If the Choice in 2024 Were So Obvious, the Election Wouldn’t Be So Close

From 2024:

Opinion | If the Choice in 2024 Were So Obvious, the Election Wouldn’t Be So Close - The New York Times

"There are many styles of Harris-Walz signage in my lovely university-town neighborhood, but the one that’s stickiest in my mind comes with a one-word slogan: “Harris-Walz 2024: Obviously.”

It’s sticky because it gets at something fundamental and fundamentally strange about Trump-era America. The divisions in our country are resilient, the reversion to a 50-50 split seemingly inevitable even amid plague and war and protest. Yet in those regions of America that officially have a professional commitment to debate — the realms of academic and journalistic argument — things are still mostly as they were when Donald Trump first emerged: To oppose him is completely obvious, obligatory, a matter of simple common sense.

Except that it can’t be that obvious or we wouldn’t be where we are. So let’s take one last survey of why some waverers might not yet be sold on Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, by returning to where this all began: The world of 2016, when Americans normally disinclined to vote for liberals were first informed that there was no other reasonable choice.

In that world, the Hillary Clinton campaign offered the country an implicit bargain. The promise was not some sort of dramatic bipartisan moderation to meet the Trumpist threat; on policy Clinton’s campaign was somewhat more left-wing than Barack Obama’s White House.

Rather the promise was that even if you disagreed with liberalism’s elites on policy, you could trust them in three crucial ways: They would avoid insanity, they would maintain stability, and they would display far greater intelligence and competence than Trump and his hangers-on.

The promise of sanity was broken first. Under Trumpian and especially Covidian conditions, the culture of elite liberalism lurched toward fanaticism, embracing radical and fanciful ideas to a degree that I had not imagined possible.

At the time some liberals resisted this lurch, but many others fell silent under pressures that felt almost McCarthyite in their threats to livelihoods and reputations.

Today more liberals concede that things got a bit kooky for a while. But the tendency is still to cast the high tide of wokeness as just a silly season whose effects were hardly comparable to right-wing depredations.

To me, though, the farther that we get from that moment, the more the remarkable the damage looks. For instance: After the liberal establishment was radicalized by the killing of George Floyd into a temporary repudiation of normal policing on “antiracist” grounds, America experienced a dramatic wave of homicides, on a scale unique among developed countries in the Covid era, in which thousands and thousands of people died unnecessarily.

Or again, America in that season mainstreamed experimental and unproven chemical and surgical treatments on thousands of gender-dysphoric young people, with the enthusiastic support of the medical establishment and then the Biden administration, because people with a normal degree of skepticism were afraid of being called transphobes.

Even before you get into harder-to-quantify issues of intellectual corruption, damage to schools and social life and mental health, there is a basic physical toll here — on “bodies,” to use the language that some progressives favor — that undermines the liberal claim to represent sanity against populist derangement.

And it undermines those claims even if the craziness has passed for now, because we could see how a figure like Kamala Harris behaved during that period. Is she a true believer in every notion she endorsed in the 2020 campaign? Perhaps not. But neither is there any good reason to think that she would offer principled resistance if liberalism entered a fevered state again.

Then alongside sanity at home, there is the failure of liberalism to deliver stability abroad. When Trump was first elected president I expected a period of testing — cross-border incursions, terrorist violence, a coordination between our adversaries against a wobbling Pax Americana.

All of that happened — but under Joe Biden’s leadership, not Trump’s. The position of the United States is more parlous today than when Trump left office, the risk of a genuine world war has intensified, and the cost of destabilization is already measured in thousands upon thousands of dead.

I don’t think all this reflects terrible case-by-case decision making by the Biden administration. But in the aggregate you can see a severe weakness in liberal internationalism right now — a tendency to extend itself rhetorically without the material investments required to back those promissory notes, a limpness in its relationship to allies who take our patience and protection for granted, a difficulty figuring out how to negotiate with enemies after you’ve spent so much time denouncing them. (We are clearly paying the price for missing a 2023-era window for an armistice in Ukraine.)

One might prefer well-meaning weakness to the Trumpian alternative of an amoral president seeking retrenchment, surrounded by foreign policy hands trying to use his mercurial persona to keep our rivals off balance. But it’s possible the Trumpian formula yielded better results for a reason, and it’s not at all clear that Harris is ready for the tests that Biden’s failing foreign policy will hand on to her.

Especially since the final promise of 2016-era liberalism — its claim to have a profound advantage in competence and intelligence — is not exactly vindicated by the Harris-Walz ticket.

I understand that we are close enough to the election that this last point will be furiously rejected. But notwithstanding the great rally around her after Biden’s bow-out, the Democratic nominee for president is still the Dan Quayle-like figure that almost everybody saw just a little while ago, still vague on policy and painful in extended interviews, still carrying a record as a vice president that inspires little confidence in her abilities.

By comparison Hillary Clinton was clearly a more serious policymaker, Joe Biden was clearly better at the work of politics, and both were more experienced in ways that matter to a chief executive. And Harris’s selection of running mate was a telling double-down on mediocrity: She picked a partner who would cast no shade on her own capabilities, even when there were clear political incentives to choose otherwise.

Better mediocrity than Trump — except that in 2024, unlike 2016, the Republican ticket has the ballast of a running mate who is capable of going multiple rounds in any format (I may have a personal bias in JD Vance’s favor, but I think his performance in interviews and the V.P. debate have been extremely effective), and the fervent involvement of the man responsible for America’s most successful automotive startup and rockets that are the wonder of the world." 

The prospects for left-wing populism

The prospects for left-wing populism

"Consider for a moment the volume of commentary that has been dedicated to the subject of inequality – the number of articles documenting the growing chasm separating the wealth of the 1% from the rest; the number of academic papers uncovering “disparities” along every conceivable axis of human difference; the number of scholarly books written condemning global inequality, or trends in income inequality. Now compare that to the number of words that have been written on the subject of inflation – the number of academic conferences that have been held denouncing the scourge of price inflation; the number of scholarly books that have documented its impact on the lives of ordinary people; the number of angry tracts demanding an end to fiat currency.

Even contemplating the comparison provides a useful window into the agonies of the modern left. As we all know, the average progressive intellectual cares a great deal about inequality and not at all about inflation. Seeing this makes it easier to understand why the left has been feeling frustrated. Consider the ill-fated Biden administration in the U.S. At least since the heyday of the Occupy Movement in 2011, there has been a concerted effort to get Americans riled up about wealth inequality, with the obvious expectation that some of this anger could be channeled into support for the Democratic Party. The fruits of this effort, at least on the electoral front, have been pretty much non-existent. Americans, we were told, have been tricked into caring only about cultural issues, not economics. And then suddenly, at the tail end of the Biden years, the entire world gets hit with a bout of inflation, and Americans become consumed by incandescent rage over economic issues, which they proceed to channel into support for the Republican party, which then rewards them by passing a gigantic tax cut for the wealthy.

It’s not hard to see why many people find this situation completely mindboggling. How could Americans get so upset about their economic situation, and yet fail to draw the obvious connection to the actual causes of their distress? How could they get so angry at immigrants and not at billionaires? Surely, surely, there must be some way for the left to channel this anger, to achieve some increase in support. In the past, there have been left-wing populists, and populist left-wing movements. Why is it so difficult to get anything going today?

This is the background against which the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City must be understood. While Democratic Socialist luminaries like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are sometimes described as “populist,” their recently-completed “Fighting Oligarchy” tour didn’t really set off any brushfires, much less erode support for Trump... Mamdani, on the other hand, was able to craft a populist message and platform that caught on with voters, catapulting him from a candidate who started with less than 1% in the primary polls to winning more than 50% of the general election. Lots of people would like to know how to bottle that lightning.

The difference between Mamdani’s pitch and the Bernie/AOC line is easy to see, if one has the correct understanding of populism. In fact, the comparison provides a good example of how widespread misunderstanding of populism handicaps left-wing strategy. The crucial thing to understand about populism, and populist anger, is that it is a revolt directed against cognitive elites, not economic elites. Its centerpiece is the affirmation of “common sense” against the sort of “fancy theories” defended by intellectuals and their lackeys. Common sense is the product of intuition, not ratiocination, and so a convenient way to understand populism is to see it as a political strategy that privileges System 1 over System 2 cognition.

While each style of cognition has its particular strengths and weaknesses, an important difference between them is that intuitions are elicited through interaction with the world, and are therefore focused on highly concrete, “primary” representations, whereas the analytical system is capable of performing operations on “decoupled” representations, which permits reasoning about abstract, hypothetical, and even counterfactual states. As Keith Stanovich has argued, this decoupling requires effort, in large part because it requires sustained attention...

An easy way to distinguish a populist appeal from a technocratic one is that the populist message will restrict itself entirely to primary representations. For example, the “cost of living” is not a primary representation, it is an abstract concept. The price of groceries, on the other hand, is a primary representation – everyone can easily summon up an image of the price, on the supermarket shelf, the last time they bought orange juice or bread. This is, of course, something that Trump spent a great deal of time talking about (“groceries, such a simple word”), and that the Brahmin left in America spent a great deal of time making fun of him for (e.g. here). In so doing, they exhibited a sort of higher-order stupidity. As Stanovich observes, the thing about primary representations is that they have a “special salience” that abstract concepts will never possess.

Mamdani was apparently one of the few to draw the more obvious conclusion from Trump’s remarks, which was that instead of making fun of him for talking about groceries (in a tone of often insufferable superiority), maybe the left should also be talking about groceries. So he made it one of the major promises in his campaign – a pledge to lower the price of groceries in New York by creating publicly-owned, city-run grocery stores. Of course, like most educated people, he probably knows that profiteering by grocery stores is not actually the cause of high food prices. It’s not difficult to find data showing that grocery stores in New York operate with pretty slim margins, and that the major costs occur further up the supply chain. The problem is that a “supply chain” is an entirely abstract concept, which means that for most people it might as well not exist. Obviously, if one wanted to develop a plausible plan for lowering the price of food, it would make sense to think about agricultural subsidies, or transportation costs, or retail overhead, but you’re not going to get the average person excited by talking this way. People who are mad about the cost of living are going to focus their ire on the last link of the chain, the consumer-facing organization, and that means the grocery store.

One can see a clear parallel between the Mamdani grocery store proposal and the anger directed against health insurance companies in the U.S. The targeted shooting of a UnitedHealthcare executive in the streets of New York, one may recall, also ignited a populist brushfire, leading to widespread veneration of Luigi Mangione, the man accused of the killing. Again, the wonks came out of the woodwork, pointing out that health insurance companies have relatively slim profit margins, and are not really responsible for much of the excess cost of the U.S. health care system. This analysis, however, relies on a series of abstract concepts (e.g. “moral hazard”) that are simply not available to intuition. Like grocery stores, health insurance companies are the consumer-facing part of the health care supply chain. Furthermore, insurance itself is an esoteric product, which very few people understand (most Americans believe that these companies create no value, but rather make their money by denying claims). And so for people who are angry – which presumably includes the 1/3 of Americans who are currently carrying medical debt – health insurance companies naturally get the blame.

From this analysis, one can see also why the Bernie/AOC “billionaires are bad” pitch is not genuine populism. The problem with criticizing inequality is that inequality is another abstraction, one that only intellectuals care about per se. There’s lots of research showing that most people have no idea what the distribution of income and wealth is in their society, in part because they don’t really care. What they do care about, first and foremost, is their own financial situation. To the extent that they are bothered by what others have, their attitudes are based on comparison to a specific reference group. They pick out an individual or group who is thought to be comparably situated to themselves (e.g. neighbours, high-school classmates, siblings, etc.), who then serve as a source of primary representations. They judge their own level of success and material comfort based on how well their situation compares to that of these people. (Hence the kernel of truth at the heart of H. L. Mencken’s observation that a truly wealthy man is one who earns more than his wife’s sister’s husband.)

The problem with complaining about Jeff Bezos’s yacht, or Elon Musk’s effective tax rate, as a political strategy, is that these people are completely outside the reference class of all but a small handful of Americans. As a result, their financial situation is completely incommensurable with that of the average person. It is very difficult to cultivate resentment, or any other strong feeling, by inviting people to contemplate an abstraction.

In order to do populism effectively, politicians must not only focus on problems that the public cares about, they must also by-and-large accept the public’s framing of those problems. This creates a dilemma for the left, because that framing, in a complex modern society, will usually be incorrect. As a result, it is extremely difficult to find issues on which left-wing politicians can be authentically populist. For example, many of the problems that the left would like to resolve, such as climate change, or mass transit, or even spiraling health care costs, are collective action problems. Collective action problems, unfortunately, are extremely unintuitive. (I can easily spend an hour with a blackboard explaining the basic structure to my students, and still many of them get it wrong.) It’s one thing to focus on grocery stores during a campaign, but if you actually want to succeed in lowering food prices, you’re going to have to do a bit of a bait-and-switch, or order to focus on points in the supply chain where government intervention can make a greater difference.

There are, of course, genuine left-wing populists out there, but they don’t have a very good track record of success when it comes to achieving progressive policy objectives. Many of Canada’s left-wing luminaries, like Naomi Klein and Linda McQuaig, were burned by their support for Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. The problem with Chávez was that he was an authentic populist, in the sense that he wasn’t just playing dumb, he really did reject the fancy theories of intellectuals. His response to inflation in the Venezuelan economy, and in particular to rising food prices, was to impose a set of price controls on basic commodities. In the process, he basically made entire sectors of the economy illegal. In particular, he made it impossible to sell food at anything other than a loss. People reacted by withdrawing their goods from sale, and in particular, many farmers switched to subsistence farming and stopped planting commercial crops. Millions of Venezuelans were pushed to the brink of starvation and the economy collapsed almost entirely. Approximately 25% of the population has since fled the country, making it one of the largest self-inflicted economic catastrophes of the modern era.

The problem, it seems to me, is not so much that Chávez was a socialist but that he was a populist. If one restricts oneself to primary representations of the world, what inflation looks like is a general increase in the price of goods. If one is willing to follow a more abstruse line of reasoning, one can see that appearances are misleading in this regard, and that inflation is actually just a decline in the value of money. Those who are willing to follow this abstract line of reasoning can usually be persuaded that the correct policy response lies in the realm of monetary policy (e.g. increasing interest rates, contracting money supply, etc.), in order to halt this decline. This is the exact opposite of the populist response. (Has any populist, anywhere in the world, ever wanted to do anything but lower interest rates?) What Chávez did was what anyone reasoning in a concrete manner would be inclined to do – he ordered the people who had been raising prices to stop doing it. And when he didn’t like how they responded, he sent the National Guard out to seize their goods.

One can see here the problem with the populism-envy that has been consuming the left in recent years. It’s not so difficult to craft effective populist slogans, condemning various aspects of the modern world. (Although it is perhaps worth noting that telling voters to support a particular political party, in order to alleviate some injustice suffered by some other person, or by some group that the voter does not belong to, is not ever a populist appeal.) The problem is that the left has very few policies that actually correspond to these slogans. One could see the awkward position that put people in during the “defund the police” mania of 2020, which was also a populist brushfire, but where no one could agree on what the slogan actually meant or entailed. At one point, it seemed as though the only thing that movement intellectuals could agree on was that it did not mean what the ordinary English-language sense of those terms would imply. (Similarly, many people who bought Alex Vitale’s book, The End of Policing, were presumably disappointed to discover that the title was a play on words, and that he did not actually want to end policing. The book is about the objective of policing.)

Again, this sort of bait-and-switch is practically inevitable in left-wing populism, which is presumably what discourages many people from making that pitch. Mamdani is obviously an incredibly talented campaigner, and even seems to be a successful Trump-whisperer. The question is whether he will be able to implement the technocratic policies that are actually needed to improve life for New Yorkers, without dousing the populist flame that got him into office."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Palestine and the Left Wing Agenda

This is a good example of how the left wing agenda is all connected (see also: The Left Wing Agenda: All Connected).

Left wingers openly proclaim that the Indigenous-Industrial complex is dedicated to destroying the USA (and by extension other Western countries, especially "settler" ones). Not just do left wingers hate their countries, but they want to destroy them. You can also see how many left wing checkboxes she ticks in under 7 minutes.

Melanie Yazzie: "We will never leave, we will never forget"

@amuse:

"GENOCIDE: When Democrats, like this Minnesota university professor say the United States must be “dismantled” and “decolonized” to save humanity, they are not speaking in metaphors. They mean it. This isn’t rhetorical flair. It’s a revolutionary premise rooted in postmodernism, Marxism, and racialized grievance politics, an explicit rejection of the American project and its founding ideals.

The Democrats want no America because America, at its best, represents the opposite of everything they believe: ordered liberty, personal responsibility, upward mobility, a colorblind justice system, and national sovereignty. These are not mere policy preferences, they are existential threats to the Marxist’s utopia.

We must reject the premise. America is not a colony. It is a nation born in revolution, tempered by civil war, expanded through hardship, and perfected, not by deconstruction, but by generation after generation striving toward its ideals. The Democrats who cry “decolonize” are not oppressed. They are pampered malcontents who drink lattes while posting manifestos from their iPhones, protected by rights they didn’t earn, in a country they detest but refuse to leave."

Full transcript:

"I just want to thank my comrades... For like Dene (Ed: Dene Tha'?) people they say that your words and your breath is sacred like it's a sacred wind that comes out and our words have power.

There's this Haudenosaunee feminist who wrote this line, a book about um the Six Nations land struggle. Um and the book came in in 2006 and she said you know with nothing more than words, indigenous people changed history on the international arena and Indigenous, it is true. Indigenous people are extremely oppressed in the United States. Our numbers were very small right compared to the settler population in the United States. But, what we can offer, right, what we can offer to the struggle for the liberation of Palestine and for the struggle for liberation of all people is our words. It's our stories. It's our memory. And it's our refusal to relinquish who we are and the relationship, the original relationship we have with this land.

We will never be moved from that. We will never leave, right, and we will never forget and I think for me, that is, what we offer, right, to our Palestinian relatives um who are facing so much suffering. Extreme settler violence in this moment. We, we are the memory of a long struggle, and we are the embodiment of the future that our ancestors struggled for. And the dream of Liberation that all colonized and oppressed people share. And, we are here you know to remind the world that even after 500 years, right, that this is something that has not gone away and in fact it will never go away, no matter how much you suffered, and how much you lose. And I think that is is what we have to offer um our Palestinian relatives.

In addition to solidarity and the things that we might do, having the Moral Authority as the original people of these lands, um, to push back against the violent settler project that is the United States, um, and to help to lead that. To be the tip of the spear here of all Liberation struggles and movements that seek to, seek a world of justice, equality and peace. Um that seek to dismantle the United States. I hope you seek to dismantle the United States and if that isn't your politics *clapping from audience*

Okay. I speak as if everybody has this commitment um and the thing is is that you should you should listen to indigenous people when they're telling you that this is the goal, and that not only is this the goal but this is the starting point. Because I think Nick articulated this very clearly um a de decolonization is the only thing that is going to save us. As a species. It's the only thing that's going to save us as a planet, and everyone should just be on board with it no questions asked.

And I say this sometimes on the podcast, our Red Nation Podcast, on the co-host of Red Power Hour, you know like of the most oppressed ass people in Turtle Island, indigenous women are like on the top of that fucking list, okay. And incarcerated at higher numbers, murdered at higher numbers, missing at higher numbers. Higher levels of rape and all kinds of sexual violence and sexual harassment. I mean indigenous women struggle so hard under the settler regime that is the United States, and the way that heteropatriarchy ties so closely into that. And if an indigenous woman is telling you that decolonization is the solution and also that there is real hope.

And that Palestine offers us, we we said this in the speech. Palestine is the alternative path for native nations. And this is because we understand Palestine and the liberation of Palestine is the tip of the spear. Right? It is a righteous struggle and it is so powerful that it has literally, in 60 days, changed the entire world. The entire world has changed. I knew it, I knew it the moment that it happened that nothing, and I mean nothing for colonizers, or for any of the good humble people of the Earth would be the same ever again. And we need to lean into that. Lean into the fact that colonizers are scared. Lean in to scaring them *laughs devilishly* and making them feel uncomfortable, right?

It is because, it is because we have power. And sometimes being here in Minnesota, it, it's real different organizing here. And it's also very different being indigenous here than it is from where I came from in Albuquerque. I find sometimes people here feel like they don't have power especially native people and other folks. Like, we have have power. This is why millions of people are standing up for Palestine across the world. Like we have power.

If we didn't have power they wouldn't go so hard to silence the people. And Palestine, one of the things I have also been had the honor of going to Palestine in 2011 on a decolonial field school when I was working on my PhD at the University of New Mexico. Palestine not only reminded me of my own humanity, as a person living under occupation here, but Palestine taught me so much about the commitment to decolonization. And sumud, that steadfastness right, that word again and again.

What does it mean to be steadfast in your commitment for decolonization? And I think that that is something in my long path of political development and my journey since we started the Red Nation, that indigenous revolutionaries here have also taught me that steadfastness. And I encourage you all, you know, when we leave this event ,tonight have that steadfastness, carry it in your heart. Do not let it go because we will win, and we know this because we have been doing this for hundreds of years and even like I said we've lost so much, we still believe we're going to win. We still will have the relationship with the land, right? We really believe this.

And if indigenous people are telling you this and if Palestinians are telling you this, then you better damn believe it yourself *laughs devilishly*, we're going to win *laughs devilishly*"

Wait till she finds out who are the top people preying on "indigenous" women.

Related:

Haviv Rettig Gur:

"If you don’t understand how vile and sad this is, ignore for a moment the “dismantle America” bit and notice what she does to Palestinians. How she thrills to October 7 because “Palestine is the tip of the spear” for her own shtick. Because if Israelis can be scared, then all “colonizers are scared.” And then she herself is powerful, a soldier in a grand anti-colonial struggle, and not just one more anxious, uncomfortably safe dullard with nothing important to actually do or fight for in the empty, grinding treadmill of academia and consumerism.

What if Israelis are just people, and making them fear for their children’s lives is a great way to upend the Middle East and shatter the Palestinian cause for yet another generation? What if Hamas actually and explicitly seeks a genocide, brutally oppresses its own people, has disrupted every peace attempt in forty years, and eagerly and at a strategic scale sacrifices civilians on the altar of a supremacist religious vision? What if ordinary Palestinians don’t want to be the avatars of every ideological peccadillo on campus that promises to fill the echoing void of meaning that is the present-day culture of the West?

This professor thrills to the Gaza war because “Turtle Island” something something. Because her own life is a virtual existence, lived online and in inane academic gobbledygook, and so she assumes the rest of us are virtual too, NPCs in her roleplaying game.

Lonely people have a harder time feeling empathy. It’s hard to think of a sadder, emptier, lonelier person than this casually bloodthirsty little ideologue."

As Race 'Equity' Advances in Health Care, Signs of a Chilling Effect on Dissent / Doctors' Dilemma: Replacing Colorblindness to Favor Minority Care (2/2)

Part 1

Still from 2021: 

As Race 'Equity' Advances in Health Care, Signs of a Chilling Effect on Dissent

"The national movement to eradicate what activists call systemic racism and white privilege from medicine and health care has few public critics in the medical profession. A possible reason: Skeptics who have questioned these efforts have been subject to harsh Twitter campaigns, professional demotions and other blowback.

A podcast of the Journal of the American Medical Association caused a furor this year when one of its editors suggested that discussion of systemic racism is an unfortunate distraction that should be taken off the table. In response to a protest petition, the AMA launched an internal investigation into the creation of the podcast (and a since deleted Tweet that promoted it). Eventually, the Journal’s top two editors, who are both white, resigned – the editor-in-chief’s departure coming after he issued a public apology in which he affirmed the existence of structural racism in the United States and in the health care field.

In Minneapolis, Hennepin Healthcare System removed gynecologist Tara Gustilo, of Filipino descent, from her position as chair of the OB/GYN department after members of her department questioned her “ability to lead.” The demotion followed her series of Facebook posts criticizing critical race theory, Black Lives Matter and “How to Be an Antiracist” author Ibram X. Kendi, and her insistence that her department must strictly adhere to race-neutral policies with regard to patient care.

Colleagues and other doctors on Twitter denounced as racist University of Pittsburgh cardiologist and professor Norman Wang, who is ethnically Chinese, after his peer-reviewed paper last year critiqued affirmative action as illegal and discriminatory. The Journal of the American Heart Association, which published the paper, soon retracted it, alleging “deliberate misinformation or misrepresentation.” Wang’s employer demoted him from his role as director of a fellowship program for physicians, barred him from contact with fellows and residents, and temporarily prohibited Wang from contact with med students. Kathryn Berlacher, director of the cardiology fellowship program, reprimanded him in an email: “It is clear to us that any educational environment in which you partake is inherently unsafe, increasing our learners’ risk for undue bias and harm."

In each case, the dissenting doctors broadcast opinions counter to the official positions and policies of their organizations. The American Heart Association and Pitt officials, on Twitter and in public announcements, said Wang’s critique of affirmative action was inconsistent with their institutional values of diversity and inclusion.

Such incidents are noteworthy because of their eerily scripted language of moral outrage and public denunciation, coming from the nation’s highest levels of professional achievement, often on internal issues that would typically be handled with sensitivity and discretion as personnel matters.

“Rise up, colleagues!”Mayo Clinic cardiologist and diversity director Sharonne Hayes Tweeted in August in response to Wang’s article. “The fact that this is published in ‘our’ journal should both enrage & activate all of us.”

Berlacher  announced Wang’s demotion in a Tweet. “We stand united for diversity, equity and inclusion,” she proclaimed. “And denounce this individual’s racist beliefs and paper.”

The American Heart Association chimed in: “JAHA is editorially independent but that’s no excuse. We’ll investigate. We’ll do better.”

Those who are concerned by the social justice fervor sweeping through the medical profession say that such examples are evidence of the movement’s chilling effect on open debate of complex social issues.

“Most in academic medicine who are troubled by this are keeping their heads down and keeping their mouths shut,” said Thomas Huddle, who retired this year as professor at the medical school at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “They’re deeply afraid of social media mobs and of academic administrative superiors who’ve taken this stuff on.”

In the wake of George Floyd’s killing last year, the social justice movement has generated tremendous support. Brittani James and Stella Safo, both African American doctors, drew more than 10,000 signatures for their petition to review and restructure JAMA in the aftermath of the February podcast...

James, a Chicago-based physician and assistant professor in the College of Medicine at the University of Illinois, said she has little patience with accusations that social justice fosters cancel culture.

“I have to chuckle,” James said. “As a black woman, I absolutely cannot express my opinion, ever.

“I have to consistently think whom I’m in the room with. And I will be fired quickly without fanfare, without anyone advocating for me,” James said. “This idea that they’re uniquely persecuted is totally divorced from reality. My entire life has been a tightrope of being careful what I say, because there’ll be retribution against me.”...

Erica Li, a West Coast pediatrician and FAIR volunteer active in the development of the medicine chapter, agrees that racism exists in some situations, but said that racial disparities could have multiple causes. She opposes using affirmative action and other race-based standards to achieve equity, a term that refers to mandating equal outcomes by race.

Li said she is not fearful of retaliation, but asked that her precise location not be disclosed in this article. She said she “has taken great lengths to take my photos and contact information off the Internet” after a colleague received death threats over an issue not related to critical race theory."

If you are for racial non-discrimination, you are racist, unsafe and will lose your job 

If you're a left wing "minority", thinking that you're a victim of discrimination is proof you're one, but if you're not on the left, even if you get fired you're not a victim of cancel culture.

 

Doctors' Dilemma: Replacing Colorblindness to Favor Minority Care

"In March 2020, when the pandemic prompted fears that overwhelmed hospitals would run out of beds and equipment, two medical ethicists proposed an ostensibly race-neutral framework for rationing ventilators to save patients’ lives.

Writing in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association, University of Pittsburgh bioethicist Douglas White and University of California, San Francisco, professor emeritus Bernard Lo reiterated the longstanding view that ventilators should “not be allocated on the basis of morally irrelevant considerations, such as sex, race, religion, intellectual disability, insurance status, wealth, citizenship, social status, or social connections.”

Less than a year later, race was no longer a “morally irrelevant” consideration for White and Lo. In a February 2021 paper about “mitigating inequities” in intensive care, they wrote: “Although at first glance it seems unproblematic to focus on saving as many lives as possible with scarce critical care resources, this approach may disproportionately deny critical care treatment to persons of color and the poor.”

Thus saving as many lives as possible in a colorblind manner becomes a classic example of systemic racism: a neutral standard that benefits white people. That’s because people of color, with lower life expectancies, are more likely to be downgraded in priority for emergency lifesaving measures.

“In our view, when society is substantially responsible for creating disparities through unfair social policies, there is a special obligation to prioritize disparity mitigation,” they wrote, “even if doing so results in somewhat fewer overall lives saved compared with purely utilitarian triage.”

Although White and Lo could not be reached for comment, the differences between the two papers published less than a year apart reflect the remarkable velocity of change that has occurred in medicine during the past year...

“To achieve equitable access and distribution of care, critical race theory must be a part of the process utilized to create broad, population-focused guidelines,” four doctors wrote in a Health Affairs article last year...

The public may be receptive to race-based medicine. According to two independent online surveys conducted in September 2020, “respondents endorsed prioritizing racial/ethnic communities that are disproportionately affected by COVID-19.”

The tradeoffs involved in this moral rebalancing of competing interests encapsulate the underlying source of the tension: individual rights versus group rights. White and Lo seek to achieve the best of both worlds, but they acknowledge that improving outcomes for some groups in the name of racial justice comes with a price: It may result in a greater loss of life.

Others have articulated a similar moral position when deciding who should be prioritized for vaccinations: essential workers, who are disproportionately minority, or the elderly, who are disproportionately white.

"Older populations are whiter," Harald Schmidt, an assistant professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, explained in The New York Times in December 2020. "Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit."...

This year a number of states sought to give priority for vaccinations to black, Hispanic and other at-risk residents, but most states used proxies for race, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Social Vulnerability Index. 

They were following the October 2020 recommendation of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine...

U.S. courts have never considered a case over the use of race to allocate scarce health care resources, according to an October 2020 paper co-authored by Schmidt, who wrote that the U.S. Supreme Court is not likely to approve an explicitly race-based allocation policy. He urged public health agencies to devise proxies to achieve their intentions.

“The Supreme Court is likely to uphold racially neutral vaccine allocation criteria, which are designed to capture worse-off minorities but not explicitly,” Schmidt and his co-authors wrote. “A vaccine distribution formula, therefore, could lawfully prioritize populations based on factors like geography, socioeconomic status, and housing density that would favor racial minorities de facto, but not explicitly include race.”

Hesitating to proceed with this ethical tightrope act would amount to a dereliction of duty, the authors suggested...

One active case study of explicit racial favoritism is a medical reparations pilot project at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston that provides “a preferential admission option for Black and Latinx heart failure patients to our specialty cardiology service.”

The project, explicitly anchored in critical race theory, seeks to repay “the outstanding debt from the harm caused by our institutions, and owed to our BIPOC patients.”...

They acknowledge that offering preferential care based on race may prompt legal challenges, but they say there is ample evidence that the current societal systems “already unfairly preference people who are white.” They further note: “Our approach is corrective and therefore mandated.”"

 

Ironically, covid hysteria was justified as protecting the elderly. 

Disparate impact is good if it benefits "minorities".

The US-Israeli strategy against Iran is working. Here is why

The US-Israeli strategy against Iran is working. Here is why | US-Israel war on Iran | Al Jazeera

"Two weeks into Operation Epic Fury, the dominant narrative has settled into a comfortable groove: The United States and Israel stumbled into a war without a plan. Iran is retaliating across the region. Oil prices are surging, and the world is facing another Middle Eastern quagmire. US senators have called it a blunder. Cable news has tallied the crises. Commentators have warned of a long war...

But this narrative is wrong. Not because the costs are imaginary, but because the critics are measuring the wrong things. They are cataloguing the price of the campaign while ignoring the strategic ledger.

When you look at what has actually happened to Iran’s principal instruments of power – its ballistic missile arsenal, its nuclear infrastructure, its air defences, its navy and its proxy command architecture – the picture is not one of US failure. It is one of systematic, phased degradation of a threat that previous administrations allowed to grow for four decades...

I have spent my academic career studying how states authorise the use of force through intelligence institutions, and what I see in the current campaign is a recognisable military operation proceeding through identifiable phases against an adversary whose capacity to project power is collapsing in real time.

Iranian ballistic missile launches have fallen by more than 90 percent from 350 on February 28 to roughly 25 by March 14, according to publicly available data. Drone launches tell the same story: from more than 800 on Day 1 to about 75 on Day 15.

The figures drawn from US and Iranian military statements differ in detail but converge on the trajectory. Hundreds of Iranian missile launchers have been rendered inoperable. According to some reports, 80 percent of Iran’s capacity to strike Israel has been eliminated.

Iran’s naval assets, fast-attack craft, midget submarines and mine-laying capabilities are being liquidated. Its air defences have been suppressed to the point at which the US is now flying nonstealth B-1 bombers over Iranian airspace, a decision that signals near-total confidence in air dominance.

The campaign has moved through two distinct phases. The first suppressed Iran’s air defences, decapitated its command and control, and degraded its missile and drone launch infrastructure. By March 2, US Central Command announced local air superiority over western Iran and Tehran, achieved without the confirmed loss of a single American or Israeli combat aircraft.

The second phase, now under way, targets Iran’s defence industrial base: missile production facilities, dual-use research centres and the underground complexes where remaining stockpiles are stored. This is not aimless bombing. It is a methodical campaign to ensure that what has been destroyed cannot be rebuilt.

Iran now faces a strategic dilemma that tightens every day. If it fires its remaining missiles, it exposes launchers that are promptly destroyed. If it conserves them, it forfeits the ability to impose costs of the war. Missile and drone launch data suggest Iran is rationing its remaining capacity for politically timed salvoes rather than sustaining operational tempo.

This is a force managing decline, not projecting strength.

Much of the criticism of the US-Israeli campaign focuses on its costs while treating the status quo ante as if it were cost-free. It was not.

Iran entered 2026 with 440kg of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity – enough, if further enriched, for as many as 10 nuclear weapons. Before the June strikes, Tehran was less than two weeks away from enriching enough uranium for one nuclear bomb, according to US intelligence assessments. At that time, the International Atomic Energy Agency acknowledged that Iran’s accumulation of near-weapons-grade material had no clear civilian justification.

The current campaign has damaged further the Natanz nuclear facility. The one in Fordow remains inoperable. The defence industrial facilities that would be needed to reconstitute enrichment capacity are being systematically targeted.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether diplomatic alternatives were fully exhausted, the Omani-mediated negotiations in February showed real progress, and there are legitimate questions about whether Washington walked away too soon.

But the critics’ implicit alternative, continued restraint while Iran inched towards a nuclear weapon, is the policy that produced the crisis in the first place. Every year of strategic patience added centrifuges to the enrichment halls and kilogrammes to the stockpile.

The limits of military force against a nuclear programme are real, and as others have argued elsewhere, strikes can destroy facilities but cannot eliminate knowledge. The 440kg of enriched uranium remains unaccounted for.

A successor regime of any political colour will inherit a strategic environment in which the case for nuclear deterrence has been strengthened, not weakened. These are genuine long-term risks. But they are arguments for a comprehensive post-conflict diplomatic architecture, not arguments against the campaign itself.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz is dominating the critical commentary...

But this framing inverts the strategic logic. Closing the strait was always Iran’s most visible retaliatory card, and always a wasting asset. About 90 percent of Iran’s own oil exports pass through Kharg Island and then the strait.

China, Tehran’s largest remaining economic partner, cannot receive Iranian crude while the strait is shut. Every day the blockade continues, Iran severs its own economic lifeline and alienates the one major power that has consistently shielded it at the United Nations. The closure does not just hurt the global economy; it accelerates Iran’s isolation.

Meanwhile, the naval assets Iran needs to sustain the blockade – fast-attack boats, drones, mines, shore-based antiship missiles – are being degraded daily. Its naval bases at Bandar Abbas and Chahbahar have been severely damaged.

The question is not whether the strait reopens but when and whether Iran retains any naval capacity to contest it. Critics compare the challenge of escorting a hundred tankers daily to an impossible logistical burden. But you do not need to escort tankers through a strait if the adversary no longer has the means to threaten them. That is the operational trajectory.

The regional escalation – Hezbollah resuming attacks on Israel, Iraqi militias striking US bases, Houthis issuing threats in the Red Sea – is cited as the clearest evidence of US-Israeli strategic failure. The war is spreading, the critics say, just as it did in Iraq. This misreads the dynamics of Iran’s alliance network.

My research on how states authorise proxy violence identifies four layers of control: strategic legitimation, operational coordination, financial-logistical distribution and deniability calibration. The current campaign has disrupted all four simultaneously.

The assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei eliminated the apex of the authorisation pyramid. His son Mojtaba’s appointment as his successor, a dynastic transfer without precedent in the Islamic Republic, signals institutional fragility, not continuity. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) command structure has been decapitated at multiple levels – the acting defence minister was among those killed.

When proxies launch retaliatory attacks across the region, this is not evidence of an expanding network; it is evidence of predelegated response authority, which is what a centralised command system activates when it anticipates its own destruction.

Predelegation is a sign of desperation, not strength. It means the centre can no longer coordinate. The attacks will continue, but they will become increasingly uncoordinated, strategically incoherent and politically costly for the host states where these groups operate.

Qatar and Bahrain are arresting IRGC operatives. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are intercepting Iranian drones over their own territory. The regional environment that sustained Iran’s proxy architecture, including the grudging tolerance by Gulf states fearful of Iranian retaliation, is being replaced by active hostility.

Hezbollah is weaker than at any point since 2006, degraded by more than a year of Israeli operations before this campaign began. Iraqi militias retain the ability to launch attacks, but they are doing so into a region where they face increasing isolation.

The Houthis in Yemen possess independent capability but lack the command integration with Tehran that transforms militia activity into strategic effect. What the critics described as an expanding regional war is better understood as the death spasm of a proxy architecture whose authorising centre has been shattered.

The most politically potent criticism is that the administration has no endgame. Trump’s own rhetoric has not helped...

But the endgame is visible in the operational phasing, even if the rhetoric obscures it. The objective is the permanent degradation of Iran’s ability to project power beyond its borders through missiles, nuclear latency and proxy networks.

Call it strategic disarmament. This is closer to the approach of the Allies to Germany’s industrial war-making capacity in 1944-1945 than to the US war on Iraq in 2003. The analogy is imperfect: Strategic disarmament without occupation requires a verification and enforcement architecture that no one has yet proposed, but the operational logic is the same.

No one is proposing to occupy Tehran. The question is what happens when the bombing stops, and here the critics raise a legitimate concern, which Murphy articulated concisely after a classified briefing: What prevents Iran from restarting production?

The answer requires a post-conflict framework that does not yet exist in public: a verification regime, a diplomatic settlement or a sustained enforcement posture. The administration owes the American public and its regional partners a clear account of what that framework would look like.

But the absence of a public diplomatic blueprint does not mean the military campaign is failing. It means the campaign is ahead of the diplomacy, a sequencing problem, not a strategic one. The military conditions for a durable settlement – Iranian missile capacity too degraded to rebuild quickly, nuclear infrastructure inaccessible, proxy networks fragmented – are being created right now.

None of this minimises the human costs...

But the critics are making a different error: They are treating the costs of action as if the costs of inaction were zero. They were not. They were measured in the slow accretion of a threat that, left unchecked, would have produced exactly the crisis everyone claims to fear: a nuclear-armed Iran capable of closing the Strait of Hormuz at will, surrounded by proxy forces that could hold the entire region hostage indefinitely.

Seventeen days in, Iran’s supreme leader is dead, his successor is reportedly wounded and every principal instrument of Iranian power projection – missiles, nuclear infrastructure, air defences, the navy, proxy command networks – has been degraded beyond near-term recovery. The campaign’s execution has been imperfect, its public communication poor and its post-conflict planning incomplete. War is never clean. But the strategy – the actual strategy, measured in degraded capabilities rather than cable news cycles – is working."

 

Iran supporters keep citing IAEA claiming there was no evidence Iran was trying to make a nuclear bomb, while ignoring their other observations 

The Passion of the Talarico

The Passion of the Talarico
When scripture becomes a tool for advancing contemporary progressive politics, Christianity begins to resemble secular humanism dressed up in religious language.

I’ve called Texas Democrat James Talarico “Pastor Pornhub” because if I could create the living embodiment of Satan on earth, he would look just like Talarico, a leftist caricature of a Christian, smug, self-righteous and generously quoting Bible verses to justify his political positions.

The problem is not so much quoting of the Bible, but the heretical interpretations of those verses because Pastor Pornhub is a “progressive” Christian, which is to say he is not a Christian at all.

In recent years, the rise of what is called “progressive Christianity” has been celebrated by its advocates as a natural evolution of the Christian faith. According to this view, the church is simply adapting to new moral insights and social realities, much as it has done throughout history, but that description strikes me as deeply misleading. What is happening is not evolution, it is divergence.

For nearly two thousand years, Christianity has rested on a recognizable set of core beliefs. Christians across centuries, continents, and cultures have disagreed on many secondary questions—church governance, liturgy, the finer points of theology—but they have largely shared a common foundation. That foundation includes belief in the divinity of Christ, the authority of scripture, the reality of sin, the need for redemption, and the resurrection. These were not invented by modern evangelicals or any particular denomination, they were articulated early in the church’s history and affirmed in statements such as the Nicene Creed and the Apostles’ Creed.

Those beliefs formed the boundary lines of what Christianity was understood to be.

Progressive Christianity, however, increasingly treats those doctrines not as defining truths but as optional metaphors. The resurrection becomes a “symbol of hope.” The divinity of Christ becomes an “inspirational idea.” Sin becomes a social construct rather than a condition of the human heart. Salvation becomes collective political improvement rather than reconciliation with God.

At that point one has to ask an obvious question: if those beliefs are no longer essential, what exactly remains that makes the system Christian?

Advocates often insist that Christianity has always evolved, pointing to past moral developments such as the abolition of slavery or the expansion of civil rights, but those examples do not demonstrate doctrinal abandonment; they demonstrate moral application. Christians argued against slavery because they believed human beings were created in the image of God. They fought for civil rights because they believed in the equal dignity of souls before God. The underlying theology remained intact.

What we are seeing today is something quite different. The underlying theology is being reinterpreted—or more accurately, rewritten—to conform to modern secular assumptions and that distinction matters. Where interpretation attempts to understand a text within its original framework, rewriting changes the framework itself.

If this sounds like the deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida, it should because it is a close cousin of the tactic of stripping all meaning from a thing and reassigning a meaning that better supports a preconceived agenda.

Progressive Christians often claim they are simply reading scripture through the lens of compassion and justice. Yet compassion and justice were hardly invented in the 21st century. The problem is not that progressive Christians emphasize moral concern for the poor or marginalized - Christianity has always done that - the problem is that modern political ideology increasingly determines which parts of scripture are emphasized, which are ignored, and which are redefined beyond recognition. When that happens, scripture ceases to function as an authority. It becomes a symbolic resource that can be reshaped to match whatever the current cultural consensus happens to be.

In that sense, progressive Christianity begins to resemble secular humanism more than traditional Christianity. The moral framework is no longer grounded in divine revelation but in contemporary (and malleable) social values. Ethical goals like equity, inclusion, and social justice are defined primarily by modern political discourse. Government policy becomes the primary instrument for achieving those goals. The language may remain Christian, but the underlying worldview is largely secular and politicized.

This is why I am not alone in arguing that progressive Christianity is not a development of Christianity so much as a religiously flavored version of modern progressivism.

Many people sincerely believe that moral truth is best derived from human reasoning and evolving social consensus, but that approach is fundamentally different from the historic Christian claim that moral truth is revealed through God and preserved in scripture.

Blending the two systems inevitably changes both.

Once doctrine becomes infinitely flexible—once miracles become metaphors, sin becomes sociology, and salvation becomes public policy—Christianity loses the very elements that once distinguished it from other moral philosophies, and the faith becomes less a religion grounded in divine action and more a spiritual vocabulary for contemporary political goals.

Some may welcome that transformation, but it should at least be described honestly. We seem to be condemned to replaying the French Revolution over and over.

In my honest opinion, what is happening is not the organic evolution of Christianity. Evolution implies continuity with the past. What we are seeing instead is a gradual departure from the beliefs that defined Christianity for centuries and the replacement of those beliefs with politically useful narratives.

A faith that systematically replaces its historic doctrines with modern secular assumptions may still call itself Christianity but whether it remains Christianity in any meaningful sense is not a hard question to answer.

Talarico is an example of evil personified, and one must really consider what that means since the entire Democrat establishment is behind him in his run for the US Senate.

 

On the Iranian Occupation

Shane Gill | Facebook

Iran is often flattened into slogans. A theocracy. A rogue state. A problem to be managed. Those labels are shortcuts. They allow governments and commentators to reduce a civilisation to a headline, and they allow power to hide behind simplicity when the situation is anything but simple

 

If you want to understand why so many Persians speak about their own government as if it were an occupying force, we have to understand this story didn't start in 1979. The Islamic Republic is not the origin. It is the latest layer in a much older struggle over identity, sovereignty, and legitimacy.

 

Before Islam, Persia was one of the great civilisations of the ancient world. The Sasanian Empire governed through bureaucracy, codified law, taxation systems, and infrastructure that rivalled Rome. Zoroastrianism functioned as a state religion with an elaborate moral cosmology. Kingship carried divine symbolism. Language, literature, and imperial memory were already deeply rooted. Persia did not lack identity. It possessed one of the most self-conscious identities in the ancient world.

 

In the seventh century, Arab Muslim armies expanded out of the Arabian Peninsula and defeated the Sasanian state in a series of decisive battles. Persia fell through war. Political authority shifted to rulers whose power originated elsewhere, as it did in many regions of the old world. Arabic became dominant in administration. New legal frameworks emerged. Islam entered Iran in the context of conquest.

 

Conversion, however, was not instantaneous or uniform. It unfolded over centuries, shaped by social mobility, taxation policy, elite integration, intermarriage, and genuine belief. Zoroastrians paid the jizya tax. Conversion opened bureaucratic and military pathways. Empires rarely convert populations at sword point en masse. They rearrange incentives. Over generations, belief follows power.

Conquest came first. Faith spread later. That distinction matters.

 

Persia did not disappear inside the caliphates of the Rashidun, Umayyads, and Abbasids. It adapted and reshaped. Persian administrators became indispensable to Islamic governance. Persian scholars and poets shaped philosophy, mysticism, and court culture. The Persian language survived and eventually reasserted itself in literary form. What began as military subjugation evolved into cultural fusion.

 

A critical turning point arrived in the sixteenth century under the Safavid dynasty. The Safavids imposed Twelver Shi’ism as state doctrine, differentiating Iran sharply from its predominantly Sunni neighbors. Shi’ism became intertwined with Iranian state identity, martyrdom theology merged with political sovereignty, and clerical authority gained structural weight. From that point forward, Iranian nationalism and Shi’a religious identity developed in parallel rather than in opposition.

 

Fast forward to the twentieth century. Iran was ruled by the Pahlavi monarchy. The Shah was secular, Western aligned, and committed to rapid modernization. He was also authoritarian. The SAVAK secret police crushed dissent. Political parties were tightly controlled. Economic inequality widened. Cultural Westernization moved faster than many communities could absorb.

 

Then came 1953. Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh nationalized Iran’s oil industry. In response, the United States and the United Kingdom supported a coup that removed him and restored the Shah’s authority. That intervention embedded a durable memory of foreign interference in Iran’s political consciousness. Anti Western rhetoric did not originate in clerical sermons alone. It drew legitimacy from lived history.

 

By the late 1970s, opposition to the Shah cut across ideological lines. Clerics, Marxists, liberals, students, bazaar merchants, and workers mobilized simultaneously. The revolution was broad based. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini provided symbolic leadership from exile, but he was not the only current within the uprising. Many factions believed they were participating in a pluralistic revolution whose direction would be negotiated after victory.

 

That calculation proved fatal.

 

Revolutions are not won by abstract theory. They are won by networks. Mosques provided nationwide infrastructure. Sermons traveled further than pamphlets. Clerical authority penetrated neighborhoods where secular ideology struggled to organize. When the monarchy collapsed in 1979, the clerical establishment possessed the deepest, most disciplined structure in the country.

 

The Islamic Republic that emerged was not improvised. It was engineered. The office of Supreme Leader was placed above electoral institutions. The Guardian Council gained veto power over candidates and legislation. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) evolved into a parallel military, economic, and intelligence powerhouse. Over time it embedded itself in construction, telecommunications, energy, and regional security operations.

 

Religion ceased to function solely as belief. It became a governing architecture. Leftist parties were outlawed. Political rivals were imprisoned, executed, or exiled. Universities were purged during the Cultural Revolution. Mandatory hijab laws were enforced. Morality policing institutionalized the state’s claim over public behavior and female dress. The system consolidated itself not by accident but by design.

 

This is where the language of occupation enters contemporary Iranian discourse. The leadership is ethnically Iranian. The institutions are domestically built. Yet coercion always produces psychological distance. When authority claims divine legitimacy, suppresses dissent, filters elections, and criminalizes protest, it can feel alien even if it speaks the same language as the governed.

 

Today Iran’s crisis is not reducible to religion. It is not reducible to foreign hostility. It is not reducible to economic sanctions, though sanctions have severely strained ordinary life. It is a legitimacy crisis. That crisis expresses itself in protest waves, from the Green Movement in 2009 to the nationwide demonstrations following the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022. It expresses itself in generational divides, capital flight, brain drain, and quiet civil disobedience. It also expresses itself in geopolitical posture. Regional militias, nuclear brinkmanship, and confrontation with Israel and the United States function externally, but they also reinforce internal narratives of siege and resistance. When foreign powers threaten Iran militarily, the regime gains temporary cohesion. When domestic repression intensifies, the legitimacy deficit widens. This is the tension at the heart of modern Iran. External conflict can delay internal reckoning. It cannot erase it.

 

Many Iranians invoking pre Islamic heritage are not calling for cultural erasure of Islam. They are signaling historical depth. They are asserting that Iranian identity is older than the current political order. That memory is not anti Muslim. It is an anti monopolisation of faith by the state.

 

Iran has been imperial, conquered, Islamic, secularizing, revolutionary, sanctioned, and regionally assertive. It has endured Arab conquest, Mongol invasion, dynastic collapse, foreign intervention, and ideological upheaval. Civilizations that survive that many ruptures develop a long memory. Force can govern for decades. It can arrest, censor, and deter. What it cannot manufacture indefinitely is consent.

 

The Islamic Republic frames itself as the culmination of divine history. Many citizens increasingly frame it as a temporary chapter. Empires have misunderstood Iran before. So have ideologues. So have we. The lesson is consistent. Iran is not a slogan. It is a civilization with a memory longer than any regime that claims to own it.

 

Iran remembers.

 

What comes next will test whether power can reform itself or whether history will force the question. We've all seen what can emerge from regime change meddling. And it's never good. Whatever it is, it must be up to the Iranian people to decide. That right is theirs and theirs alone.

 

May the people of Iran have a free and peaceful future.

Fascism in the USA

Senator Chris McDaniel | Facebook

“Fascist” has become the laziest word in American politics. It gets thrown around the way schoolchildren throw rocks, loud, emotional, and rarely aimed at anything real. For years now, it’s been attached to Donald Trump, often without serious historical context.

 

If fascism means anything at all, it means centralized power, coerced compliance, and the use of government force to compel obedience. It doesn’t mean offensive speech. It doesn’t mean rude rhetoric. It doesn’t mean that people are unhappy with an election. It means control.

 

So let’s talk about control. Not tone. But real control. That’s government action that restricts liberty, punishes dissent, and forces compliance.

 

Democratic administrations have a long, well-documented history of doing exactly that.

 

Under Woodrow Wilson, speech was criminalized. Americans went to prison simply for criticizing the government under the Espionage and Sedition Acts. That wasn’t metaphorical oppression. It was jail time for words, defended at the time as necessary and patriotic, and later recognized for what it was, a constitutional disgrace.

 

Under Franklin Roosevelt, the federal government seized sweeping control over the economy. Industries were regulated by decree. Wages were capped. Prices were fixed. Rationing became a fact of daily life. At the same time, Roosevelt authorized the internment of American citizens based solely on ancestry. Families were removed from their homes by executive order. The Supreme Court upheld it at the time. That didn’t make it right. It made it a lawful injustice. Just uncontrolled government power exercised without regard for individual rights.

 

That same Democratic era produced one of the most shameful abuses of federal authority in American history. Beginning in the 1930s, the federal government knowingly deceived Black Americans in the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, denied them treatment, and used them as test subjects for decades without consent. This wasn’t ignorance. It was deliberate. It was bureaucratic cruelty carried out in the name of science and public health. And it was sustained across administrations until exposure finally forced it to end.

 

Earlier still, Democratic President Andrew Jackson used federal law, executive authority, and military force to remove Native Americans from their land. The Trail of Tears wasn’t rhetoric. It was a forced relocation at gunpoint. It was defended as lawful and necessary. It resulted in death, dispossession, and suffering on a massive scale. It remains one of the clearest examples of government power used to compel obedience without moral restraint.

 

Republicans aren’t immune from abusing power either. Under Abraham Lincoln, the federal government suspended habeas corpus, imprisoned critics without trial, shut down newspapers, and asserted extraordinary executive authority in the name of national survival. Those actions were coercive. They were controversial then, and they’re still debated now. They prove a simple truth of American history: when government claims emergency power, liberty is usually the first thing to suffer, no matter the party.

 

In more recent times, the pattern hasn’t disappeared.

 

Under Barack Obama, the federal government used the tax code to punish citizens for declining to purchase a government-approved product. The Supreme Court upheld it only by recharacterizing it as a tax after the administration insisted it wasn’t one. The label changed. The coercion didn’t.

 

Under Joe Biden, the federal government tried to condition continued employment on compliance with a medical directive affecting tens of millions of private-sector workers. The Supreme Court stopped it because it exceeded constitutional limits.

 

At the state level, Democratic governors shut down businesses by decree. They also restricted church attendance, imposed curfews, and regulated daily movement. They did it without legislative approval and in open tension with constitutional guarantees. Courts later struck down many of those actions. By then, the damage to livelihoods and liberties had already been done.

 

That’s what control looks like.

 

Federal power has been abused before. Repeatedly. Sometimes brutally. American history isn’t short on examples of government action that crushed liberty, punished dissent, and compelled obedience by force. Measured against those episodes, the alleged abuses of the present simply don’t compare in scale, scope, or consequence.

 

Nothing happening today remotely resembles mass imprisonment for speech, the forced relocation of entire populations, the internment of citizens based on ancestry, the deliberate denial of medical treatment by government design, or the open suspension of fundamental legal protections. Those were real exercises of coercive power. They were enforced by law, backed by force, and justified at the time as necessary.

 

Today, the institutions of constitutional government still function. Congress still legislates. Courts still operate. Elections still happen. Power still changes hands through lawful processes, however noisy and contentious that process may be.

 

Calling the present moment fascism doesn’t require courage. It requires historical amnesia.

 

Fascism isn’t defined by tone. It’s defined by force.

 

Words are easy. But power tells the truth.

 

And when Americans look honestly at which political party has most often used the machinery of government to compel obedience, censor speech, enforce ideological conformity, and punish dissent, the charge of fascism doesn’t just fall apart.

 

It reveals exactly who’s been practicing it.

 

Senator Chris McDaniel | Facebook

In my last column on Facebook, I laid out what actual fascism has looked like in American history, from past Democratic administrations to the present, and why tone, rhetoric, or political dislike do not meet that definition. The reaction to that piece proved the point more clearly than any footnote ever could.

 

Liberals went bananas. Which, of course, made me smile.

 

What has become clear in reading the comment section is that the American Left has a favorite pastime. Redefining words. Once the definition is loose enough, it’s followed by something worse, confusing hurt feelings with political doctrines. Offense becomes oppression. Disagreement becomes violence. Tone becomes tyranny.

 

That clever sleight of hand is how serious words lose their meaning. It’s also how real abuses of power hide in plain sight. When every discomfort is treated as authoritarianism, the public loses its ability to recognize the real thing when it actually appears.

 

Historically, fascism has never been subtle. You don’t infer it. You don’t sense it. You live under it. It shows up through harsh laws that punish speech, rigid orders that don’t tolerate refusal, and absolute power that no longer asks permission.

 

Every genuine example looks the same once the slogans are stripped away. Dissent against the nation-state becomes disloyalty. Courts are sidelined. Elections lose consequence. Obedience stops being voluntary and becomes enforced.

 

Calling fascism a “cluster of traits” might work in a seminar room, but it collapses in the real world if those traits never culminate in coercion. Without arrests, bans, or compelled compliance, you aren’t describing a system of rule. You’re describing a personality you don’t like.

 

And you know who I’m talking about.

 

American history gives us clarity on this point, and I cited examples in my last column. Democrat administrations jailed citizens for words. They removed families from their homes by executive order. Businesses shuttered by decree. Employment was conditioned on obedience. Movement restricted. These weren’t metaphors. They were acts carried out by governments and backed by force.

 

That history matters because it sets a threshold. Words like “fascist” are supposed to mean something serious. It’s an evil ideology. But when it’s applied to every policy disagreement or election result, the word loses the power to warn. Put simply, when everything is fascism, nothing is.

 

The real danger isn’t harsh rhetoric or ugly politics. Or a hard-hitting social media post from Donald Trump. The real danger is confusing discomfort with oppression. That mistake doesn’t defend liberty. It dulls our instincts for when liberty is actually being taken.

 

Argue policy. Protest loudly. Vote someone out. That’s politics. Fascism begins when the government no longer tolerates disagreement and uses force to compel obedience.

 

History doesn’t ask us to panic. It asks us to remember.

 

So let’s sum it up for the social media warriors: Fascism is not a matter of tone. It is not a vibe. It is not triggered by a rude tweet. Fascism is a system in which the government claims to know best, renders the individual secondary to the state, and enforces obedience through law backed by force.

 

And history makes one thing unmistakable. When persuasion fails, when argument runs out, and when dissent refuses to fall in line, it has been Democratic administrations that most readily turn to compulsion. Not debate. Not tolerance. Just force.

 

And that, inconvenient as it may be, is where the real record leads.