Mimsy Were the Borogoves

I don’t think you can get more emblematic of the modern beltway class than this notion that US troops should be sent overseas and should not protect US borders. It fires on all cylinders: What they used to call imperialism is now the only moral use for the army. And that farm and industrial workers should make less money by undercutting their jobs with people coming here illegally and forcing those jobs overseas.

They denigrate Americans as lazy and snobbish for not wanting to do the jobs that they themselves have made it almost impossible to hire Americans for.

My mom used to do some of those “jobs Americans won’t do”, which in our farm-based area meant picking asparagus and other fruit and vegetables. Many women did that to pick up extra money to improve their families’ incomes and save for their kids’ education.

She did not stop doing it because she didn’t want to do those jobs. I’m pretty she never wanted to do those jobs, but she did them anyway. She, along with the other women, stopped doing it because the farms stopped hiring them.

She wasn’t alone. An Ace of Spades commenter writing under the nom de plume notsothoreau wrote about their experience in farm work:

I used to work cherry harvest. Typically you work 10 hour days straight for about 21 days. When I started, high school kids could still work there. Then Washington passed a law that kids under 18 could only work up to 60 hours a week and there were also limits on the hours in the day they could work. It wasn’t worth it to the company and they stopped hiring them.

The farms stopped hiring people like my mom because it became progressively more expensive to hire part-time workers due to the regulatory burden per employee. They stopped hiring people like “notsothoreau” because they were no longer allowed to hire high school kids for short bursts of long hours—arguably something teenagers are well-suited for, and which many prefer over longer-term commitments.

The paperwork and other added regulatory expenses made it too expensive to hire the Americans who wanted to do these jobs. The paperwork for hiring someone here illegally is by necessity a lot less than for hiring citizens and legal immigrants.

“Fight!” (Photo by Evan Vucci)

An assassination attempt against a former president and current candidate must not be forgotten.

• Mark Steyn: “The other night my youngest expressed a wish to see The Manchurian Candidate—the original, of course. And, as great as it is, its famous ending seemed an artifact of a lost and somewhat innocent age: a man is able to stroll into a political rally and access easily a high-up vantage point with a direct line of sight to the nominee. Couldn’t happen now… And yet it just did.”
• Austin Ruse: “Good Lord Almighty, that man is a legend. He gets shot, gets up almost immediately, with blood running down his face, throws his fist in the air and shouts ‘fight, fight, fight.’ Donald Trump is a legend.”
• Judicial Watch Statement on the Assassination Attempt on Former President Donald Trump: “Americans can be assured that Judicial Watch has already initiated an independent investigation into today’s events.”

More and more, the horse seems to be controlling the rider.

More and more, I do not trust calls for term limits on elected representatives, or for dispersing the permanent bureaucracy. It seems to me that both of these potentially useful proposals are being co-opted by the permanent state to weaken the ability of voters to change the system through elections. They’re deliberately designed to weaken elected officials while strengthening the permanent state.

Superficially, a lot of the calls for term limits seem, in my opinion, to miss the point entirely. First, and biggest, a long period in government results in the officeholder identifying more with government than with voters. Second, and related, is that a long period in government means that the officeholder has no experience in common with voters; even officeholders who started with experience outside government see that experience become more and more antiquated.

Most term limit-style proposals don’t just not fix those problems, they exacerbate them. They encourage, not gaining experience in the private sector, but moving from one office to another and thus identifying even more with government.

This tendency is so bad that it often becomes its own version of the Peter Principle, that people rise to the level of their own incompetence. A governor is doing a great job as governor? Get them out of the governor’s office and into the race for the White House! This has become so ingrained in the political class that just about every successful governor is already planning on a Presidential run in their second term.

Even outside of governorships—which is where term limits for elected officials makes the most sense—it often seems that the moment a successful representative gains a name, they are instantly neutered by moves into the federal bureaucracy or even more powerless offices like the vice presidency. This appears to be what happened with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and what the bureaucracy tried to do when they attempted to bribe Arizona’s Kari Lake to move into DC’s bureaucratic event horizon.

There are a lot smarter people than me commenting on the necessary response to the witch hunt in New York City, so I’m going to lead with them.

• Ace: “Enough of the compromised fake Republicans at National Review and Commentary. Man up or get out.”
• Bookworm: “It’s to be hoped that, by turning Trump into an outlaw, the Democrats both bit off more than they can chew and woke the sleeping giant. Plus, they inspired memes…”
• Daniel Greer: “Citizens have seen politically motivated judges & prosecutors warp statutes, lawmakers remove protections to target disfavored individuals retroactively, and executives selectively ignore the plain text of the law they’re sworn to uphold. How will Texas’ public servants respond?”
• Sarah Hoyt: “…if the verdict weren’t a foregone conclusion, they’d have tried to make the trial more plausible.”
• William A. Jacobson: “Lawfare very easily can become warfare when people lose trust in the institutions that are supposed to protect against political persecution.”
• Robert Stacy McCain: “…the problem with writing about this trial is that the English language doesn’t have enough synonyms for bullshit.”
• Brooke L. Rollins: “This accommodation must stop. We will not last if we continue giving them the civics of comity while they give us the hard hand of lawfare. Let them live under the rules they impose upon us—upon ordinary Americans.”
• Mark Steyn: “A governing party of a serious nation so indifferent to elementary maxims of prudence that it's prepared to invent out of whole cloth crimes with which to convict the leader of the opposition is not one you'd want to bank on to keep us from stumbling into, say, a third world war… right now there is no law in America, and, in consequence, no politics. So there is no point in pretending you enjoy benefit of either, and in doing so you're just part of the problem.”

There’s a lot of truth to this meme: Democrats are certainly acting as if Biden didn’t actually win.

This two-tier policing, where one side commits actual crimes and goes free, and one side is criminalized for what aren’t even crimes, has to go. All extradition requests to states like New York and DC must be actively refused. Those states cannot be trusted to exonerate the innocent any more than they can be trusted to lock up the guilty. Their goal is demonstrably to free dangerous criminals—and to lock up innocent people for the crime of holding different political views.

And everything to the institutional left is political. They will not permit a course correction.

While the verdict in New York City was no surprise given the corrupt instructions from the judge, it was still disappointing that there were not enough old school independent New Yorkers to at least provide some dissent from the swamp.

But that’s how the American judicial system works nowadays. Any jurors willing to examine the evidence against the government’s position and the lack of evidence for it would have been weeded out during jury selection.

Mark Steyn pointed out the further aid to corruption, that prosecutors are allowed to throw multiple dubious allegations against the defendant like strands of spaghetti against a wall, in the hope that one of them will stick—both in the jury’s mind and in the public’s. If this is allowed to stand it will grow far worse in New York and other Democrat-run states. Jurors there won’t even be required to agree on which strand of spaghetti they’re convicting on. Even now we don’t know what the actual crime is that Trump has been convicted of. New York and DC and every place that Democrats take over have become insanely Kafkaesque.

One of the weird results of the February shooting at Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church is seeing how bipartisan the hatred for Osteen, and the so-called prosperity gospel¹, is. The reaction in comments and even in some public postings come very close to advocating violence against him. They start with a superficial acknowledgment that it’s too bad the violence occurred against a child, and then use the violence as a platform to complain about the existence of Osteen, Lakewood Church, and the message of those kinds of megachurches.

These responses highlight that there are still popular people who are nonetheless open season, literally, for attacks from both sides of the political spectrum. The left hates Osteen because he’s Christian, and the right hates him because he’s not.

So there are obviously a lot of people who do not like prosperity gospel preachers and prosperity gospel. But by the same token, a lot of people are clearly fans of either the preachers or the message. I know very little about prosperity gospel. I did, with a friend, see Joel Osteen once, and there’s definitely a sense of asking God for material things that seems way over the top for me as a Catholic.

Catholics have moved away from asking God for earthly things. In the period between when I went to Mass regularly as a child and when I returned to the church several years ago, the Ecce Agnus Dei² response changed from “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.” to “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.”

Now, that’s probably not a change in meaning. Judging from the original Latin, it was probably always supposed to be a plea for spiritual healing, and my understanding is that this was a change in the American missal, not the worldwide missal. It was a change to better translate the Latin missal of Rome.

Domine, non sum dignus ut intres sub tectum meum, sed tantum dic verbo, et sanabitur anima mea.

If anything in modern life could be worse than the October 7 atrocities against Israelis, it would be the unalloyed support those atrocities have received from the institutional Left in America. Everywhere you turn in academia and even so-called “mainstream” news sites, there are people in power attempting to justify not just the invasion but the kidnappings, rape, and torture that was its entire point.

Why does the left hate Israel so much? While the institutional Left seems to hate just about everyone, here you have a nation of peoples who in other countries reliably vote far left, and whose country began explicitly communist and remains a very left-leaning country.

In my opinion that’s an explanation for the hate, not a contradiction. Israel may have a demonstrably left government, but it began even further left than it is now. Israelis quickly discovered that communes and kibbutzes do not work on a countrywide level. Rather than put up with famine and corruption, they changed. They learned from their mistakes.

This is anathema to the leftist elite. The institutional left deliberately never learns from that kind of mistake and especially never allows its constituents to learn from that kind of mistake. Instead, they blame an imaginary far right for their own failure and double down on failure.

That’s the whole point of creating crises, to use them to gain more power. Looking at a crisis and saying, hey, maybe we did something wrong to get here, is missing the entire point of their policies.

It is power and domination.

You’re a Black woman who turns against the left? You’re neither “a true Black” nor “a true woman”. They actually say this. If you’re a Hispanic who argues for individual liberty? You’re a race traitor. That’s not a phrase I made up. It’s a phrase of the left to describe people who are non-white and yet do not submit to the left.

The institutional Left see everything in terms of race, so it isn’t surprising that when an entire country of Jews turns against socialism even slightly, the Left doubles down on antisemitism.

I recently read Cynthia Hughes’s Due Process Denied. She’s not a professional writer, and in a book like this that’s a benefit. Her story about how she became involved with the January 6 prisoners runs the gamut from emotional to rambling to prayerful to humorous.

This is the kind of book that we need more of: inexperienced writers telling a story they’re compelled to tell because they have a unique perspective on an important event. Hughes experienced January 6 through her nephew-from-another-family who, like many, was allowed into the Capitol by the Capitol Police and was then arrested for it.

Unlike Julie Kelly, who does great work as a professional journalist, Hughes really is just an American who happened to see evil happen to someone she loves and decided to do something about it. Her Patriot Freedom Project grew from a weekly support chat for families of those held without bail to a fund for helping them survive the loss of breadwinners and jobs, as well as a referral service for helping them find lawyers and therapists. Many people lost both friends and family after the arrests.

She is obviously someone who doesn’t understand what’s going on in her country yet who wants to make a difference anyway. And by most accounts, she is making a difference.

Sometimes, among the concerted efforts to make it seem like President Trump should abandon his supporters, it seems like there’s a concerted campaign on the conservative forums I follow to fool people into thinking Trump has abandoned his supporters. I see a small number of unfamiliar posters claiming that he’s abandoned the January 6 prisoners, for example, despite him introducing and praising people like Cynthia Hughes at his giant rallies for all the world to see, despite him calling out the prosecutions as the witch hunts they are.

“We all saw this a mile away,” they write, so why didn’t Trump? Why didn’t he pardon all of his supporters who attended his rally?

But the fact is, we didn’t see this a mile away. We certainly didn’t see it less than two weeks away, which is what would have been necessary for a blanket pardon between January 6 and January 20. And it would have had to have been a big blanket. It’s not like there were signups for people attending his rally.

Presidents have pardoned named individuals for unspecified crimes (President Ford, pardoning Richard Nixon). Presidents have pardoned specific groups for specified crimes (President Carter, pardoning people who avoided the draft by moving to Canada).

He really did. He just had a different name for them.

I’ve quoted Thomas Sowell many times on this blog about the anointed, and how they believe that saying something is true is more important than whether it is true—that, in fact, saying it makes it true.

A few years ago in Illinois there was a Nazi running for office in a Democrat-dominated district. The district was pretty much one hundred percent Democrat, to the point where Republicans don’t even bother to run an opponent. So this guy told the State of Illinois that he was a Republican, in order to get on the ballot unopposed; Republicans pointed out that he was not, in fact, a Republican, but under Illinois election rules the Republican Party had no say in who ran as a Republican.

Illinois is also an open-primary state. This means that none of the people voting for this guy in his nearly 100% Democrat district were Republicans either.

In other words: this was not a Republican primary. This was not a Republican candidate. These were not Republican voters. And the candidate was not going to win in the general election against the official Democrat nominee anyway.

But the left wanted the Republican Party to take money from actual Republicans in Illinois to fight this guy. In order to fight an extreme Democrat in an extreme Democrat district, Democrats tried to force Republicans to spend money donated by Republicans to support the official Democrat against the unofficial Nazi, also supported by Democrats.

This is part of why we have such a dysfunctional political system, and why third parties have such a hard time taking hold. They have to defend themselves in venues they aren’t part of and have neither candidates nor voters in.

The Democrat’s plan was a win for hate. Either the Republicans raise a Nazi’s profile by competing against him, or the Democrats raise a Nazi’s profile by promoting him as a Republican.

When it was pointed out that raising his profile at all was a waste of money, because the guy wasn’t going to win, the Left claimed that there was money “earmarked for the Republican party’s race in that district”—a district and a contest that Republicans had never competed in before and hadn’t planned to compete in now—and that money would go to waste if it wasn’t used.

That’s a purely leftist notion: there is money in the air and we need to spend it now! Or it’s gone! There’s no reason to save it for a contest where it matters, or move it to a contest that matters. Effectiveness doesn’t matter, spending money is what matters. Money that isn’t spent doesn’t exist. Money that’s saved doesn’t exist.