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I don't really think J. D. Vance is weird.
I think Trump is pretty weird. I'm concerned that he has accelerating dementia. His press conference the other day was jammed packed with gibberish. A rational GOP, which doesn't exist, would at this point show him the door. Rather than a rational GOP, however, we have the Populist masses and a collection of forces with agendas, such as the National Conservatives, Christian Nationalist, etc. Some adore his meandering gibberish as they are unthinking or actually quit thinking about what's going on years ago. Some tolerate it as they know that when he's in office they can basically shove him aside and run the bus. Some, I strongly suspect, figure that if elected, which they were planning on, age and the 25th Amendment or a pine box will take him out the back door of the White House and put them in the leather upholstered executive chair.
I think J. D. Vance was in that last category. By supporting Donald Trump, I suspect, he and people in his obit, were figuring that that Trump would play the same role that the Ghost plays in Hamlet. . . departed and out of power.
If that's what Vance was figuring, that's not weird. It's probably correct in terms of the expiration of Trump's mortal coil or his cerebrum. The latter would be, of course, slightly more problematic than the former, but in a pinch, would likely work just as well, save for some disruptions from the Maga Militia crowd.
Anyhow, Trump is getting weird, but neither Harris or Vance are weird. What they are is poles apart in existential views, and they both really have one.
Harris is a politician of the political left, which has gone increasingly leftward since the mid 20th Century. Indeed, it's final descent into the far left is what sparked, in part, the populist counter reaction. It's adopted lifestyle politics with lifestyle's that were regarded as "weird" until fairly recently, and frankly many still are.
At the same time, the full bore assault on culture that commenced in the 1960s was hugely successful, normalizing behaviors regarded as immoral at the time, but which now are not. That's why, in no small part, people are proclaiming J. D. Vance as "weird". As I noted here earlier, Vance isn't of the populist line of thought, he's an actual conservative, but a National Conservative of the Rusty Reno, Patrick Dineen, Kevin Roberts, type. Vance expresses cultural views that have in varying degrees been under attack since the 1960s, but which have remained all along in some sectors of the culture and are attempting to stage a comeback, or even more, gain entry and acceptance for the first time.
That race, if it were on the surface, would be a really interesting existential one.
Chance are high that the country isn't really comfortable with it. Certainly the unwashed populists who see nothing inconsistent about proclaiming themselves Christian while admiring the Hailey Welch or Sydney Sweeny wouldn't really be all that comfortable with the views of Roberts and Vance. But for that matter, a lot of suburban moms or the now lauded/condemned "cat ladies" are probably not all that comfortable with the views of Sanders and Harris.
That contrast would serve a purpose in and of itself.
The race, however, we actually have is a national embarrassment due to the figure leading the GOP.
Trump is “like a couch, bears the impression of the last person who sat on him.”
Ann Coulter, far right commentator, and former supporter of Donald Trump.
The entire time that Donald Trump has been in the news as a political figure, I've had a hard time figuring him out. I can tell what most political figures stand for, claim to stand for, and whether they are sincere or not.
And they are certainly not all sincere, as the gaggle of Republican office holders who remain from the pre Trump days now buying all in to Trump demonstrate.
But Trump's hard to figure.
I think I've come to the conclusion that Ann Coulter, whom I generally really dislike, is quite correct. As Coulter, no matter what you think of her, actually believes what she says, she grew disgusted with Trump really early, determining basically that he was a phony.
I can't tell if Trump is, or was, even smart.1
That's hard to judge at a distance. Two Republican Presidents who were really smart were often sort of assumed, while in office, not to be. One was Ronald Reagan, and the other was Dwight Eisenhower, both of whom had perfected the art of acting like they weren't all that sharp in order to use it to their advantage.
Eisenhower, as one of his biographers Carlo D'Este noted, had learned in the Army that it was often better to not appear to be the sharpest tool in the shed but to hang back, taking in the opinions, and trust, of others. By the Second World War it was obvious to all that he was in fact extremely intelligence, but part of the manifestation of that was that once he was President, he reengaged the act to his advantage. If you ever hear a recording of Eisenhower in a private speech, such as when Kennedy called him up to get advice on Indo China, it's a shock. He doesn't even seem like the same person.
That same shock has been noted by people who spoke to Reagan privately. Reagan perfected as an actor an "ah shucks" one of the crowd personality, but in reality he was extremely intelligent. People who came in to discuss a topic with him were often stunned that his grasp of it was vast, while the public, particularly the American left, wondered if he was a doddling old fool right from the onset. His mental decline by the end of his second term was obvious, but it wasn't there from the first. It served him well, however, as it was possible to believe on something like the Iran Contra Scandal that maybe he didn't really know it was happening.
Trump, on the other hand, seems to me to genuinely not have all that sharp of an intellect. That would explain some of the outrageous and stupid things he says, of which there are a plethora. Being a wealthy man his entire life, he's gotten through life being able to say stupid outrageous things and not draw rebuke from those around him, and in turn be encouraged in his own belief that he's really smart. Just as the political and economic class of current China tends to assume that everyone at the top is really smart, as they've been weeded out that way, Trump probably believes he's a genius as everyone has always told him he's a real smart guy.
If Trump doesn't have a great intellect, what he does have is another type of intelligence. He's a good salesman.
I wouldn't say a great salesman, as he's had a lot of business failures and his enterprises have been bankrupt more than once. But he is a good salesman. He knows how to sell. And like good salesmen, he can sell what he's selling. He doesn't have to believe it.
Over the years I've known several people who were good salesmen, some of whom were really intelligent. Their hallmark, however, was the ability to sell. They'd often move between one sales job and another. If you know them well enough, you'd sometimes find that they really didn't have all that great of interest in what they were selling, whether that was cars, houses, basketballs or whatever. Sometimes they personally had a massive disinterest in the product they were selling. It was the selling that they were interested in.
I strongly suspect Trump is like that.
At some point, for some reason, Trump decided to enter politics and his selling sense was that rank and file rust belt and lower middle class Americans were unhappy and disgruntled, with some very good reasons existing for that, so he sold them what basically amounted to snake oil in 2016. Once in, he needed people to run the government and they came in and did it, defeating his wildest and most dangerous ideas. People didn't buy the snake oil in sufficient quantities in 2020, so now he's turned to a new improved product.
Populist Outrage.
Populist Outrage is a dangerous cocktail in the US right now. It includes everything from the New Apostolic Movement to the Hawk Tuah Girl, all one brew. You literally have Mike Johnson quoting the Bible and some TikTok Tart describing spitting on male sex organs all in the same group. But snake oil cures what ails ya, and people are buying.
J. D. Vance, on the other hand, is the real deal.
I really haven't followed Vance until now and while his book Hillbilly Elegy sounded interesting when it was released, I didn't read it and I'm not going to. When it was released, what the general reaction was, wat that it was a well written elegy to his roots, and to the hillbilly class, now in desperate straits, from somebody who had rising up out of that class into affluence. That might in part be right, but like McMurtry's contemporarily set novels, they were not only reflecting the people he came out of, but were also a more intellectual reflection of their virtues in spite of their vices.
Vance is genuinely fairly remarkable. He came out of a real blue collar, hillbilly background and became very well educated. What was missed is that as he moved along, through education and influence, he became something other than what American liberals simply assume that education does. He didn't become an educated liberal, looking back on his drug fueled hillbilly ancestors, but rather became an educated National Conservative intellectual.
He's not a populist, and isn't even ballpark close to one.
For good or ill, he's more in the nature of a Beloocian. I.e, if you brought Hilaire Belloc back today, made him an American, and had him run for office, you'd get J.D. Vance.
That's why he comes across to many on the left, and not a few on the right, as "weird". All along he's been saying the things that National Conservatives and Illiberal Democrats have been saying. If he sounds like a Christian Nationalist, that's because all National Conservatives are Christian Nationalist, even if they aren't observant, whereas not all Christian Nationalist are National Conservatives by any means.
Vance has a lot more in common with Viktor Orbán,, Giorgia Meloni, Philippe Pétain, and Francisco Franco than he does with Trump or Mike Johnson.
More this than this.
We've dealt with National Conservatism here before, but we didn't address is how smart they've really been since 2020. Unlike the goofball hordes that go to Trump rallies wearing absurd red, white and blue costumes. It's actually fairly deep, and it early on set out it goals in print, as we've noted here:
Its founder in American politics, if not its overall founder, is Patrick Deneen and its backers can be found in the pages of R. R. Reno's First Things. Quite frankly, that puts it in the intellectual heavyweight category. It's issued a manifesto, and the signers of it include some well known conservative thinkers. Deneen has issued at least two well regarded books on the topic. Its central thesis is that liberalism has failed, in part due to its success, and is now consuming itself, and the entire culture of the West with it, by a frenzied orgy of libertine, mostly sexually focused, individualism. What needs to be done, it holds, is the preservation of democracy, but Illiberal Democracy, with the boundary lines of the culture externally enforced. It sets its manifesto out as follows:
1. National Independence. We wish to see a world of independent nations. Each nation capable of self-government should chart its own course in accordance with its own particular constitutional, linguistic, and religious inheritance. Each has a right to maintain its own borders and conduct policies that will benefit its own people. We endorse a policy of rearmament by independent self-governing nations and of defensive alliances whose purpose is to deter imperialist aggression.
2. Rejection of Imperialism and Globalism. We support a system of free cooperation and competition among nation-states, working together through trade treaties, defensive alliances, and other common projects that respect the independence of their members. But we oppose transferring the authority of elected governments to transnational or supranational bodies—a trend that pretends to high moral legitimacy even as it weakens representative government, sows public alienation and distrust, and strengthens the influence of autocratic regimes. Accordingly, we reject imperialism in its various contemporary forms: We condemn the imperialism of China, Russia, and other authoritarian powers. But we also oppose the liberal imperialism of the last generation, which sought to gain power, influence, and wealth by dominating other nations and trying to remake them in its own image.
3. National Government. The independent nation-state is instituted to establish a more perfect union among the diverse communities, parties, and regions of a given nation, to provide for their common defense and justice among them, and to secure the general welfare and the blessings of liberty for this time and for future generations. We believe in a strong but limited state, subject to constitutional restraints and a division of powers. We recommend a drastic reduction in the scope of the administrative state and the policy-making judiciary that displace legislatures representing the full range of a nation’s interests and values. We recommend the federalist principle, which prescribes a delegation of power to the respective states or subdivisions of the nation so as to allow greater variation, experimentation, and freedom. However, in those states or subdivisions in which law and justice have been manifestly corrupted, or in which lawlessness, immorality, and dissolution reign, national government must intervene energetically to restore order.
4. God and Public Religion. No nation can long endure without humility and gratitude before God and fear of his judgment that are found in authentic religious tradition. For millennia, the Bible has been our surest guide, nourishing a fitting orientation toward God, to the political traditions of the nation, to public morals, to the defense of the weak, and to the recognition of things rightly regarded as sacred. The Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities, and as the rightful inheritance of believers and non-believers alike. Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private. At the same time, Jews and other religious minorities are to be protected in the observance of their own traditions, in the free governance of their communal institutions, and in all matters pertaining to the rearing and education of their children. Adult individuals should be protected from religious or ideological coercion in their private lives and in their homes.
5. The Rule of Law. We believe in the rule of law. By this we mean that citizens and foreigners alike, and both the government and the people, must accept and abide by the laws of the nation. In America, this means accepting and living in accordance with the Constitution of 1787, the amendments to it, duly enacted statutory law, and the great common law inheritance. All agree that the repair and improvement of national legal traditions and institutions is at times necessary. But necessary change must take place through the law. This is how we preserve our national traditions and our nation itself. Rioting, looting, and other unacceptable public disorder should be swiftly put to an end.
6. Free Enterprise. We believe that an economy based on private property and free enterprise is best suited to promoting the prosperity of the nation and accords with traditions of individual liberty that are central to the Anglo-American political tradition. We reject the socialist principle, which supposes that the economic activity of the nation can be conducted in accordance with a rational plan dictated by the state. But the free market cannot be absolute. Economic policy must serve the general welfare of the nation. Today, globalized markets allow hostile foreign powers to despoil America and other countries of their manufacturing capacity, weakening them economically and dividing them internally. At the same time, trans-national corporations showing little loyalty to any nation damage public life by censoring political speech, flooding the country with dangerous and addictive substances and pornography, and promoting obsessive, destructive personal habits. A prudent national economic policy should promote free enterprise, but it must also mitigate threats to the national interest, aggressively pursue economic independence from hostile powers, nurture industries crucial for national defense, and restore and upgrade manufacturing capabilities critical to the public welfare. Crony capitalism, the selective promotion of corporate profit-taking by organs of state power, should be energetically exposed and opposed.
7. Public Research. At a time when China is rapidly overtaking America and the Western nations in fields crucial for security and defense, a Cold War-type program modeled on DARPA, the “moon-shot,” and SDI is needed to focus large-scale public resources on scientific and technological research with military applications, on restoring and upgrading national manufacturing capacity, and on education in the physical sciences and engineering. On the other hand, we recognize that most universities are at this point partisan and globalist in orientation and vehemently opposed to nationalist and conservative ideas. Such institutions do not deserve taxpayer support unless they rededicate themselves to the national interest. Education policy should serve manifest national needs.
8. Family and Children. We believe the traditional family is the source of society’s virtues and deserves greater support from public policy. The traditional family, built around a lifelong bond between a man and a woman, and on a lifelong bond between parents and children, is the foundation of all other achievements of our civilization. The disintegration of the family, including a marked decline in marriage and childbirth, gravely threatens the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations. Among the causes are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life. Economic and cultural conditions that foster stable family and congregational life and child-raising are priorities of the highest order.
9. Immigration. Immigration has made immense contributions to the strength and prosperity of Western nations. But today’s penchant for uncontrolled and unassimilated immigration has become a source of weakness and instability, not strength and dynamism, threatening internal dissension and ultimately dissolution of the political community. We note that Western nations have benefited from both liberal and restrictive immigration policies at various times. We call for much more restrictive policies until these countries summon the wit to establish more balanced, productive, and assimilationist policies. Restrictive policies may sometimes include a moratorium on immigration.
10. Race. We believe that all men are created in the image of God and that public policy should reflect that fact. No person’s worth or loyalties can be judged by the shape of his features, the color of his skin, or the results of a lab test. The history of racialist ideology and oppression and its ongoing consequences require us to emphasize this truth. We condemn the use of state and private institutions to discriminate and divide us against one another on the basis of race. The cultural sympathies encouraged by a decent nationalism offer a sound basis for conciliation and unity among diverse communities. The nationalism we espouse respects, and indeed combines, the unique needs of particular minority communities and the common good of the nation as a whole.
And its been further developed since then, although Dinneen2 and Reno3do not seem to be leading the charge any longer, nor is Rod Dreher4, who for a while just urged societal retreat. Now Kevin Roberts5. , head of the Heritage Society, is, and he's taking the movement into a concrete action oriented direction. He's written a book, Dawn's Early Light, on that very topic. It's Amazon write up states:
America is on the brink of destruction. A corrupt and incompetent elite has uprooted our way of life and is brainwashing the next generation. Many so-called conservatives are as culpable as their progressive counterparts.
In this ambitious and provocative book, Heritage Foundation President Dr. Kevin Roberts announces the arrival of a New Conservative Movement. His message is simple: Global elites — your time is up.
Dawn’s Early Light blazes a promising path for the American people to take back their country. Chapter by chapter, it identifies institutions that conservatives need to build, others that we need to take back, and more still that are too corrupt to save: Ivy League colleges, the FBI, the New York Times, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Education, BlackRock, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy, to name a few.
All these need to be dissolved if the American way of life is to be passed down to future generations.
The good news is, we’re going to win.
The Swamp is so drunk on power that the elites don't realize the ground is moving beneath their feet. In Washington, they wear foreign flags on their lapels, but they don’t protect our border. They wave around the Constitution, but they don’t respect its wisdom. They appeal to Reagan, but Reagan would never put up with this non-sense.
Their decadence will be their downfall. A new day is here.
The forward to that book was written by one J. D. Vance.
That, National Conservatism in its most proactive form, is what J. D. Vance stands for.
Vance's biography really demonstrates this. He didn't go from hillbilly poverty to populism. He went from hillbilly poverty into the Marine Corps, and then into university where he met budding National Conservative type intellects and developed into one. Along the way somewhere, he converted into Catholicism, which is the oldest and original Christian religion, and which has a deep sense of the existential and a profound tradition. While its far from the case that all Catholics are National Conservatives or Illiberal Democrats, or anything like that, it is fair to say that observant Catholics are horrified by the cultural decay of the west and its unliking from an existential sense in a manner and way which protestants, including those in the New Apostolic Movement, are not, which is not to say that they are not.6
So what's with all this "cat lady" and pro natalism stuff?
It ties right into the overall world view of much of National Conservatism in its recent most radical form, and indeed in some ways is an evolution away from its original intellectual corps.
It's an undercurrent in conservatism, but there's definitely a strain of it which is genuinely intellectual that emphasizes, perhaps hyper emphasizes, traditionalism in a very definite sense, including traditional male and female roles to an extremely strong degree. They're not romanticizing the 1950s, or indeed, romanticizing anything at all, but looking back, way back, to a time and way of thinking in which this was not questioned in any fashion. Indeed, in the corners of the Internet where they hang out, you can find them discussing the social norms of the Middle Ages in comparison to those of the present, and they're serious about it. I need not and indeed don't have the bandwidth to go into all of that now, but it touches on a lot of topics, not all of which I'm not completely sympathetic to.
So is this "weird"?
Well at least some of Project 2025 is downright weird, as for example the proposal to create "Freedom Cities" in "unoccupied" portions of the public domain in the west. That is, well, Bat Shit Crazy. And its hard not to listen to the Dr. Taylor Marshall7and the Simone and Malcolm Collins8of the world and not thing, "well, that's weird".
Other stuff is more in the nature, however, of Bellocian Traditionalism and by any measure, it's certainly no weirder than the tranvestite genital organ obsessed "woke" view of much of the left, which indeed is deeply weird. And here's where, in fact, much of instinctive populism and National Conservatism meets. The MAGA crowed don't have the faintest clue who Hilaire Belloc is, or even grasp that it doesn't matter what your local Evangelical Free pastor said, divorce and remarriage is barred by Christianity, but they do grasp that in the natural order of things the Hawk Tuah girl may be gross, but she's not gender confused and something odd is going on here that needs to be addressed.
Put another way, some if it is scary James Watt Weird 9 while some of it probably seems "weird" to you if the Mantilla Girls seem weird. If they don't, it may make you uncomfortable depending on where on the social conservatism scale you fit, but its not really weird. The fact that much of modern America and all of the left find it all weird is because of how far to the left hit needle has moved in the past forty years.
Trump, on the other hand, can be really weird.
The National Conservatives, unlike the populists, are pretty deep, and pretty smart. Very smart, in fact. And they've realized what the red, white and blue populist crowds have not. Trump doesn't' really stand for anything.
They do.
They also know that they can't get a National Conservative elected into the Oval Office.
But what they've gambled on was two things. One was that the populists are too dim, and Trump too lazy, to draft his own agenda. They did that for him, through Project 2025. They bet they can get a start on a National Conservative revolution, and that's how the chief of the Heritage Foundation has put it, through a lazy Trump.
They've placed a bet on a certainty, that being that Trump won't last an entire four year term. He'll die within the next four years, assuming that old age and advancing intellectual decline doesn't get him before the election, and they gambled that they could get a Chief Executive into office who was one of their own through the Vice Presidency.
That figure is J. D. Vance. And up until Joe Biden dropping out of the race, it looked like the bet was going to pay off for sure.
Vance has been willing to play the part, while never disavowing what he's always stood for. He's sort of a National Conservatives Manchurian Candidate, with the National Conservatives waiting for age, disease, or senility to take out a sitting Donald Trump. Trump, too shallow to really bother to care about it, was willing to go along with a seemingly fawning J. D. Vance, probably never realizing that Trump's merely a temporary vehicle for them to get into office, and start their revolution.
Now those plans seem to have been disrupted, maybe.
The problem, in part, is that they wrote a 900 page book.
Project 2025 was designed to be, as noted, a blueprint for a lazy President. But once you publish a book, people start reading it, and they start asking questions about the people who wrote it. Particularly if one of those authors has written a second book about his pending National Conservative revolution.
Now, when people are distracted due to mental fog and don't touch it, that's not much of a problem. But once they do, if any of it is outside of the mainstream at all, and a lot of Project 2025 is, and if any of it is weird, which some of Project 2025 is, attention will start being paid in spades.
And that may very well spell the end of there being a chance that National Conservatives shall remake the nation via an electoral revolution. Too confident in themselves, they seem to have shot their bolt. Americans are now uncomfortable with the direction they want to take the country, which is in a direction the country's never really gone before.
Footnotes
* This thread was started several days ago, and its really worth noting that a lot of things have developed since I first started posting it, including a huge amount of attention on J. D. Vance, and discontent in Republican ranks regarding him.
**It'll be hard not to note all the references to various Catholic figures in National Conservatism, which may lead to the impression that National Conservatism is a Catholic thing. It isn't. Indeed, one of the primary figures in Illiberal Democracy is Viktor Orban, who is a Presbyterian.
What's probably notable here is that the deep intellectual history of Catholicism and Apostolic Christianity in general has lead some of those who realize how shallow modern Western Culture is into the Church. That doesn't make it a movement of the Church, and as some Catholics have feared, these movements pose a risk to Catholicism at least in the US, where it is a minority religion. Indeed, it's likely that some members of the New Apostolic Movement, thin theology that they have, do not even recognize Catholics as Christians when in fact they are the first Christians.
1. I'm hugely reluctant to opine on somebody's intelligence remotely, but at this point, it's hard not to. Some of the things Trump says are amazingly dumb. So much so that it raises a lot of questions regarding a wide variety of topics.
It's notable that Trump fairly frequently brings up his own intelligence, which is something intelligent people rarely do.
2. Patrick Dineen is a professor at Notre Dame who has written on Illiberal Democracy and National Conservatism favorably.
3. R. R. Reno is the editor of First Things, and a convert from the Episcopal Church to Catholicism. He's also on the Dineen end of things, but not as pessimistic about democracy as Dineen is.
4. Rod Dreher is a writer who wrote The Byzantine Option. He's moved to Hungary. Dreher was a Protestant who converted to Catholicism, and then converted to Orthodoxy.
5. Kevin Roberts is the main intellectual figure behind The Heritage Foundation and has a Wyoming connection, in that he was at one time the head of Wyoming Catholic College.
6. It's worth noting here that members of this movement and those on the fringe of it, sometimes the very fringe, have seen some notable conversions to Catholicism in recent years. These include Candace Owens, Tammy Roberts Peterson, wife of psychologist and author Jordan Peterson, and Eva Vlaardingerbroek.
7. Dr. Taylor Marshall, also a convert to Catholicism, is an extreme traditionalist who has come to engage in conspiracy theories about the Vatican. He's on the fringe right.
8. Simone and Malcolm Collins come across as genuinely weird. Their leaders of a pro natalist organization with Simone having indicated that she intends to have children until, basically, her uterus blows out. The Collins are atheist and frankly have somewhat of a scary Social Darwinist view of the world. They therefore fit into the really weird side of pro natalism, where Elon Musk can also be found, who have an incorrect feeling that but for massive procreation, society is going to fail, which is completely incorrect.
Showing, I suppose, how old school Neanderthal I am, Michael Collins looks so anemic, and Simone Collins so unattractive, that the thought of their fitting the bill in a basic way to create a lot of children is surprising.
Watt was Reagan's Secretary of the Interior and basically believed that as Christ was returning very soon, there was no reason not to use natural resources with a mind towards conserving them.
And a common political theme in Wyoming, albeit here from a doomed attempt at displacing the current incumbent Senator, with the incumbent right below him:
Wyomingites claim, and very often really do, have a deep love of the wildness of our state and nature. And yet, at the same time, the economy of the state, and its reliance upon extractive industries, causes a deep loyalty to the fossil fuel industries, beyond that, very ironically, which those industries have themselves.
Speak to any of the more knowledgeable and powerful people within the coal or petroleum industries, and you will not tend to get debate on anthropocentric caused global warming. They accept it, and frankly accept that they're going away in their current forms. They will debate how rapidly they can go away, with quite a bit of variance between that. Many in the industry are realpolitik practitioners in regard to energy, accepting the decline as inevitable, but cynical about how fast it can occur. Some, however, are nearly "green" in their view, and see a rapid phase out.
It's at the wellhead level, and the coal shovel level, that you have those who can't accept it. The same people will look forward to elk season, but can't imagine that what's happening is happening, and that it's bad for the elk. But then many of the same people imagine themselves being outdoorsman while planted on the back of an ATV.
Politicians, some genuine, and some not, emphasize the wallet end of this. "America needs", "America depends", etc. Well, it's passing away.
Passing away with it may be the town of Heartville Wyoming, but not due to economics, but due to catastrophic fire.
Human memories are flawed, and that's where we get into false debates and the The Dunning-Kruger effect. The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities. The flipside, interestingly enough, is the Imposter Syndrome, in which highly competent people imagine that they are not.
Combine the Dunning-Kruger effect with poor memories, poor education and dislocation from your native place, and you get what we have here.
Add in economic self interest, and well you really get what we have here.
I'll hear all the time that the weather today is the same as it always was. BS. My memory on these things is good, and I can recall that 100F days were so rare when I was a kid that entire years went by in which we didn't experience them. Nor did we experience constant year after year fires like this. Indeed, as a National Guardsmen I was sent to two fires, back when resources were so thin on this topic, as they weren't really needed, that this was routine for the Guard.
Two fires in six years.
I've never heard of a Wyoming town being evacuated for a fire until now.
Yes, fires have always occurred, as the naysayers will note, but not so often and not like this.
And to add to it, whether Wyomingites want to believe it or not, coal in particular is on its way out. It simply is. 500,000 people can sit in a corner of the country saying "nuh uh", but that's not going to make it change. It's been on the way out for a century or more:
Petroleum is less vulnerable than coal, in part because of the often forgotten petrochemical industry. A friend of mine who was a geologist and and an engineer was of the view that the consumption of petroleum for ground transportation ought to be phased out simply for that reason, to save it for petrochemicals. But big changes are coming here too. Electric vehicles are coming in, like it or not. The switch to green, and all that means, some good and some bad, is coming.
Denying that and maintaining that the rest of the country must pretend its 1973 isn't going to change that.
But understand this: there will be terrifying times in the last days. People will be self-centered and lovers of money, proud, haughty, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, irreligious,callous, implacable, slanderous, licentious, brutal, hating what is good,traitors, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God,as they make a pretense of religion but deny its power. Reject them.
For some of these slip into homes and make captives of women weighed down by sins, led by various desires, always trying to learn but never able to reach a knowledge of the truth.
Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so they also oppose the truth—people of depraved mind, unqualified in the faith.
But they will not make further progress, for their foolishness will be plain to all, as it was with those two.
2 Timothy, Chapter 3.
A very interesting Canadian agriculturalist whom I follow on Twitter (I don't care with Elon Musk calls it), who is also an Eastern Rite Catholic, noted that he, like me, didn't watch the Olympic opener (as will be noted, I watched the very start of it, grew bored, and wondered off). So he, like me, was left with the media accounts, of which there are plenty, including video, of a group of drag queens mocking Da Vinci's The Last Supper. He goes on to make the point that the sex laden transvestite portrayal was likely calculated to offend, but that The Last Supper is not an icon, which is quite correct.
But, with some exception, the Latin Rite lacks icons. While not the same, the great Medieval and Renaissance works of art in the West tended to be commissioned by the Church, so they have an association with it. Put another way, in order to offend to the degree as denigrating an icon, there'd be little other choice. 1 Again, it's not an icon, but part of a set of religious works of art commissioned by and associated with Christianity in the West.
It's hard to grasp why this would occur, but the outrage in the Catholic Church, and there is a lot of it, is justified. So is the embarrassment in some French circles, particularly French conservative ones. The French far right came with in a gnat's breath of taking over the French government two weeks ago and the ultimate makeup of the upcoming French government is still unknown. Had this happened before the election, I have a strong feeling that the French far right would be forming a government now.
That provides a topic for another thread, which we will address, but we'll note here. Part of the rise of National Conservatism and Christian Nationalism, and even just far right populism, is due to debauchery such as this.
The Olympics itself was quick to claim that the portrayal wasn't not of The Last Supper, which of course is an Italian, not a French, Renaissance work, noting on Twitter:
The interpretation of the Greek God Dionysus makes us aware of the absurdity of violence between human beings.
Hmm. . . Dionysus is a Greek mythological figure, not a French one. . .
Dionysus was the Greek god of is the god of wine-making, orchards and fruit, vegetation, fertility, festivity, insanity, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, and theatre. His Roman equivalent was Bacchus. While celebrated in Roman times, the Romans also restricted unofficial celebrations dedicated to Bacchus due to the excess he was associated with it.
Whatever else Dionysus may stand for or have stood for, it certainly had nothing to do with being against violence between human beings. He really had a lot more to do with booze, drunkenness, sex and insanity, and its interesting that the ancient Greeks linked all of them together. Eirene or Irene was the divinity associated with peace, but she didn't engage in drunken excess.
Another Olympic official also reacted with a series of excuses that were fairly lame. Thomas Jolly, the artistic director of the Olympics Opening Ceremony, said the display was about "inclusion".
When we want to include everyone and not exclude anyone, questions are raised. Our subject was not to be subversive. We never wanted to be subversive. We wanted to talk about diversity. Diversity means being together. We wanted to include everyone, as simple as that.
Whatever diversity means, it doesn't mean "being together". At least to some significant degree, it means being apart, and in the modern era, when this is being self defined in a way contrary to nature, it literally means being a Dionysus until one's self.
Jolly noted:
In France, we have freedom of creation, artistic freedom. We are lucky in France to live in a free country. I didn’t have any specific messages that I wanted to deliver. In France, we are republic, we have the right to love whom we want, we have the right not to be worshippers, we have a lot of rights in France, and this is what I wanted to convey.
Um, okay.
Le Filip, the winner of Drag Race France season three, probably got it more accurate.
I thought it would be a five-minute drag event with queer representation. I was amazed. It started with Lady Gaga, then we had drag queens, a huge rave, and a fire in the sky. It felt like a crowning all over again. I am proud to see my friends and queer people on the world stage.2
Whatever a person thinks of it, Le Filip grasped it better than Jolly did, quite frankly.
For many, as I have often told you and now tell you even in tears, conduct themselves as enemies of the cross of Christ.
Their end is destruction. Their God is their stomach; their glory is in their “shame.” Their minds are occupied with earthly things.o
St. Paul to the Philippians, Chapter 3.
A portion of France, particularly urban France, has waged war with the Church and Christianity since the failed French Revolution. Like all the revolutions that were conducted by populist mobs, their god was their belly and they turned on the Church. The same is true of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Mexican Revolution. The Church stands for the proposition that there is something greater, much greater, than us, where as populism of the left and right, at the end of the day, doesn't. Modern "progressivism", heir to the extreme left that arose in 1798 and 1917 has the same ethos, rejecting anything outside of ourselves and rising each person to an individual Bacchus no matter how much a person's own nature may be corrupted in one fashion or another, as individual natures are the only thing that matters. The portrayal at the Olympic opener celebrated that ethos shamefully mocking Christianity in favor of a world outlook that goes no deeper than a person's gentiles. Their glory, is their shame.
The storms that are raging around you will turn out to be for God’s glory, your own merit, and the good of many souls.
St. Padre Pio.
I'll be frank that I quit watching the opening ceremonies of Olympic games some time ago. I think the last one I actually watched was the Moscow Olympics, which is now quite some time back. They've ceased to make sense to me. The Olympics are ostensibly about sports, not about the glorification of the country where they're held, or drag queens. Indeed, I've frankly lost interest in the Olympics themselves for some reason.
This really reinforces that view, particularly as to this particular Olympics.
I feel they should just be permanently placed in Greece, for the summer games.
Make no mistake: God is not mocked, for a person will reap only what he sows, because the one who sows for his flesh will reap corruption from the flesh, but the one who sows for the spirit will reap eternal life from the spirit.
Galatians, Chapter 6.
I suspect most of the viewing audience will simply regard this attack on Catholicism as part of the show, shrug it off, and move on. In doing so, they benefit from the liberal culture the Church created in the West and the fact that central to the Christian worldview is turning the other cheek. In contrast, France has a very large Muslim population that nobody would dare attack in such a fashion, a cartoon depicting Mohammed for instance famously resulting in murder. There will be no drag queens taking on an Islamic topic. None. Islam doesn't turn the other cheek. Likewise, Hinduism, which of course would be completely foreign to France, can't be attacked in this fashion either without almost immediate retribution.3
Catholics aren't going to do that, nor will the rest of the Christian world.
Which doesn't mean that the offense should be ignored.
Footnotes:
1. One religious image that has endured this is the tilmahtli associated with Our Lady of Guadalupe. Back when there was a print Playboy magazine, the company issued a Mexican edition with a Mexican woman featured on the cover replicating the image in a pornographic fashion, which brought a firestorm of criticism.
That, and this, give credence to those who claim a diabolical origin to these events.
2. Are there no French singers to do an Olympic opening? Why Stefani Germanotta as the opening act? That alone is embarrassing for France.
Having said that, the Marseilles was beautifully sung by Axelle Saint-Cirel. They should have just stopped right there.
In case anyone wonders, my watching of the show was basically bookended by those two acts. I grew tired of the masked boofador running over roofs and wondered off to take a shower and watch something else.
3. One religion that has endured something like this is the LDS, Mormon, faith. Target of the satiric comedic The Book Of Mormon, it's basically shrugged it off, probably figuring, correctly, that as a minority religion, it might actually benefit from being mocked, as it at least puts a spotlight on it. I'd guess, however, that Mormons aren't keen on the portrayal, and while I've never seen it, and I'm not a Mormon, I'm not either. As noted, nobody would put on a Broadway satiric "The Koran", nor should they.
The Republican National Convention is into day three as of the time of this writing. It's a populist party now, and as others have been pointing out, it's shedding values, as all populist movements do, as rapidly as it once claimed them.
Populist movements are famously shallow, having no real political thesis behind them other than that the "will of the people" is right, because it must be. For this reason, they're also nearly universally co opted in the end by other movements. The American Populist movement of the late 19th Century was absorbed by the Progressive movement, which had a real thesis behind it. American Populist who hadn't been absorbed by first the Republicans of the Theodore Roosevelt era or by Democrats following the rise of Woodrow Wilson, ended up various far left wing movement of the 20s and 30s, including American Socialism and Communism, which again had a deeper thesis. The Communist road had already been laid for Populist in Russia, where populist movements against the Crown in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries ended up in revolution, with the revolution being co opted by the Bolsheviks, who again had a real thesis, and would absorb and destroy populism in their country. In the German Weimar Republic street level populsits, and they're always street level, would gravitate towards the KDP and the NADSP, with the Nazi's, which had a heavily populist element which again was amazingly think, winning out in the end. Post war debates on whether the Nazi Party was socialist or fascist miss the reality entirely, it was populist, making it the most successful populist party, in terms of gaining control of a major nation, of all times.
Because populism is shallow, in the end it only reflect the thin surface of a populace's culture, and often the worst elements of it, once it is allowed to establish itself. German populism yielded to insane racial theories and hatred and worshipped with fanatical loyalty the German Volk in the form of a single man, Adolf Hitler. Southern populism of the 20th Century had, as a claimed feature, a deep love of culture and Protestantism, but it also featured a profound prejudice against anyone who was not a white Protestant.
And so we've arrived at that point.
Donald Trump's rise was adopted by and backed by Christian Nationalist, who just held a convention within the last two weeks. Open about their desire to establish the United States as an exclusively Christian (Protestant) nation, they've seen Trump as a Cyrus the Great who is their divinely appointed ally. In the wake of last week's assassination attempt by a young registered Republican who, in numerous ways, demonstrated that he didn't know diddly about marksmanship, rank and file and more elite members of the movement have declared that Trump was saved by Devine Providence.
That may in fact be true, but it's worth remembering that Adolf Hitler was the target of 42 known assassination plots, more than one of which went right to the edge of success. It's also worth remembering that God does in fact work in mysterious ways, and God's acts don't necessarily corelate with human desires, and life may in fact be preserved for reasons we don't really grasp, but which do not necessarily equal our political goals.
At any rate, the Republican Convention in fact with numerous prayers offered by Christian clerics, including Catholic ones, who should be cautious about Christian Nationalism. But it's worth noting that it also opened by a prayer from a conservative Sikh female lawyer. I'm not saying that's not admirable, but the hardcore Protestant backers of a man who last year said that he would keep out of the country people who did not adhere to "our religion" are now scrambling to suggest that this isn't contrary to their view.
And beyond that, an opening speaker was one Amber Rose, about whom I know nothing other than that she has a pornographic past and present, and who does not seem to stand for anything that MAGA populist claim to is revealing. Essentially, she evokes the very type of "wokeism" that actually did give rise to the movement in significant ways, as people instinctively reacted to what they knew to be contrary to common sense and morality.
The point, therefore, at which a populist movement is absorbed into something else has been reached. The "conservative" element of populism has been boiled out. Now the Republican Party and the Populist movement stands for one thing only, Donald Trump. Almost anything that a person thinks Trump stands for is now suspect in additional. We already know, for example, a movement which was deeply opposed to abortion in a party that had been deeply opposed to abortion, has abandoned that plank, as Trump is wishy washy on the whole thing.
Not that there weren't signs of this already.
Nearly coincident with the conference on Christian Nationalism, the "Hawk tuah Girl" rose to temporary fame regarding her TikTok interview on engaging in fellatio. Deeply antithetical to Christian morality, she showed up shortly thereafter featured in Daisy Duke's al la Playboy helicopter scene from Apocalypse Now. This past week, as already noted, the RNC gave a prime speaking slot to a pro-abortion feminist and self-proclaimed slut whose claim to fame is having sex with rappers. It turns out, accordingly, that lots of rank and file MAGA adherents don't really have a concern for traditional morality, indeed, they're okay with immorality as long as its fairly conventional, or in the case of same sex marriage, with Don Jr. claims Don Sr. has always been in favor of, in spite of what he said post Obergefell, it's become conventional as our memories only stretch back to last week.
Hawk tuah.
Well, this isn't that surprising. Much of the "Christian" and "moral" nature of the current populist was paper thin. Donald Trump is a serial polygamist who took rides on the Lolita Express. Lots of ardent populists saluting Christian Nationalism have long ignored Matthew 19:9.
Fr. Joseph Krupp provides a really interesting discussion on courting (dating?), engagement and marriage.
It starts at about 24:30. The material before that is on a completely different topic.
The comments by Fr. Krupp before that are interesting, albeit, as noted, on a completely different topic. Those aren't the reason that I linked this in here, but I am fairly amazed that he hasn't gotten himself in trouble for saying such things as he says in the first half of this video podcast.
Indeed, if I had power for some thirty years I would see to it that people should be allowed to follow their inbred instincts in these matters, and should hunt, drink, sing, dance, sail, and dig, and those that would not should be compelled by force.
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