Roundup: Kill The Cows Before They Kill Us?

Over the weekend a common refrain among commenters here was: Who are these people? Who are these people behind the overthrow of our culture and society? Is it an evil cabal—WEF, certain foundations, the Deep State? Or are these institutions populated by people who have simply imbibed the Spirit of the Age—the current version of Hegel’s Weltgeist or Heidegger’s Dasein—and are simply surfing what they believe is the wave of the future, Being coming to us from the future, being on the right side of History. Whoever or whatever History is in this telling. Are they possessed by the World Spirit, much as the mad scientists in C. S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength?

Today’s post will present some news and commentary items that, in the aggregate, seem to have some bearing on these questions.

First we have Tom Luongo addressing the matter of Vivek “surging”. I summarize the tweet thread:

@TomiLahren

Vivek is surging for a few reasons:

He’s getting a ton of media by being an anomaly and a spectacle

He’s appeasing MAGA voters because they don’t seem him as a threat to their guy

Trump doesn’t see him as a threat. He’s not attacking. …

Tom Luongo (Head Sneetch) @TFL1728:

He’s being purposefully amplified as a stalking horse for the establishment

bluehound @craigknapp76:

Viveck isn't pulling support from Trump.... he is getting it from RDS people who are NeverTrump. Trumps numbers aren't going down..... Seems to me NeverTrump conservative types are the ones he is appealing to...

Tom Luongo (Head Sneetch)

And that's your tell that he's a stalking horse. All the other yabos like Christie and Nimrata have zero appeal, so enter Vivek sounding like a low-rent @RonPaul

I’m not sure if this theory can be worked out fully. However, I would add what might be another tell—well, make that two tells or maybe dog whistles:

1. Vivek is a war monger. It’s just that he’s mongering war with China rather than the losing war on Russia. Does that remind you of any faction currently running US foreign policy, that wants to freeze the conflict in Ukraine and pivot to China?

2. This: vivek won't prosecute hunter. Interpret his statements any way you want, but his statements do demand attention.

So who’s behind him? Recall yesterday’s updating of Micheal Anton: “The people who really run the United States of America have made it clear that they can’t, and won’t, if they can help it, allow Donald Trump to be president again.” And, of course, we know they think they can help it—they always think they can. What’s their plan this time?

Is this part of the plan? A new Covid Regime? We’ve been hearing the rumors about the new strain, BS 24/7. Can they lock the country down again to enable the Big Steal 2.0? Luongo sees something of this sort going on in Germany, so why not here?

Tom Luongo (Head Sneetch) @TFL1728

Finally some real light coming form Germany. This is why they are trial ballooning a new COVID lockdown

Megatron @Megatron_ron

BREAKING:

Almost two-thirds of Germans want a new government, citizens said in a poll on Saturday — dpa.

Even Jonathan Turley is saying that part out loud, in a professorial, legal way—the Ruling Class is trying to prep Election 2024 by pre-selecting the candidates we’ll be allowed to vote for:

The Disqualification Of Donald Trump And Other Legal Urban Legends

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Below is my column in The Hill on the increasingly popular theory that former president Donald Trump is already barred from office under the 14th Amendment.

…

In a constitution designed to protect free speech and prevent the concentration of power, this theory would allow for the banning of candidates based on fluid definitions of aiding and abetting insurrection.

Such ballot cleansing is common in countries like Iran where citizens await to learn which opposition candidates will be allowed to run. The implications of this theory for our constitutional system is chilling.

As Roger Kimball put it yesterday:

Who are those people? Mostly Democrats, yes, but really, it’s a bipartisan, deep-state consensus, a uniparty assumption that Trump, being an existential threat to their continued existence must be kept from political power by any means necessary.

Mostly Dems? I dunno.

But, still—who are these people who are reckless and crazy enough to threaten the demolition of our constitutional order just to keep their hands on the levers of power? What do they want? Michael Anton says they want “open borders, trade giveaways, and endless war.” Or are those simply means to an end? When given power we begin to see just how crazy these people are, as we noted just a few days ago:

These 14 American Cities Have A ‘Target’ Of Banning Meat, Dairy, And Private Vehicles By 2030

Fourteen major American cities are part of a globalist climate organization known as the “C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group,” …

C40’s dystopian goals can be found in its “The Future of Urban Consumption in a 1.5°C World” report, which was published in 2019 and reportedly reemphasized in 2023. The organization is headed and largely funded by Democrat billionaire Michael Bloomberg. Nearly 100 cities across the world make up the organization, and its American members include Austin, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Seattle.

Wait a minute—2030 is only seven years from now! And this isn’t just blue cities. We know that the Euros are buying into this madness, too. The Dutch are trying to shut down their farms because—Global Warming. And now the Irish want to kill their cows—the geese that lay their Dairy Gold eggs, so to speak:

Ireland’s bonkers plan to kill cows to save the planet

It seems the Irish, who have been transformed from a Christian country folk into urban Woke masses—rather like the Dutch and Americans—have become convinced that all those cattle farting in the countryside are going to kill them because—methane and Global Warming. Kill the cows before they kill us? The logic makes sense, if you buy into the insane premises.

You know you’re living in strange times when cows become a front line of the culture war but several recent marches by eco-zealots have seen young protesters holding placards proclaiming that anyone who eats meat or drinks milk obviously hates Mother Earth …

Which does kinda make you wonder whether there may be something to the various depopulation theories. Especially when you realize that the people behind the Climate Hoax are eugenicists:

UK Population Collapse "Good For The Planet", WEF Adviser Prof Sarah Harper Explains

Authored Igor Chudov via DailySceptic.org,

Remember how depopulation was called a right-wing conspiracy theory?

Things have changed, and ‘population collapse’, which can no longer be denied, is now good for us!

This is a new post-Christian faith, as it seems to me. It fits in with Roger Kimball’s observation, citing Trump himself:

Trump was right when he said “they’re not after me. They’re after you. I’m just standing in the way.” Anton got to the nub of the issue when he observed that “Anti-Trump hysteria is in the final analysis not about Trump. The regime can’t allow Trump to be president not because of who he is (although that grates), but because of who his followers are.”

The connect is that Trump’s “followers” are by and large people with some degree of residual attachment to the traditional culture of the West. They stand in the way of the new cult. Lewis Andrews addresses this phenomenon in an insightful article today:

Fearful Worship of a Climate Idol

“Eco-anxiety” may stem not just from prevalent climate scaremongering, but also from the decline of religion.

Well, here’s a slightly different way of putting it: The decline of Christian faith—reasonable belief—and its replacement with a new religion.

Andrews begins by citing Allysia Finley, who argued in the WSJ that “Alarmist stories about bad weather…are fueling mental derangements.” He then cites additional studies that tend to confirm that mental derangement based on Woke ideology and hoaxes is, indeed, widespread in the collective West.

[While t]he problem is clearly real ... has something more profound happened to our culture which makes such catastrophic prophesying seem more credible than it otherwise would be?

After all, this is not the first time the world has had to cope with a seemingly science-based prediction of planetary catastrophe or with the tendency of activists to exaggerate every conceivable indication of its coming. Before the current concern with climate change, there was fear of overpopulation. Before overpopulation, there was the fear of global thermonuclear war. And before nuclear apocalypse, overpopulation again, that time courtesy of an English scholar named Thomas Malthus.

Woops! It seems Malthus has made a big comeback from the dead.

This is not even the first time that major sectors of the economy have had a vested interest in aggravating the general population’s concerns about what will happen to humanity “if something isn’t done immediately. ...

We cannot overlook the fact that what historically has been a powerful antidote for scientific pessimism—the biblical belief that while material knowledge is a useful tool (Genesis 1:28), it should never be accepted as a complete picture of the universe (Corinthians 3:18–19)—has clearly lost its force in the West. ...

But as the German philosopher Max Weber (1864-1920) famously worried, playing even favorable odds is never an adequate substitute for a sense of deeper reality, when it comes to living with confidence in uncertain times. ...

Alex Krainer weighs in on what he calls the “Idiocracy”—the elevation of post-truth, post-objectivity professional[s] whose first duty is to the "party" to positions of authority. In a sense it boils down to the famous aphorism—often, but apparently incorrectly, attributed to G. K. Chesterton:

“When a man stops believing in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing, he believes in anything.”

Krainer presents the improbable yet undeniable phenomenon of the Idiocracy in a graphic:

But after the laugh, Krainer makes a disturbing observation about the way forward once a society has succumbed to an Idiocracy:

Has incremental reform become impossible?

In such systems, corrective action which the competent, principled professional could exert at important junctures may become so weakened that they ossify around distorted ideas and flawed plans, making any reform short of a violent, revolutionary collapse impossible. In the west, we may be past this point.

I’ll close with a few passages from an essay by the Italian historian Roberto de Mattei, writing today. It seems to me that several passages that de Mattei provides capture our plight rather well. He cites figures from the past who had already answered our question: Who are they? The answer, in fact, echoes Marx’s quote from Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, which Marx deliberately tears from its context. Eric Voegelin comments on Marx in his brilliant Science, Politics, and Gnosticism (p. 36):

Prometheus crams his impotence and rebellion into the line quoted by Marx: “In a word, I hate all the gods.” But the line is not part of a monologue. At this outbreak of hatred the messenger of the gods replies admonishingly: “It appears you have been stricken by no small madness.”

On to de Mattei:

Pius X and the Imponderable of what lies ahead: A Lesson for Our Time

One hundred and twenty years after the election of St. Pius X, the chaos in which we are immersed is the ultimate outcome of a revolutionary process that has remote origins and its own centuries-long dynamism. Bishop Jean-Joseph Gaume (1802-1879) identified the soul of this process in nihilism.

"If, tearing off the Revolution's mask, you ask it, Who are you? it will say to you, I am hatred for every religious and social order that man has not established and in which he is not king and God together. I am the philosophy of revolt, the politics of revolt, the religion of revolt: I am armed negation (nihil armatum); I am the foundation of the religious and social state on the will of man instead of the will of God! In a word I am anarchy, because I am God dethroned and man in his place. That is why I am called Revolution, that is, overthrow."

…

Pius X, his first encyclical E supremi apostolato, dated Oct. 4, 1903, casts on our confused age the supernatural light needed to understand contemporary events. Aiming at the most funereal conditions in which mankind found itself, Pius X stated,

"For who can fail to see that society is at the present time, more than in any past age, suffering from a terrible and deep-rooted malady which, developing every day and eating into its inmost being, is dragging it to destruction? You understand, Venerable Brethren, what this disease is - apostasy from God, than which in truth nothing is more allied with ruin, according to the word of the Prophet: 'For behold they that go far from Thee shall perish.' (Ps. 1xxii., 17)."