Oh my goodness—lots of reading! Let me put some stuff together. Thanks for reading Meaning In History! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. I started out reading a guest article at Larry Johnson’s blog: WHY IS THE WEST SO WEAK (AND RUSSIA SO STRONG)? THE ROLE OF HUMAN CAPITAL AND WESTERN EDUCATION
Rereading it, I think it's actually a giant dog whistle. Restating parts of it, I'd argue:
- Obama split with his Jewish girlfriend over the question of tribal loyalty. He chose his own tribe (as should any politician with an ounce of genuine patriotism)
- Fresh off two Nobel prizes and a "first black president" trip, and with trademark malignant narcissism, Obama was righteously pissed at being treated by Netanyahu et al as just another house nigger. The tribal question once again
- The JCPOA was simply Obama's giant middle finger to Israel
I loath Obama for his smarmy BS and extensive warmongering, but on the above points I have sympathy with his positions.
The author won't openly say "Obama was not an *Israel-first* exceptionalist", hence the nonsensical way it reads. The Tablet publishes some good stuff, but it's own tribal loyalty is never in doubt.
I don’t know if anything I’m about to write amplifies anything other than a small part of the opening paragraph but; I had a PhD gentleman come work for me, yup, he wanted to be a cop. His motivation was to get his family out of the beltway and to a more “normal” place to live. He worked in the DC bureaucracy where his job was correcting the Congressional Record when one of our esteemed “betters” said something very stupid or foolish, you just can’t let that stand on record, can you now. I’m not sure what they did about video stupidity, but I’m sure there was a separate department for that.
Great guy, great cop, still working there at my PD. I guess you could say his job had been the modern day equivalent of the guy who followed the circus parade with a broom and shovel cleaning up after the elephants (and donkeys).
The PhD gentleman's previous job sounds a lot like Orwell's 1984 character Winston Smith, who worked in the Ministry of Truth.
"Winston Smith works in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, where he alters historical documents to make them coincide with the Party's current political agenda or confirm an "accurate" declaration made from Big Brother. The mutability of the past is a central tenet of Ingsoc and Winston is directly involved in manipulating and erasing certain events and people from history to benefit the Party. At the Records Department, Winston is required to write in Newspeak, which utilizes the principles of "doublethink," and corrects the Party's mistakes in past articles."
Winston tried to escape too but was not as lucky as the PhD gentleman.
I respectfully find the 1/4 of that Tablet article that I suffered through to be nonsense.
Obama challenged the notion of US exceptionalism? Really? When he is widely quoted as saying "I believe in US exceptionslism with every fibre of my being"? And while personally overseeing weekly drone strikes? Which is believing in and practising exceptionalism to an extent few (if any) other countries practice.
Invading and destroying Syria. And Libya. Yep, totally a committed and practising non-exceptionalist.
The Neocon issues you point out are part of why I added my caveat about not agreeing with important parts of the presentation. I still think it offers some good insights into our Ruling Class, despite the Neocon propaganda.
That Tablet article on Obama is stunning. I had always wondered who Obama really was, especially after he left the presidency, and this article/interview answers that question. Very insightful.
Powerline is on a par with the National Review in terms of clear thinking about the future of America. I gave up reading PL after 2020. Before NR did its against Trump edition, I had left them years before. We are all blessed that there are so many talented substack writers to choose from.
"What is the attraction of this self invented, transparently unreal figure, that is so irresistible to the Left?"
I would direct you to the fact that in a post-Christian nation, many more people than Jews have a God-sized hole they fill with Politics. It was painful to read about Obama's self-invention, and very painful to endure the intense interest and admiration for his successful self-invention by the interviewer and the interviewee in the Tablet. It was as though they were talking about a successful prelate who didn't believe in God and was only playing the game well.
But now we know why Obama hired Ben Rhodes; he needed the guy with an MFA in creative writing.
Reinsch: Your book is an exploration of identity politics as a spiritual, religious manifestation into our politics that has taken over our politics, but maybe we can get into it this way more specifically. You use this term towards the beginning of the book, you talk about the “invisible economy of man.” What is that? Why does that matter for identity politics?
Mitchell: I would give the left some credit on this. I think the deepest theological insight we have from the Hebrews and from Christians is that there is in fact two economies... for example, one of the gospels, the opening passage, Joseph and Mary had to go back to their place of birth because all the world was to be taxed. The way I characterize this is one of the gospels opens up with the idea that there is this thing called a world of payment, dollars and cents and taxes. Everything gets accounted for in the ledger book. Everything visible can be accounted for in the ledger book. The gospel is very clear, they don’t stay at the inn, they stay in probably a cave, Jesus is put into an animal feed trough, it’s completely off the ledger books of the world of visible payment. I think that’s what the gospel writer is trying to say. Christ came into the world not to address the visible world of payment, but the invisible economy of transgression and stain and to offer redemption in that way.
Then I think the more glaring example of this, the most beautiful example of this is Judas. It’s very clear that Judas, he praised Christ because he is thinking of this visible economy. Oil is poured down onto his head, think of the money that was worth. He feels like Christ is not being the revolutionary in the visible economy to help the poor. Christ says the poor will always be with us and it means any number of things, but among other things, it means that there’s something deeper going on here in the world than just this visible economy. He comes to offer relief from the transgression that no world of payment can understand. This is the deepest Christian insight, it’s a profound insight. I give the left credit for that, or the identity politics credit for that. It’s announcing, saying a more profound economy than the world of payment. I’m not saying it’s one that has to be replaced, we have to live with both economies....
It’s not an accident, in my view, that the collapse of the mainline churches in the aftermath of the Vietnam war didn’t put an end to the category of transgression and stain. It shifted. The Pew Charitable Trust poll indicates that a larger and larger number of Americans are among this group called the none, they have no religious affiliation. I’m saying: that’s not true, they have a profound religious affiliation. They are addressing the problem of transgression and stain, but they’re just not doing it in the churches, because they have a new place and a new way to do it and it’s called identity politics. /endquote
The lack of limiting principles and the value (grift) of leading movements is ruinous. It has driven disastrous excess in the civil rights movement (race and feminist branches especially), such that women are now being erased by LGBTQ excesses and racial leadership has gifted us BLM and reparations. Perhaps ChatGPT can be put to use in the cause of interconnected transparency: follow the money
And what a mess they’ve made. Remember back where the feminists started marching and yelling at us that when women took power everything would sweetness and life would perfect? There would be peace on earth and we would all love each other.
I recall a CIA / Howard Hughes gambit to recover a sunken Soviet sub during the mid-70s. The cover story for the unusually constructed ship was deep-seabed/ ocean floor mining exploration. What is old is new again. Billionaires, deep state, new tech, etc cetera etc cetera etc cetera
Also when I read the Entertainment Lawyer column (which does have a lot of truth in it) recently, those in the know say RFK jr has not been able to stop his cheating habit and may be cheating on his wife. But that never stopped Bill Clinton.
Another telling bit re Obama is the part about how his only friends are people who are will beneath him. That was also the case during his time as a "professor" at UChicago Law. He steered clear of the real professors.
Yes he was truly a fake professor, employed at the bequest of someone important. I think he actually taught night school. I had to explain to many people that this was not a tenure-track professorship, but a boondoggle. The average person does not understand any of this.
Yes I remember that about his lack of writing ability. I have a friend of more than 30 years who went to Columbia when Obama was supposed to be there, and he said, no he was definitely not there, as he knew all the black kids and played basketball with them. We need DNA tests of all Presidents-elect .
Yes he presumably got into Pakistan with an Indonesian passport. So it turns out there is a huge secret CIA facility in Pakistan where he probably underwent a lot of training. What they didn't count on was all the official US documents becoming available with the onset of Genealogy !! So we found the faked Selective Service form, the fake Social security number and most importantly, no real birth certificate. Also all plane records were removed so we could not see where his mother traveled before his birth. They had to scramble to fabricate fake records and remove real ones. Also they killed his boyfriends.
Actually, he was "president" of the law review, not the editor. "President" is a largely honorary title. But, yes, he's a poor writer and, without a teleprompter, a poor speaker. Painful to watch him swinging his head back and forth, switching from one screen to the other.
Completely on the money about Obama. I remember all my work colleagues going crazy over him back in 2008, fully buying into all the PR guff. Even back then, I kept on thinking "Who the hell is this guy? Where did he come from?" Even now, we can't answer these questions. He was definitely a Manchurian Candidate, and the prototype of the completely vapid and empty Davos-type pol who rules virtually every Western nation. He's a fleshful of hatred hanging on a human skeleton.
Hinderaker is a lawyer, and extremely careful in what he writes. I don’t think he believes in Biden’s vote totals, but has the issue of proof and there was a lot of bs accusations on the election fraud (my view chaff - deliberate bs to obscurate,hide the steal by anti Trumpers / deep-state plants / operatives ).
He comes across as mildly anti Trump, and a bit more gop establishment.
Hmmm, I agree he is doing very good work in Minnesota (hard to say where we'd be there if he wasn't active), but on the anti-Trump scale he comes across to me as vociferously anti-Trump. Hinderaker is from that school of politics / legal circles where even a smidge of untidiness is disqualifying. He is not much of an improvement over eGOP, but his drive for high transparency is most laudable.
I'm working now and so only had time to read about a minute in, but I have to highlight this most quotable quote:
"It’s about the programmatic attempt to suppress the key element of any high functioning society—high IQ people who also have strong critical skills and independent character. It’s about the programmatic effort to elevate relatively smart people, but people who are easily molded and directed. Perfect bureaucrats, you might say, which explains the vast expansion of bureaucracy under our Uniparty system of generally progressivist oriented governance and culture."
Bam! That's it. That's where we are. So much else just logically flows from there.
I don't think it's ever been any different. It's just now that the midwits have the full power of social media and the MSM to demonstrate their mediocrity. I'm currently reading about the world in the 1890s and the hysteria in the US about the sinking of the USS Maine and in France over the Dreyfus Affair would seem absolutely familiar to us today. Just a few sane voices amidst a mob of howling jackasses. Plus ca change!
I do think there has been an evolution in who / how levers of power are controlled, in the Hayek sense of 'how the worst get on top': it is why lawyers, pols, media, and law enforcement are entangled at the nastiest end of today's stick. The possibility in the US for unusual transparency is one lever that can be used to clean up the leadership malfeasance.
What's amazing is how supine and utterly irrelevant the GOP is. Where are they all? There's just Jim Jordan and MTG doing meaningless stunts, and Graham pops up occasionally to boost for WW3, but the rest have vanished. With the utter disaster of the Biden regime, the GOP should be a battleship in full flow, all guns blazing. Trump is on his own.
And that is always my answer to those who insist she will be the next president. She is too lazy. Never shown the slightest inclination to do a day’s work. Do I need to spell out who “she” is? I can’t stand her.
Absolutely agree with you on the “lazy” observation and I would also add not particularly smart either. He was a pretty face and a great bullshiter, but he just never struck me as being a great intellectual. Nope, the real movers and shakers were elsewhere; Valerie Jarrett, Michelle-I personally think the woman is Lady Macbeth on steroids and should n e v e r be underestimated-and of course, Susan Rice.
Definitely. There may be people in his entourage who are running things, but it's not him. He is indeed too lazy, and not half as clever as he thinks he is.
Thanks for the shout-out for my book (as well the previous mentions of my writings).
I'd be happy to have a conversation some time, or do an online Q&A, discussing these themes.
Rereading it, I think it's actually a giant dog whistle. Restating parts of it, I'd argue:
- Obama split with his Jewish girlfriend over the question of tribal loyalty. He chose his own tribe (as should any politician with an ounce of genuine patriotism)
- Fresh off two Nobel prizes and a "first black president" trip, and with trademark malignant narcissism, Obama was righteously pissed at being treated by Netanyahu et al as just another house nigger. The tribal question once again
- The JCPOA was simply Obama's giant middle finger to Israel
I loath Obama for his smarmy BS and extensive warmongering, but on the above points I have sympathy with his positions.
The author won't openly say "Obama was not an *Israel-first* exceptionalist", hence the nonsensical way it reads. The Tablet publishes some good stuff, but it's own tribal loyalty is never in doubt.
I don’t know if anything I’m about to write amplifies anything other than a small part of the opening paragraph but; I had a PhD gentleman come work for me, yup, he wanted to be a cop. His motivation was to get his family out of the beltway and to a more “normal” place to live. He worked in the DC bureaucracy where his job was correcting the Congressional Record when one of our esteemed “betters” said something very stupid or foolish, you just can’t let that stand on record, can you now. I’m not sure what they did about video stupidity, but I’m sure there was a separate department for that.
Great guy, great cop, still working there at my PD. I guess you could say his job had been the modern day equivalent of the guy who followed the circus parade with a broom and shovel cleaning up after the elephants (and donkeys).
The PhD gentleman's previous job sounds a lot like Orwell's 1984 character Winston Smith, who worked in the Ministry of Truth.
"Winston Smith works in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, where he alters historical documents to make them coincide with the Party's current political agenda or confirm an "accurate" declaration made from Big Brother. The mutability of the past is a central tenet of Ingsoc and Winston is directly involved in manipulating and erasing certain events and people from history to benefit the Party. At the Records Department, Winston is required to write in Newspeak, which utilizes the principles of "doublethink," and corrects the Party's mistakes in past articles."
Winston tried to escape too but was not as lucky as the PhD gentleman.
Citation: "Why is Winston’s job in the Ministry of Truth important to the Party in 1984?" eNotes Editorial, 23 Jan. 2019, https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/why-winstons-job-ministry-truth-important-party-13899. Accessed 5 Aug. 2023.
I respectfully find the 1/4 of that Tablet article that I suffered through to be nonsense.
Obama challenged the notion of US exceptionalism? Really? When he is widely quoted as saying "I believe in US exceptionslism with every fibre of my being"? And while personally overseeing weekly drone strikes? Which is believing in and practising exceptionalism to an extent few (if any) other countries practice.
Invading and destroying Syria. And Libya. Yep, totally a committed and practising non-exceptionalist.
Seriously, WTF..?
The Neocon issues you point out are part of why I added my caveat about not agreeing with important parts of the presentation. I still think it offers some good insights into our Ruling Class, despite the Neocon propaganda.
That Tablet article on Obama is stunning. I had always wondered who Obama really was, especially after he left the presidency, and this article/interview answers that question. Very insightful.
Powerline is on a par with the National Review in terms of clear thinking about the future of America. I gave up reading PL after 2020. Before NR did its against Trump edition, I had left them years before. We are all blessed that there are so many talented substack writers to choose from.
"What is the attraction of this self invented, transparently unreal figure, that is so irresistible to the Left?"
I would direct you to the fact that in a post-Christian nation, many more people than Jews have a God-sized hole they fill with Politics. It was painful to read about Obama's self-invention, and very painful to endure the intense interest and admiration for his successful self-invention by the interviewer and the interviewee in the Tablet. It was as though they were talking about a successful prelate who didn't believe in God and was only playing the game well.
But now we know why Obama hired Ben Rhodes; he needed the guy with an MFA in creative writing.
I have wanted to share an excellent interview with Joshua Mitchell on the occasion of his book "The Spiritual Quest of (Identity) Politics" at https://lawliberty.org/podcast/the-spiritual-quest-of-identity-politics/ from late last year. It's an easy listen but here's an excerpt,
/quote
Reinsch: Your book is an exploration of identity politics as a spiritual, religious manifestation into our politics that has taken over our politics, but maybe we can get into it this way more specifically. You use this term towards the beginning of the book, you talk about the “invisible economy of man.” What is that? Why does that matter for identity politics?
Mitchell: I would give the left some credit on this. I think the deepest theological insight we have from the Hebrews and from Christians is that there is in fact two economies... for example, one of the gospels, the opening passage, Joseph and Mary had to go back to their place of birth because all the world was to be taxed. The way I characterize this is one of the gospels opens up with the idea that there is this thing called a world of payment, dollars and cents and taxes. Everything gets accounted for in the ledger book. Everything visible can be accounted for in the ledger book. The gospel is very clear, they don’t stay at the inn, they stay in probably a cave, Jesus is put into an animal feed trough, it’s completely off the ledger books of the world of visible payment. I think that’s what the gospel writer is trying to say. Christ came into the world not to address the visible world of payment, but the invisible economy of transgression and stain and to offer redemption in that way.
Then I think the more glaring example of this, the most beautiful example of this is Judas. It’s very clear that Judas, he praised Christ because he is thinking of this visible economy. Oil is poured down onto his head, think of the money that was worth. He feels like Christ is not being the revolutionary in the visible economy to help the poor. Christ says the poor will always be with us and it means any number of things, but among other things, it means that there’s something deeper going on here in the world than just this visible economy. He comes to offer relief from the transgression that no world of payment can understand. This is the deepest Christian insight, it’s a profound insight. I give the left credit for that, or the identity politics credit for that. It’s announcing, saying a more profound economy than the world of payment. I’m not saying it’s one that has to be replaced, we have to live with both economies....
It’s not an accident, in my view, that the collapse of the mainline churches in the aftermath of the Vietnam war didn’t put an end to the category of transgression and stain. It shifted. The Pew Charitable Trust poll indicates that a larger and larger number of Americans are among this group called the none, they have no religious affiliation. I’m saying: that’s not true, they have a profound religious affiliation. They are addressing the problem of transgression and stain, but they’re just not doing it in the churches, because they have a new place and a new way to do it and it’s called identity politics. /endquote
The lack of limiting principles and the value (grift) of leading movements is ruinous. It has driven disastrous excess in the civil rights movement (race and feminist branches especially), such that women are now being erased by LGBTQ excesses and racial leadership has gifted us BLM and reparations. Perhaps ChatGPT can be put to use in the cause of interconnected transparency: follow the money
There's truth in that.
Haters have to hate
Secular Jews, obviously.
Here's the list I keep of the women running the government. Please add anyone I've missed:
Yellen - Treasury
Power -AID
Nuland - DoS
Monaco - DoJ
Rice - Domestic Policy
Haines, Avril - DNI
and
Jarrett, Valarie
Biden, Jill
Harris, kamala
Obama, Michelle
Jennifer Granholm - Secretary of Energy
And what a mess they’ve made. Remember back where the feminists started marching and yelling at us that when women took power everything would sweetness and life would perfect? There would be peace on earth and we would all love each other.
Admiral Rachel Levine -- HHS
Richard Levine
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/will-insurance-costs-derail-ev-revolution
I recall a CIA / Howard Hughes gambit to recover a sunken Soviet sub during the mid-70s. The cover story for the unusually constructed ship was deep-seabed/ ocean floor mining exploration. What is old is new again. Billionaires, deep state, new tech, etc cetera etc cetera etc cetera
The Glomar Explorer
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/08/rfk_jr_and_trumps_achilles_heel.html
This article raises several important questions re who RFK really is.
Also when I read the Entertainment Lawyer column (which does have a lot of truth in it) recently, those in the know say RFK jr has not been able to stop his cheating habit and may be cheating on his wife. But that never stopped Bill Clinton.
Another telling bit re Obama is the part about how his only friends are people who are will beneath him. That was also the case during his time as a "professor" at UChicago Law. He steered clear of the real professors.
Yes he was truly a fake professor, employed at the bequest of someone important. I think he actually taught night school. I had to explain to many people that this was not a tenure-track professorship, but a boondoggle. The average person does not understand any of this.
Yes I remember that about his lack of writing ability. I have a friend of more than 30 years who went to Columbia when Obama was supposed to be there, and he said, no he was definitely not there, as he knew all the black kids and played basketball with them. We need DNA tests of all Presidents-elect .
Yes he presumably got into Pakistan with an Indonesian passport. So it turns out there is a huge secret CIA facility in Pakistan where he probably underwent a lot of training. What they didn't count on was all the official US documents becoming available with the onset of Genealogy !! So we found the faked Selective Service form, the fake Social security number and most importantly, no real birth certificate. Also all plane records were removed so we could not see where his mother traveled before his birth. They had to scramble to fabricate fake records and remove real ones. Also they killed his boyfriends.
Actually, he was "president" of the law review, not the editor. "President" is a largely honorary title. But, yes, he's a poor writer and, without a teleprompter, a poor speaker. Painful to watch him swinging his head back and forth, switching from one screen to the other.
Completely on the money about Obama. I remember all my work colleagues going crazy over him back in 2008, fully buying into all the PR guff. Even back then, I kept on thinking "Who the hell is this guy? Where did he come from?" Even now, we can't answer these questions. He was definitely a Manchurian Candidate, and the prototype of the completely vapid and empty Davos-type pol who rules virtually every Western nation. He's a fleshful of hatred hanging on a human skeleton.
Kamala fits the mold perfectly. Vapid. anti intellectual. Not an original thought in her empty head
Hinderaker is a lawyer, and extremely careful in what he writes. I don’t think he believes in Biden’s vote totals, but has the issue of proof and there was a lot of bs accusations on the election fraud (my view chaff - deliberate bs to obscurate,hide the steal by anti Trumpers / deep-state plants / operatives ).
He comes across as mildly anti Trump, and a bit more gop establishment.
He is doing good work in Minnesota.
Hmmm, I agree he is doing very good work in Minnesota (hard to say where we'd be there if he wasn't active), but on the anti-Trump scale he comes across to me as vociferously anti-Trump. Hinderaker is from that school of politics / legal circles where even a smidge of untidiness is disqualifying. He is not much of an improvement over eGOP, but his drive for high transparency is most laudable.
I'm working now and so only had time to read about a minute in, but I have to highlight this most quotable quote:
"It’s about the programmatic attempt to suppress the key element of any high functioning society—high IQ people who also have strong critical skills and independent character. It’s about the programmatic effort to elevate relatively smart people, but people who are easily molded and directed. Perfect bureaucrats, you might say, which explains the vast expansion of bureaucracy under our Uniparty system of generally progressivist oriented governance and culture."
Bam! That's it. That's where we are. So much else just logically flows from there.
I don't think it's ever been any different. It's just now that the midwits have the full power of social media and the MSM to demonstrate their mediocrity. I'm currently reading about the world in the 1890s and the hysteria in the US about the sinking of the USS Maine and in France over the Dreyfus Affair would seem absolutely familiar to us today. Just a few sane voices amidst a mob of howling jackasses. Plus ca change!
I do think there has been an evolution in who / how levers of power are controlled, in the Hayek sense of 'how the worst get on top': it is why lawyers, pols, media, and law enforcement are entangled at the nastiest end of today's stick. The possibility in the US for unusual transparency is one lever that can be used to clean up the leadership malfeasance.
Completely agree. I had at first included the sentence "That's where we've been," but deleted it for brevity.
I skip much of what Hinderaker pens these days. On (bad) energy policy, he remains worth the read
What's amazing is how supine and utterly irrelevant the GOP is. Where are they all? There's just Jim Jordan and MTG doing meaningless stunts, and Graham pops up occasionally to boost for WW3, but the rest have vanished. With the utter disaster of the Biden regime, the GOP should be a battleship in full flow, all guns blazing. Trump is on his own.
Zhou isn’t the only grifter in town…
The GOP is not even that
Samuels is big on the 'O' is the real prez thing, but I think O is too lazy for that.
Yes I agree. More likely I think it might be Susan Rice running things.
O as lead strategist, C team as tacticians / doers
And that is always my answer to those who insist she will be the next president. She is too lazy. Never shown the slightest inclination to do a day’s work. Do I need to spell out who “she” is? I can’t stand her.
Absolutely agree with you on the “lazy” observation and I would also add not particularly smart either. He was a pretty face and a great bullshiter, but he just never struck me as being a great intellectual. Nope, the real movers and shakers were elsewhere; Valerie Jarrett, Michelle-I personally think the woman is Lady Macbeth on steroids and should n e v e r be underestimated-and of course, Susan Rice.
Valerie Jarrett I can see. She’s strong and seems to be driven by a plan. Her ego doesn’t mind being a behind the scenes driver.
Michelle is too angry and bitter (similar to Hillary) in that she was second fiddle instead of first. People can feel that resentment and shy from it.
Susan Rice has a weak chin and shifty eyes. She will fold under pressure. And probably did.
Definitely. There may be people in his entourage who are running things, but it's not him. He is indeed too lazy, and not half as clever as he thinks he is.
Lisa Monaco, who runs the DOJ, is an Obama acolyte. She takes her orders from him, or the people behind him. To this day.
Plus while he does have his people in the Zhou WH there are also plenty of Hillary retreads.