The Post-Partisan Emporium

  The article is better than the title... Katherine Maher is Worse Than a Leftist BY  ANDREW LOWENTHAL Katherine Maher, NPR’s new CEO, has been in the spotlight for more than a week now as the straight-out-of-casting avatar of peak woke and peak institutional attainment. But Katherine Maher is not a liberal or a leftist. Though she apes identitarian thought bubbles you won’t find her on a picket line, or splitting any of her previous  800k annual Wikipedia salary  with the downtrodden. I don’t remember it being a trait of the Left to work at the World Bank, the National Democratic Institute, and HSBC, intern at the Council of Foreign Relations, be a WEF young leader, or a fellow at the Atlantic Council, a NATO-affiliated think tank. Maher is what I call a Cosmopolitan Authoritarian – a cultural libertine that institutional power has anointed into the charmed circle. I crossed Maher’s path several times on the digital rights conference circuit but met her only once...

All This and World War Too James Howard Kunstler For three decades, since the old Soviet Union ended in a whimper, reincarnated Russia asked “the West” for very little, almost nothing, really, certainly not the kind of “aid” that the USA used like a fungo-bat to beat lesser states around the world into hegemonic submission. All Russia asked, after seventy-five years of mass formation communist insanity, was to be treated once again like a normal European nation. Early on, Russia even floated a possible application to NATO, which NATO laughed off — among many other insults to follow. But slowly after 1991, and then all at once, Europe and the USA fell under their own mass formation spell, apparently at the instigation of a certain Schwabenklaus and his WEF factotums implanted throughout Western Civ, like poison raisins in a fruitcake, rendering the EU members and the USA insane, which is to say no longer able to entertain normal relations with others. And so, by February of 2022, you ge...

Activism: A Write-off and Autopsy Dustin Broadbery Audio Version  New Feature! Audio Player 00:00 00:00 Use Up/Down Arrow keys to increase or decrease volume. If Extinction Rebellion is  the midlife crisis of activist causes , the war in Ukraine is the crack cocaine of moral high grounds. For those finely attuned to consensual reality, activism is the perfect oasis from which to emulate dissent, while keeping one’s head beneath the parapet. Gone are the old hellraisers on the left stickin’ it to the man. Instead, you have a bunch of  snowflakes  looking to extricate themselves from moral responsibility by signalling their righteousness, rather than embodying it. Activism, for want of a better word, has become an assembly point to a fire drill. A part-time hobby for those in the cultural backwaters who mistake hoax for reality and  other people’s misfortune as their personal consolation . This innocent fun and games aside, however, the rebranding of groupthink in...

‘Left’ Is Now Political Shorthand For ‘Corporate State Technocracy’ Ben Bartee The left-right paradigm was always dubious as a way to describe the Western political dichotomy. Given what modern “Leftism” entails, it’s even more irrelevant now. Here’s a  basic definition of “Leftist” ideology  that, once upon a time, characterized many aspects of leftist politics in the early-to-mid-20th century: “The portion of the political spectrum associated in general with egalitarianism and popular… control of the major institutions of political and economic life… Leftists tend to be hostile to the interests of traditional elites, including the wealthy and members of the aristocracy, and to favour the interests of the working class.” What a difference a few decades of corporate capture makes! What sort of egalitarian,  hostile-to-elite-interests  positions does the modern Western left take? Does the ‘Left’ safeguard Constitutionally-guaran...