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How to Philosophize about DSA / Woke 2

I’m all flummoxed. I can’t decide if Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) is a cunning CIA agent planning a color revolution in the US. Then I can’t decide if Karen Bass is a Cuban intelligence agent or a Chinese intelligence agent, or Commie IC-adjacent, or merely a lefty fool.

And then there is the question, raised by Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic and dissected by Liel Leibowitz in The Free Press, of whether Zohran Mamdani is a crazed lefty lunatic or a cunning “partisan of overthrow” planning the destruction of New York City to prepare for the revolution. No, Jonathan. Stop the misdirection. Mamdani is not a moderate.

But really, the only sensible way to understand the DSA and the culture cult of Woke 2 is to understand it all as a Christian heresy. The whole point of Christianity was that Christ gave His life so we could be saved, and go to Heaven in the next life. Socialism says we can have Heaven in this life, if only the rich pay their fair share and the police are replaced by mental health services and buses are free and childcare is unlimited.

There is, of course, another Christian heresy that might dovetail better, Manichaeism:

A radical dualist faith teaching an eternal war between the kingdom of Light (spirit) and the kingdom of Darkness (matter).

In our modern era, this Christian heresy has secularized into:

A radical dualist faith teaching an eternal war between the Oppressed (innocent) and the racist patriarchal Oppressors (guilty).

Now, of course, all the world knows that the Iranians invented dualism first, in Zoroastrianism:

Features a classic cosmic struggle between Spenta Mainyu (the Bholistic/Truth spirit) and Angra Mainyu (the Destructive/Falsehood spirit)[.]

I wonder if the mullahs in Iran have any dualist residues left. Google says NO!

The most famous dualistic heresy under Christianity is Catharism. There were lots of Cathars in France back in the day. That, experts agree, has nothing to do with the current mostly peaceful manifestations in France, which is merely about devoted students dreaming of a better education.

Of course it could be that the way to understand our lefty friends and their Angst about life, the universe, everything, is to replay the story of the Garden of Eden. There they were, Adam and Eve, lolling around in perfect bliss, when the Serpent tempted Eve into eating an apple off the Tree of Knowledge. So she did, taking a modest little bite so she could share the apple later with Adam.

I wonder if Eve had eaten the whole apple, and then applied to God for a full lesson in philosophy and the Big Bang and the question of women in the public square, if everything would have turned out different.

But anyway, here we are, turned out of Paradise, and our lefty friends cain’t stand it. They want back in, and they want the billionaires to pay for it.

But obviously, trillionaire Elon Musk has other ideas, and I suspect that in his youth he watched more than a few episodes of The Honeymooners. I dare say he decided that “to the Moon, Alice” didn’t quite do the trick in the internet age, and so a more comprehensive and mandatory program to “Occupy Mars” with lefty lunatics would be required.

Do you think I have, as the Brits say, “lost the plot?” Maybe, but I am just trying to do a Sun Tzu and endeavoring to know the enemy. And that, I believe, requires a discursive journey through all human history and beyond, particularly as today is Wednesday.

But the philosophers at The New Yorker have a bigger worry. What if les manifestations en France create

an extreme, right-wing, conspiratorial, anti-immigrant, anti-European, anti-NATO, anti-the-alliance-of-democracy government. We already have something like that in the U.S.

Yep. The only thing to do is create more states, abolish the Senate, add more seats to the Supreme Court, and frighten conservative youth away from politics.

Also known as a color revolution to those on the inside.

| Wed, 21 Oct 2026 22:37:02 GMT |


Paris is Burning

I read somewhere that the French establishment is pretty relaxed about the protesters — mostly white — and the rioters — mostly immigrant — that are occurring in France. Can’t find it. But the point of the article was that the establishment was pretty relaxed about lefty leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon calling the kids into the street.

I suppose it’s always like this. Lefty insurrections are just “mostly peaceful protests” but righty demonstrations are Literally Hitler and racist-sexist-homophobic to boot.

Then there’s all the noise about the Democrats mobilizing to change the rules if they win the midterms, and that, per DataRepublican, it’s not just a few DSA crazies but an organized establishment operation.

The mysterious group who’s been coordinating 50501, Indivisible, and coordinating the NoKings protests is called “United Democracy Alliance”[.]

And if the Democrats win the midterms then all the Democrats from Washington DC to the states will be coordinating to shut the Trump administration down.

Maybe Sen. Slotkin is saying the quiet part out loud when she says that she

hopes planned political prosecutions of republican leaders will scare young conservatives from getting involved in politics.

It’s distressing to me, because I see all this as the regime of the last century or so realizing that they are running out of options. They have spent all the money, marched through all the institutions, flooded the borders with migrants, shoveled trillions of money at their supporters, politicized everything and yet, somehow, everything seems to be slipping away.

And so they are going to suspend the rules. As Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt wrote,

Sovereign is he who decides on the exception[.]

Meaning that, when there’s a crisis, and normal law breaks down, then the sovereign acts, extralegally, to end the chaos. And I’d say that our liberal friends are trying to work up an exception, so they can change the rules.

If they don’t, you see, their regime ends and they are out of power.

It all makes me wonder what the rulers think they are doing. I know, they don’t think; they just play the game of power as they have learned it, and they accept the various beliefs that have found their way into the ruling class narrative over the years.

Maybe the reason they don’t change anything and won’t reform is that any reform, any change, is going to hurt them and their supporters.

I mean, think of the French. Their government spends about 57 percent of GDP. So that means that 57 percent of the French economy is rigidified and doesn’t really deliver what the French people want. To change it means that all kinds of people with comfortable government sinecures and checks are going to be hurt. In the economy outside the government sector people understand that they must adapt to changes in prices and supply and demand. But people in the government sector do not react to change that way. In government everything is done by meetings and regulations and bureaucratic procedure. I was reading about a NASA engineer that went to work at SpaceX. He was amazed that, when he came up with an idea, it got implemented in the hardware in days. At NASA no change could happen without months of meetings and bureaucratic shuffling.

I was reading Ruy Teixeira today about “middle suburbs”, the “collection of blue-collar counties heavily concentrated in the Industrial Midwest” that have suffered from de-industrialization as the union jobs faded away over the decades. That’s what Make America Great Again is all about: reversing the decline in union-centered industry, and getting the “middle suburbs” to vote Republican.

If only. The fact is that blue-collar unionized manufacturing has had its day. In fact, the unionization of manufacturing probably made things worse, because it hindered the manufacturing employers from adapting to market and technological change and raised workers’ wages — and their expectations — above the market.

No doubt the “middle suburbs” will end up disappointed in Trump and the Republicans and then… Yes, and then the Democrats will save them?

Technological revolutions come and go. Just make sure that your kids are primed to get with the program on the latest revolution.

And the real way to Make America Great Again is to dial down government spending from 40 percent of GDP to 15-20 percent. That would mean transforming Social Security into IRA accounts, Medicare into HSA accounts, welfare into charity, and education into homeschooling. It would work!

But it would also mean blood in the streets, and not merely the performative burning of the occasional historic hôtel de ville in France.

| Tue, 20 Oct 2026 22:17:41 GMT |


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Christopher Chantrill Follow chrischantrill on Twitter

Christopher Chantrill (@chrischantrill) is a writer and conservative.

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.


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A Commoner Manifesto

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TODAY’S MAXIMS:

Today’s rulers want you to take the knee — to them, not BLM, silly!

Anglo culture: Equality means the ancient rights and liberties of Englishmen, and nobody is above the law. Continental culture: Egalité means substantive equality. No social distinctions except to support the common good.

all maxims...

BIG IDEAS:

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”.

IN BRIEF:
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
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