Our Goebbelsian Culture and the Soviet Minders Who Claim to Protect Us

A smear, according to Merriam-Webster’s unabridged is “a deliberate and usually unsubstantiated charge or accusation intended to foment distrust or hatred against the person or organization so charged.”

As a logical fallacy, it is one-half of ad hominem. The fallacy runs as follows: “Mr. X is immoral. Therefore, his argument is false.” Today’s smear merchants, to use Sharyl Attkisson’s term, specialize in using the first sentence, embellished and sensationalized in varied ways, and omit any pretense of talking about logical argument.

In a world where facts don’t matter, our culture has become Goebbelsian. (See also (Applying Principles, pp. 293-95, 307-15)

Attkisson’s book The Smear: How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What you Think, and How You Vote cites Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda from 1933-45, as one of the pioneers of smear-merchantry. The Gobbelsian method, in Attkisson’s words, says: “Tell a big lie. Focus and repeat—until the audience recites it in their sleep” (p. 12).

Smear merchants are unprincipled promoters who work for the highest bidder, and they have worked on both sides of the political aisle, but the difference today is that in the last twenty to twenty-five years that Attkisson chronicles, there are more “useful innocents” on the progressive Left who fan the flames of the smear.*

The fanners, says Attkisson, are the mainstream press, reporters eager for hot stories with legs, fed to them by the promoters and reproduced wholesale with little investigation on their part. The reporters, of course, are oblivious (or hostile) to the concept of objectivity in journalism and their own biased premises guiding the sensationalized slurs.

How do the smear merchants work? First, they funnel millions of dollars into nonprofit organizations that pretend to be unbiased watchdogs and protectors of the “public good.” (Words like “free” or “free society” are no longer used.) Next, they find influential targets to destroy, targets who are considered enemies of the “public good” (which means political correctness).

The organization assigns one Nazi- or Soviet-style “minder” (my term, not Attkisson’s) to read, listen to, or watch every word of the target, sitting in wait for the tiniest slipup, though the slip does not have to be actual. It may only be apparent, but once the smear merchants do their work, the audience will see it as actual.**

The slip, or alleged slip, is posted on the internet and distributed to hundreds of sympathetic members of the press who will then magnify and sensationalize it and express unforgiveable outrage, demanding not just groveling apologies but removal of the target from his or her influential post.

Part of the smear technique that is new in today’s world of the internet is the immediate use of social media and email. Media Matters, the most notorious and effective of these organizations, uses an algorithm and a small number of operatives to send thousands of social media messages and emails that appear to come from thousands of different people from all over the country. They all, of course, express the same outrage as the press.

The death blow for the target is thousands of emails sent to advertisers, who seldom have the spine to stand up to these kinds of assaults or the will or resources to verify the assertions. Advertisers then join the cabal for removal.

This is how Don Imus was removed from CBS radio and Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly were removed from Fox television. Sean Hannity was attacked in the same way, but he was prepared and has survived.

Imus, for example, made his name making shockingly offensive remarks as humor about a wide variety of people all over the political spectrum. The last straw for the Left were racial comments made in jest by him and his producer.

Beck, in a Media Matters campaign funded by wealthy Leftist George Soros, was accused of potentially inciting violence, domestic terrorism, and recklessly endangering innocent lives. O’Reilly was smeared for unverified charges of sexual harassment.

Hannity fought back loudly and at length on his television show and threatened to sue for slander and libel, which is what is necessary to defeat the smear merchants.

Joseph Goebels reportedly said, “A lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.” This is the essential modus operandi of the smear merchants.

What happens if someone from the other side of the aisle commits a slip? Nothing. Attkisson lists seven such actual, not apparent, slipups—double standards, she calls them. One slip was dismissed simply as a “lame attempt at humor” (pp. 52-53). Everything thereafter was right with the world.


* I begrudgingly use the kinder words of Ludwig von Mises. Mises used the words to describe naïve, alleged classical liberals who flirted with and made concessions to the communists. “Useful idiots,” my preferred choice, were words attributed to Lenin, apparently mistakenly, though Lenin had many such idiots to swallow and distribute his propaganda. Attkisson just calls the innocents “friendlies in the media.”

** “Tracker” is what the organizations call their minders. When the target commits a verboten slip, or pretended slip, many more trackers may be assigned to gather ammunition for the kill.

On Judging Other People and Moral Agnosticism

A familiar maxim from Jesus (Matthew 7:1, New Living Translation) says, “Do not judge others, and you will not be judged.”

Ayn Rand’s advice is “Judge, and be prepared to be judged.”

At first, the two prescriptions seem to be contradictory and there are various interpretations and applications of both. Can we reconcile them?

The first is often taken to mean “never judge,” thus leading to a policy of moral agnosticism. As for Rand’s statement, some of her followers have taken it to mean recklessly and often unjustly condemning other people who don’t meet their presumed (and frequently mistaken) interpretation of Rand’s ethics.

In a previous post, I discussed several issues required to judge the character of other people. My conclusion was that it is not easy because it takes time to get to know the other person. Let me sort out the above two prescriptions, both of which are considerably nuanced.

Subsequent verses in Matthew 7 essentially restate the Golden Rule encouraging us to use the same standard of value when judging ourselves as when judging others. No double standards, in other words. The Golden Rule can be ambiguous but it is an early and reasonable attempt to state the virtue of justice.

The last verse of this section in Matthew (7:6) concludes by urging us to be careful when collaborating with other people. “Don’t throw your pearls to pigs! They will trample the pearls, then turn and attack you.” As I said in my previous post, don’t hop into bed after one date (or two or three), get married after one month, or sign a business partnership after one meeting.

Divorce in marriage and business (including joint ventures) is far too prevalent. Be absolutely certain you are not dealing with a pig! Good advice from Matthew 7:1-6.*

Many assume “do not judge others” means “No one can determine right from wrong” or “Who am I to judge?” Ayn Rand reacted to that idea by offering her strong statement of always judging and being prepared to be judged, which, when properly understood, also is good advice.

We constantly make judgments—both of fact and value. “This person is pointing a gun at me” is a judgment of fact and “this gun in the hands of a criminal is a threat to me” is a judgment of value. Making value judgments, however, according to Rand, does not mean regarding “oneself as a missionary charged with the responsibility of ‘saving everyone’s soul’” or of offering unsolicited condemnation of others who may appear to be dishonest. Those others may just be committing what Rand calls an error in knowledge and the condemner may not have bothered to get to know the others well.

And judging others, of course, does not mean saying to your supervisor, “Boss, I cannot tell a lie. You’re a jerk.”

“Rationally appropriate” are the key words Rand uses to determine when or when not we should or should not make our value judgments known.

But because epistemological skepticism and moral agnosticism are rampant today and have mired us in a “who am I to judge?” culture, Rand’s further comments warrant attention. We are seeing in real time what she said over fifty years ago.

“Moral neutrality,” Rand said, “necessitates a progressive sympathy for vice and a progressive antagonism to virtue.” The sequence, especially for today’s leftists and their sycophants in the press,** in Rand’s words, has gone from “there is some good in the worst of us” to “there’s got to be some bad in the best of us” to “it’s the best of us who make life difficult—why don’t they keep silent?—who are they to judge?” (The Virtue of Selfishness, pp. 85-86, Rand's italics).

And those who dare to judge the left’s dishonesties and enormously destructive policies are silenced and condemned by the left’s massive smear campaigns.

“Free speech for me, but not for thee” is the left’s unspoken and unacknowledged motto. “Do not judge” refers to us, not them.

Most people speaking out today in defense of ethics seem to be from the religious right. Dennis Prager, as I point out in my 2018 post, argues that the Ten Commandments (or rather, Ten Statements, as he calls them) are what have driven the development of civilization.

Where are the secular ethicists, besides Ayn Rand, to defend the development of civilization?


* There are many additional values besides the ethical ones involved in successful marriages and business relationships. In both, total trust is paramount along with the notion that nothing is off the table for discussion. In marriages and sometimes even in business relationships an emotional connection through a matching sense of life and enjoyment of morally optional values (pp. 85-90) is required. How to raise children or to run a business can involve both ethical and optional values. Lack of total trust in the relationship may at some point reveal a pig!

** “Useful idiots”—propagandizers for a cause they don’t understand—might also be an appropriate term for today’s press. The two words have been attributed to Vladimir Lenin, who supposedly applied them to communist fellow travelers and even ignorant classical liberals. Evidence for Lenin’s use of the words, however, has not been found.

That Heaven on Earth Called Socialism Is Elitist Totalitarian Violence and Destruction: The Modern Jacobins Promote It through Deception and Fraud in Their Continued War against Capitalism

“The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

This revealing statement is attributed to a member of the radical 1960’s Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), in David Horowitz’s pamphlet “Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model” (p. 9).

The saying is and has always been the guiding principle of leftists going back at least to Marx and Lenin, and probably to the Jacobin leader, Robespierre, of the French terror in 1793-94. Lenin, after all, was an admirer of Robespierre, calling him a “Bolshevik before his time.”

Put in cliché terms, the statement says, “The end justifies the means.”

Horowitz elaborates the meaning of the SDSer’s statement: “In other words the cause—whether inner city blacks or women—is never the real cause, but only an occasion to advance the real cause which is the accumulation of power to make the revolution” (p. 8).

This is the gospel of Saul Alinsky, Marxist teacher of our former president and his secretary of state. Our former president, of course, said on the eve of his election that his goal was to fundamentally transform American society. Alinsky denied that he was a Marxist, but that is also part of his gospel because facts don’t matter in revolutions.*

To elaborate Horowitz’s elaboration of the SDS statement, Marx and Machiavelli were too timid. Revolution is war and in war deception and fraud are justified; lying, cheating, ritual defamation (character assassination), smears, intimidation, threats, psychological terror, sit-ins and other obstructions, and, if you can get away with it, assault, battery, and more serious forms of violence, all should be part of your arsenal.

If one cause is not successful in securing power, immediately promote another one. And then another, and another. Be relentless. The enemy is naïve and will not believe that what they are facing is naked dishonesty. And the enemy is anyone who disagrees with you, especially anyone who promotes the values of Western civilization, namely individual rights, political freedom, and capitalism.

Now this “Alinsky model” of revolution is still consistent with Marx and the communists. David Horowitz has written extensively on the subject, largely because he was a red-diaper baby and himself a communist sympathizer for many years, but has since become a conservative.

Horowitz’s parents were members of the American Communist Party, but never admitted it in public. They preferred to call themselves progressives. The Communist Party explicitly promoted this kind of deception.

The Communist magazine in 1937 urged teachers who were Party members to teach Marxism and Leninism in every class, but never let anyone know that they were communists. Teachers “must take advantage of their positions, without exposing themselves,” and they must “inject [Marxism-Leninism] into their teaching at the least risk of exposure and at the same time conduct struggles around the school in a truly Bolshevik manner” (quoted in Sidney Hook, Out of Step, p. 499, Hook’s italics omitted).

Facts don’t matter because lying and putting on a front are the essential requirements for winning revolutions. In today’s political climate, this means that opponents are viewed literally as evil monsters who must be defeated and destroyed at all cost, which includes making up whatever will sound good and succeed.

This, too, is consistent with the Marxist/Leninist/communist mantra. When it is opportune, leftists, whether old or new, will not hesitate to call themselves advocates of democracy, freedom, reason, and justice, and then denigrate, or rather, smear, their opponents as the opposite, usually in the vilest terms they can find. Today, in particular, they like to call themselves liberals and progressives and their opponents fascists or Nazis.

Of course, by “justice” they mean “social justice,” which is the opposite, and obfuscation, of giving each person his or her due. “Social justice” means taking wealth (legal plunder) from those who have earned it and giving it to those who have not. More generally, it means cutting the “fat cats” down to size, motivated by envy or what Ayn Rand called “hatred of the good for being the good.” (Capitalists are the “fat cats,” whereas wealthy leftist “fat cats,” funders of the activists, are never called out as such or criticized.)

What about the end that justifies the means, the socialism that the revolution aims to establish? A line sometimes heard spoken to socialists and communists is “I admire your end but not your means.” Such a statement, however, is a disastrously unfortunate concession to leftists because it is a compromise of Enlightenment principles. The end of socialism is as despicable, if not more so, than the means claimed necessary to achieve it.

Government ownership of the means of production, that giant post office Lenin wants us all to work for, cannot be achieved without massively initiated coercion that must be run by a just-as-massively coercive and elitist bureaucracy or deep state. Unless propped up with remnants of capitalism (as Lenin did with his New Economic Policy) or from the generosity and imports of capitalist outsiders, socialism must inevitably collapse in ruin (as did the USSR).

Socialism—and all its variants—is an act of violence and destruction, as we have witnessed throughout the twentieth century and today in certain countries, such as Venezuela.

Why don’t leftists see the violence and destruction? Horowitz says they first set up their ideal as a heaven on earth, a Garden of Eden in which the lion lies beside the lamb and horns of plenty are given to everyone. Then, they ignore all consequences of socialism when put into practice and blame the violence and destruction on depraved dictators who have usurped the leftists’ rightful power and destroyed their heavens on earth.

The fantasy projection of a socialist state, allegedly creating a “New Man” or “New Woman,” was built on the principle of self-sacrifice that today and in the recent past has implemented the destruction of individual and private property rights on a scale never before seen. It has created nothing but sacrificial lambs, millions of which have been slaughtered on the altar of the elitist beasts—“lion” is too benign a word—of the “collective good” and “revolution.” 

Facts are facts, and delusions of grandeur, like heavens on earth and Gardens of Eden, are just that, delusions.

More likely, they are rationalizations for highly destructive and viciously heinous ends, as well as viciously heinous means.

No amount of “virtue signaling” can justify dishonest, coercive methods of establishing allegedly noble—though actually despicable—ends.

Robespierre, interestingly, was apparently the first virtue signaler. “Terror,” he said, “is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible . . . an emanation of virtue.”

Terror as the implementation of virtue? Was Robespierre well intended and noble, and did his end justify his means?


* Alinsky’s world is “corrupt and bloody” (p. 24), divided into the “Haves” and “Have-Nots.” Machiavelli’s The Prince was a guide to the Haves on how to keep power, whereas Alinksy’s Rules for Radicals is a guide to the Have-Nots on how to take power away from the Haves (p. 3). His world is a Hobbesian war where “the end justifies almost any means,” (p. 29) because morality is time and situation bound, that is, subjective. Nevertheless, to “clothe” methods and arguments “with moral garments” is one of his rules (p. 36).


Postscript. David Horowitz is not one to kowtow to the communist/fascist left. He speaks with courage and vigor. For example, “when rioters and ‘protesters’ defend criminals and attack the police it is not a protest. It is an attack.” In other words, the acts are criminal and the criminals should be arrested. On the recent “show trial” of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, nominee for the Supreme Court, Horowitz calls it “the equivalent of a modern-day lynching.” And on the howling (and screeching) of today’s toxically hostile feminists, he says, we need to “grant women true equality by confronting their lies and their reckless accusations with the same candor and frankness we would if they were coming out of the mouths of men.” Because: “despite half a century of women’s ‘liberation’ and ‘hear me roar’ proclamations the feminist attitude towards women is still Victorian. Women are fragile violets who wilt before the raised voices and impassioned claims of male innocence.” (Italics added.)

On the Path to Dictatorship: Why Our Current President Must be Reelected

Democratic socialists have always paved the way for brutal totalitarian dictators, historically and logically. Our current president is the only person standing between us and such a dictatorship. Here are my reasons why.

Democratic socialists, as Hayek taught us (1, p. 158; 2), don’t have the guts to enforce their coercive policies. Dictators do, with blood. “Armed robbery and murder” is how George Reisman (part I) describes the means of establishing and maintaining a socialist society. This is true historically wherever socialism has been implemented and by logical necessity of the initiated coercion the socialists aim to impose on citizens.

“Progressivism” is the Left’s euphemism for democratic socialism (and sometimes communism). It is a specter, to use Marx’s word, that has haunted American culture and political life since the 1890’s (Applying Principles, pp. 110-13). Today, its coercive policies are nakedly explicit.

Socialism is not just government ownership of the means of production, which the Left certainly is seeking, but it is also, more fundamentally and menacingly, government ownership of you, and all of us, the citizens. Taking our guns, so we can’t defend ourselves, and shutting down free speech, so we can’t criticize the dictators and propose radically different ideas, are just the first steps.

Government ownership of you is what total control means and that is what produces the totalitarian state. (And fascism is a form of socialism that only differs superficially.) Here is Ludwig von Mises on the path to socialism and how its acolytes are treated along the way:

As soon as a socialist deviated an inch from the orthodox creed, Marx and Engels attacked him furiously, ridiculed and insulted him, represented him as a scoundrel and a wicked and corrupt monster. After Engels' death the office of supreme arbiter of what is and what is not correct Marxism devolved upon Karl Kautsky [Marxist philosopher and theoretician].

Sound familiar? Just substitute today’s versions of the post-moderns’ political correctness for Marxism. The goal is the same, to silence dissent. Mises continues:

In 1917 it passed into the hands of Lenin and became a function of the chief of the Soviet government. While Marx, Engels, and Kautsky had to content themselves with assassinating the character of their opponents, Lenin and Stalin could assassinate them physically” (Theory and History, pp. 131-32).

Assassinations and gulags are the end—the dead end—of socialism, that is, unless you happen to be one of the elites who lives well, that is, again, unless you offend the wrong person and end up with a bullet between the eyes.

The list of past and present socialist assassins is lengthy: Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Chavez, and Maduro. For 130 years, Progressives have been moving us ever so inexorably closer to that end.

Our current president, and his constituency, seem to know this, at least implicitly, if not in some respects, explicitly. The Left is attacking and eroding the American sense of life. The president and his constituency represent it.

The dishonest blather—and “blather” is too kind a word to describe the babblingly vicious attacks made on our president—whether about his alleged “rude,” “crude, or “mannerless” words and behavior or his alleged dishonesty, are the Left’s projection of what they have done for 130 years and are doing in spades today. Our president may have rough edges and speak bluntly, which makes him transparent, but the Left talks out of both sides of their mouths and holds hearings in basement star chambers.

The Left, however, does rightly feel legitimate fears that the president is out to destroy their fiefdoms. The “good ‘ol boy” networks of lobbyists, the unelected deep state, and corrupt politicians are what he accurately calls “the swamp.” The mixed economy, after all, is a mixture of freedom and dictatorship. Freedom requires dismantling these Machiavellian strongholds.*

It is absurd to say that our current president would establish a dictatorship. That is the Left’s Goebbelsian smear campaign. So what if he sometimes falls back on ad hominem attacks? The Left’s smears are nonstop and far worse, stemming from their updated Marxian polylogism (Applying Principles, pp. 309-10; 2) that celebrates relativism and the collapse of reason, logic, and Enlightenment values.

So what if the president talks nicely to dictators? Seriously? How do you conduct a negotiation by saying to your opposite, “You’re evil! Now, let’s talk.” The essence of good negotiation is sticking to principles, especially the principle of national self-interest, something our president has practiced far more consistently than his predecessors. He refuses to sacrifice himself to others and our nation to other countries.

And so what if the president is not an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism? Seriously again? That is a reason not to vote for him?

He is proud to be an advocate of capitalism as he understands it. He is proudly self-interested—for himself and for both the nation and his constituents. He is proud to be rich and wants everyone else to become rich. He is proudly and vehemently opposed to socialism and any kind of leveling of society to its lowest common denominator.

I did vote libertarian in 2016 because I thought the Republican candidate was “too socialistic” and that my California vote was a useless throwaway, but I immediately changed my mind when I saw the putsch mentality and fervent hatred take over political discussion. I have since written some twenty blog posts touching on political issues and essentially defending our current president. I plan to vote Republican next November!

Would a winning Democratic candidate in 2020 really establish a dictatorship? Probably not, because the American sense of life is still strong enough to provide pushback against the worst trying to rise to the top. But in twenty, forty, or sixty years?

The American sense of life must be articulated explicitly to the electorate. Our current president, with his confident selfishness and equally confident condemnation of the swamp are good starts.


* And then there are the Pravdas and Izvestias that whine and cry when the president describes them as “enemies of the people,” which they are. If they had any guts or integrity, they would be upholding the principles of a free society and writing factual stories about the Left—a Left that would surely shut them down as soon as acquiring power or attach them to the government. On the dead end of an unelected deep state, see my 2016 post, “The Reductio of Bureaucracy” (Applying Principles, pp. 117-21), where I argue that the final product of bureaucratic management is to be found in the gulags of totalitarian dictatorship.

On the Path to Dictatorship: Why [Former President Trump] Must be [Elected]

This repost is from November 4, 2019, one year before the 2020 election, and last repost in my series of three for the current election season. The previous reposts were October 1 and September 5. The present repost has been edited to update it, changing such wording as “current president” to “former President Trump,” or some abbreviated version, and “reelect” to “elect.” In the spirit of sparing capital letters, called “down” style by some manuals of style, I have lower-cased “Left” and “Progressive.”
 
 
Democratic socialists have always paved the way for brutal totalitarian dictators, historically and logically. [Former President Trump] is the only person standing between us and such a dictatorship. Here are my reasons why.
 
Democratic socialists, as Hayek taught us (1, p. 158; 2), don’t have the guts to enforce their coercive policies. Dictators do, with blood. “Armed robbery and murder” is how George Reisman (part I) describes the means of establishing and maintaining a socialist society. This is true historically wherever socialism has been implemented and by logical necessity of the initiated coercion the socialists aim to impose on citizens.
 
“Progressivism” is the left’s euphemism for democratic socialism (and sometimes communism). It is a specter, to use Marx’s word, that has haunted American culture and political life since the 1890’s. Today, its coercive policies are nakedly explicit.
 
Socialism is not just government ownership of the means of production, which the left certainly is seeking, but it is also, more fundamentally and menacingly, government ownership of you, and all of us, the citizens. Taking our guns, so we can’t defend ourselves, and shutting down free speech, so we can’t criticize the dictators and propose radically different ideas, are just the first steps.
 
Government ownership of you is what total control means and that is what produces the totalitarian state. (And fascism is a form of socialism that only differs superficially.) Here is Ludwig von Mises on the path to socialism and how its acolytes are treated along the way:

As soon as a socialist deviated an inch from the orthodox creed, Marx and Engels attacked him furiously, ridiculed and insulted him, represented him as a scoundrel and a wicked and corrupt monster. After Engels' death the office of supreme arbiter of what is and what is not correct Marxism devolved upon Karl Kautsky [Marxist philosopher and theoretician].

Sound familiar? Just substitute today’s versions of the post-moderns’ political correctness for Marxism. The goal is the same, to silence dissent. Mises continues:

In 1917 it passed into the hands of Lenin and became a function of the chief of the Soviet government. While Marx, Engels, and Kautsky had to content themselves with assassinating the character of their opponents, Lenin and Stalin could assassinate them physically” (Theory and History, pp. 131-32).

Assassinations and gulags are the end—the dead end—of socialism, that is, unless you happen to be one of the elites who lives well, that is, again, unless you offend the wrong person and end up with a bullet between the eyes.
 
The list of past and present socialist assassins is lengthy: Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Chavez, and Maduro. For 130 years, progressives have been moving us ever so inexorably closer to that end.
 
[Former President Trump], and his constituency, seem to know this, at least implicitly, if not in some respects, explicitly. The left is attacking and eroding the American sense of life. The former president and his constituency represent it.
 
The dishonest blather—and “blather” is too kind a word to describe the babblingly vicious attacks made on President Trump—whether about his alleged “rude,” “crude, or “mannerless” words and behavior or his alleged dishonesty, are the left’s projection of what they have done for 130 years and are doing in spades today. Our Pent may have rough edges and speak bluntly, which makes him transparent, but the left talks out of both sides of their mouths and holds hearings in basement star chambers.
 
The left, however, does rightly feel legitimate fears that the president is out to destroy their fiefdoms. The “good ‘ol boy” networks of lobbyists, the unelected deep state, and corrupt politicians are what he accurately calls “the swamp.” The mixed economy, after all, is a mixture of freedom and dictatorship. Freedom requires dismantling these Machiavellian strongholds.*
 
It is absurd to say that our [former] president would establish a dictatorship. That is the left’s Goebbelsian smear campaign. So what if he sometimes falls back on ad hominem attacks? The left’s smears are nonstop and far worse, stemming from their updated Marxian polylogism (1, 2) that celebrates relativism and the collapse of reason, logic, and Enlightenment values.
 
So what if the president talks nicely to dictators? Seriously? How do you conduct a negotiation by saying to your opposite, “You’re evil! Now, let’s talk.” The essence of good negotiation is sticking to principles, especially the principle of national self-interest, something our [former] president has practiced far more consistently than his predecessors. He refuses to sacrifice himself to others and our nation to other countries.
 
And so what if the president is not an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism? Seriously again? That is a reason not to vote for him?
 
He is proud to be an advocate of capitalism as he understands it. He is proudly self-interested—for himself and for both the nation and his constituents. He is proud to be rich and wants everyone else to become rich. He is proudly and vehemently opposed to socialism and any kind of leveling of society to its lowest common denominator.
 
I did vote libertarian in 2016 because I thought the Republican candidate was “too socialistic” and that my California vote was a useless throwaway, but I immediately changed my mind when I saw the putsch mentality and fervent hatred take over political discussion. I have since written some twenty blog posts [2017–19] touching on political issues and essentially defending our [former] president. [I voted Republican in 2020 and plan to do so again on November 5!]
 
Would a winning Democratic candidate in 2020 really establish a dictatorship? Probably not, because the American sense of life is still strong enough to provide pushback against the worst trying to rise to the top. But in twenty, forty, or sixty years?
 
The American sense of life must be articulated explicitly to the electorate. Our [former] president, with his confident selfishness and equally confident condemnation of the swamp are good starts.
 
 
* And then there are the Pravdas and Izvestias that whine and cry when the former president describes them as “enemies of the people,” which they are. If they had any guts or integrity, they would be upholding the principles of a free society and writing factual stories about the left—a left that would surely shut them down as soon as acquiring power or attach them to the government. On the dead end of an unelected deep state, see my 2016 post, “The Reductio of Bureaucracy,” where I argue that the final product of bureaucratic management is to be found in the gulags of totalitarian dictatorship.

Hatred, the Leftist Emotion?

You’re a white racist.

This is one of the lovely epithets being slung around today. If I were on the receiving end of such hostility, I would have to respond by saying that I do not believe in turning the other cheek. Therefore . . .

You’re a totalitarian, postmodern progressive irrationalist, which means you are a communist/socialist/fascist/Nazi polylogist leftist and wannabe dictator whose only method of accomplishing anything is through physical force masked by governmentally initiated coercion and legal plunder called laws and regulations.

Other comments could be added, such as, “you’re a racist against whites, a misandrist, and a heterophobe,” but let’s just say, for short, that you are a communist/fascist leftist.* Your motivation is envy and hatred.

Envy has been covered by Helmet Schoeck and Ayn Rand, though Rand said envy is not the right word. Hatred of the good for being the good is more correct. So, let’s look at the psychology of hatred.

“Hatred of the good” is not envy because bad students who express this emotion do not want to be good students. They want the good students to fail, or at least be dragged down to their level. The same can be said for today’s entitlement poor. They do not want to work hard to become rich like successful business people. They want the rich to suffer (ignoring the history of rags-to-riches stories) and become like them.

Hatred, according to psychologist Edith Packer (Lectures on Psychology, chap. 4), is an emotion that begins with anger and resentment. If unchecked, that is, if underlying evaluations of the emotions are not examined for truth or falsity, and when false, not corrected, anger and resentment can develop into rage, hostility, and aggression.

Underlying anger, says Packer, is the universal evaluation that “an injustice has been done to me,” the word “universal” meaning all instances of anger express the same evaluation. That evaluation in any specific instance, however, may be valid or true, as when someone rudely cuts in front of us in a movie line, or invalid or false when it turns out that the cutter was joining his wife who was holding his place, or the cutting was inadvertent.

Anger expresses an injustice resulting from a specific action. Resentment expresses stored-up anger, stemming from a belief (valid or invalid) of long-term unjust treatment that has been neither confronted nor resolved. This can then lead to hatred.

Hatred says the target of the emotion is totally contemptible, that the person’s character, not just his or her specific action, is despised. To quote Packer, “an individual who feels hatred usually also feels helpless to correct the injustices committed by the person he hates. While hatred can be justified in some rare cases, almost always it is neurotic or pathological”** (pp. 103-04).

Rage, an out-of-control fury deriving from the conviction that somehow I am the cause of this injustice, often follows from hatred and is pathological. As is hostility, although hostility is a defense mechanism that only looks like anger. Deriving from self-doubt that is projected outward at an alleged injustice, the aim of hostility is to make the target suffer. Aggression, finally, is the behavioral manifestation of hostility, verbal or physical actions to deliver the intended injuries.

Hatred of the good that we see today is rage, hostility, and aggression, by way of shouting down speakers or banging on windows to disturb them, blocking street intersections or entrances to venues, and, in the worst cases, hurling rocks and other missiles at the targets and destroying their property.

Such hostile behaviors are criminal, driven by frail egos filled with self-doubt, and are not new.

Recall the decidedly un-civil-disobedient student demonstrations of the 1960s, the seizures of property, kidnappings of college deans . . . and bombings and killings. Or recall 1920s Weimar Germany and its street clashes between red-coated communists and brown-shirted Nazis, not to mention Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch.

The pathological and contemptibly immoral goal in both time periods was to tear down and destroy the accomplishments of capitalism and, ultimately, replace it with some form of totalitarianism. The same is occurring today.

Marx and Engels advocated violent revolution. Lenin, Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler were just carrying out the communist/fascist founder’s wishes.

Marx’s method of argument was to declare to his opponents, “you’re just a bourgeoisie.” We can’t reason with you, he would say, because you don’t understand proletarian logic. That’s the meaning of “polylogism.”

Today’s Marxists, that is, the postmodern progressive Leninist, Mussolinian, Stalinist, Hitlerian leftists, do not even pretend to offer arguments. They smear opponents—people of prominent positions in universities, business, entertainment, and, especially, the media—by calling them names: “You’re a white racist, misogynist, homophobe.”

And they intimidate and threaten them, by pouring money into campaigns of vilification. If the targets do not toe the politically correct party line, or apologize grovelingly when they cross it, the leftists step up their campaigns to have them removed and their careers destroyed.

If this is not hatred—hatred of the good, the competent, the able—I don’t know what is.

(By the way, communist/fascist leftists, all crimes are hate crimes. That pickpocket who relieves you of your wallet is not doing it out of warm, fuzzy love.)

Postmodernism, and its leftist activists, reject the Enlightenment’s values of objective reality, reason, logic, individual rights, and capitalism. Stephen Hicks, in his book Explaining Postmodernism (1; Applying Principles, pp. 33-36), eloquently dubs postmodernists the Iagos to the Enlightenment’s Othellos. Their goal is to inject doubt into modernity’s values and, as it did with Othello, “let that doubt work like a slow poison” (Hicks, p. 200).

Or, as Hicks elsewhere describes the activists on college campuses (whom he denies the epithets “snowflakes” and “delicate flowers” because their tears, he says, are a tactic): the “grievances are not meant to be resolved. They are meant to fester and be used in the service of power-politics strategy. . . . The protesters’ point is to make unreasonable demands, and their goal is to see how much they can get away with.”

Calculated hate? How can it not be!

The antidote to this festering poison is a rational psychology that the Iagos do not possess, but if they did, it would consist of independence and a commitment to facts and truth.

In particular, it would be a commitment to the Enlightenment’s values that there really is an objective reality “out there,” that we can identify it through reason and logic, that we each individually possess rights deriving from our nature as human beings and applying universally to every person on earth, and that laissez-faire capitalism, or the closest thing we have ever come to it, has cured, and continues to cure, dread diseases, and has abolished, and continues to abolish, poverty in cultures worldwide by providing abundant opportunities for all to rise above their original stations in life.



* I’ve been struggling for some time to come up with an appropriate sobriquet to describe the far leftists. “Communist/fascist” works because differences between the two systems are superficial and Marx, Engels, and Lenin considered communism and socialism to be synonyms. “Left” on the political spectrum means total control of life and economy—this includes fascism—so “totalitarian leftist” becomes redundant.

** A justified emotion of hatred, for example, might be that of a victim of the Holocaust whose hatred is directed at the Nazis and their modern-day sympathizers.

Hatred, the Leftist Emotion?

Below is a repost from May 15, 2018, lightly edited. Two months later I posted “Is the Next Step for the Left to Liquidate Its Enemies?” July 11, 2018, in which I ask three times, “Are We There Yet?” A year earlier, October 8, 2017, I posted “The Fascist Left,” explaining the left-right continuum and arguing that fascism belongs on the left, as it is a form of socialism, “socialism of the German pattern,” as Ludwig von Mises wrote (Human Action, p. 759).   

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You’re a white racist.

This is one of the lovely epithets being slung around today. If I were on the receiving end of such hostility, I would have to respond by saying that I do not believe in turning the other cheek. Therefore . . .

You’re a totalitarian, postmodern progressive irrationalist, which means you are a communist/socialist/fascist/Nazi polylogist leftist and wannabe dictator whose only method of accomplishing anything is through physical force masked by governmentally initiated coercion and legal plunder called laws and regulations.

Other comments could be added, such as, “you’re a racist against whites, a misandrist, and a heterophobe,” but let’s just say, for short, that you are a communist/fascist leftist.* Your motivation is envy and hatred.

Envy has been covered by Helmet Schoeck and Ayn Rand, though Rand said envy is not the right word. Hatred of the good for being the good is more correct. So, let’s look at the psychology of hatred.

“Hatred of the good” is not envy because bad students who express this emotion do not want to be good students. They want the good students to fail, or at least be dragged down to their level. The same can be said for today’s entitlement poor. They do not want to work hard to become rich like successful business people. They want the rich to suffer (ignoring the history of rags-to-riches stories) and become like them.

Hatred, according to psychologist Edith Packer (Lectures on Psychology, chap. 4), is an emotion that begins with anger and resentment. If unchecked, that is, if underlying evaluations of the emotions are not examined for truth or falsity, and when false, not corrected, anger and resentment can develop into rage, hostility, and aggression.

Underlying anger, says Packer, is the universal evaluation that “an injustice has been done to me,” the word “universal” meaning all instances of anger express the same evaluation. That evaluation in any specific instance, however, may be valid or true, as when someone rudely cuts in front of us in a movie line, or invalid or false when it turns out that the cutter was joining his wife who was holding his place, or the cutting was inadvertent.

Anger expresses an injustice resulting from a specific action. Resentment expresses stored-up anger, stemming from a belief (valid or invalid) of long-term unjust treatment that has been neither confronted nor resolved. This can then lead to hatred.

Hatred says the target of the emotion is totally contemptible, that the person’s character, not just his or her specific action, is despised. To quote Packer, “an individual who feels hatred usually also feels helpless to correct the injustices committed by the person he hates. While hatred can be justified in some rare cases, almost always it is neurotic or pathological”** (pp. 103-04).

Rage, an out-of-control fury deriving from the conviction that somehow I am the cause of this injustice, often follows from hatred and is pathological. As is hostility, although hostility is a defense mechanism [or habit] that only looks like anger. Deriving from self-doubt that is projected outward at an alleged injustice, the aim of hostility is to make the target suffer. Aggression, finally, is the behavioral manifestation of hostility, verbal or physical actions to deliver the intended injuries.

Hatred of the good that we see today is rage, hostility, and aggression, by way of shouting down speakers or banging on windows to disturb them, blocking street intersections or entrances to venues, and, in the worst cases, hurling rocks and other missiles at the targets and destroying their property.

Such hostile behaviors are criminal, driven by frail egos filled with self-doubt, and are not new.

Recall the decidedly un-civil-disobedient student demonstrations of the 1960s, the seizures of property, kidnappings of college deans . . . and bombings and killings. Or recall 1920s Weimar Germany and its street clashes between red-coated communists and brown-shirted Nazis, not to mention Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch.

The pathological and contemptibly immoral goal in both time periods was to tear down and destroy the accomplishments of capitalism and, ultimately, replace it with some form of totalitarianism. The same is occurring today.

Marx and Engels advocated violent revolution. Lenin, Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler were just carrying out the communist/fascist founder’s wishes.

Marx’s method of argument was to declare to his opponents, “you’re just a bourgeoisie.” We can’t reason with you, he would say, because you don’t understand proletarian logic. That’s the meaning of “polylogism.”

Today’s Marxists, that is, the postmodern progressive Leninist, Mussolinian, Stalinist, Hitlerian leftists, do not even pretend to offer arguments. They smear opponents—people of prominent positions in universities, business, entertainment, and, especially, the media—by calling them names: “You’re a white racist, misogynist, homophobe.”

And they intimidate and threaten them, by pouring money into campaigns of vilification. If the targets do not toe the politically correct party line, or apologize grovelingly when they cross it, the leftists step up their campaigns to have them removed and their careers destroyed.

If this is not hatred—hatred of the good, the competent, the able—I don’t know what is.

(By the way, communist/fascist leftists, all crimes are hate crimes. That pickpocket who relieves you of your wallet is not doing it out of warm, fuzzy love.)

Postmodernism, and its leftist activists, reject the Enlightenment’s values of objective reality, reason, logic, individual rights, and capitalism. Stephen Hicks, in his book Explaining Postmodernism (1; Applying Principles, pp. 33-36), eloquently dubs postmodernists the Iagos to the Enlightenment’s Othellos. Their goal is to inject doubt into modernity’s values and, as Iago did with Othello, “let that doubt work like a slow poison” (Hicks, p. 200).

Or, as Hicks elsewhere describes the activists on college campuses (whom he denies the epithets “snowflakes” and “delicate flowers” because their tears, he says, are a tactic): the “grievances are not meant to be resolved. They are meant to fester and be used in the service of power-politics strategy. . . . The protesters’ point is to make unreasonable demands, and their goal is to see how much they can get away with.”

Calculated hate? How can it not be!

The antidote to this festering poison is a rational psychology that the Iagos do not possess, but if they did, it would consist of independence and a commitment to facts and truth.

In particular, it would be a commitment to the Enlightenment’s values that there really is an objective reality “out there,” that we can identify it through reason and logic, that we each individually possess rights deriving from our nature as human beings and applying universally to every person on earth, and that laissez-faire capitalism, or the closest thing we have ever come to it, has cured, and continues to cure, dread diseases, and has abolished, and continues to abolish, poverty in cultures worldwide by providing abundant opportunities for all to rise above their original stations in life.


* I’ve been struggling for some time to come up with an appropriate sobriquet to describe the far leftists. “Communist/fascist” works because differences between the two systems are superficial and Marx, Engels, and Lenin considered communism and socialism to be synonyms. “Left” on the political spectrum means total control of life and economy—this includes fascism—so “totalitarian" becomes redundant when talking about leftism.

** A justified emotion of hatred, for example, might be that of a victim of the Holocaust whose hatred is directed at the Nazis and their modern-day sympathizers.