they'd been doing since 1980, figure they could simply carry the populist along.  

The 2016 election proved that to be completely incorrect.  Two populists emerged, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.  Election controls built into the Democratic Party's' process kept Sanders from being the Democratic nominee.  No such controls existed in the GOP, and Trump ended up winning the election against Hillary Clinton, and incredibly poor choice for the Democrats, but only through the electoral college. Clinton carried the popular vote.

It was populists, particularly Rust Belt populist, who carried the day for Trump.

Enough of the conservatives remained in the party, and Trump was incompentent enough as a President, that conservatives kept the Trump Presidency from goign full bore populists.  He knows that and his supporters do as well.   A second Trump Presidency will not repeat that.

A European Tale

Giving the European story is more difficult than the American one, as Europe is of course a collection of countries, not one, and each country has its own story.  So we'll do broad generalizations.

Europe, going into the 20th Century, remained more traditional, and hence more conservative, than the United States.  Almost every European country, save for France, had some kind of monarch who at least represented tradition, but who had very limited, if any, powers, save for Austro Hungaria, Germany, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire, whose monarchs held real power.  The Russian Czar actually held absolute power.  Many countries, however, such as Sweden, had monarchs who had a least some veto type power over their  parliaments.

In this system extremism was bound to rise, but underground.  The more substantial a European monarchy was, the more likely it was to have really radical underground movements which, in the way we are analyzing this, would be termed Progressive.  Imperial Russia had a host of far left Socialist parties.  Germany had a strong radically left Socialist Party.

Other more democratic countries had radical movements as well, but they tended to never get as strong, or they would see their radicalism dissipate if they received voter support.  So, for example, French socialist were elected to power, but they never behaved like a Communist Party once in power.

World War One smashed the old order in Europe.  Democratic countries became more democratic.  Countries with parliamentary democracies began to make their monarchs symbolic or eliminate them altogether.  Monarchs in Austro Hungary, Germany, Russia, Finland (which had just become independent) and Turkey were tossed out, with the Russian one and his family losing tehir lives.  

The 1920s accordingly saw struggles between liberalism and conservatism all over Europe, and in the most stressed countries, a type of populism and progressivism enter the mix as well, sometimes as arm contestants for the future of the country.  The Russian Revolution can be seen as a contest between liberals and conservatives as allies, against progressives as enemies, with the radical left winning.  The Russian Civil War can be seen as a contest between Progressives and Populists as allies, against Conservatives.  Weimar Germany saw endless contests between Liberals and Conservatives, with Populists being the allies of extremists on the right and the left, giving their support to the KDP and the NASDP.

All of that, of course, gave rise to Communism, Nazism, and FAscism, which in turn gave rise to the Second World War.  

World War Two, like World War One, smashed the existing order and saw the triumph of Liberalism in the West.  Communism, won in the East, of course, but not in the same fashion.  Like in the US, the post war free European states were very much consensus oriented and remained so even after the stress of 1968.  AFter the Cold WAr, however, all European states began to see some of the same economic issues, and cultural issues, that had arisen in the United STates rise in Europe.  Some of the state accordingly began to fall into extremism.  Russia retreated into a weird sort of conservative imperialism that recalled its pre World War One status, but without a Romanov.  Putin became the new imperial head.  Hungary outwardly abandoned liberal democracy in favor of illiberal democracy.  Poland teetered on the edge of liberal and illiberal democracy.  Ukraine went for the long pass of liberal democracy.

And now we have a war in the former Russian Empire over the question.

Grape Nuts.

And in the US, we're about to have an election over it.  

Unfortunately, that election will feature only two parties, and in one of them the ancient candidate feels he must take input from progressives in his party. The other party's candidate is an ancient narcissistic oddball who tells populists what they want to hear, and who feeds from them in an application of the Führerprinzip.  

This is not good, to say the least.

The Democrats, of course, retain liberals in their party still.  The progressives are few, but influential.  The Republicans retain conservatives, but hey'v ebeen largely silenced and castrated.  The GOP is the populist party.

Part of the reason we're where we are is due to a poverty of parties, and language.  Populists have never been conservatives, and they aren't now.  But they think they are.  Progressives aren't liberals, but liberals don't really understand the extent to which that's not true.

Grape Nuts aren't made of grapes. . . but there's probably a lot of people who think they are.

Last prior edition:

A Primer, Part I. Populists ain't Conservatives, and LIberals ain't Progressives. How inaccurate terminology is warping our political perceptions.

The Four Things.

Because I've referenced it more than one time, but apparently never posted it (cowardice at work) I'm going to post here the topic of "the four sins God hates".  I'm also doing this as I'm getting to a political thread about this years elections and the candidates, in the context of the argument of "Christians must. . . " or "Christians can. . . "

First I'll note using the word "hate", in the context  of the Divine, is a truncation for a much larger concept.  "Condemns" might have been a better choice of words, but then making an effective delivery in about ten minutes or less is tough, and truncations probably hit home more than other things.

Additionally, and very importantly, sins and sinners are different.  In Christian theology, and certainly in Catholic theology, God loves everyone, including those who have committed any one of these sins, or all of them.

This topic references a remarkably short and effective sermon I heard some time ago. The way my 61 year old brain now works, that probably means it was a few years ago.  At any rate, it was a homily based on all three of the day's readings, which is remarkable in and of itself, and probably left every member of the parish squirming a bit.  It should have, as people entrenched in their views politically and/or economically would have had to found something to disagree with, or rather be hit by.

The first sin was an easy one that seemingly everyone agrees is horrific, but which in fact people excuse continually, murder.

Murder is of course the unjust taking of a life, and seemingly nobody could disagree with that being a horrific sin. But in fact, we hear people excuse the taking of innocent life all the time.  Abortion is the taking of an innocent life.  Even "conservatives", however, and liberals as a false flag, will being up "except in the case of rape and incest".

Rape and incest are horrific sins in and of itself, but compounding it with murder doesn't really make things go away, but rather makes one horror into two.  Yes, bearing a child in these circumstances would be a horrific burden.  Killing the child would be too.

The second sin the Priest noted was sodomy.  He noted it in the readings and in spite of what people might like to say, neither the Old or New Testaments excuse unnatural sex. They just don't.  St. Paul is particularly open about this, so much so that a local female lesbian minister stated that this was just "St. Paul's opinion", which pretty much undercuts the entire Canon of Scripture.  

A person can get into Natural Law from here, which used to be widely accepted, and which has been cited by a United States Supreme Court justice as recently as fifty or so years ago, and the Wyoming Supreme Court more recently than that, and both in this context, but we'll forgo that in depth here. Suffice it to say that people burdened with such desires carry a heavy burden to say the least, but that doesn't make it a natural inclination.  In the modern Western World we've come to excuse most such burdens, however, so that where we now draw lines is pretty arbitrary. 

Okay, those are two "conservative" items.

The next wasn't.

That was mistreating immigrants.  

This sort of speaks for itself, but there it is. Scripture condemns mistreating immigrants.  You can't go around, as a Christian, hating immigrants or abusing them because of their plight.  

Abusing immigrants, right now, seems to be part of the Conservative "must do" list.

And the final one was failing to pay workmen a just wage.  Not exactly taking the natural economy/free market approach in the homily.

Two conservatives, and two liberal.

That's because Christianity is neither liberal or conservative, but Christianity.  People claiming it for teir political battles this year might well think out their overall positions.