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Understanding the Left
Rule One, according to Sun Tzu, is to understand your enemy. Well, not exactly. He wrote:
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.
My mission, and I accept it, is to understand the Left.
One of the means I use to understand politics, apart from Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and his Friend/Enemy Distinction, is the Political Formula of Gaetano Mosca. So Google AI:
Gaetano Mosca’s political formula refers to the legal, moral, or ideological justifications used by a ruling minority to legitimize their power over the majority.
And the left’s political formula is encoded by them in the notion of Allyism, that the left is the ally of the oppressed people in their fight against the oppressors.
So, the left adapts the Friend/Enemy distinction into a oppressed/oppressor relationship, so that the enemy is not just the Enemy but an all-powerful oppressor Enemy, and the left are the brave activists, the Friends of the oppressed, standing up against the oppressors.
You can see the political formula in Marx’s idea that, even though capitalism would collapse of its internal contradictions, the Communists were the allies of the working class in its fight against the bourgeoisie.
Then Lenin in Imperialism proposes that imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, exploiting not just the workers but the whole world.
The feminists propose they are allies of women oppressed by the patriarchs.
The anti-racists propose that they are allies of blacks oppressed by the racists.
The anti-semites propose that they are allies of ordinary people oppressed by the Jews.
The LGBT movement is the ally of gays oppressed by the homophobes.
The unions propose they are the allies of the workers oppressed by the employers.
The left proposes that Palestinians are the helpless victims of Israeli oppressors.
Jake Tapper proposes that the Iran regime is the helpless victim of the Trump administration.
Here’s a piece on “decolonization” featuring a peaceful protest for Freedom for Palestine. They were in the streets only days after the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas. Helpless Palestinians under the knout of oppressor Israelis.
You know what I wonder? I wonder about the unconscious human instinct involved here. Is it the instinct to help the helpless? Is it an instinct in low status people to guilt-trip the high status people into helping them?
I wonder. I don’t think our lefty friends invented this. Of course, starving peasants down the ages have swarmed into the city demanding food. And whatabout the German Peasants War of 1524-25? And Watt Tyler’s Rebellion in 1381?
More research is needed.
| Mon, 20 Apr 2026 21:46:20 GMT |
"There's Never Been Anything Like It"
If you ask Google AI about this it replies:
[It] is a frequent, hyperbolic phrase used by Donald Trump to describe various events, successes, or crises as unprecedented in human history.
If you ask Grok:
Yeah, Trump’s signature line… — It’s his go-to hyperbole for pretty much everything:
I don’t know what you think, but I think that Google is sneering and Grok is not.
But I gotta say: if President Trump is really getting the Iranian government to fold it’s one of the greatest triumphs in world history.
And it looks like the Iran regime is also folding on itself at the same time as the various factions start to argue about who gets to be the next regime.
And you will find that the great American philosopher Lina Lamont was right when she said, talking about our liberal friends: “they cain’t stand it.”
Let us hope that the Persian people get to create a new regime that honors the fact that Persian religion, featuring Zoroaster, is upstream of just about all religion to the west of Persia. Let us just go with Google AI;
Zoroastrianism is one of the world’s oldest monotheistic religions, founded by the prophet Zoroaster (Zarathustra) in ancient Persia (approx. 6th century BC). It centers on the worship of one creator god, Ahura Mazda, and the cosmic struggle between truth (Asha) and falsehood (Druj).
In my view Judaism and Christianity are downstream of Zoroaster. In my view that is what Nietzsche was hinting when he wrote Also Sprach Zarathustra.
And the Iranian, or Persian people, deserve to emerge from the revolting regime of mullahs and their various brutal armed police forces that maintain it in power by the most cruel and oppressive force on the people of Iran.
I expect that, starting tomorrow, our liberal friends will be deploying a narrative that represents President Trump as a clown and an authoritarian.
Do you think they will get away with it?
Who knows. But meanwhile, I think that we hard-right racist-sexist-homophobes can appreciate a president who gets things done.
Without the help of experts.
| Fri, 17 Apr 2026 23:14:28 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
People busy bending the arc of history usually fail to learn the lessons of history.
A fact is a fact until it isn’t.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: Crane Brinton's The Anatomy of Revolution
