Daniel Greenfield, who blogs at Sultan Knish, often has interesting views. I don't always agree with them, but in a recent speech to the South Carolina Tea Party Coalition Convention, I think he hit several home runs clear out of the park. It's very worthwhile to listen to his speech in full; I've included it after the excerpt below, and you can read a transcript at his blog.
Here's a lengthy excerpt that I think encapsulates the core of his argument.
Whether it’s Federal or State, Executive, Legislative or Judiciary, the left moves power around to run the country. If it controls an institution, then that institution is suddenly the supreme power in the land.
This is what I call a moving dictatorship.
There isn’t one guy in a room somewhere issuing the orders. Instead there’s a network of them. And the network moves around.
If the guys and girls in the network win elections, they can do it from the White House. If they lose the White House, they’ll do it from Congress. If they don’t have either one, they’ll use the Supreme Court.
If they don’t have either the White House, Congress or the Supreme Court, they’re screwed. Right?
Nope.
They just go on issuing them through circuit courts and the bureaucracy. State governments announce that they’re independent republics. Corporations begin threatening and suing the government.
There’s no consistent legal standard. Only a political one.
. . .
The only consistent thing is that leftist policies are mandatory and opposing them is illegal.
Everything else is just a song and dance routine.
That’s how it works. It’s the moving dictatorship. It’s the tyranny of the network.
You can’t pin it down. There’s no one office or one guy. It’s a network of them. It’s an ideological dictatorship. Some people call it the deep state. But that doesn’t even begin to capture what it is.
To understand it, you have to think about things like the Cold War and Communist infiltration.
A better term than Deep State is Shadow Government.
Parts of the Shadow Government aren’t even in the government. They are wherever the left holds power. It can be in the non-profit sector and among major corporations. Power gets moved around like a New York City shell game. Where’s the quarter? Nope, it’s not there anymore.
The shadow government is an ideological network. These days it calls itself by a hashtag #Resistance. Under any name, it runs the country. Most of the time we don’t realize that ... It’s only when someone came on the scene who didn’t play the game by the same rules, that the network exposed itself. The shadow government emerged out of hiding and came for Trump.
And that’s the civil war.
. . .
Now the network isn’t running the country from cover. It’s actually out here trying to overturn the results of an election and remove the president from office.
It’s rejected the victories of two Republican presidents this century.
And if we don’t stand up and confront it, and expose it for what it is, it’s going to go on doing it in every election. And eventually Federal judges are going to gain enough power that they really will overturn elections.
It happens in other countries. If you think it can’t happen here, you haven’t been paying attention to the left.
Right now, Federal judges are declaring that President Trump isn’t allowed to govern because his Tweets show he’s a racist. How long until they say that a president isn’t even allowed to take office because they don’t like his views?
That’s where we’re headed.
Civil wars swing around a very basic question. The most basic question of them all. Who runs the country?
Is it me? Is it you? Is it Grandma? Or is it bunch of people who made running the government into their career?
. . .
Freedom can only exist under a volunteer government. Because everyone is in charge. Power belongs to the people.
A professional government is going to have to stamp out freedom sooner or later. Freedom under a professional government can only be a fiction. Whenever the people disagree with the professionals, they’re going to have to get put down. That’s just how it is. No matter how it’s disguised, a professional government is tyranny.
Ours is really well disguised, but if it walks like a duck and locks you up like a duck, it’s a tyranny.
There's much more at the link, and/or in the video below. Highly recommended reading and/or listening.
As proof of Mr. Greenfield's thesis, I offer the bizarre situation that developed last year over the succession to the leadership of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It was clearly, unambiguously and unmistakably an attempt to bypass Presidential authority and ignore his policies. It couldn't be clearer - and, I submit, it demonstrates that the conflict identified by Mr. Greenfield is real.
Peter
Yep, clear and concise...
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't matter, ultimately.
ReplyDeleteI think it was Borepatch, years ago, that noted that when the left completed the Long March through our institutions - they all stopped working. Consider: the mass media can't sell a newspaper or a subscription for love or money and are mocked as fake news by the public. Our schools? Well, they know why Johnny has three mommies, and why Trump is worse than Hitler, but they can't read, write or add. The courts are being regarded with utter contempt and citizens are starting to openly defy them and rebel against them.
My only comment on that is - we let them do it.
Vox Day's two books on Social Justice Warriors more systematically explore the phenomenon which Borepatch noted. The way Vox puts it is that when an organization becomes "converged" on the SJW agenda, it ceases to perform its original function; its new function is "promoting social justice." The books have some useful observations and a good list of common SJW ploys.
ReplyDeleteJerry Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy also enters into it. In the good old days, the organization merely became corrupt and filled with careerists.
Today, as with parasites that alter host behavior to improve the parasite's chances of spreading, HR departments are SJW strongholds. "Diversity," "inclusion," and other social justice buzzwords start (as we see from Google) to affect its hiring, firing and promotion practices, then spread from HR into the organization's mission statement and its operations.
That is at best a considerable parasitic drain on the organization even when the organization is a company that makes and sells physical products and where economic reality is a factor. In the case of schools, indoctrination is already a major purpose. The SJW agenda replaces the original one and becomes the organizing principle for future planning.
I think that Glenn and Peter B are referring to this post:
ReplyDeletehttps://borepatch.blogspot.com/2010/05/liberal-crackup.html
It's held up surprisingly well - if anything the crackup has accelerated after Trump's election, but the dynamics are the same.
With credit to Glen Filthie, but with qualifications.
ReplyDeleteInasmuch as "conservatives" (and particularly "conservative Christians") have only provided lip service to the fundamental principle of "what is he doing in here" (IOW, upon what Constitutional principle is government involved in "X"?), "they" have been allowed to "do it".
Legion are the number of "Conservatives" who loudly denounce big government and its inexorable mission creep, but when don't ever tell them to remove their children from the indoctrination camps. Oh no, then it immediately becomes "our schools".
Well, "your schools", for multiple generations, have taught that there is no God, that good and evil, right and wrong are mutable social constructs, that liberty equals license, and that our genetic makeup is subject to an individual opinion. They have been permeated with(communism in the slow lane) socialism, and instructed to worship at the altar of demos.
Let them do it? No, Americans assisted them at every step of the way by gladly giving their children to become mindless wards. And those children grow up to vote.