Cataclysmic Pep Talk

Imagine if Kamala Harris becomes president. Some people might think that things will actually run better than when Joe Biden was in charge because she’s even stupider than he was and won’t attempt to run anything at all and so the “geniuses” in charge of the deep state will manage all the decisions of the federal government and everything will be coordinated to the nth degree.

And maybe to some extent this will be true.  But I don’t think the various bureaucracies of the federal government can be allowed to run their little satraps indefinitely without supervision by someone who understands reality.  I’m imagining the State Department and the CIA explaining to Harris that it’s going to be necessary to return to Afghanistan to prevent homophobia and transphobia from threatening the LGBTQ population there.  And Kamala would immediately approve of such a plan.  Or suppose the EPA talks her into banning fossil fuels altogether.  Or the Justice Department easily convinces her that reparations for slavery to the tune of $45 trillion dollars can no longer wait.  You can see how having a complete moron as president could lead to extremely unfortunate decisions being made.

This kind of analysis goes along with the accelerationist theory for destabilizing the current regime.  Specifically, if the terrible people in charge of the Left are allowed to follow their inclinations without a brake from the Right, eventually they’ll damage the system so much that it will cease to function.  I think this is a simplistic version of how things will go but essentially it is correct.  This is what happens in a blue state like Massachusetts for instance.  The Democrats will assume complete control of the legislature, governor’s mansion and the courts and they will run hog wild and vote themselves anything and everything.  And then they go broke and everything stops working.  And they will vote a Republican governor in to fix the budget and return at least a modicum of sanity to the state government.  And of course, a Massachusetts “Republican” means William Weld or Mitt Romney.  Basically, they’re middle of the road Democrats anywhere else.  And as soon as this Republican has balanced the budget he is immediately cast into the outer darkness and replaced by a lunatic lesbian who wants to fund on-demand gender affirming surgery for toddlers and cradle to grave benefits for illegal aliens.

So the problem is how to avoid the return to power by the Democrats?  I think part of the answer is to take a page from Milei’s book.  Radically reducing the size of the federal government would reduce the power and control of the deep state.  And it would make policies that favor private sector job creation critical.  Of course, most of these laid off bureaucrats will be at a distinct disadvantage in the real world of the private section but I’m sure a few of them will survive.  So, it would be a win/win, sort of.

But I’m not trying to paint the accelerationist model as a pain free scenario.  In order to get to a place where a solid majority would be willing to let the Right have their way, there will have to be economic chaos unleashed on our society, the like of which hasn’t been seen for over a century.  We’re talking 30% unemployment or runaway hyperinflation.  That kind of stuff.  So, shock therapy.  Anything less than that will be tolerated by the schlubs who now populate this sad benighted world we live in.

I’ll be honest.  Having this be the path forward is a pretty depressing plan.  But I now doubt anything less will shock this nation out of its addiction to infantile socialism.  So that’s my pep talk!

A Little Love for the Left

Something I’ve noticed lately is that the Left is feeling blue.  I think they have a sense that the vast majority of people in the country have come to the realization that the Left has single-handedly ruined a whole slew of very important parts of American life.  All kinds of people; poor, rich; black, white, brown; educated and uneducated; men and women.  They’ve looked around and they see things like closed up stores in cities, failing school systems, homeless encampments everywhere, violence even in the rich neighborhoods and the cost of living becoming unmanageable.  And they all know exactly how and who did it.  The Left did it on purpose and unapologetically.  And now the fingers are being pointed directly at them.  And they want a hug.

I’ll read an article in the Atlantic or the New York Times and they’ll bemoan the loss of safety in the cities and they’ll wring their hands over the paradox of how making the criminal justice system easier on criminals has inexplicably made the streets mysteriously more dangerous.  And they’ll finally say, “Well maybe we went too far.”  And then they look for some kind of solidarity with the “good people in the middle.”  They want to join hands with people who didn’t vote for Joe Biden.  They’re looking for the kumbaya moment where we all share the blame for defunding the police and voting in soft on crime prosecutors and mayors.  They want absolution; a do-over.  Maybe they even want to leave the same bad actors in place and just let them learn from this “teachable moment.”

Of course, there are plenty of Republicans just stupid enough to rise to the bait and “reach across the aisle.”  But hopefully the people themselves have become disgusted enough that we can build up a slow boil in society at large.  We need enough areas to finally get wise to the futility of cooperating with the Left.  States with large cities have to become sophisticated enough to make laws that can allow the state to step in when local officials create dangerous or dysfunctional conditions.  They can legislate against unconstitutional gun laws, sanctuaries for illegal aliens or unhealthy treatment of children.  And these states can counteract the federal laws that damage life for them.  Improve the schools and eliminate propaganda from the Left, welfare reform, defunding of illegal aliens.

So, I take it as a very healthy sign that the Left is worried about the exposure they’ve received for driving the country into a ditch.  And anyone who reacts to these kinds of appeals to solidarity and fellow citizenship should have his head examined and then given a good solid butt kicking for good measure.

And as far as these kinds of things happening in deep blue states like California and Oregon, I’m absolutely thrilled.  I hope that nothing whatsoever is done to change the policies or alleviate the outcomes of the policies they’ve instituted.  I want places like San Francisco and Portland to become just one big homeless encampment.  I want every single store in places like Oakland to close up.  I want the price of gasoline in Los Angeles to reach twenty dollars a gallon and brownouts to last for most of the workday.  What I’d really love to see is all of Silicon Valley move to Texas and California officially go broke and go out of business.  Then I’ll give them a hug.

The ZMan and the Republicans

Today’s ZMan post was very thought provoking.  He links to two other articles that take a pro and con stance on whether ineffective “conservative” parties like the Republicans in America and the Tories in England should be totally abandoned or reformed.

The abandonment thesis is that if the British Tories were completely abandoned by their supporters this would have the twin benefits of destroying the spineless Tory part, thus paving the way for a replacement and delegitimizing the whole Uni-party arrangement that the Labor and Tory parties have practiced for generations.

The reform opinion holds that destroying the brake on the power of the progressives that the half-hearted but at least existing opposition party provides will make things much worse with all the worst policies now happening unchecked.

It’s a very difficult argument to pick a side on.  It’s hard to imagine a worse situation than the one we find ourselves in presently with Joe Biden ruling by executive order.  That is until you imagine what would happen if he had even a two thirds majority in the Congress.  They’d impeach and remove Supreme Court justices and anyone else standing in their way.

So, the ZMan is staunchly on the abandonment side of the argument.  He’d let the Republicans go down to complete defeat and depend on an accelerationist scenario to drive the present government into disrepute and depend on a reset to produce a new system that suits him better.

I guess I’m currently in the reform camp.  But I will say, if the Democrats hold onto the presidency this year I may change my mind.  At a certain point you just give up on “working within the system.”

It’s a pretty good read.

Give the Left What It Says It Wants

The recent bus service from Texas to New York City and Washington DC that Governor Abbott initiated got me thinking.  It sort of aligns with the idea of acceleration that is popular with some on the Dissident Right.  The idea is to accelerate the crazy ideas that the Left favors in order to let reality crash the system sooner.  The thought is that hitting bottom is the only way to convince the stupid that their beliefs are irrational.

I have mixed feelings about the accelerationist theory.  Hitting bottom seems like a particularly dangerous place to be.  I’m not sure some of these “bottom” conditions can be reversed.  For instance, if Biden allows another fifty million illegal aliens to invade the country, I’m not sure it will be possible to repair that kind of damage short of some horrific violence that might finish the country off altogether.

But the example of the bus rides points to a different kind of acceleration.  If the damage can be restricted to blue states, then maybe the actions will serve a purpose.  Suppose the bus rides were extended to other groups that aren’t wanted in the Red States.  For instance, imagine if the homeless could be persuaded to move to California.  And the same could extend to prison inmates.  Their sentences could be commuted if they agreed to leave the red states permanently.  After all New York and California have been pioneering the concept of emptying the prisons and eliminating criminal convictions.  It only makes sense to send career criminals where their talents can be put to their best effect.

I haven’t gone through all the accelerationist scenarios that could be handled this way but I’m sure it could be quite interesting to play this thought experiment.  Maybe there could even be some kind of negotiations to get certain corporations to move out of state.  Or more realistically, provide a carrot and stick approach for companies (and universities) based on whether they engage in anti-social behavior like white guilt struggle sessions and EDI propaganda.  Hefty fines for each infraction would quickly make these companies weigh whether their policies were more important than relocating.  As a practical example, Ron DeSantis has recently tweaked Disney by eliminating their self-governing status in Florida.  It will be interesting to see if further “lessons” influence Disney’s propensity for condemning conservative laws and programs in Florida.  Changing their behavior would be a major victory.

Obviously, my poor efforts are woefully insufficient to evaluate just how many similar ideas could be identified.  Governors and legislatures are the right ones to do it.  Imagine if Washington DC could be inundated with a million illegal aliens and a hundred thousand freed felons.  Joe Biden would probably have to roll out the razor wire and call back the National Guard to keep his friends from defecating on his lawn, stealing the catalytic converter on his bomb proof limousine and spray painting, “Let’s Go Brandon” on the side of the West Wing.

Well anyway, that’s what I thought about this evening.  You see, I can be constructive if I try.  It doesn’t always have to be doom and gloom.  We can have fun once in a while too.

The Absurdity of Republican Governors in Blue States

The linked article describes how Andrew Cuomo’s refusal to resign following his twin scandals of killing off all of New York State’s old people with COVID and groping all the women who work for him has opened up an opportunity for a Republican to be elected as Governor next year.  Oh, joy.

I lived for decades in a state that typically goes through a cycle of one or two terms of a Democrat governor followed by four or five terms of Republican governors.  How it works is that a Democrat governor does so much fiscal and public safety harm during just a few years in office that even the ideologues in the blue state population realize that their livelihoods and lives are at risk.  So, they allow a Republican to come in and right the ship.

But the Republican governor is so grateful to be allowed to fix their mess that he bends over backward to be indistinguishable from a Democrat on social issues.  The state I refer to is Massachusetts and they brought in William Weld and his two subordinates and then Mitt Romney to clean up the Mike Dukakis mess.  Then after they let the Barack Obama Mini-Me (Deval Patrick) crash the Massachusetts Miracle for eight years they had to bring in Charlie Baker to stop the hemorrhaging and allow the state to revive.

Why exactly Blue State Republicans are willing to fulfill this role for their progressive constituencies is a mystery to me.  I suppose they are attached to their homes and always hope that a permanent equilibrium is possible.  But this is a fool’s hope.  Just looking at Massachusetts, or even more vivid, New York City’s mayoral history will demonstrate that the fiscal and public safety sanity that a Republican leader provides will eventually convince the progressive population that they have nothing to fear by installing a lunatic like Deval Patrick or Bill de Blasio.  And once the inevitable happens they still only grudgingly accept the prescription that a Republican reformer brings to them and chafe at its requirements to hold people accountable regardless of favored racial and sexual status.

So, you get this predictable oscillation, up and down, for crime and poverty and chaos.  The question remains why the Republicans bother.  It will never get better and they will never get credit for keeping their constituencies from destroying themselves.  Places like California, New York and New England should be allowed to destroy themselves without interference from the people they so obviously despise.  This is the accelerationist argument and over time I’ve come to adopt it wholeheartedly.  It will only be after one of these places crashes completely that the people who are left might learn enough to know that the things they believe in are irrational and unsustainable in the real world.

So, I wholeheartedly agree with ridiculing the people who run these states and highlighting for everyone to see how awful the outcomes of their policy choices are.  But I object to the Right, such as it still exists in these places, pulling their chestnuts out of the fire.  Things need to get so bad that even the elites that formulate these nonsensical polices are made to suffer the consequences.  Probably, from my point of view, the perfect outcome would be for the inhabitants to revert to cannibalism and eat Bill Gates and Nancy Pelosi off of a spit.  In that way they could see the racial justice they strive for brought to fruition and also do their part for sustainability.  After all, in California there is an almost inexhaustible supply of white progressives and I can think of no higher use to put them to than as entrees on a community barbecue menu.