New Normal Digest #4
Eleven days....
… and almost everything mainstream media breathlessly gasps out or does indicates how fearful leftists are that they might lose this election. Example:
That was aggregated by leftist Big Tech outfit Yahoo from the British leftist The Guardian by leftist Big Tech outfit Yahoo.
As leftists like to say when they believe they can get some mileage out of it:
Wouldn’t it be nice if there was even a scrap of substantial evidence to support the allegation?
Oh … we’re supposed to believe women!
Even if they’re accusing a leftist like Doug Emhoff (Kamala Harris’s hubby)?
Uh…. Waiting on that one from all the feminists out there.
The fact that this woman surfaces just two weeks before the election makes the allegation all the more suspicious.
Talk about post-truth….
But if Trump should win … what will he do? (That’s assuming he’s able to take office, leftist rioters not having filled the streets and begun a campaign of mayhem and destruction dwarfing what they did during the 2020 George Floyd Summer of Love, with no one stopping them.)
Paul Craig Roberts has filled his ideal cabinet:
Trump, if he is careful about his appointments, could make a good stab at restoration: Robert Kennedy as the head of the Food and Drug Administration. General Flynn as head of the CIA. Elon Musk as Secretary of State. John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute as Attorney General. Michael Hudson as Secretary of the Treasury. Edward Snowden as Director of the National Security Agency.
A number of the police state agencies, such as Homeland Security, could be abolished. So, yes, in theory, Trump could have a go at restoring America. But is Trump capable of even imagining these appointments, and if so could he get them confirmed by the US Senate?
I’ll say up front, I’m dubious about a couple of these. Elon Musk, for example, may have coined the phrase woke mind virus but he’s also designed a contraption that can be implanted in a human brain.
Not in my head, you don’t!!
PCR is exercising his imagination, of course. Fantasizing might be a better word. Because none of them would be confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
But coming to his main query: is the U.S. too far gone to be saved? He thinks it might be.
A second Trump presidency will be fought tooth-and-nail, just like the first one was. The ensuing chaos will likely be blamed on Trump and his supporters.
But I’m reminded by guys like Brandon Smith and John Bush (no relation to those Bushes) and Derrick Broze that there’s a brighter side to all this.
For starters, a country as large as the U.S. might collapse at its center (the Asylum on the Potomac, and big cities), but parts of it outside those centers wouldn’t necessarily follow them into the abyss. This has been clear for some time.
Hence prepping.
People flocked to cities for jobs. They became dependent on a functional infrastructure, which might experience severe shocks.
Out in the boonies, life may well continue as usual….
It's important to be cautious with collapsism….
I went to Chile convinced that the U.S. dollar was going to collapse during the 2010 decade and possibly before the end of the Obama years.
It didn’t … even with the central bank (the Federal Reserve) printing more and more of the things and the national debt skyrocketing to $35 trillion (if memory serves, it was around $12 trillion when I left), people continued to use dollars voluntarily.
But on the other hand, currency matters aside, circumstances in a country can change very quickly.
Anyone who was in Chile on October 19, 2019, saw that firsthand … with people sipping their pisco sours at leisure during the lunch hour with nothing seemingly out of the ordinary, and the streets filling with rioters and buildings going up in flames that night as protests erupted. The explosion had been building for some time, but if you didn’t know what to look for, you wouldn’t have seen it.
Chile was almost destabilized. President Sebastian Piñera managed to maintain control over the situation. But the whole of the situation ruined his presidency. (It ruined other things, as well; at least one friend of mine made a horrible decision and it cost him dearly!) Aspects of the country never have fully recovered. Chile now has a leftist president, Gabriel Boric. Its very own Joe Biden, except that Boric is much younger. Arguably, in Camila Vallejo, Chile has its very own Kamala Harris—in temperament if not in position.
Two people who have learned the hard way that running a country is a bit more complicated than running a university student protest. That’s the milieu these two clowns came out of.
Could similar things happen in the U.S.? I can’t rule it out!
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But none of this is within our control. Stoicism (which I’ve been studying for some time now) counsels: focus on that which you can control. Note the rest if it can affect you; but don’t try to exercise control over others.
What you can control is your degree of resilience: psychological, practical, economic-financial. And by refusing to fall into the trap of believing that whatever happens, the government is going to save you.
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In this light, the most interesting Tucker podcast this past week was with none other than Dave Ramsey, a financial advisor you can probably trust. He’s a Christian, for one thing. For another, he’s been there, with the bad experience of having nearly lost everything due to bad financial decisions, and finding himself having to rebuild from scratch. What he built was his company Ramsey Solutions which has helped a lot of people get out of debt and get their financial houses in order.
This is also on the Tucker Carlson Network, obviously, but you need a membership to view it there.
Ramsey understands the environment we inhabit. Staying beyond “isms” still: we inhabit an environment in which corporations, especially credit card companies and banks (or both rolled into one) incentivize debt. We are encouraged to spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need to impress people we don’t know.
Think about that. Isn’t it a bit silly?
The corporate methodology may be diabolical, but tens of millions of Americans have fallen for it. According to Ramsey, the average credit card debt is now $37,000!
Whipping out plastic is easier than whipping out Georges and Abrahams because there’s a pain factor in seeing those Georges and Abrahams disappear from sight that isn’t there with plastic. You get the card back, after all, and you don’t have to worry about the fortune you just blew until your monthly statement comes out.
Credit card companies have very good marketing departments!
All of this is the reason you won’t find financial literacy classes in any public school. Because one of the aims of public education is to turn out masses ready and willing to consume. Plastic makes it easier.
The environment is what it is, but the onus is on us — as persons — to develop and maintain the systems, the discipline, the behaviors, that reduce and then control personal spending, avoiding debt wherever possible Because one thing is for sure. No one is going to do it for us.
I discovered I had a copy of Ramsey’s book The Total Money Makeover right here, with a workbook to go with it. How I came by them, I have no idea. But I dug it out the day before yesterday after publishing my “Civil Wrongs: 30 Years After” piece and began actually reading it this time.
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Speaking of which … as an election approaches with arguably the first full-fledged “DEI” candidate in U.S. history … I’d like to think my very first book, Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (ICS Press, 1994) might be worth revisiting as the book’s 30th birthday approaches.
After all, my book was among the first to draw the direct connection between the manifest failure of affirmative action programs to deliver any goods for ethnic minorities — the primary beneficiaries were middle- and upper-class white women with hard left beliefs — and political correctness.
Something had to be done to “chill” the freedom to criticize these programs, after all, and branding them as racist and sexist (today the preferred term seems to be misogynist) seemed the way to go.
Among my predictions: if this juggernaut was not arrested, it would spread until it infected every institution in the country.
The first institutions captured were universities and mainstream media. Then corporations.
Now, of course, it’s everywhere, and it’s now called DEI: Diversity-Equity-Inclusion.
It became the woke mind virus Musk spoke of.
Here’s an account of how DEI has wreaked havoc on one institution.
The University of Michigan spent $250 million on something that not only has utterly failed to accomplish what it supposedly set out to accomplish, but has only promoted campus discord.
That’s money that could have been used for faculty salaries … or perhaps not acquired at all, so tuition could have stayed a bit lower.
The irony is, you don’t promote “diversity” by emphasizing differences. You identify problems that we all share: financial problems, for example. You create an environment encouraging of empathy. You don’t force “inclusion” absent this environment, which is what DEI (or as I sometimes call it, DIE because it’s killing Western civilization) does.
Where has the agenda that began with hijacking civil rights well over three decades ago brought us?
Men don’t trust women, and women don’t trust men.
Men are moving to the right and uniting behind Trump, while women are moving to the left and uniting behind Harris. Not all of them, of course, but enough of them.
Meanwhile, it’s clear: conservatives and leftists basically hate each other. Civil conversation, especially online, has gotten harder and harder. Does this end in civil war between right versus left? One can only hope not, because we’re not talking geography, such as another north-south clash of organized armies. We’re talking about families, neighborhoods, towns and cities being torn apart.
There would be no victors, not really. Nothing good could come of such a conflict.
One can only hope it’s not too late, because we’re already in a kind of civil “cold war.” The attacks on Trump as a “fascist” (by people who couldn’t tell you what a fascist is) illustrate this.
Neither side, meanwhile, is focusing on the top: on the leviathan financial corporations (what we could call BlackRock capitalism), the credit card industry the unstated plan of which has clearly been debt-based indentured servitude, Big Pharma, and others who have reaped unearned windfalls during the past 30 years.
Or on the projected Great Reset (or Great Taking).
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All that said: Paul Manafort believes the winds of change are blowing in Trump’s favor….
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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