Angelo Codevilla's take on things

freyasman

Platinum Member
Apr 1, 2020
16,270
9,354
1,128
Texas
From the link;

"The moral class critique from above was always implicit. It largely stayed in the background of the campaigns for social improvement into which Progressives have led the American people ever since the 1930s, and especially since the 1960s. The ruling class chided Americans for insufficient commitment to education, to well-being for the poor and disadvantaged, to a healthy natural environment, and to public health, as well as for oppressing women, and, above all, for racism. The campaigns for remedying these conditions have been based on propositions advanced by the most highly-credentialed persons in America—experts certified by the U.S. government, whom the media treated as truth-telling scientists, their opponents as enemies of the people.


But each and all of these campaigns produced mostly the ostensible objectives’ opposites while increasing the numbers of the oligarchy’s members and their wealth and power, endowing them with socio-political clienteles as well as with levers for manipulating them. As its members’ powers grew, they developed a taste for disdaining independent Americans and acquired whips for punishing them.


In 1950, Americans at all levels of government spent 2% of GDP on K-12 education and 0.37% on higher education. In our time we spend 4.4% on K-12 and 1.9% on higher education, of a GDP that is about ten times as large. By any measure, the increases have been huge. These were supposed to uplift Americans intellectually and (maybe) morally. But they have dumbed down the nation to the point of mass illiteracy at the bottom and, at the top, created herds of ignorant, haughty, debt-ridden college graduates, fit only to enforce government edicts against Americans they despise. But the money also built up and entitled a class of monied, entitled, self-indulgent educrats—mostly administrators. U.S. college towns nowadays are islands of luxury, ease, and hate. They act as the ruling class’s gatekeepers.


Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir had reminded Americans to preserve our country’s beauty and bounty for all. But beginning in the 1960s the ruling class started using conservation as an excuse for restricting the public living on and profiting from the land, even their own properties. This resulted in big developers, regulators, politicians and lawyers making fortunes while preserving the privacy and increasing the value of places where they themselves live. (Now they want to outlaw building new single-family homes anywhere.) They also reaped billions from subsidies for “renewable energy” by flogging possible correlation—without evidence of cause—between CO2 and “global warming.” All others have suffered.


In 1965, the Census counted some 40 million people as “poor”—roughly the same number as today. Over the succeeding half-century, the Federal government has spent some $22 trillion to lift people out of poverty. Had that money been divided evenly between all the poor, each would have been a millionaire. Instead, the War on Poverty swelled and solidified America’s underclass. Because the government paid to support women with children so long as they were not married, marriage and family cohesion declined. With only about one in eight black children growing to adulthood with two married parents, the black community and America as a whole are beset by a self-perpetuating flow of dysfunctional youth. This led to the long-term imprisonment of more than a million people. Prisons became an industry. But the war on poverty enriched countless contractors, consultants and members of the “helping professions.”


These initiatives are scams. Whatever else they have done, they have increased the number of people whose livelihoods depend on government. Since 1965, the number of direct employees has more than doubled to 22 million, and their pay exceeds that of persons who actually perform services that people want. The city of San Francisco, for example, employs 19,000 persons whom it pays more than $150,000 yearly. This does not count the countless government contractors, or the advantages for some and disadvantages for everyone else that government power combined with corporate power conveys. In short, whatever else these initiatives have done, they surely have created a lot of patronage."




It's a long read, and a deep dive into what's happening, why it's happening, and who is doing what and to whom, but it's worth the time to read, if for no other reason than to know who it is we're all up against, and why they're are coming after us.
And make no mistake, if you're a traditional American, who actually believes in our founding ideals and values, they are definitely coming after you.
 
  • Thread starter
  • Banned
  • #2
More from the link;

"Race (and sex, etc.) is yet another set of excuses for transferring power to the ruling class. The oligarchy is no more concerned about race than it is about education, or environmentalism, or sex, or anything else. It is about yet more discretionary power in the hands of its members, for whom not all blacks (or women, or whatevers) are to be advantaged—only the ones who serve ruling class purposes. In education, employment, and personnel management, co-opting compatible, non-threatening colleagues is the objective. As Joseph Biden put it succinctly: if you don’t vote for him, “you ain’t black.” A ruling class of ever-decreasing quality is a result.


Members and hangers-on who receive privileges, however, are a small number compared with the ruling class’s clients. Breaking down their client’s resistance to the revolution of the ruling class requires inducing them to share in the revolution’s logic of hate for its targets. This in turn requires control over channels of communication. Google, Facebook, and Twitter are indispensable for this. But creating and maintaining a sense of identity between oligarchs and the client mobs is possible mostly because of the latter’s gullibility."
 
  • Thread starter
  • Banned
  • #3
More;


"The Logic of Hate


I noted that this revolution’s logic leads to no logical end. That is because “the logic that drives each turn of our revolutionary spiral is Progressive Americans’ inherently insatiable desire to exercise their superiority over those they deem inferior.” Its force, I observed, “comes not from the substance of the Progressives’ demands,” but rather “from that which moves, changes, and multiplies their demands without end. That is the Progressives’ affirmation of superior worth, to be pursued by exercising dominance: superior identity affirmed via the inferior’s humiliation.” Affirmation of one’s own superiority by punishing inferiors is an addictive pleasure. It requires ever stronger, purer doses of infliction, and is inherently beyond satisfaction.


In short, the Progressive ruling class’s intensifying efforts to oppress those they imagine to be their inferiors is not reversible. It is far less a choice of policy than it is the consequence of its awakening to its own identity—awakening to the powers and privileges to which they imagine their superior worth entitles them. It is awakening to its deep resentment—indeed, to hate—for whoever does not submit preemptively.


Let there be no doubt: the ruling class’s focus on Donald Trump has been incidental. America’s potentates do not fear one pudgy orange-haired septuagenarian. They fear the millions of Americans whom they loathe, who voted for Trump, who gave his party control of House and Senate, and who will surely vote for folks these potentates really should fear."
 
From the link;

"The moral class critique from above was always implicit. It largely stayed in the background of the campaigns for social improvement into which Progressives have led the American people ever since the 1930s, and especially since the 1960s. The ruling class chided Americans for insufficient commitment to education, to well-being for the poor and disadvantaged, to a healthy natural environment, and to public health, as well as for oppressing women, and, above all, for racism. The campaigns for remedying these conditions have been based on propositions advanced by the most highly-credentialed persons in America—experts certified by the U.S. government, whom the media treated as truth-telling scientists, their opponents as enemies of the people.


But each and all of these campaigns produced mostly the ostensible objectives’ opposites while increasing the numbers of the oligarchy’s members and their wealth and power, endowing them with socio-political clienteles as well as with levers for manipulating them. As its members’ powers grew, they developed a taste for disdaining independent Americans and acquired whips for punishing them.


In 1950, Americans at all levels of government spent 2% of GDP on K-12 education and 0.37% on higher education. In our time we spend 4.4% on K-12 and 1.9% on higher education, of a GDP that is about ten times as large. By any measure, the increases have been huge. These were supposed to uplift Americans intellectually and (maybe) morally. But they have dumbed down the nation to the point of mass illiteracy at the bottom and, at the top, created herds of ignorant, haughty, debt-ridden college graduates, fit only to enforce government edicts against Americans they despise. But the money also built up and entitled a class of monied, entitled, self-indulgent educrats—mostly administrators. U.S. college towns nowadays are islands of luxury, ease, and hate. They act as the ruling class’s gatekeepers.


Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir had reminded Americans to preserve our country’s beauty and bounty for all. But beginning in the 1960s the ruling class started using conservation as an excuse for restricting the public living on and profiting from the land, even their own properties. This resulted in big developers, regulators, politicians and lawyers making fortunes while preserving the privacy and increasing the value of places where they themselves live. (Now they want to outlaw building new single-family homes anywhere.) They also reaped billions from subsidies for “renewable energy” by flogging possible correlation—without evidence of cause—between CO2 and “global warming.” All others have suffered.


In 1965, the Census counted some 40 million people as “poor”—roughly the same number as today. Over the succeeding half-century, the Federal government has spent some $22 trillion to lift people out of poverty. Had that money been divided evenly between all the poor, each would have been a millionaire. Instead, the War on Poverty swelled and solidified America’s underclass. Because the government paid to support women with children so long as they were not married, marriage and family cohesion declined. With only about one in eight black children growing to adulthood with two married parents, the black community and America as a whole are beset by a self-perpetuating flow of dysfunctional youth. This led to the long-term imprisonment of more than a million people. Prisons became an industry. But the war on poverty enriched countless contractors, consultants and members of the “helping professions.”


These initiatives are scams. Whatever else they have done, they have increased the number of people whose livelihoods depend on government. Since 1965, the number of direct employees has more than doubled to 22 million, and their pay exceeds that of persons who actually perform services that people want. The city of San Francisco, for example, employs 19,000 persons whom it pays more than $150,000 yearly. This does not count the countless government contractors, or the advantages for some and disadvantages for everyone else that government power combined with corporate power conveys. In short, whatever else these initiatives have done, they surely have created a lot of patronage."




It's a long read, and a deep dive into what's happening, why it's happening, and who is doing what and to whom, but it's worth the time to read, if for no other reason than to know who it is we're all up against, and why they're are coming after us.
And make no mistake, if you're a traditional American, who actually believes in our founding ideals and values, they are definitely coming after you.
Nice article. Thanks for posting it.
 
  • Thread starter
  • Banned
  • #5
More;

"Events since 2016 have surprised because of the ever-increasing speed with which this revolution’s logic has unfolded. Hillary Clinton’s 2016 suggestion that Donald Trump might refuse to accept losing the election seemed a speck of gratuitous campaign mud. Even if Trump had lost and been so minded, his recalcitrance could not have amounted to anything. No one imagined, however, that the Democratic Party—the party of government, of the entertainment industry, of the educational establishment, of the judiciary, of corporate America, the party of the ruling class—that this party, having lost the 2016 elections, would refuse to accept popular rejection and launch a full-court “Resistance” against the voters who had rejected them. But that is what happened.


A parenthetical note is needed to square politics’ perversion of language with reality. The word “resistance” does describe what the ruling class did vis-à-vis the 2016 election’s results. But the impression that the ruling class was resisting some kind of onslaught is the reverse of reality. In fact, the election’s outcome had resulted from the general population’s resistance to the ruling class further solidifying its oligarchy. Hence the self-described “Resistance” was but a continuation of its longstanding oligarchic revolution.


The oligarchy’s offensive to forcibly disable the voters began as a mere protest against—and explanation and excuse for—the 2016 elections’ outcome. But, as its identity unfolded according its logic of hate, one thing led to another.


Official and unofficial ruling class confluence in the Resistance turned the Democratic National Committee’s July 2016 throwaway lie that the Russians had hacked its emails into a four-year national convulsion about Trump’s alleged conspiracy with Putin. Ruling class judges sustained every act of opposition to the Trump administration. Thousands of identical voices in major media echoed every charge, every insinuation, nonstop, unquestioned. The Resistance made it official ruling class policy that Trump and his voters’ “racism” and a host of other wrongdoings made them, personally, illegitimate. In 2016 Hillary Clinton had tentatively called her opponents “deplorables.” By 2018 the ruling class had effectively placed the “deplorables” outside the protection of the laws. In any confrontation, the ruling class deemed these presumed white supremacists in the wrong, systemically. By 2020 they could be fired for a trifle, set upon on the streets, and prosecuted on suspicion of bad attitudes, even for defending themselves.


This happened because the Resistance rallied the ruling class’s every part to mutually supporting efforts. Nothing encourages, amplifies, and seemingly justifies extreme sentiments as does being part of a unanimous chorus, a crowd, a mob. Success supercharges them. The Resistance fostered in the ruling class’s members the sense that they were more right, more superior, and more entitled than they had ever imagined. It made millions of people feel bigger, and better about themselves than they ever had.


Ruling class violence started on inauguration day 2017 and grew unceasingly, at first an ominous background to all manner of bureaucratic, oligarchic, and media attacks on the election’s winners. But note well that the black-clad burners and looters were the very opposite of a proletariat and that, Marxist rhetoric aside, they never attacked the wealthy or the powerful—not Wall Street, nor major corporations, certainly not any government, never mind Google, Facebook, or Twitter, America’s most powerful monopolies, or corporate officials. Instead, they received financial contributions from these sources. The violent ones were as troops in the service of the powerful, out to crush the spirit of rebellious subjects. Some Marxists!"
 
  • Thread starter
  • Banned
  • #6
More;


"The ruling class use of COVID-19 is medical nonsense. But the “lockdowns” made perfect political sense because they disadvantaged primarily the sort of people who vote conservative. The lockdowns also made ordinary people more economically dependent on government, while enriching those best connected with it.


Most remarkable has been the unbroken consistency with which every part of the ruling class’s entourage joined the campaign while piggybacking its own priorities to it—to the complaisance of all the others. That is the meaning of “intersectionality.” Teachers’ unions, for example, conditioned returning to the classroom on the government banning charter schools; Black Lives Matter (BLM) claimed that “White Racism” must be treated as another public health menace. All other components supported them. All signified solidarity by demanding that all Americans wear masks outdoors, and that those who don’t be jailed. Meanwhile, they insisted that persons convicted of rape, robbery, and murder be released. The world turned upside down."
 
  • Thread starter
  • Banned
  • #7
More;

"The riots that began depopulating America’s major cities in late May are intersectionality’s apotheosis. Since blacks commit homicides at five times and other violent crimes at three times the rate of whites, confrontations between black criminals and police are quotidian. Violent reactions to such confrontations are common. Any number of personalities and organizations, mostly black, have made fortunes and careers exploiting them, e.g. New York’s Al Sharpton. Increasingly since 2013 BLM has become the most prominent of these, founded as a project of a hardline Communist organization based in Cuba and funded lavishly and unaccountably by a high percentage of America’s major corporations. Its stated goals of protecting the black community against police brutality notwithstanding, it functions to mobilize black voters on the Democratic Party’s behalf. Along with Antifa, an organization of violent Marxists and anarchists, BLM organized the physical side of the ruling class’s campaign of intimidation against the American people.


The patently counterfactual claim that months of burning, looting and personal attacks by mobs professionally armed, marshaled, and effectively authorized are “mostly peaceful protests” doubly serves the ruling class by warning the victims that they are alone, can expect no help, and that even resenting the mobs is culpable.


Yet the riots may be intersectionality’s downfall because ordering people to tell each other things they know are not true is the most hazardous of political power grabs."
 
  • Thread starter
  • Banned
  • #8
More;


"In 2020, the ruling class imposes itself by Democratic officials’ arbitrary regulations as well as by all manner of corporate restrictions on dissent. Demanding that people apologize for their whiteness and show other signs of submission on pain of being fired have become routine. In 2016 it would have been difficult to imagine the 2020 level of ruling class presumption, virulence and violence. In 2020, violent bands roam America’s cities with official complaisance, acting as the ruling class’s officious enforcers of powers without logical end.


Thus, acting in the name of public health and social justice, the ruling class effectively repealed the Constitution and the laws of the United States. Freedom of religion? Filling churches and synagogues, celebrating baptisms, weddings and funerals can now land you in jail. Freedom of speech? On the contrary. You may now be punished for failing to declare what is ordered of you, even if you don’t believe it, or even for failing to attend a political re-education session or by not showing due deference therein. Freedom of assembly? Only for those on the ruling class side. Property? If you forcibly defend it against the mob, Democrat-controlled states will jail you. They will also prosecute you for defending your life.


None of this was done by laws passed by elected representatives. All was done by all manner of officials’ and bureaucrats’ edicts, and discretionary actions supported by the media and corporations. Leaderless, the American people by and large obeyed a regime that had become an oligarchy served by thousands of its clients, eager to hurt opponents financially, socially, and physically.
"
 
  • Thread starter
  • Banned
  • #9
More;

"When the American people vote on November 3, they—like the proverbial husband who walks in on wife in flagrante—will choose whether to believe what they are told or what their senses tell them.


The ubiquity, depth, and vehemence of the ruling class’s denigration of Donald Trump is such as to render superfluous any detailing thereof. Suffice it to note that not a day in four years has gone by without the news media hyperventilating or ruminating on some allegation of Trump’s wrongdoing or wrongbeing. For what? Again, the list of subjects is so exhaustive that it is easier to note that there is hardly any mortal transgression of which he has not been accused. Suffice it to say that, to the extent one depends on the media’s narrative, one cannot help but believe that Donald Trump is the enemy of all good things, that nothing he has done has been any good, that he is responsible for all that is bad.


Nor has the media forgone any occasion to protect, foster, and embellish narratives in support of each and every member of the “intersectional” coalition and to shut out or denigrate alternatives thereto. It labels as false and/or as “hate speech” facts and arguments that counteract its narratives. Since the ruling class can be certain of the media’s unquestioning support, it need not worry about truth."
 
You apparently like Angelo. Get this book as it does a great job of exposing who are the ruling class and what they are all about.
e
1601410961706.jpeg
 
More;


"The revolution long since destroyed the original American republic in the minds, hearts, and habits of a critical mass of citizens. They neither want nor are any longer able to live as Americans had lived until so recently. Loudly, they declare that the rest of us are racists, etc., unworthy of self-government. No one can undo that. Chances are against the undoing happening on its own. The longer we pretend to live under precisely the same laws, the likelier we will end up killing one another. We must not do that. And yet regional differences notwithstanding, we are mostly intermingled. Sorting ourselves into compatible groups is part of the American genius and tradition. More of that has been happening and more will happen yet. If we want to live in peace, as we should, we must contrive to agree to disagree to accommodate peace.


The greatest benefit that would come from the Left’s defeat in the 2020 election is the possibility that it may become possible to convince the ruling class, if not the intersectionals, that such accommodation is the best deal they can get. But the intersectionals are violent enemies—who must be dealt with as such. Fortunately, there are more spoiled children among them than heroes."
 
More;


"The revolution long since destroyed the original American republic in the minds, hearts, and habits of a critical mass of citizens. They neither want nor are any longer able to live as Americans had lived until so recently. Loudly, they declare that the rest of us are racists, etc., unworthy of self-government. No one can undo that. Chances are against the undoing happening on its own. The longer we pretend to live under precisely the same laws, the likelier we will end up killing one another. We must not do that. And yet regional differences notwithstanding, we are mostly intermingled. Sorting ourselves into compatible groups is part of the American genius and tradition. More of that has been happening and more will happen yet. If we want to live in peace, as we should, we must contrive to agree to disagree to accommodate peace.


The greatest benefit that would come from the Left’s defeat in the 2020 election is the possibility that it may become possible to convince the ruling class, if not the intersectionals, that such accommodation is the best deal they can get. But the intersectionals are violent enemies—who must be dealt with as such. Fortunately, there are more spoiled children among them than heroes."
Let’s peacefully separate into several separate nations, peacefully coexisting.
 
More;


"The revolution long since destroyed the original American republic in the minds, hearts, and habits of a critical mass of citizens. They neither want nor are any longer able to live as Americans had lived until so recently. Loudly, they declare that the rest of us are racists, etc., unworthy of self-government. No one can undo that. Chances are against the undoing happening on its own. The longer we pretend to live under precisely the same laws, the likelier we will end up killing one another. We must not do that. And yet regional differences notwithstanding, we are mostly intermingled. Sorting ourselves into compatible groups is part of the American genius and tradition. More of that has been happening and more will happen yet. If we want to live in peace, as we should, we must contrive to agree to disagree to accommodate peace.


The greatest benefit that would come from the Left’s defeat in the 2020 election is the possibility that it may become possible to convince the ruling class, if not the intersectionals, that such accommodation is the best deal they can get. But the intersectionals are violent enemies—who must be dealt with as such. Fortunately, there are more spoiled children among them than heroes."
Let’s peacefully separate into several separate nations, peacefully coexisting.
If they were capable of leaving others alone, we wouldn't have to separate.
 
More;


"The revolution long since destroyed the original American republic in the minds, hearts, and habits of a critical mass of citizens. They neither want nor are any longer able to live as Americans had lived until so recently. Loudly, they declare that the rest of us are racists, etc., unworthy of self-government. No one can undo that. Chances are against the undoing happening on its own. The longer we pretend to live under precisely the same laws, the likelier we will end up killing one another. We must not do that. And yet regional differences notwithstanding, we are mostly intermingled. Sorting ourselves into compatible groups is part of the American genius and tradition. More of that has been happening and more will happen yet. If we want to live in peace, as we should, we must contrive to agree to disagree to accommodate peace.


The greatest benefit that would come from the Left’s defeat in the 2020 election is the possibility that it may become possible to convince the ruling class, if not the intersectionals, that such accommodation is the best deal they can get. But the intersectionals are violent enemies—who must be dealt with as such. Fortunately, there are more spoiled children among them than heroes."
Let’s peacefully separate into several separate nations, peacefully coexisting.
If they were capable of leaving others alone, we wouldn't have to separate.
They?
 

Forum List

Back
Top