#Micah Meadowcroft

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Madeline Peltz at MMFA:

In January, Ohio senator and Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance said that Heritage Foundation president and Project 2025 architect Kevin Roberts “is somebody I rely on a lot who has very good advice, very good political instincts.

[...] The Heritage Foundation is leading Project 2025, a far-right staffing and policy initiative backed by more than 100 conservative partner groups that seeks to remake the federal government into a vehicle for Trumpism. The proposals in the project’s policy book, Mandate for Leadership, would severely diminish reproductive, LGBTQ, and civil rights, implement draconian immigration policy, and crush climate change mitigation efforts. The Trump campaign has attempted to distance itself from Project 2025 as it becomes increasingly toxic, in spite of numerous well-documented ties between the Trump campaign and the project. A CNN review found that there are “nearly 240 people with ties to both Project 2025 and to Trump,” and at least 140 former Trump administration staffers contributed to the project. Vance brings his own close ties to Project 2025 and Heritage. In October 2023, Roberts and Vance wrote a joint op-ed in The Hill titled “Don’t hold up Israel aid to further Ukraine War funding.” Vance reposted the op-ed to his official Senate website.

Vance has also made multiple public appearances with Roberts. In March 2024, he spoke on a Twitter Space with Roberts, Johnny Burtka, president of Partner 2025 partner Intercollegiate Studies Institute, research director of Project 2025 partner Center for Renewing America Micah Meadowcroft, and Antonin Scalia, senior advisor at the Manhattan Institute.

Ohio Senator and Trump VP pick J.D. Vance praises Project 2025 architect and Heritage President Kevin Roberts as “somebody I rely on a lot who has very good advice, very good political instincts.”

Wonder why we call the Trump/Vance ticket the Project 2025 ticket?

[meret118]

Speaking to undercover reporters, Micah Meadowcroft privately admitted that Republicans tend to think that if “you just produce enough wealth, and then you can just buy your way out of whatever pollution deficit you put yourself into later.”

[contemplatingoutlander]

These secret recordings make it abundantly clear that Trump's denials of Project 2025 are lies, and that Trump and his cronies at The Heritage Foundation are planning to institute a neofascist "Christian" nationalist agenda if Trump gets reelected.

Trump's Project 2025 Denials are Just a Political Game

Trump has publicly rejected Project 2025 as Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign has sought to tie him to some of the plan’s most extreme proposals. But in private, Vought said that those disavowals were merely “graduate-level politics." [...] Vought said he had personally talked to Trump in recent months and received at least one personal “assignment” from him after he left office. He noted that the former president has “been at our organization, he’s raised money for our organization, he’s blessed it … he’s very supportive of what we do.” [emphasis added]

Deportations and an Attack on Multiculturalism

In discussing Trump’s plan to carry out the largest deportation in US history – which the former president has called for publicly – Vought said the expulsion of millions of undocumented immigrants could help “save the country.” Once deportations begin, “you’re really going to be winning a debate along the way about what that looks like,” Vought said. “And so that’s going to cause us to get us off of multiculturalism, just to be able to sustain and defend the deportation, right?” [emphasis added]

Secret Executive Orders Being Drafted

“We’ve got about 350 different documents that are regulations and things of that nature that are, we’re planning for the next administration,” he said. [...] Those plans will not be made public, Vought said, but instead will be “very, very close hold.” A Centre for Climate Reporting journalist... also secretly recorded a separate conversation with one of Vought’s aides.... Micah Meadowcroft, the research director for CRA.[...] “It’s a big, fat stack of papers that will be distributed during the transition period,” Meadowcroft said in the video – while noting that “you don’t actually, like, send them to their work emails,” in order to avoid disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. [emphasis added]

Christian Nationalism

In the conservative movement, “we’ve been too focused on religious liberty, which we all support, but we’ve lacked the ability to argue we are a Christian nation.... Our laws are built on the Judeo-Christian worldview value system.” He said that conservatives should push to have debates over whether to allow mosques to be built in America’s downtowns, and whether Christian immigrants should be prioritized over those of other faiths – ideas that run contrary to First Amendment protections. “I want to make sure that we can say we are a Christian nation,” Vought added later. “And my viewpoint is mostly that I would probably be Christian nation-ism. That’s pretty close to Christian nationalism because I also believe in nationalism.” [emphasis added]

Race Issues and the Use of the Military

And in discussing the protests and riots around the US in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Vought said that the president had the ability to use the military to restore order. He argued that the commander-in-chief wasn’t limited by the Posse Comitatus Act, a nearly 150-year-old law that prevents federal troops from conducting civilian law enforcement except when authorized by law. “The President has, you know, the ability both along the border and elsewhere to maintain law and order with the military,” Vought said. “And that’s something that, you know, it’s going to be important for, for him to remember and his lawyers to affirm.” [...] Vought added that the unrest following Floyd’s death “obviously was not about race.” “It was about destabilizing the Trump administration,” he claimed. [emphasis added]

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Don't let Trump get away with denying his plans to utilize the Project 2025 resources to impose a neofascist "Christian" nationalist regime on the nation if he is reelected.

(CNN) — Last month, Russell Vought sat in a five-star Washington, DC, hotel suite, bowing his head in prayer with two men he thought were relatives of a wealthy conservative donor.

Vought, one of the key authors of Project 2025, a right-wing blueprint for a second Trump term, expected the meeting would help his think tank secure a substantial contribution. For nearly two hours, he talked candidly about his behind-the-scenes work to prepare policy for former President Donald Trump, his expansive views on presidential power, his plans to restrict pornography and immigration, and his complaints that the GOP was too focused on “religious liberty” instead of “Christian nation-ism.”

But the men Vought was talking to actually worked for a British journalism nonprofit and were secretly recording him the entire time.

[arcticdementor]

(link)

[apesoformythoughts]

«…it also might be seen as providential rather than tragic that our first leap to the stars didn’t carry us that far, that there is for now some limit on our further expansion. Because, after all, that “Fill the earth and subdue it” admonition was given to a still-unfallen species, and the human condition under decadence raises the possibility that space travel without other forms of renewal might be less an escape from dystopia than an expansion of its scope.

This is the most plausible case against space travel, whether environmentalist or religious or both: that insofar as “modernity’s drive to power over nature is a corruption of what ought to be mankind’s dominion over creation,” as the Protestant essayist Micah Meadowcroft puts it, we can’t morally justify the expansion of that power to the stars unless we become better stewards of our planet, our societies, ourselves. This possibility resonates with cautionary themes in nuclear-age sci-fi—that we had gained power for which we were morally unready, and that greater powers needed to step in—and with themes in twentieth-century Christian science fiction, in novels like C. S. Lewis’s space trilogy and Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, in which the universe is actually crowded with sentient life that we're just too sinful to be permitted to encounter, and the real Great Filter on human expansion is our own fallen status, a kind of spiritual quarantine around our world.»

— Ross Douthat: The Decadent Society

[i-news-day]

A Path to Submission: Michel Houellebecq, Sex, and History

A Path to Submission: Michel Houellebecq, Sex, and History. By Micah Meadowcroft on September 26, 2019. read. 9 min. This article first appeared in ... Via Alerta do Google - sex https://ift.tt/2GYoAhV via Blogger https://ift.tt/2mb6gtY

[news-mashable-yahoopartner-blog]

Biden 'asked President Obama not to endorse' him, but people aren't buying it

Joe Biden is officially running for president in 2020, and from the looks of his first day in the race it's going to be a long, awkward journey.

As you may remember, Biden served as Barack Obama's vice president for eight years, and the two men were exceptionally close. Their "bromance" was talked about constantly, they exchanged friendship bracelets, and Obama even awarded Biden the Medal of Freedom. But because they were such genuine pals, Obama's in a pretty strange spot right now.

On Thursday, a reporter asked Biden why Obama had yet to endorsed him for president, to which the former VP replied, "I asked President Obama not to endorse, and he doesn’t want to. Listen, we should — whoever wins this nomination should win it on their own merits." That's when things got awkward.

Here's the video of Biden telling reporters he asked Obama to not endorse him: I asked President Obama not to endorse and he doesn't want to — whoever wins this nomination should win it on their own merits. pic.twitter.com/9qAmfyuSI4

— Julio Rosas (@Julio_Rosas11) April 25, 2019

SEE ALSO: Creepy Joe Biden fails at sensitivity training on the 'SNL' cold open

As a former president it makes sense why Obama wouldn't want to weigh in on the race — especially considering there are currently 20 Democratic candidates. But because of his past relationship with Biden, a lot of people were expecting some sort of comment.

As Obama continues to remain neutral, Twitter users have taken it upon themselves to troll Biden's "I asked him not to endorse me" claim, comparing it to other classic, untrue excuses.

Biden: “I asked President Obama not to endorse”

— Shane Goldmacher (@ShaneGoldmacher) April 25, 2019

you don't know him, he goes to another school https://t.co/m6WxYACOZT

— Kevin McNamara (@KevinMPMcNamara) April 25, 2019

I asked Rihanna not to DM me https://t.co/p3TytePAjH

— Steadman™ (@AsteadWesley) April 25, 2019

in other news i asked the pulitzer committee not to give me a prize this year https://t.co/tC6bYE7JtR

— Alex Roarty (@Alex_Roarty) April 25, 2019

"Actually my girlfriend lives in Canada." https://t.co/OkLgGUWKnK

— Micah Meadowcroft (@Micaheadowcroft) April 25, 2019

Biden has a past presidential endorsement but it lives in Canada https://t.co/HvRwmvpTlr

— Kathryn VanArendonk (@kvanaren) April 25, 2019

Translation: Biden: "When do you think you'll endorse me?" Obama: "I think it's better [for my own sake] not to endorse you." Biden: "I agree, I won't ask you to endorse me." Biden: "I asked him not to endorse me" https://t.co/hUPyndMBP1

— Robert M. Cutler (@RobertMCutler) April 25, 2019

I asked Chrissy Teigen not to follow me https://t.co/4se4smOC5A

— Grace Segers (@Grace_Segers) April 25, 2019

Of course I have presidential support..you just don't know him cuz he goes to a different high school. https://t.co/XemGbshzAE

— smoketinged (@smoketinged) April 25, 2019

Biden is saying.... out loud where people can hear him.... that he asked President Obama NOT to endorse him. Me right now: pic.twitter.com/Nd9QvH98Rb

— April (@ReignOfApril) April 25, 2019

BIDEN: vote for me! I’m friends with barack obama! VOTERS: does he endorse you? BIDEN: ... VOTERS: ... BIDEN: here’s a photo of us on a ferris wheel!

— Jesse McLaren (@McJesse) April 25, 2019

When announcing his candidacy on Instagram on Thursday morning, Biden included a photograph of himself and Obama, and photos with the former president are already being included in promoted tweet ads for Biden's campaign.

View this post on Instagram

#Joe2020 Join our campaign! Link in bio.

A post shared by Joe Biden (@joebiden) on Apr 25, 2019 at 3:06am PDT

Image: screengrab/twitter

Even former White House photographer turned Instagram troller/author, Pete Souza, is sharing photos of the two men together.

View this post on Instagram

Two good men.

A post shared by Pete Souza (@petesouza) on Apr 25, 2019 at 10:50am PDT

So while Obama might not publicly endorse Biden during the course of his campaign, it seems he'll have a very tough time escaping his association with the 2020 candidate.

WATCH: Kamala Harris announces 2020 presidential bid

[saadullah-faisal-world]

Joe Biden is officially running for president in 2020, and from the looks of his first day in the race it's going to be a long, awkward journey.As you may remember, Biden served as Barack Obama's vice president for eight years, and the two men were exceptionally close. Their "bromance" was talked about constantly, they exchanged friendship bracelets, and Obama even awarded Biden the Medal of Freedom. But because they were such genuine pals, Obama's in a pretty strange spot right now.On Thursday, a reporter asked Biden why Obama had yet to endorsed him for president, to which the former VP replied, "I asked President Obama not to endorse, and he doesn't want to. Listen, we should -- whoever wins this nomination should win it on their own merits." That's when things got awkward.> Here's the video of Biden telling reporters he asked Obama to not endorse him: I asked President Obama not to endorse and he doesn't want to -- whoever wins this nomination should win it on their own merits. pic.twitter.com/9qAmfyuSI4> > -- Julio Rosas (@Julio_Rosas11) April 25, 2019SEE ALSO: Creepy Joe Biden fails at sensitivity training on the 'SNL' cold openAs a former president it makes sense why Obama wouldn't want to weigh in on the race -- especially considering there are currently 20 Democratic candidates. But because of his past relationship with Biden, a lot of people were expecting some sort of comment.As Obama continues to remain neutral, Twitter users have taken it upon themselves to troll Biden's "I asked him not to endorse me" claim, comparing it to other classic, untrue excuses.> Biden: "I asked President Obama not to endorse"> > -- Shane Goldmacher (@ShaneGoldmacher) April 25, 2019> you don't know him, he goes to another school https://t.co/m6WxYACOZT> > -- Kevin McNamara (@KevinMPMcNamara) April 25, 2019> I asked Rihanna not to DM me https://t.co/p3TytePAjH> > -- Steadman™ (@AsteadWesley) April 25, 2019> in other news i asked the pulitzer committee not to give me a prize this year https://t.co/tC6bYE7JtR> > -- Alex Roarty (@Alex_Roarty) April 25, 2019> "Actually my girlfriend lives in Canada." https://t.co/OkLgGUWKnK> > -- Micah Meadowcroft (@Micaheadowcroft) April 25, 2019> Biden has a past presidential endorsement but it lives in Canada https://t.co/HvRwmvpTlr> > -- Kathryn VanArendonk (@kvanaren) April 25, 2019> Translation: > Biden: "When do you think you'll endorse me?" > Obama: "I think it's better [for my own sake] not to endorse you." > Biden: "I agree, I won't ask you to endorse me." > Biden: "I asked him not to endorse me" https://t.co/hUPyndMBP1> > -- Robert M. Cutler (@RobertMCutler) April 25, 2019> I asked Chrissy Teigen not to follow me https://t.co/4se4smOC5A> > -- Grace Segers (@Grace_Segers) April 25, 2019> Of course I have presidential support..you just don't know him cuz he goes to a different high school. https://t.co/XemGbshzAE> > -- smoketinged (@smoketinged) April 25, 2019> Biden is saying.... > > out loud where people can hear him.... > > that he asked President Obama NOT to endorse him. > > Me right now: pic.twitter.com/Nd9QvH98Rb> > -- April (@ReignOfApril) April 25, 2019> BIDEN: vote for me! I'm friends with barack obama! > > VOTERS: does he endorse you? > > BIDEN: ... > > VOTERS: ... > > BIDEN: here's a photo of us on a ferris wheel!> > -- Jesse McLaren (@McJesse) April 25, 2019When announcing his candidacy on Instagram on Thursday morning, Biden included a photograph of himself and Obama, and photos with the former president are already being included in promoted tweet ads for Biden's campaign.> View this post on Instagram> > Joe2020 Join our campaign! Link in bio.> > A post shared by Joe Biden (@joebiden) on Apr 25, 2019 at 3:06am PDTImage: screengrab/twitterEven former White House photographer turned Instagram troller/author, Pete Souza, is sharing photos of the two men together.> View this post on Instagram> > Two good men.> > A post shared by Pete Souza (@petesouza) on Apr 25, 2019 at 10:50am PDTSo while Obama might not publicly endorse Biden during the course of his campaign, it seems he'll have a very tough time escaping his association with the 2020 candidate. WATCH: Kamala Harris announces 2020 presidential bid

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://yhoo.it/2W6MtbS

[beautytipsfor]

Biden 'asked President Obama not to endorse' him, but people aren't buying it

Joe Biden is officially running for president in 2020, and from the looks of his first day in the race it's going to be a long, awkward journey.As you may remember, Biden served as Barack Obama's vice president for eight years, and the two men were exceptionally close. Their "bromance" was talked about constantly, they exchanged friendship bracelets, and Obama even awarded Biden the Medal of Freedom. But because they were such genuine pals, Obama's in a pretty strange spot right now.On Thursday, a reporter asked Biden why Obama had yet to endorsed him for president, to which the former VP replied, "I asked President Obama not to endorse, and he doesn't want to. Listen, we should -- whoever wins this nomination should win it on their own merits." That's when things got awkward.> Here's the video of Biden telling reporters he asked Obama to not endorse him: I asked President Obama not to endorse and he doesn't want to -- whoever wins this nomination should win it on their own merits. pic.twitter.com/9qAmfyuSI4> > -- Julio Rosas (@Julio_Rosas11) April 25, 2019SEE ALSO: Creepy Joe Biden fails at sensitivity training on the 'SNL' cold openAs a former president it makes sense why Obama wouldn't want to weigh in on the race -- especially considering there are currently 20 Democratic candidates. But because of his past relationship with Biden, a lot of people were expecting some sort of comment.As Obama continues to remain neutral, Twitter users have taken it upon themselves to troll Biden's "I asked him not to endorse me" claim, comparing it to other classic, untrue excuses.> Biden: "I asked President Obama not to endorse"> > -- Shane Goldmacher (@ShaneGoldmacher) April 25, 2019> you don't know him, he goes to another school https://t.co/m6WxYACOZT> > -- Kevin McNamara (@KevinMPMcNamara) April 25, 2019> I asked Rihanna not to DM me https://t.co/p3TytePAjH> > -- Steadman™ (@AsteadWesley) April 25, 2019> in other news i asked the pulitzer committee not to give me a prize this year https://t.co/tC6bYE7JtR> > -- Alex Roarty (@Alex_Roarty) April 25, 2019> "Actually my girlfriend lives in Canada." https://t.co/OkLgGUWKnK> > -- Micah Meadowcroft (@Micaheadowcroft) April 25, 2019> Biden has a past presidential endorsement but it lives in Canada https://t.co/HvRwmvpTlr> > -- Kathryn VanArendonk (@kvanaren) April 25, 2019> Translation: > Biden: "When do you think you'll endorse me?" > Obama: "I think it's better [for my own sake] not to endorse you." > Biden: "I agree, I won't ask you to endorse me." > Biden: "I asked him not to endorse me" https://t.co/hUPyndMBP1> > -- Robert M. Cutler (@RobertMCutler) April 25, 2019> I asked Chrissy Teigen not to follow me https://t.co/4se4smOC5A> > -- Grace Segers (@Grace_Segers) April 25, 2019> Of course I have presidential support..you just don't know him cuz he goes to a different high school. https://t.co/XemGbshzAE> > -- smoketinged (@smoketinged) April 25, 2019> Biden is saying.... > > out loud where people can hear him.... > > that he asked President Obama NOT to endorse him. > > Me right now: pic.twitter.com/Nd9QvH98Rb> > -- April (@ReignOfApril) April 25, 2019> BIDEN: vote for me! I'm friends with barack obama! > > VOTERS: does he endorse you? > > BIDEN: ... > > VOTERS: ... > > BIDEN: here's a photo of us on a ferris wheel!> > -- Jesse McLaren (@McJesse) April 25, 2019When announcing his candidacy on Instagram on Thursday morning, Biden included a photograph of himself and Obama, and photos with the former president are already being included in promoted tweet ads for Biden's campaign.> View this post on Instagram> > Joe2020 Join our campaign! Link in bio.> > A post shared by Joe Biden (@joebiden) on Apr 25, 2019 at 3:06am PDTImage: screengrab/twitterEven former White House photographer turned Instagram troller/author, Pete Souza, is sharing photos of the two men together.> View this post on Instagram> > Two good men.> > A post shared by Pete Souza (@petesouza) on Apr 25, 2019 at 10:50am PDTSo while Obama might not publicly endorse Biden during the course of his campaign, it seems he'll have a very tough time escaping his association with the 2020 candidate. WATCH: Kamala Harris announces 2020 presidential bid

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://yhoo.it/2W6MtbS via Beauty Tips

from Blogger http://bit.ly/2vqWsgi

[arcticdementor]

When last weekend Southwest Airlines canceled nearly two thousand flights, many on the right took something of a victory lap. The cancellations were caused by either an odd cascade of weather incidents and circumstances that appeared to only affect the budget airline or a staff shortage triggered by pilots taking sick leave and paid time off in response to Covid vaccine mandates and imminent layoffs. Dependent as most of us are on media and authorities not lying to us, it is sort of hard to say for sure.

…

This moment of labor action pushing a political hot button became (is becoming, in this column) the pedestal for renewed calls for the American right to seek to give birth, in the GOP or out of it, to a party that meets the needs of American workers. Here’s Ahmari again:

For those of us on the right who want to see the GOP remade as a workers’ party, this is where the rubber meets the road. This is where commitment matters. And we don’t get to tell workers what to get worked up about, though we should certainly seek to widen our policy and political backing beyond the current vaccine question.

To which I say, yes, let’s do it. The right does need to think critically about its relationship to organized labor and organized capital, to distinguish between public and private sector unions, and to consider where workers’ organizations fall in the ladder of subsidiarity and solidarity that makes up the nation. All of conservatism’s dreams for American life, especially that of healthy families, require that normal people, not just those with advanced degrees, be able to earn a decent living; there will certainly not be any return to single-income households as normal without some squeals of pain from corporate finance, as markets distended by globalization are corrected by national political will.

The right has an opportunity to exercise any post-Southwest enthusiasm for strike actions now, in light of the UAW action at Deere & Company of John Deere tractors. This is not a call to uncritically accept the goodwill of national and international labor organizations, which even setting aside ideological commitments are often more enamored with their status and power in D.C. than the good of their members. Continue to be suspicious. But it is a test case in which we can practice ignoring the right revulsion that has been inculcated in the red voter by public sector organizations like teachers’ unions so that we might reconsider the prudential opportunities in private collective bargaining.

…

The Deere strike appears a straightforward demand for improved wages and benefits, especially in regards to retirement pensions and health care. These are exactly the sort of things welfare-state skeptical conservatives should want the private sector providing—not everything can be shunted onto Americans’ rightly praised charitableness. Deere workers, primarily striking in Iowa and Illinois, are exactly the great American middle that politicians are constantly jockeying to champion; behold, flyover country, and a situation in which your rhetoric is nearly all that is needed. And to repeat a point above, if your vision of the future includes the return of bread-earner jobs for most American families, it will require that factory-working men make more money.

Of course, that will not just require union actions. The reason that public sector labor unions are so repulsive is that as citizens of a representative democracy, a universal-suffrage republic, Americans already have mechanisms for voicing their needs to and demanding their rights from the government. Public unions are a kind of extraconstitutional double representation. In a sense, to be extra corny for a moment, citizenship is the biggest union membership of them all. To correct the American labor market, then, so that it can again provide the sorts of wages conservative priorities demand, requires doing something about all the scabs the establishment of both parties gleefully use to depress your wages and soon your vote. Until there is some kind of collective bargaining that arrests the exploitation of guest workers and illegal immigrants by corporate powers to undermine the position of American citizens, no amount of legal strikes by organized workers is going to build the future we want to live in.  

[arcticdementor]

Sam Moore and Alex Roberts are researchers, anti-fascist activists, and the hosts of a podcast about the far right. So says the jacket of their new book, out this week. They’re Brits, too. That’s all I know about them. I know a little bit of them now, however, having read some 130 pages of their writing (not the end notes): mainly that they seem to be earnest chaps, sincere in their efforts to do the work. This book is short, yes, but it performs conscientiousness on every page, pop academic leftism doing its best to be as fair as being helpful to the cause will allow.

To be clear, I am not recommending this book to most of my readers. Its definitions are baroque and boutique, and the argumentation unsatisfyingly semantic. It is as breezy as acadamese gets, but it is still written in the language of contemporary social science. If, however, you are something of a researcher yourself, perhaps an activist of sorts, maybe even the host of a podcast, then perhaps you’ll find a leftist survey of right-wing ecological thought mildly interesting. After all, you may not be interested in climate politics, but climate politics is interested in you. I don’t regret the couple hours I spent with The Rise of Ecofascism; it is illustrative, not only semi-informative.

What it illustrates is the reality that, when it comes to environmental activism, serious leftists find themselves in a bit of a bind. “Climate justice” looks a lot like globalist greenwashing. Meanwhile, environmentalism and ecological thinking have a long, if occasionally sordid, pedigree on the right, more so probably than the left. The right, in its particularism and recognition of difference, sees the relationship between the environment and the person, and in seeking to preserve a mode of life naturally seeks the conservation of place. The left, in its commitment to liberating humanity from all inequalities, seeks to flatten distinctions, and especially in the Marxist vein has historically seen the formation of mass industrialized society and all its environmental consequences as a step in the synthetic march to a classless future where, without the crucial intervention of Christ’s kingship, Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low.

This is a flattening that closely resembles the reduction of humanity to homo economicus and aspirations to global governance that characterize what leftists prefer to call “neoliberalism.” This “capitalist” world order, like the left, also focuses on a planetary scale, and thus on climate and carbon and temperature (that is, I think, the accurate direction of causality in both cases), while playing a cups and ball game with unsustainable and degrading industrial practices. In their honesty Moore and Roberts recognize that similarity, and why those on the right might find it more than a little suggestive.

…

Again, Moore and Roberts seem sincere, sincere enough to recognize that the systems of control suggested by efforts to cool the entire planet sound like the makings of a totalitarian future, which they insist is not what their idea of solidarity demands. The main thing, of course, is to not be a reactionary:

Because the problems overlap and ‘express themselves through each other’, they might seem to require a form of total governance, the temptation of authoritarian expansion. It is largely within this authoritarian expansion that the far right will situate their responses to the complex sum of these problems, each perhaps superficially revolutionary. Indeed, without reducing our opposition to its ideas one bit, we might nevertheless admit that, as they have in the past, the far right might once again offer ‘plausible solutions to modern social problems’. There is likewise no particularly good reason to imagine that future far-right politics will be inflexible or hopeless. But there is plenty of good reason to believe it will be disastrous.

…

This presumed pale-blue-dot human unity divorced from reference to the imago Dei, humanity’s equality as creature, gets at the heart of an anthropological divide vital to all political questions. Right and left agree, scarcity as such is a matter of conflict, not of natural potential, but where the right sees in this conflict a reaction to locality and natural difference, the left sees an unnatural imposition, only libido dominandi. The religious right can point to fallenness here, but also to a theological tradition that sees natural government as existing in potential even prior to Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the garden; had our first parents remained in growing grace, they and their children would still have not been identical, equal in an earthly sense, because of differences of age and sex and aptitude, and so authority and direction would still be needed for the full flourishing of that unfallen human community.

In his political philosophy qua business book Zero to One, cowritten with Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters, Peter Thiel presents four quadrants for speculating about the future. On one axis is the classic optimist and pessimist dichotomy, and on the other is definite and indefinite thought. Moore and Roberts seem unable to pick a plane for their thinking.

…

The trouble for the serious leftists like Moore and Roberts is that, like the neoliberal masters of the universe they despise, they want global action. At the planetary scale, everything becomes indefinite, and a commitment to class conflict against the bourgeois middle means obvious and existent state-level solutions, such as nuclear power, are off the table. Cheap electricity will perpetuate reactionary social arrangements, or something like that. But the right is all about the definite: definite places, definite people, definite solutions. There is solidarity in the nation and the family; natio means “birth.”

The right, then, has a real chance of providing a more compelling alternative as the nexus of political problems that are put under the label “climate” comes to a head in the next couple decades, problems such as mass migration and energy supply and food production and natural disasters and declining birth rates and hormonal disruption and mass die-off. Moore and Roberts are almost there when they write, “We are dependent on a particular climatic system, a fact which, for most of us, modernity has obscured.” Replace “we” with “Americans” and “climatic” with “environmental.” As they put it, “Thus, solidarity must extend not just to those humans and societies upon which we depend, but to the more-than-human nature that we exist within as well.” From sea to shining sea.

[arcticdementor]

Context determines meaning and readership matters. Like the parables, what is written for some is not written for all, and a few given to understand always implies a many left unpersuaded. Curtis Yarvin knows something of writing for the few, so it came as a not unwelcome surprise to find this last week that he had chosen to use a State of the Union blog post here by me to tee off a recent missive from his Substack, “Gray Mirror.” He objects to my hope, professed as “We are Going to Win,” and so wrote “You are going to lose” in reply. I will not blame him for either misunderstanding me or misrepresenting me; it serves his purposes, and his subscribers, to appear to be stabbing me in the front. It’s good theater and he knows his audience. I know mine.

Curtis Yarvin writes for courtiers and would-be courtiers and, if he is very lucky, for the statesman they surround. A latter day Baldassare Castiglione or Niccolo Machiavelli, in his Gray Mirror he advises a future prince on what it takes to rule. Safely presuming that the many of the few that are his readers will never have the chance to try their hand at a rod of iron, his reflections are more a glass to see through than to see the royal self in, a particular perspective on our politics that clarifies what is usually distorted. Indeed, he writes for people like me, and so I will not bother you or him with a line by line response to his bits-and-pieces use of my short post, but simply say I happily take his point—that the institutions of the regime must be razed or wrested away from those who hold them if there is to be any national political reform—and propose in answer that this is his readers’ job, not yours.

Who are you? I write for a hyperlocal elite (at that Yarvin will scoff), outside D.C., Boston, and S.F., for pastors of churches, teachers at private schools, leaders of regional nonprofits, for small business owners, and peers eager to occupy town and county seats. I write for people who know that things have gotten very bad, that the country is sick, that even civilization is lying in hospice, but who—because, like Yarvin, they understand the ballot box is not a mechanism of power—know with equal certainty that whatever it is that they can do about all this, whatever they are responsible for, is near at hand. You are not fighting here in the capital, and your fight is not here, but at the homefront.

…

My rhetoric is based on ethos; I am making ethical arguments about what kind of people readers of The American Conservative outside the Beltway should want to be. I am assuming the existence of a community that needs only to be spoken for to realize its own reality and draw courage from the fact that its members do not labor alone. Yarvin, programmer, theorist of cybernetics, writes with logos, explicating the logic and logics of power and rule. His appointed role is to remind his readers that the American state does not need a software update; it needs new hardware and a user who knows what he is doing. Call it CEO restoration or constitutionally royalist theory, maybe CRT for short.  

The protracted medieval culture war that historians call the Investiture Controversy—over whether earthly emperors or the Roman pope had prime shepherd’s power to appoint bishops and abbots, princes of the Church—had curious consequences in the city states of Italy. Under the names of Guelph and Ghibelline, the international politics of the Holy Roman Empire were translated into parties that survived the resolution of the original conflict. Guelphs were partisans of the pope, while Ghibellines made up the imperial party. Then with Pope Boniface VIII, the Guelphs split further, into Black and White, the Whites not Ghibellines, but no longer of the papal party, either. Dante Alighieri was exiled from Florence as a White Guelph, when the Black Guelphs took control of the city. The conflicts and rivalries persisted centuries after their initial cause had been basically decided.

Yarvin is perhaps best known for his coinage of “the Cathedral” to describe the culture-making and culture-enforcing institutions of elite America. While essays arguing that wokeness or progressivism or liberalism “is a new religion” are now very nearly overdone, he was early to the party observing parallels in form and function between churches of yore and puritans of now. Yarvin is a Ghibelline, or trying to be, and his condescension comes from worry and frustration, a worry and frustration that we (you and me, poor White Guelphs to him) don’t know of what the Black Guelphs in control are capable—or the fact that we, like Dante, are already in exile.

[arcticdementor]

Tanner Greer, who blogs under the title “The Scholar’s Stage,” is one of the most incisive independent writers commenting on American politics today. Some very smart people read him; some very powerful people read him; sometimes, those people are the same people. In a recent post, “Culture Wars Are Long Wars,” Greer makes just that important titular point, reminding us that it is in the turnover of generations that society is truly transformed. This is an old observation: think of the comments of Socrates on education in The Republic or the Bible’s perpetual use of the language of generations—some are crooked and perverse but others will return to the path of wisdom. But it is also a truth that is easy to forget in the hubbub of partisan legislative battles, so that the “culture war” is generally waged by conservatives not with the end in mind, that is the production of a new generation confident in what it means to be a human being and an American, but rather for little horse race victories in elections and the judiciary. The voters are, too often, taken for a ride. 

…

The task in the meantime, then, is to light whatever little candles of culture you can in the face of an encroaching dark and keep them lit by any means necessary, conventionally political or otherwise. Then marry, have children, and add fuel to the fires till they become conflagrations big enough to burn away the chaff. The twilight that is falling now will only make it easier to see the other points of light, to find your companions in the long war’s fight.