New Normal Digest #3
Kamala Harris a plagiarist; Democrats likely to attempt to steal the election; the chronic disconnectedness of the world of modernity; more.
Author’s note: this series is an experiment: as I recently explained, the fallout from my decision to depart Facebook. These are items that would have gone there. Now they’re going here. I propose to do ten and then decide, based on reader response (if any). Do you like what you see? Or do you think my time would be better served doing other things? Let me know in the comments. I will interpret zero comments as indicative of zero interest, meaning this project will be discontinued.
Kamala Harris revealed to be a plagiarist: details and links.
John Nolte — the John Nolte who authored the magnificent novel Borrowed Time (reviewed here) — has busted Kamala Harris for plagiarism on Breitbart.
She and another Left Coaster wrote a book called Smart on Crime or something like that a little over a decade ago.
Recently, a noted expert on plagiarism revealed that the co-authors had copied most of a Wikipedia article without credit, while fabricating sources.
Dr. Stefan Weber, called the “plagiarism hunter”:
“Kamala Harris copied virtually an entire Wikipedia article into her book without providing attribution to Wikipedia.”
She did a little creative rearranging of the plagiarized passages, and also “fabricated a source reference, inventing a nonexistent page number.”
She and her co-author copied entire sections from sources without the slightest attribution.
Original report from Christopher Rufo:
The woke New York Times (“all the news that’s fit to print,” right ) tried to debunk the allegation, calling in their own “expert” who claimed it was just “500 words” or so and then called Rufo a racist (the usual leftist ploy when all else fails).
Rufo responded by sharing his full analysis as reported here in Nolte’s follow-up. Kammie and her ko-author plagiarized far more than “500 words”!
The NYT’s “expert” confessed that he’d not really done a “full analysis.”
In short, the NYT has tried to cover this up.
The Democrat Party is really running this woman for president, her VP being the guy who, as Minnesota governor, stood by while the capitol city of his state was being burned by George Floyd rioters?
Have we gone from the New Normal to cloud-cuckoo land?
Ideally we’d know in 18 days, because that’s Election Day. But it wouldn’t surprise me any if things don’t play out that way.
As much as is being written about how Trump won’t accept the results of the election he loses, I’m suggesting that things could get far more “interesting” if, say, he loses the popular vote again but wins in the Electoral College.
Even more so, should he win decisively in a landslide (I have no idea of the likelihood of this).
I’ve been predicting all along that should he win, you’ll see enraged leftists filling the streets, making what happened in 2020 look like a grade school cafeteria food fight by comparison.
We’ll be able to ask, Will the real insurrectionists please stand up?
I doubt that the controlled media will call them that, though, any more than they used a term like that for the George Floyd rioters who did far more damage than was done on January 6, 2021.
The coming mental health crisis … on the left (if Kammie loses)
While I wanted to shy away from Tucker Carlson who is adequately covered elsewhere on Substack, he recently spoke with political journalist Mark Halperin on a topic directly relevant to the above.
Halperin predicts a “massive mental health crisis” should Trump win, i.e., it will suddenly make millions of miseducated leftists question their very connection to the country, given that they’ve been told, over and over again, ever since Trump declared his candidacy, that a Trump victory in 2024 would be the very worst thing that could happen to the country. That it would be THE END OF DEMOCRACY!!
Far more likely, Elon Musk’s prediction, that if Kammie wins, this will be the last meaningful election. First off, she isn’t bright enough to be president. So the presidency-by-committee that we’ve had since January 21, 2021, will continue. It consists of the Obamas, the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, a few other powerful Democrats.
The presidency-by-committee (which hates traditional majority-white America) will unilaterally legalize the 12 - 15 million illegal migrants that have entered the country since January 21, 2021. All the latter will vote Democrat, since Democrats are presently more likely to keep the borders open so the migrants can get their families into the U.S. This will mean: still more Democrats.
So if Kamala Harris becomes the nominal president, the U.S. will have one-party rule by 2028, much as California is a one-party state now. I’m told that in Los Angeles you can walk for block after block without hearing anyone speaking English.
That will be America’s future.
We got on this road decisively when conservatives were unable to circumvent political correctness back in the 1990s and stop the incessant march into cultural leftism. “Movement” conservatives never even really tried; they were too scared of being called racists. More on this in an article I’m doing that will be published (Lord permitting!) right around the end of this month.
Listen to the Tucker Carlson – Mark Halperin conversation here.
Will Democrats steal this election?
Paul Craig Roberts thinks that another stolen election is the most likely outcome of what faces the U.S. 18 days from today.
Here.
Doubtless we’ll see the same belligerent denials, and then some.
PCR:
If the Democrats do not intend to steal the election, why did California make it a felony to require an ID to vote?
Why did the Wisconsin Supreme Court overturn the ban on ballot drop boxes?
Why did some blue states rule that ballots have to be counted regardless of irregularities in how they are filled out.
What Democrats have done in swing states is to legalize vote fraud. Some blue states have tried to make it illegal to challenge the vote count, an issue that will have to be settled by the US Supreme Court.
Arizona is illegally withholding the list of 218,000+ registered voters who have not provided proof of citizenship as required by law
https://media.scored.co/post/Y7jpOjPGZNvk.png
The above is just a sampling, and none of it has been reported by any corporate media outlet that I’m aware of.
And now, this (which has been in the works since the start of the Bidenista years):
The Department of Homeland Security has flagged individuals questioning COVID-19 origins, vaccine efficacy, and election integrity as potential domestic terrorism threats.
Is a coup being set in place?
A new Department of Defense directive 5240.01 issued September 27, 2024, just prior to the November presidential election allows the US military to use lethal force against American citizens in assisting police authorities in domestic disturbances.
A report on this development lists these civil liberties concerns:
Right to protest: There are fears that expanded authority could suppress legitimate protests.
Privacy rights: Increased military involvement in domestic intelligence gathering could infringe on privacy.
Due process: The military’s role in law enforcement could bypass standard due process protections.
Freedom of speech: The broad definition of “national security threats” could target individuals for their political beliefs.
Civilian control: The expanded military role could erode civilian oversight of the military.
Ensuing discussion shows how this would finish the job of gutting the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights that the Western Ruling Class has been working towards for decades.
Not a peep about this anywhere in the mainstream corporate media.
PCR links to the directive itself, and an internal government report:
Assess for yourselves, readers.
Wokeness as akin to China’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s … and the problem of a comprehensive alternative gaining visibility online.
Doug Casey, economist and investment advisor, fears that the Woke Revolution, which he and others have compared to the Cultural Revolution in Maoist China, has gone too far to be reversed.
A major problem with opposing the Woke Revolution, he argues in this recent interview, is what he believes is the absence of a consistent and coherent alternative.
Here are some key paragraphs:
The best analogy for the United States today might be China in the late 1960s.
The US is experiencing a cultural revolution to eliminate anything that’s traditional. The Chinese Cultural Revolution was about getting rid of the Four Olds — old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. I wrote an article five years ago discussing that revolution and why Trump would lose in 2020. I urge you to read it.
The Woke Revolution going on today is similar in lots of aspects to the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Not least is the intense radicalism in the universities, and its promotion by the government and the media.
My guess is that even though some people are reacting against the Woke cultural revolution, it may be too little and too late. The problem is that they don’t have a sound alternative philosophy to rally around. They’re simply against things they don’t like, but they lack any coherent beliefs to actively promote. Worse, they accept many of the Wokesters basic moral principles. They just think they’re too outrageous, and going too far, too fast. They fail to see them as evil and outright destructive. Worse, some of them want to impose their own brand of authoritarianism.
Let me re-emphasize that I hope Trump wins not because he’s a solution. He’s not. He has no core philosophical, economic, or political beliefs. But he’s at least a cultural conservative who doesn’t want to overturn the essence of what’s left of America.
What’s going on is a psychological war, and the lack of a well-defined philosophy and moral tenets is exactly how you lose a psy-op war.
I am not sure what Casey is referring to by saying that “they accept many of the Wokesters basic moral principles.” He doesn’t say who, or which principles, leaving a gap in his discussion.
Is he referring to the fact that many students who have been (mis)educated woke took to the streets to defend Palestinians in Gaza, and that many of us outsiders have also severely criticized Israel?
I’ve no idea, of course. Maybe he means something totally different. But this was what went through my mind when I first read that. I don’t think you have to be woke to think that Netanyahu is a sociopath.
To be sure, most of the people at the pinnacles of power in that part of the world are psychopaths. So was Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader, just killed in Gaza the other day.
Come to think of it, most of the people at or near pinnacles of power anywhere in the world where modernity has brought us are probably sociopaths. That’s what modernity’s pinnacles of power have incentivized and it’s what they’ve rewarded.
In any event….
There is a “sound” alternative philosophy of conservatism—at least, no one has told me otherwise, or shown me supposed problems. That’s if anyone ever bothers to read it. Start here and here.
Aurelien’s social metaphysics of modernity’s disconnectedness and its roots in Western philosophy (and classical economics).
There’s this idea that Western modernity took a wrong turn at some point. At least, that’s the working premise of this brilliant Substack essay by the fellow (or maybe it’s a team, I’m not sure) who posts under the name Aurelien. I have wonder what his — or their — secret is, getting 7,500 subscribers!
This is the basic idea: we have little understanding of how our pre-modern ancestors saw the world beyond giving it a metaphor: connectedness. Not in the technological but the metaphysical sense of everything being connected to everything else.
Modernity, on the other hand, has disconnected us, fragmented us, fractured us into competing and sometimes warring divisions, leaving us isolated, frustrated and even angry in some cases and merely lonely in others, but at risk of mental illness since human beings are not wired psychologically for isolation (the reason solitary confinement breaks a lot of prisoners).
What, then, can we do to get connectivity back again? This is the challenge Aurelien tries to articulate in this essay.
You can read his effort here. I certainly would encourage you to subscribe, as this is far from the first thoughtful and thought-provoking essay to come off Aurelien’s word processor.
First of all, there’s a lot that’s gone right with modernity. All except for the extremely destitute or those out in the middle of nowhere have lifestyles that not even kings and queens could have dreamt of even 500 years ago. Most of our stomachs are full; we’ve cured diseases that sent millions to their deaths in centuries past; we’ve lengthened our lifespans; we’ve developed and increased opportunities, so that a great many of us live in relative comfort and convenience. We don’t have to wash clothes by hand, or worry about fresh food spoiling because we can’t keep it cold.
We have all the books any civilization ever wanted, all the television programs, all the movies, and much of the world at our fingertips via the Internet.
It’s a shame that most people use all these conveniences and television and Internet channels to keep themselves entertained, but that’s a different essay.
The point is, the West has been by and large a successful civilization? At least so far? Why? I would argue that we can attribute much of the West’s successes to the Christian premise that a rational God created the world and us, such that the world would be both intelligible to our rational (God-created) minds, and filled with resources about which we could learn specifics and then make use of them to improve our lives.
That’s a kind of connectedness I don’t think Aurelien explores. He does see the adoption of “scientism” as a mistake:
“which is to say the mechanical [sic] application of nineteenth-century conceptions of scientific materialism as the explanation of everything. I have watched scientists rub their hands in glee as they drive home to their audiences how puny and insignificant we are, a race evolved by chance from the primeval slime on an unexceptional planet of an obscure star in one of millions of galaxies. We live in a meaningless, mechanistic world consisting only of hard stuff called matter, where consciousness itself may be an accident or an anomaly, in a universe which is itself winding down to an inevitable heat death.”
This, of course, rules out Christianity (and every other faith community, for that matter) as hopelessly backward and irrational. Not necessarily useless, though, if your aim is to get money from people. Money, of course, has become the dominant obsession in a world gone from modernity to postmodernity, where morality has become subjective and assertions of truth themselves are covert applications of bias of various sorts which protect power and privilege. With this last, we’re back to the Woke Revolution.
Where did it all go wrong? That’s a much longer story than I can get into here. (Maybe in future issues? Or you can read my book to learn more.)
So let me just sketch, and in a more staccato fashion than Aurelien would prefer.
The French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes’s path of methodic doubt converged on himself as a “thinking thing,” a point of pure deductive reason, apart from experience and all that makes us fully human, metaphysically and epistemologically isolated from everything else in the universe.
There’s your disconnection.
Skipping over a lot of the historical details, this point of pure reason continued to haunt Western philosophy and letters, sometimes appearing as the one entry to a numinous order that could provide a basis for morality in the cold, deterministic world of emerging physical science (Kant), and then as the homo economicus of classical liberalism:
“Liberalism promotes individualism, certainly, but also a definition of individual success which is very largely financial, with the status and power that generally comes with it. Since not everybody can succeed by this definition, and since the success of the few requires the failure of the many, a Liberal society brands those who do not become rich and powerful as failures. Logically enough, it also regards all identity-related grievances as stemming from an imbalance in the numbers of rich and powerful (and hence successful) individuals of different identities, and encourages competition between identity groups for the baubles of wealth and power.”
Liberalism, as political scientist Patrick Deneen has also argued, has the drawback of having at its core the metaphysical autonomous individual, by nature self-interested (and profit-motivated), and this gradually undermines institutions that are necessary conditions for civilization itself: the family, for example. Or community in a broader sense. Or just social trust (discussed last week) . Family members, neighbors, community groups to which one feels a longstanding connection tend to generate trust. Individuals viewed as isolated monads competing endlessly for a share of the pie aren’t inclined to trust one another. Hence division, fragmentation, and breakdown.
Will we somehow get back on track? At present things are not looking especially good, but if the West falls from within, some will survive, propagate, rebuild. This realization should give us some basis for hope.
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Steven Yates is a (recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored three books, more than 20 articles, numerous book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself.
In 2012 he moved to Chile. He married a Chilean national in 2014. Among his discoveries in South America: the problems of the U.S. are problems everywhere, because human nature is the same everywhere. The problems are problems of Western civilization as a whole.
As to whether he’ll stay in Chile … stay tuned!
He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.
Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.
His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.
His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.
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