I attempted to publish this comment at Small Dead Animals a couple of days ago. It was repeatedly rejected. See my comments about its rejection at the bottom of this post.
NOTE: Chaplin Gale has been suspended for making suggestive remarks to a fellow officer.
Captain Beatrice Gale
Chaplain Beatrice Gale, the Canadian Armed Forces’ first openly transgender chaplain, says:
“It makes us stronger when we share our challenges, and I hope that being a transgender chaplain sends a message to the 2SLGBTQI+ community that the Royal Canadian Chaplain Service cares. That it cares for that community.”
"I am a woman", he declares.
No, he is not. He simply is not.
Human biology is immutable. This is a fundamental truth. But Mr. Gale does not realise this. This makes him a fool. In addition, he is also a fraud and a coward because of his lack of the mental and moral qualities that constitute character.
Culture is an indispensable part of human existence but culture must always be tethered to biological reality. But when culture simply becomes a vehicle for wishful thinking eventually there will be a disconnect from reality and there will be consequences
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Transexuals and their supporters scream and demand that we become complicit in their fantasy world but if we do we will only find that:
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
And now we have the devil's disciples infiltrating the temple, disguised as women.
I attempted to comment, here on SDA, about this person on or about Mar 31/24. The comment immediately disappeared. I tried several more times but all of these attempts failed. On a hunch, I removed this passage:
Note: I tried several times to publish the offending passage but my comments immediately disappeared.
Your guess is as good as mine as to what was the reason is for these comment rejections.
I have put my original comment up on my blog. The part I removed is highlighted in red. You can link to the blog (I think) by clicking on my moniker.
Today, my favorite word is “schadenfreude”.
Maybe I am being paranoid but….
If you read my comment today you could have concluded that I must be a very important person for some third party to be censoring my comments here at SDA. Or maybe it’s SDA that is very important. But, why are my comments being censored and how does this third party know when and where to censor?
There is only one answer that answers any of these questions: it is the federal government (or possibly just the military and/or intelligence branches) that is doing the censoring and they can only know when and where a comment is worthy of their attention because they monitor all comments (in Canada?) all the time.
Am I being paranoid or is this conclusion widely known and accepted and I am simply out of the loop?
As for me, I am going to be more cautious when comment. What a bloody country!
In the early 1980’s there was a public affairs TV show on one of the Canadian networks that showed how CSIS tapped millions of telephones in Canada and monitored conversations with computers. If certain “trigger” words were spoken,the entire conversation was then recorded and examined by CSIS. It was supposed to be about preventing terrorism.
If they indulged in that kind of activity way back then, you can be damned sure they are doing so now,with much more sophistication. I would imagine many websites, especially conservative ones, are monitored regularly. I’d bet a small amount of money that SDA is on the LPC’s list of enemies, as well.
American civilization has been turned upside down, and we have a rendezvous soon with the once unthinkable and unimaginable.
Victor Davis Hanson Jan 08/23
In the last six months, we have borne witness to many iconic moments evidencing the collapse of American culture.
The signs are everywhere and cover the gamut of politics, the economy, education, social life, popular culture, foreign policy, and the military. These symptoms of decay share common themes.
Our descent is self-induced; it is not a symptom of a foreign attack or subterfuge. Our erosion is not the result of poverty and want, but of leisure and excess. We are not suffering from existential crises of famine, plague, or the collapse of our grid and fuel sources. Prior, far poorer, and war-torn generations now seem far better off than what we are becoming.
What is happening to us is not due to an adherence to a too strict conservative tradition but is almost exclusively the wage of the progressive project.
In short, we are seeing fissures that America has not experienced in our cultural history since the Civil War. The radical Left apparently feels such chaos, anarchy, and nihilism are necessary to topple past norms and customs and thereby adhere to a socialist, equity agenda that no one in normal times would stomach.
Some of the decay is existential and fundamental; some anecdotal and illustrative. But either way, while decline came about gradually over decades, its sudden and abrupt chaos during the three years of Biden’s presidency has shocked Americans.
As long as interest rates were de facto zero, both parties ran up gargantuan debt. Now the national debt has hit $34 trillion. But two odd things have also happened under the Biden administration that are beginning to undermine the very existence of the U.S. financial system:
1) Interest rates have soared from de facto zero and are on a trajectory to 5.5%—meaning that the interest on the debt, in theory, in the not too distant future will require 20 percent of the annual budget, squeezing out both entitlements and defense.
2) Yet the upcoming rendezvous with economic Armageddon has not slowed a Biden administration intent on borrowing nearly $2 trillion in the current fiscal year.
The public is baffled: is the Left playing chicken with us? Is the strategy to “gorge the beast,” thereby demanding even higher federal taxes, which, combined with many state taxes, now exceed 50 percent of one’s income?
Is the goal massive “redistribution” by ensuring “equity” by gouging the middle class and rich? Or is the left’s goal more nihilistic: to force a remedy for insolvency by ensuring high inflation, renouncing government debt, or government appropriation of private capital?
Military Crises
Americans have lost deterrence abroad.
Confusion reigns among the public over why the Biden administration fled from Afghanistan, leaving behind billions of dollars of munitions and equipment in the hands of Taliban terrorists. Why did it allow a Chinese spy balloon to traverse the continental U.S. with impunity?
And why did Biden signal to Russia when preparing an invasion of Ukraine that our reaction would depend on the magnitude of Putin’s offensive? Why has military recruitment cratered, shorting the Pentagon of thousands of soldiers?
Why do Iranian proxies attack almost daily U.S. installations abroad and ships in the Red Sea, apparently without fear of reprisal? Why did Hamas slaughter Israelis on October 7? What explains our indifference or ennui?
Is the answer a deliberate effort to curb supposed American “arrogance” by once more leading from behind? Are we rebooting the Obama Administration’s bankrupt idea of empowering an Iranian crescent from Teheran to Damascus to Beirut to Gaza to ensure “creative tension” between Israel and the moderate Arabs and Persian-led theocratic Shiites?
Why do our officer classes rotate in and out of lucrative military consultantships, lobbying billets, and board membership on corporate defense contractors—as if their innate talents rather than their lifelong contacts with current serving procurement officers earned their exorbitant fees?
Why did our retired four stars with disdain violate the uniform code of military justice by serially and publicly trashing the commander in chief? Why has the Pentagon revolutionized the entire system of recruitment, promotions, and tenure in the armed forces by predicating them in large part on race, gender, and sexual orientation rather than merit or battlefield efficacy? Did we learn anything from the old Soviet commissariat system? Would we prefer to lose a war by promoting equity than win one by ensuring liberty?
Why did the top brass go after supposedly “insurrectionist” white males (who died at twice their demographics during combat in Iraq and Afghanistan) in the military, only to discover from their own internal investigations that no such cabal of “domestic terrorists” existed, and only to drive out thousands more of the maligned by stupidly requiring COVID vaccinations from those with naturally acquired immunity?
In sum, the U.S. will either undergo a post-Vietnam-like revolution in the military or, in late Roman imperial fashion, our armed forces will be unable to defend the interests or indeed, the very safety, of the U.S.
Race
Why, when so-called non-white ethnicities and races were achieving parity with or exceeding the majority population in per capita income and when racial intermarriage was commonplace, did we blow up the values of the civil rights movement and revert to precivilizational tribalism? Who were the sophists who convinced us that racially segregated dorms, safe spaces, and graduations, or using race as an arbiter of admissions and hiring, were not racist?
The Sexes
Did anyone in, say, 2004 believe that in just twenty years, the Left would try to mainstream the previously rare medical malady of gender dysphoria into a transgendered civil rights issue by insisting on three rather than two sexes?
Would anyone have believed that leftists, gays, and feminists would have done their best to destroy a half-century of female athletic achievement by allowing biological males to compete in women’s sports and thereby erase the record performances of three generations of women?
Would anyone have believed that a feminist and accomplished swimmer like Riley Gaines would be cornered, swarmed, threatened, and barricaded in at a university for the crime of daring to state the obvious: that transgendered women are still, in terms of their musculoskeletal physiques and frames, males and thereby have no business competing in women’s sports?
Would anyone have believed that a gay senate aide would have engaged in passive, unprotected sex in a public and hallowed Senate chamber, filmed in graphic detail his act of sodomy, had it circulated among friends and social media, and then, when outrage followed, claimed victimhood by accusing those offended of being homophobic toward him and his active homosexual partner?
Lawlessness
We are witnessing the steady erasure of jurisprudence, both civil and criminal. Does the law as we knew it a mere decade ago still exist? Massive looting with impunity is now largely exempt from justice in our major blue-state cities. In Compton, a van slams into a Mexican bakery as waiting crowds swarm, loot, and destroy the business. And for what? Some free pies and cakes? Or the nihilist delight in ruining the livelihood of a hardworking family business?
Such smash-and-grabs rob stores of billions of dollars in revenue each year. Can we even comprehend that employees and security guards are now ordered to stand down, as if the apprehension of such thieves might in some way seem illiberal or racist?
Does anyone even care that pro-Hamas protestors—many in America as guests on green cards and student visas—shouted support for the October 7 massacre of Jews, screamed for the destruction of Israel and the Jews in it, shut down the Manhattan and Golden Gate Bridges, defiled the Lincoln Memorial and White House gates, and disrupted Christmas celebrations in our major cities with complete exemption? Is storming the California legislature, and disrupting it in session, now a felony in the manner of those convicted after January 6, or do we have two sets of laws, dependent on ideology, race, and party affiliation?
In one of the most chilling videos in memory, Las Vegas Clark County District Court Judge Mary Kay Holthus was recently violently attacked by an unshackled career felon defendant (with three prior violent felony convictions and facing additional new felony counts). The assailant, Deobra Redden, leaped over the justice’s bench with ease and began beating her and pulling her hair before two bailiffs, with great difficulty, managed to restrain him. Why was Redden out on parole given his violent record, and why was he not shackled given his toxic past? His self-admitted effort to kill the judge, his ability nearly to pull it off, and the record of past leniency accorded him are a commentary on a sick society.
But then again, in our major cities, George-Soros-subsidized prosecutors have all but destroyed civil society. They have been systematically releasing felons with violent criminal records on the same day they are arrested, freeing convicted felons early from prisons and jails, and sabotaging the law by arbitrary enforcement on the grounds that it is inherently either unfair or racist.
The post civilization civil bookend to that precivilizational subterfuge was a systematic legal effort, for the first time in American history, to remove in an election year the leading primary and general election candidate Donald Trump from various state ballots. The Soviet-like charge was that he was guilty of “insurrection,” a crime he has never been charged with, much less convicted of. Meanwhile, three state prosecutors and one special federal counsel—all leftists and some previously bragging in their own election campaigns of their intention to destroy Trump—have charged candidate Trump with an array of felonies. The vast majority of Americans agree Trump would never have been so charged had he just not sought to seek reelection—or had been a liberal Democrat.
Education
In ancient times, the President of the Harvard Corporation was a signature scholar and intellectual, befitting Harvard’s own self-regard as the world’s most preeminent university. No longer.
Now-resigned president Coleen Gay’s meteoric career was based on a flimsy record of a mere 11 articles—the majority of them plagiarized. Her entire career was fueled by the tired pretext that the privileged Gay was somehow deserving of special deference given her race and gender.
Confronted with such corruption, the Harvard Corporation, its legal team, and 700 faculty sought to downplay Gay’s intellectual theft. Indeed, they smeared her critics as racist—only then to deal with her new billet as a professor of Political Science with a long record of plagiarism that was exempt from the sort of punishments dealt out to students and faculty for less egregious defenses.
How did Ivy League degrees so quickly become mostly certifications of ideological and woke orthodoxy? Or is it worse than that? Does a Stanford history major or Yale literature graduate know anything, respectively, about the Civil War or Shakespeare’s plays? Do they even know that we, the public, know that they don’t know?
Was Elizabeth Warren really Harvard’s first law professor of color? Was Claudine Gay truly an impressive and respected scholar of political science? Are the governing members of the Harvard Corporation the nation’s best and brightest?
How in less than five years did our elite universities destroy meritocracy, abolish SAT requirements, require DEI oaths and pledges, and mirror the worst commissariat institutions of the old Warsaw Pact nations and Soviet Union? How and why these elite universities blew themselves up in a mere decade will baffle historians for decades to come.
The End of Sovereignty
The Biden administration has shattered federal immigration law, as some 10 million illegal entries will have crossed unlawfully and with impunity in the first Biden term—all by intent. The southern border is not merely porous; it no longer even exists.
Did the Left want new constituents? New entitlement recipients to grow government and raise taxes on the clingers and deplorables?
Did it want a larger DEI base to replace the steady exodus of non-whites from left-wing agendas? Does it shun sovereignty, preferring a global village without arbitrary borders? Do these utopians in Malibu and Martha’s Vineyard similarly feel their own yards and grounds need no walls, no barriers, and no boundaries to deny the underprivileged their rights to enjoy what the predatory classes possess?
In this new America of ours, Joe Biden is hale and savvy, while Hunter did nothing wrong. Our heroes are Dylan Mulvaney, Gen. Rachel Levine, and the two Sams, Bankman-Fried and Brinton.
In today’s America, Karin Jean-Pierre is truthful, while Alejandro Mayorkas is honest. An innocent and saintly George Floyd was randomly murdered; his death proof of systemic police racism. And defunding the police brought calm and quiet, in the way our border is secure and the homeless are mere victims.
Dr. Jill is an impressive academic. Oprah and LeBron are the downtrodden and victimized. Gen. Mark Milley is a brave maverick, and so is Adam Schiff. The flight from Afghanistan marked a brilliantly organized retreat.
The Chinese balloon really did not take too many pictures of sensitive areas. January 6 was an armed insurrection, preplanned by fiery conspirators and revolutionaries. Ashli Babbitt deserved to be blasted in the neck for entering a broken window.
Kamala Harris is a wordsmith. Russian collusion really happened. So did Russian laptop disinformation. Christopher Steele’s dossier was mostly true, in the fashion of Claudine Gay’s dissertation and Barack Obama’s memoir. And 51 former intelligence authorities bravely came forward to offer their expertise in certifying that Hunter’s laptop was cooked up in Moscow.
With all this, what do we think the Iranians, Putin’s Russians, the communist Chinese, the Houthis, Hezbollah, and Hamas now think of the United States?
That we are the nation that won World War II or fled from Afghanistan? Did the eight million who broke our laws and simply walked across our border respect us, fear us, admire us, or come here to manipulate and use us? Did Hamas appreciate the hundreds of millions of dollars we gave them, in the same way Iran was friendlier after we lifted the sanctions?
In sum, American civilization has been turned upside down, and we have a rendezvous soon with the once unthinkable and unimaginable.
On June 16, it will be nine years to the day since Donald Trump rode down that golden escalator in the Manhattan tower bearing his name and announced his candidacy for president of the United States.
During those nine years, his name and image have dominated not just American political discourse but the entirety of American culture, and even world culture, in a way that may well be without precedent in the entire history of the Republic.
Yes, the name and image of Franklin D. Roosevelt loomed over the country during his twelve years in office, just as the name and image of Abraham Lincoln were ubiquitous during his four-year presidency. But FDR’s centrality was wrapped up in the Great Depression and, then, World War II, and to think of Lincoln is to think, first and last, about the Civil War. By contrast, Trump’s predominance is in one sense just about Trump himself – Trump as symbol – and in another sense about something even larger than the colossal historical events associated with FDR and Honest Abe. Trump didn’t become iconic by presiding over an economic crisis or prosecuting a major war; he became iconic by doing something that no president before him had ever done. He took on the establishments of both major political parties, told some harsh truths about the ways in which those establishments had betrayed the American people and their Constitution, and rooted his presidential campaigns, and his entire term in office, in a determination to restore to the people the kind of government that the Founders had intended.
In doing so, he also became an emblematic figure for people around the world whose own governments were betraying the freedoms on which they had been founded.
What about Reagan? Yes, he too was a revolutionary hero: in the wake of the appalling Jimmy Carter, that master of malaise, the Gipper spoke of morning in America, speechified ardently about the evils of Communism, and championed with gusto the cause of freedom around the world. Still, it must be admitted that during his two terms he did precious little to drain the Swamp. He didn’t even go so far as to abolish the perfidious Department of Education, which Carter had just created in 1979, and which Reagan had inveighed against passionately.
Perhaps Reagan sensed that if he’d tried to do any more than he did to try to challenge the Deep State, he’d have ended up as Trump did several decades later, with the whole D.C. apparatus out to destroy him, bankrupt him, and put him behind bars. Besides, Reagan had his hands full bringing down the Soviet Union. So I’m not here to diminish Reagan. He was a giant. But even at the height of his popularity he didn’t take up as much space in the minds of people around the world as Trump has done during the last nine years.
In his heyday, Reagan shared the international stage with Thatcher and Gorbachev, as FDR did with Churchill and Stalin; Trump shares the world stage with no one. As for most of the other modern presidents – Ford, Carter, Bush Sr. – they were, by comparison to Trump, utter pygmies.
The point is that the Trump ascendancy is, in modern times, unique. To find a rough counterpart to his utter domination of the society and culture, you have to look to the great dictators, from antiquity right up to the twentieth century – Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Mao. The big difference, of course, is that Trump, whatever his detractors may say, is the furthest thing from a dictator: he’s a liberator. Besides, dictators have no sense of humor about themselves; and their admirers, unlike Trump’s fans, don’t feel safe making affectionate jokes about them.
In his Farewell Address, President Eisenhower – who had led the Allies to victory in Europe during World War II, ushering in an era when the U.S. was by far the most powerful nation in all of human history – famously warned us of the dangers of that power. “Throughout America’s adventure in free government,” he said, “our basic purposes have been to keep the peace; to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among people and among nations.”
In the postwar era, the U.S. enjoyed an unprecedented opportunity to achieve these goals. Yet it was unwise, he counseled, in the name of finding government-funded cures for every ill, to allow “the public economy” to fall out of balance with the private. In particular, while it was vital to maintain a strong military, it was potentially worrying that Cold War circumstances had compelled the establishment of “a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions” and necessitated annual military expenditures that exceeded “the net income of all United State corporations.”
This new state of affairs, observed Eisenhower, posed the threat of “the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex” – in short, “the disastrous rise of misplaced power” that could ultimately “endanger our liberties or democratic processes.” America’s involvement in World War II, a brilliantly prosecuted conflict with a crystal-clear motive and goal and two exceedingly powerful enemies that had conquered and subjugated much of the earth’s surface, lasted only four years; what would Eisenhower have made of our eight confused, pointless, and ultimately futile years in iraq and twenty years in Afghanistan – the latter of which ended with billions of dollars worth of military equipment being left in the hands of the enemy?
A warrior by profession, trained in the art of deploying military power, Eisenhower the president was more concerned with placing limits on the menace posed by unrestricted power to individual freedom. What, then, would he have made of the Patriot Act, which was ratified after 9/11 in the name of protecting Americans from foreign enemies but which, as was obvious from the start, had the potential of impinging on Americans’ own freedoms? What, for that matter, would Eisenhower have made of the formation of the Homeland Security Department, the very name of which, at the time, sounded outrageously un-American? Then there’s this. While Ike’s warning about the military-industrial is well known, less familiar is the fact that, in the same speech, he warned about the downside of the scientific and technological revolution – namely, “the danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
How aghast would he have been at every aspect of the COVID lockdown – from the severe rules about masks and distancing to the draconian limitations on freedom of movement and assembly? What would he have made of the pathetic readiness of so many millions of Americans to knuckle under to these unconstitutional mandates and to shun relatives, friends, coworkers, and neighbors who, asserting their fundamental rights as Americans, admirably refused to do so?
One thing Eisenhower didn’t mention in his Farewell Address was America’s intelligence services. The Central Intelligence Agency, founded in 1947, grew out of the wartime Office of Strategic Services. The National Security Agency came along in 1952, the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1961. Not all that long ago, many of us were watching the TV series Homeland (2011-20) and cheering on the exploits of CIA agents Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) and Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin), because we thought of the real-life counterparts of these characters as working for us.
Of course, all of these intelligence agencies were Cold War creations, purportedly necessitated by what was quite genuinely an existential face-off with the Soviet Union; and for most of us who lived during the Cold War, almost anything that the CIA did to keep us one step ahead of the Soviets and to prevent the expansion of Communism was worth it. Yes, we used to read about the CIA’s suspected role in certain revolutions and assassinations, and we may have felt twinges of confusion or discomfort about some of these actions; but whatever CIA agents did, we told ourselves that they understood these matters better than we did and that their long-term motives were admirable – that, in other words, they were fighting for our freedom in the struggle for global dominance against Soviet totalitarianism.
After the Cold War ended, new antagonists emerged. But what had been – or had, at least, seemed – a relatively clear big picture became a muddle. Why was our government spending blood and treasure to fight Islamic enemies in the Middle East even as unpleasant but strategically relevant facts about Islam were being systematically scrubbed from military and intelligence training manuals, insufficiently vetted Muslim immigrants were being welcomed to America in huge numbers, and politicians of both parties (with the unwavering aid of the legacy media) were constantly reassuring us that Islam was a religion of peace?
Meanwhile, what had once been the Steel Belt – a region of cities that, thanks to their booming manufacturing sectors, had previously been populated by some of the most affluent factory workers on the planet – was gradually being transformed into the Rust Belt, as jobs were exported en masse to China, Mexico, and elsewhere. Politically, these blue-collar workers were left high and dry. The Democrats (once the party of labor, or at least of labor unions) were now more interested in cultivating certain minority groups who were officially considered to be oppressed.
As the party moved from traditional liberalism to something that bore an uncomfortable resemblance to Communism, it also increasingly became the political home of corporate bigwigs and other high-income types who’d been brainwashed at elite colleges by far-left professors. As for the members of the Republican establishment, the large-scale betrayal of decent, hard-working middle Americans mattered less to them than the lower prices of goods that were now being produced by underpaid drudges in China and Mexico. Meanwhile, both parties were perfectly happy with mass illegal immigration – the Democrats because they wanted the votes, the Republicans because this phenomenon meant the suppression of wages for low-skilled jobs.
For blue-collar voters who’d been financially ruined by the drastic decline of American manufacturing, Trump was a godsend – a politician who, unlike the entire Washington establishment, was actually on their side. And for those of us who hadn’t really been paying much attention to the plight of those blue-collar voters, Trump was an eye-opener. Among other things, he made some of us recognize for the first time the extent to which, in practice, the two parties were, to a remarkable extent, one.
I remember not so many years ago seeing a photograph of George W. Bush in a cozy moment with Hillary Clinton. I can’t stand either of them, but I have to admit, to my great embarrassment, that my reaction to the picture at the time was to admire the ability of political opponents to treat each other not just with respect but with what looked like genuine affection. Today, needless to say, I see that picture in an entirely different light. It’s a picture of two people who were and are part of the same exclusive club, who have profited (and whose families have profited) from the same system, and who, while supporting different candidates in elections, were content with the results so long as the winners were reliable insiders who had no intention of trying to change the game.
It was, as I say, Trump who opened the eyes of millions of us to this sordid, cynical reality. Some of us may have been at least somewhat aware of the extent to which America’s government was in the hands of a permanent Deep State, and some of us may even have recognized just how much of a betrayal this was of the Constitution and of the people. But Trump, with his passionate denunciations of the Swamp, focused our attention on this outrage. He forced us to realize that for a long time it hadn’t really mattered all that much whom we voted into national office, given that a significant amount of the real power in Washington was actually in the hands of the executive departments, the intelligence community, and agencies like the IRS.
This was why the issues that really mattered to American voters – such as mass immigration and the mass export of blue-collar jobs – had consistently been ignored by both parties and unmentioned in campaign speeches.
But it wasn’t just Trump who opened our eyes. So did his enemies. The desperate effort by Obama, the Clintons, and their cronies to tie him to Russia – a charge that was ridiculous on the face of it, but that was pushed by the media without surcease – only served, in the end, to show just how much of a threat to their power they recognized him to be. Ditto the unprecedented attacks on Trump, even while he was in office, by military and intelligence officials who were technically under his command.
Two baseless impeachments of Trump, the raid on Mar-a-Lago, the blizzard of ridiculous prosecutions directed at him, and the attempt by New York’s attorney general to seize his properties all underscored both the political establishment’s desperation to remove him from the chessboard and the nakedly undemocratic lengths to which public officials all over the country and at every level are willing to go in order to preserve the Deep State in its current form. And there are many more developments, of course, that have demonstrated the fierceness of Trump’s enemies’ determination to crush him and everything he represents – among them the long-term detention of January 6 protesters, the over-the-top raids on the homes of Trump allies like Roger Stone, and the angry, disturbing speech that Biden gave in September 2022 against that blood-red background.
All of these events showed just how much contempt the Democratic elites have for the white working-class Americans who dare to recognize in Donald Trump a champion of the people and of America’s founding values. And nothing reflected that contempt more powerfully than a single word uttered by Hillary Clinton in 2016: “deplorables.”
Trump and his movement, say his enemies, represent a “threat to our democracy.” The fact is that Trump is the symbol of everything that stands in the way of the efforts by the legacy media and social-media giants (X excepted), as well as by the United Nations, European Union, World Economic Forum, and other international organizations, to undermine democracy – by, among other things, silencing dissent from the progressive agenda and plotting to remove beef from our diets, deny us air travel, and confine us to “fifteen-minute cities.”
In short, the very people who label Trump a “threat to our democracy” are the ones who are intent on dismantling democracy – not just in America but throughout what we used to call the free world. Take Justin Trudeau’s freezing of the bank accounts of truckers who protested the COVID lockdowns.
Note how British police give free rein to protestors who call for Jewish genocide but arrest patriots who dare to wave the Union Jack. And witness what happened just the other day in Brussels, where local authorities sent a battalion of police to close down a gathering of top-flight conservative leaders from around Europe, including Nigel Farage, Éric Zemmour, and Viktor Orbán.
For many of us, the chilling abuses of power by left-wingers who are determined to bury the MAGA movement and its international counterparts haven’t just led us to worry about the present and future of American freedom. They’ve caused us to wonder just how free we’ve really been during the last half-century or so. It was in 1961 that Eisenhower gave his Farewell Address. He was succeeded by John F. Kennedy, who among other things wanted to shutter the CIA, which he recognized as having gotten out of control. He was assassinated in 1963.
The Warren Commission, which concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was the killer of JFK and had acted alone, was the ultimate Deep State entity, consisting of the Chief Justice, the head of the CIA, the former head of the World Bank, two Congressmen, and two veteran Senators. Over the years, Roger Stone and other investigators have not only shown the Warren Commission’s conclusions to be utterly at odds with mountains of evidence but have also provided a great deal of information in support of the hypothesis that the murder was, in fact, the ultimate Deep State crime, involving LBJ, the CIA, and the FBI.
There are those who, reading backwards from the current treatment of Trump by his powerful enemies, now say that the JFK assassination was the moment when the free Republic that Eisenhower spoke of with such reverence and concern in his Farewell Address underwent a dramatic behind-the-scenes transformation.
Stone and others have pointed out that our involvement in the Vietnam War, however legitimately motivated by a desire to contain Communism in southeast Asia, also was of great personal profit to LBJ, who stepped up our war effort almost immediately after entering the Oval Office. Deeply troubling questions have even been raised about the 1981 assassination attempt on President Reagan, which may, after all, have had less to do with Jodie Foster than the news reports would have it.
Yes, splashy books presenting revisionist theories about the JFK assassination and other historical crises of the last half a century are nothing new. But not until Trump came along and pulled back the curtain on the extent of Deep State shenanigans in our own time did it become much easier to believe in the hypotheses put forward in those books.
Yes, we’ve always known that American history, like all of human history, has been full of corruption: the 1919 World Series was fixed; any number of elections, including, famously, the one that first sent LBJ to Congress, were rigged; everybody knows that JFK won in 1960 because the Mob took care of Illinois and LBJ took care of Texas. But although most of us maintained a healthy American cynicism about professional politicians and big government, we still basically trusted the system and believed that our votes (usually) counted.
No, the U.S. government was scarcely perfect. But what human institution is? America’s founding documents were based on an unblinkered recognition of the depth of human moral frailty. Not only, moreover, could we hardly expect contemporary politicians to measure up to Adams and Jefferson; the fact was that even Adams and Jefferson were not without blemish: the former had signed the Alien and Sedition Act, and the latter’s purchase of Louisiana had no constitutional warrant.) But it was the advent of Trump, and the extraordinary scale of the campaign to take him down, that made many of us realize the degree to which our leaders in Washington had rejected the dictates of the Constitution.
Some observers gripe that we all think and talk too much about Trump – that we make more of him than he is or deserves, that our preoccupation with him serves to obscure the importance of other figures on the political scene and reflects a severe lack of a sense of historical proportion. On the contrary, I don’t think that most of us, however much we may love (or hate) him, fully appreciate the extraordinary scale of the revolution he has wrought.
Other figures on the political scene? What political scene? Trump transformed the political scene, and there’s no going back. It’s beyond strange these days to try to read most of the veteran inside-the-Beltway commentators, both Democrat and Republican, because they genuinely seem to believe – or to hope against hope – that somehow the clock can be turned back, the genie put back in the box, and pre-Trump politics as usual restored.
Such thoughts are nothing short of delusional. Tens of millions of decent, patriotic Americans are not magically going to unlearn what they’ve learned in the last nine years. They’re not going to forget the vile lies, poisonous acts, and outright treason of Obama, the Clintons, Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler, Rachel Maddow, John Brennan, Merrick Garland, Antony Blinken, Alejandro Mayoras, and a host of others.
They’re not going to go back to believing in the good faith of the D.C. establishment any more than you and I are going to go back to believing in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. Because Trump did indeed effect nothing less than a revolution – a revolution of the American mind and heart and soul. He woke us up. He educated us, in a way that a teacher with a more sober and restrained classroom manner would never have been able to do.
He showed us who our leaders really are and showed us who we, if we dare to take heart and take action, might be. He encouraged us – inspired us – to take our country back, all the while believing in its principles, its history, and (in spite of everything) its enduring promise.
Extreme dieting is the latest way for the mega-rich to signal their wealth and status
“I don’t want all this shit, shrieks Logan Roy, characteristically hot-tempered, in the opening episode of Succession’s second season.
The “shit” in question is platter after platter of shucked oysters, fat orange prawns, and lobsters smothered in garlic butter served up on beds of ice. “Pizza! We’ll have pizza,” Logan commands. And so his staff carry away the dishes teeming with crustaceans and unceremoniously dump them into the bins outside.
The emergency pizzas are duly ordered and laid out on the dining table as the Roy family get down to business, but these too remain completely untouched.
In Succession, status is signaled by what characters eat – or don’t eat.
When Cousin Greg brings along his arriviste date to Logan’s birthday party – the one with the “ludicrously capacious bag” – Tom Wambsgans quips that she’s “wolfing all the canapés like a famished warthog”.
Tom occasionally reveals his own middle-class greed and snobbery through his irrepressible excitement about fine food, as in the scene where he introduces Greg to the pleasures of eating deep-fried ortolan.
Later, when he’s threatened with prison time, the first thing he frets about is the “prison food” and the logistics of making “toilet wine”. By contrast, the Roys, the billionaires atop the Waystar Royco media empire, seem to barely eat or drink anything at all.
Succession is fiction, granted. But it remains an impressively accurate (and well-researched) vignette of the lives of the mega-rich. Like the Roys, the one per cent are increasingly styling themselves as having conquered and subdued their appetites.
X co-founder Jack Dorsey once admitted to fasting for 22 hours a day, while multimillionaire biohacker Bryan Johnson has previously claimed to do a 23-hour daily fast. Many other Silicon Valley workers swear by meal replacement shakes like Soylent and Huel under the guise of “biohacking”.
But extreme fasting isn’t just confined to tech bros: Bella Hadid’s morning routine video featured over 20 different supplements and vitamins and just one bite of a sad-looking croissant.
Of course, the most obvious example is Ozempic, the weight loss drug du jour among the elites, which works by suppressing hunger. Ozempic’s impact has been so seismic that analysts have reckoned the drug could have an unprecedented impact on food consumption.
“I obviously don’t know when someone is taking drugs,” Anthony Geich, director of guest relations at Priyanka Chopra’s haute Indian restaurant Sona, told The Cut back in 2023. “[But] I’ve definitely noticed the trend of salads being ordered more, or people who are boxing their food up at the end of the night.”
A person’s relationship to food has always revealed a lot about their class. The English king Henry I famously died after eating “a surfeit of lampreys”.
In the UK, the connotations carried by different foodstuffs have always been “heavily dependent on scarcity,” explains Pen Vogler, author of Stuffed: A History of Good Food and Hard Times in Britain. “The economists’ old friend, the supply and demand curve, is a fairly reliable indicator of what foods are used to signal high status: venison and game, the sale of which were highly controlled, from the Norman invasion onwards; spices in Medieval and Tudor England; French food in the 19th century,” she says. “For centuries anything imported was high status – and we still grant ‘middle class’ to imported foods such as avocado or quinoa – even though they might be peasant foods in their countries of origin.”
As food choices are so closely linked to status, it follows that we also view certain body types as more ‘desirable’ than others. “Fatness used to be a symbol of wealth and lack of need – and therefore desirable – whereas thinness was associated with poverty – and therefore undesirable,” explains Dr Maxine Woolhouse, a senior lecturer in Psychology at Leeds Beckett University with expertise in social class and eating practices.
“In contemporary times, some trends have flipped.” Our work-centric society leaves little time for people – particularly people on low incomes – to plan, purchase and cook healthy food or exercise, and as Dr Woolhouse says, “this is a key reason why fatness is now more associated with the working classes as opposed to thinness.”
Today, despite the ‘body positivity’ movement’s best efforts, Western culture continues to valorise thinness. It's a trend which has had a devastating impact on public health.
In the UK, around 1.25 million people in the UK have an eating disorder and the number is rising sharply.
Society has never prized thinness more, and yet it has never been so unattainable. “We are surrounded by so much food now, it is harder not to eat than to eat,” Vogler explains. “So many things push food upon us: marketing, social media, TV advertising, delivery apps, supermarket meal deals, cheap ultra-processed food which is designed to make us eat more.”
Things are very different for the elite. “The mega-rich don’t have to eat obesogenic food,” Vogler says. “It might be quite tough in our food and social media environment to be slim – and healthy too – but the mega-rich have the resources they need to do it: access to good fresh food, education, space, time, social validation.”
It’s also worth noting that Ozempic is still primarily used by the wealthy, with reports claiming that users of the drug are concentrated in affluent areas like Manhattan and Hollywood.
“Being able to demonstrate a lack of need for material goods, like food, suggests social transcendence” – Dr Maxine Woolhouse
Consequently, hosting a lavish banquet or ordering lobster is no longer a sufficient signifier of status; today, a sign of true wealth is the ability to forgo food entirely.
Eating essentially betrays a person’s most basic human needs; in an era obsessed with ‘self-optimisation’, not eating suggests that a person is somehow ‘beyond’ needs and has achieved total mastery of their body with a heightened capacity for efficiency and focus.
“There is a history in Judeo-Christian societies – and likely in many other religions, hence the widespread practice of fasting – where demonstrating a lack of need for material things, especially food, and being able to demonstrate self-control and discipline are signs of spiritual transcendence,” Dr Woolhouse says.
Famously, Italian Saint Catherine of Siena would fast for prolonged periods of time as a means of demonstrating her devotion to God through extreme self-control. “But there’s also a class dimension to this,” Dr Woolhouse continues, “because being able to demonstrate a lack of need for material goods, like food, suggests social transcendence too; it’s symbolic of living a life whereby our material needs aren’t a daily concern.”
She adds that “fad diets are very unlikely to take off in societies where there are food shortages or food insecurity.”
It’s still jarring to watch celebrities openly admit to fasting for 23 hours a day or taking 14 different supplement pills in lieu of a balanced breakfast.
“It normalises and sanctions practises that in other contexts would be regarded as eating disordered,” Dr Woolhouse says. “When eating practices are packaged as ‘done in the name of health’, they are more socially acceptable and difficult to contest.”
She points out that a normal teenage girl restricting her diet in the same way as Johnson would likely be regarded as ill and in need of medical intervention. “What we, as a society, regard as ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ eating is contextual and largely rides on how those eating practices are framed.”
It’s obvious but bears reiterating that extreme, fad diet trends are both ineffectual and dangerous. But this trend isn’t really about food or health. It’s about performance.
It’s a way for the moneyed classes to signal their wealth and status and posture as above us mere mortals who debase ourselves by eating. Ultimately, though, there’s no such thing as a jab or pill or meal replacement shake that can totally eradicate the need to eat – so you might as well enjoy it.
I attempted to comment, here on SDA, about this person on or about Mar 31/24. The comment immediately disappeared. I tried several more times but all of these attempts failed. On a hunch, I removed this passage:
Note: I tried several times to publish the offending passage but my comments immediately disappeared.
Your guess is as good as mine as to what was the reason is for these comment rejections.
I have put my original comment up on my blog. The part I removed is highlighted in red. You can link to the blog (I think) by clicking on my moniker.
Today, my favorite word is “schadenfreude”.
Maybe I am being paranoid but….
If you read my comment today you could have concluded that I must be a very important person for some third party to be censoring my comments here at SDA. Or maybe it’s SDA that is very important. But, why are my comments being censored and how does this third party know when and where to censor?
There is only one answer that answers any of these questions: it is the federal government (or possibly just the military and/or intelligence branches) that is doing the censoring and they can only know when and where a comment is worthy of their attention because they monitor all comments (in Canada?) all the time.
Am I being paranoid or is this conclusion widely known and accepted and I am simply out of the loop?
As for me, I am going to be more cautious when comment. What a bloody country!
In the early 1980’s there was a public affairs TV show on one of the Canadian networks that showed how CSIS tapped millions of telephones in Canada and monitored conversations with computers. If certain “trigger” words were spoken,the entire conversation was then recorded and examined by CSIS. It was supposed to be about preventing terrorism.
If they indulged in that kind of activity way back then, you can be damned sure they are doing so now,with much more sophistication. I would imagine many websites, especially conservative ones, are monitored regularly. I’d bet a small amount of money that SDA is on the LPC’s list of enemies, as well.