New Normal Digest #5

Last NND before the most contentious election of our lifetimes....

This every-Friday series profiles authors and articles other than myself you might find it useful to consider, and presents commentary not available elsewhere.

Some of these would have appeared on my Facebook page, but censorsh— Oops, I mean content moderation, has compelled me to quit posting on that platform. On this one, I am in charge. I have ten of these planned, extending into December. If they increase subscribers, I’ll continue. Otherwise ten issues is where they stop.

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Nicole Russell, who writes for USA TODAY, doesn’t love Donald Trump. She doesn’t even like him. But she is going to vote for him. She explains why, in this opinion piece.

It’s useful to remember that whoever we’re voting for is not a saint, not a pastor, not a Savior. There is only one Savior: Jesus Christ Our Lord.

Trump is human, and like all humans, flawed.

But he may be able to solve problems that Kamala Harris will worsen if she gets in and continues the kind of closet figurehead-presidency we’ve had since January 21, 2021.

Russell explains (I’ll paraphrase; you can check the link for exact quotes):

Trump is simply stronger on three things that should matter to all Americans: the economy, foreign policy, and the southern border. Under Trump’s watch back in the late 2010s, inflation was low. Since 2021, the cost of food alone has gone up 22 percent. Utilities have gone up 28 percent. Rents and mortgages, more than that.

You can’t rent a decent apartment anywhere in the U.S. now for under $1,500 / mo.

Yes, some wages have gone up during the dumpster fire of the Bidenista era, but not enough. This is one of the reasons we also have record-high homelessness in the once Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.

Two dangerous foreign wars have erupted under the Bidenista watch. While contrary-to-fact conditionals always involve a bit of speculation no one can test (we can’t exactly turn back the calendar and do things differently), it is difficult to believe that either the war between Russia and Ukraine, or the one Israel is waging in Gaza and Lebanon (and possibly Iran before this plays out) would have happened, had the perpetrators not perceived weakness in the political power centers of the Exceptional Nation.

Finally … people on the ground will tell you that settling migrants in stable communities renders them unstable, even if it benefits a few local rich people who will tell you immigration “helps the economy.”

Witness Springfield, Ohio. Why is this? Because human beings naturally prefer the familiar to the unfamiliar, the known to the unknown. Haitians were both unfamiliar and unknown. Add to that: no one in that community took a vote on whether or not to settle 20,000 Haitians in a community of 40,000.

Unlimited immigration via open borders is going to give rise to more “far right” sentiment as a natural response to increasing instability and the sense ordinary people have of having lost control of their communities and their lives.

Behind all this: even while all the pundits in “legacy” media, which is invariably left-leaning, are claiming that Trump is “unfit for the presidency” (even Russell claims she could make a case for that based on her official-narrative take on January 6), I submit that she makes a compelling case why you shouldn’t vote for Kamala Harris.

What Russell says: she’s vague on what she believes on policy matters; she’s pro-abortion in the strongest sense of actually promoting it (as opposed to the “old school” view that abortions should be “safe, legal, and rare”), and she’ll be abysmal on foreign policy. I would add something Russell wouldn’t dare say as she’d probably be handed a pink slip by USA TODAY:

She’s the unofficial DIE (Diversity, Inclusion, Equity) candidate.

Contrary to what some will tell me, this hasn’t happened before.

Yes, Barack Obama was mixed-race, but I wouldn’t have called him a DIE candidate. Obama was far from stupid, after all. He had charisma; listening to him speak, something he was very good at doing, you couldn’t help but want to like him even if you disagreed with him.

I’ve never seen the slightest spark of intelligence or independent thought in Kamala Harris. She graduated from a fifth rate law school and still could only barely pass the bar on her second try. She rode to prominent on Willie Brown’s coattails (I don’t even want to know what else!) in San Francisco’s left wing environment, and owes her appointments to what used to be called affirmative action hiring. She utterly mishandled the one thing she was given any real responsibility for during the Bidenista years: the southern border.

The official response to such sentiments are that they are “racist, racist, racist!” (I can almost hear the hissing).

If that’s the best that leftists can do, that’s pretty pathetic.

I don’t know what to say to anyone who thinks such a response is adequate.

The only thing I can say in her favor is that she’s less unpleasant to look at and listen to than Hillary Rodham Clinton. Her voice doesn’t remind me of fingernails scraping a chalkboard.

I could add that Kamala Harris is the one candidate who was placed atop the Democrat Party ticket without having won a single primary vote. Never. Not in 2020; and in 2024 as VP she wasn’t running against Biden.

The Democrats will tell you this election is a choice between democracy and autocracy. Naturally they claim to be on the side of democracy.

Forget what the say and just watch what they do.

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In any event, another item that came to my attention this past week that struck me as a good contribution to this Digest appeared on The Hill and offers another reason why many people who may not like him personally will vote for Trump: the culture.

Derek Hunter advises: if you’re a parent and you’re looking for a reason to vote for anyone other than Harris, just walk into a public library.

You’re liable to see kids’ sections that have been inundated by books on “gender fluidity,” portrayals of whites as racists, and hysteria about man-made climate change.

Do kids need to be exposed to this sort of thing?

There used to be such a thing as age-appropriateness. Sexuality educators took the idea seriously when I was exposed to that in the late 1990s. But now, even age-appropriateness appears to have gone out the window as our culture has gotten steadily more decadent.

Among the things I’m most grateful for is that I was born when I was, and am not a child growing up in today’s environment, in a pop culture encouraging me to question my “gender.”

When I was growing up, boys knew they were boys, girls knew they were girls, and anyone who thought otherwise would have received some strange looks if not outright ridicule.

Now, “gender fluidity” seems to be everywhere. Everyday I encounter some story featuring “trans kids.”

Where were these kids when I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, which were fairly “liberated” times, after all (sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll and all that).

I’ll tell you: they simply didn’t exist. Transgenderism as a product of postmodernist “truth fluidity” has been manufactured by the cultural left, employing a social media saturated environment, and that’s all you can reliably say.

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Can this be reversed? We profiled Paul Craig Roberts’s doubts last week.

For this week: he argues that this election will decide what road Americans are on: toward freedom or toward tyranny.

Let’s break this down.

It is Roberts’s view that Democrats are in the process of stealing this election if they are able to get away with it. He observes that in Nevada, the Democrat-controlled state Supreme Court ruled that non-postmarked ballots that arrive three days late can be counted. Democrat controlled federal courts have ruled that in Virginia, non-U.S. citizens must be restored to voter rolls after the state removed them. No one thinks such voters are going to vote Republican. In Pennsylvania, the Democrat-controlled court ruled that improperly cast mail-in ballots must be counted.

In many states, it is now illegal to require a voter to present an ID in order to vote. You need an ID, and sometimes have to navigate multiple layers of authentication, to do almost anything else.

But not to vote!

The above are just three examples of a general trend, which as Roberts also observed, is supported by the woke billionaire class (Elon Musk and Peter Thiel being the only two billionaires I can think of who aren’t supporting leftists at all levels in this election; they’ve given Harris hundreds of millions of dollars).

The Democrats want a one-party federal government, akin to the one-party state they’ve engineered in California, Kamala Harris’s home state, and they will have it in 2028 if she becomes figurehead-president.

That means that if Trump cannot manage to win this election, next November 5 will be the last meaningful election in the U.S., the last election in which the candidates have opposed political philosophies of governance.

But of course, until 2016 we rarely had such elections. It was globalist A versus globalist B. Trump changed that. The world’s real ruling class has been scheming ever since to get its power back, and then some.

We’ll find out next week—or possibly in subsequent weeks—how successful they were.

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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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