Trump lies all the time, except when the truth makes him look good.

Trump: Protesters Your Ass, They Are Not Protesters; They Are Anarchists, Agitators, Rioters & Looters

And assholes, but he left that out.

President Donald Trump criticized the protests and riots that ensued in the streets of Washington, D.C. following his acceptance of the Republican nominee for president at the White House. 

Trump said Friday at a campaign event in Manchester, NH that they are anarchists, agitators, rioters, looters who do not get denounced by Democratic politicians.

"Today's Democrat party is filled with hate," Trump said Friday. 

That's a lie, but the Democrats sure are walking right into it.

Antifa and anarchists have no love for Democrats and may even hope their violence gets a win for Trump.

Maybe some of the BLM or other radical racial left, too.

"Just look at Joe Biden's supporters on the streets screaming and shouting at bystanders with unhinged, manic rage. Right? You see it. It's crazy. You ought to see last night in Washington, it was a disgrace. It was a disgrace that these people are representing the United States of America. It was a disgrace."

"Protesters. You know what I say? Protesters, your ass. I don't talk about my ass. They're not protesters. Those aren't protesters. Those are anarchists, they're agitators, they're rioters, they're looters. You say that and some of the people, not all of the people, back there how dare you? These are friendly protesters, right?" Trump said.

Trump versus Biden on the "Cultural Revolutionaries"

MSNBC this morning says the Duce's weekend, 4th of July speeches were American Carnage all over again.

They were racist and divisive instead of healing and celebratory and uniting.

They were wrong and harmful and wicked altogether.

The network showed videos of excerpts.

Trump actually made two speeches on the same themes, one at the White House and one at Mt. Rushmore.

Two points.

First, in both speeches Trump made no reference to the Confederacy, instead defending public honors for the Founders, defending the revolution of 1776, celebrating our nation's founding and our history, and by name celebrating Christopher Columbus at the White House, tracing back to him the story of the building of America.

Tammy Duckworth's public charge that Trump's spent his entire Rushmore speech defending "dead traitors", an apparent allusion to the debate about public honors for the Confederacy and Confederate leaders, was a ridiculous lie.

Those things could all have appeared in a speech by Joe Biden, as they reflect what we know of his rarely mentioned and all but concealed official position.

But none of that was in any weekend message or speech of Biden's, so far as I can tell from media reporting.

[Biden's near silence on these matters invites conservative "interpretation".]

Second, the Duce characterized the vandals tearing down and destroying monuments as radical leftists with a divisive and destructive program who want to "overthrow the American Revolution" and tear down America and replace it with a repressive regime featuring massive levels of indoctrination of the whole population, particularly of the young in schools.

The actions and words of the cultural revolutionaries increasingly, daily, bear that out.

Recall the statue of Columbus was wrecked by a white anarchist.

Recall Kaepernick's tweet deliberately echoing and going beyond the bitter but entirely justified remarks of Frederick Douglass about what Independence Day means to the slave before the Civil War, repudiating the revolution, the Founders, the republic, and the history of the nation from that day to this.

Neither he nor anyone of the racial left ever mentions Douglass's utter reversal when at last Lincoln and his allies ended slavery at so massive a cost in lives and treasure.

This is one the country would have been better off not seeing.

Talk about race hate.

Talk about black skin privilege.

Kaepernick denounces 4th of July as ‘celebration of white supremacy’

Along with a video showing images of the Ku Klux Klan, police brutality, slavery and lynchings, Kaepernick wrote: “Black ppl have been dehumanized, brutalized, criminalized + terrorized by America for centuries, & are expected to join your commemoration of ‘independence’, while you enslaved our ancestors. We reject your celebration of white supremacy & look forward to liberation for all.”

Letting his Rev. Wright flag fly.

Sometimes you push "send" when you should just push "delete".

For sure, the alt.right will be using this tweet as recruiting material.

Maybe now it's Trump's turn to play Biden and sit tight while these endless demonstrations of hatred for America, black and white, wear on.

But, nope, he's still out there defending honors for the Confederacy and its leaders, as well as all the rest.

Asked about honors for Washington today Tammy Duckworth, whom I never liked for the job, anyway, stammered and stumbled and gave no answer.

The Democratic sympathizing media are still calling them protesters and even peaceful protesters but now they seem to be mostly vandals looking for more to destroy in the name of their politics, and to hell with everybody else's.

38 days of disorder now in some cities.

Anarchists in Pittsburgh

Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman are long gone, but all the same.

Pittsburgh police ID suspect who allegedly incited violence during Saturday’s protest

Pittsburgh police on Sunday afternoon served a search warrant for a suspect believed to have incited the violence that punctuated Saturday’s Downtown protest over the killing of George Floyd by law enforcement in Minnesota.

The warrant was served against Brian Jordan Bartels, 20 of Shaler for allegedly “breaking the windows out of a marked Pittsburgh Police vehicle Uptown, against the wishes of peaceful protesters who tried to stop him,” according to a release from police.

Mr. Bartels was not home when police served the warrant at his Shaler residence, but they did find evidence that links him to the violence that occurred Saturday. 

He is currently facing charges of “institutional vandalism, rioting and reckless endangerment of another person,” according to the report.

A warrant has been issued for Mr. Bartels’ arrest while the investigation continues.

. . . .

Mayor Bill Peduto said that evening the protest had been “hijacked by a group of individuals who put their own self-interest above the interest of the movement” and shared a video that is believed to be of Mr. Bartels.

Peduto tweeted:

For 2+ hours thousands of Pittsburghers Marched against Injustice, for building a better city, for the critical changes necessary to change our country. Then.. their March for Justice was hijacked by a group of 100+ Anarchists - focused only on violence.

Mass politics

It could be said that an essential attribute of a successful regime in the age of mass politics is vulgarity.

But there is a considerable difference between the mere vulgarity of style and propaganda of the liberal regimes and the profound vulgarity of values of authoritarian and, even worse, fascist, racist, or Nazi regimes.

And right now many leading Western nations are sliding from the former toward the latter.

Are regimes, parties, or movements of the further left also committed to vulgar values?

Or is that another difference between them and regimes of the vicious right, from the merely authoritarian even to the totalitarian?

Questions that arise while watching on Amazon video Detective De Luca.

Anti-antifa madness

Did the feds class them as a terrorist group?

A congeries of terrorist groups (do the feds track congeries?)

Yastreblyansky reports that it's just another propaganda lie.

The Breitbart type right is trumpeting their altogether fictitious success in both painting the antifas as left-wing equivalents of the neo-Nazi right and associating them with Democrats as the nazis and their kind have associated themselves with the Republicans (in no small measure by invitation).

For some reason, some of them think Nancy Pelosi's recent denunciation of some antifa violence in California amounted to a surrender to their propaganda that Dems have been slow to condemn the antifas, their response to Dem and media charges Trump and the Republicans are soft on nazi and other right wing violence.

In the face of that, Yastreblyansky first denies that the alt.left - recall that use of the term was part of The Duce's initial moral equivalence peddling in relation to Charlottesville - "is really a thing" and goes on to question the thinghood of antifa.

But it is.

The hypocrisy of antifa

Jonathan Turley.

The Guardian's pages on the Inheritance Tax

Why not fund the welfare state with a 100% inheritance tax?

Inheritance tax is toxic. We need new ways to tackle inequality

Inequality is absolutely unavoidable in any organized society, and inequality of power over the means of production is just as inevitable whether under capitalism or the most thorough socialism.

But in contrast to socialism and the dreams of some egalitarians, capitalism privatizes and thus very effectively disperses power over the means of production, and that is its virtue.

A virtue the abolition of inheritance would go way too far to undermine.

I don't think The Guardian - or maybe it's just their readers - quite gets that.

Too many people still dream of egalitarianism and Utopia, socialist or anarchist, and a lot of them seem to either work at or read The Guardian.

Crazy for all these years

While MSM Focuses on Insignificant Alt-Right, They Should Be All Over the Black Bloc

Sorry, who?

This is who.

Not my demonstrators

Anti-Trump protesters march for 3rd night; Portland police call it a 'riot'

Close enough.

Liberals wring their hands

E J Dionne says center left and right parties need to learn a lesson and do something for those left behind in the era of globalization.

Fair enough, and even true.

Even true and important.

But like what?

Not a hint.

What could or should the democratic parties of Germany and Italy have done to diminish the appeal of Hitler and Mussolini?

There is some truth to the idea that people in Europe were frightened into fascism by communism, though in Spain it was both revolutionary Marxism and anarchism.

That's not the whole story, but it's certainly part of it.

So what's frightening Europeans, today?

Islam.

Utopia

Some people think Utopia is any society without coercion.

But not all violence is coercive.

Secret killing - for revenge, say - is not and is not intended to be coercive.

Others think Utopia is any society without violence.

But date rape drugs make it possible to rape someone without violence and, for that matter, without coercion.

Is date rape OK in Utopia?

How the left takes sides on immigration

French police convinced direct action taken by migrants trying to storm Channel Tunnel is coordinated by British anarchists or far-Left activists

British far-left activists are “manipulating migrants” to stage mass intrusions into the Channel Tunnel and provoke violent clashes with security forces they depict as “savages”, French police have claimed.

The accusations came two days after a French officer was treated for face wounds after being struck by a rock apparently thrown by a Sudanese migrant in the first such incident inside the Eurotunnel site to date.

Migrants made around 1,700 attempts on Sunday night to penetrate the Eurotunnel premises in a bid to get to England.

The previous night, an “organised” group of around 200 migrants tried to “walk” to the UK via the Channel Tunnel, tearing down outer fences and charging past police with tear gas, chanting: “Open the borders!”

When they were rebuffed, they staged a sit-in that lasted into the early hours of before finally being dispersed.

So little time, so much nonsense

Muslim Student Murders A Wakeup Call For Atheists: We’re Capable Of Violence, Too

Starting with the finger-waving title.

Amanda Marcotte, notorious feminist virago, gets straight to it with an attack on Bill Maher, Sam Harris, and their poisonous Islamophobia.

It didn't take long for the left to turn from implausible attacks on the Chapel Hill shooter as a hate criminal to attacks on one of their standard targets, atheists prepared to face and state the fact that Islam is in our time a particularly nasty source of religious violence.

Attacks which, she says, are quite justified whether or not Hicks acted out of hate or was simply the rage-filled nut he seems to have been.

As an aside, I note this remark.

Unlike all the major world religions, atheists have no history of violence being done in the name of atheism—at best, you can try to round up some communist violence, but that’s hardly the same thing.

Pshaw, what an ignorant girl.

A good deal of communist, anarchist, and other left wing violence against churches, clergy, and the religious took place all over the world during the 20th Century, motivated by exactly the sort of anti-theist views she says characterize the contemporary atheist movement.

Atheism is a relatively new movement; people who don’t believe have always been with us, but it’s only been in recent years that atheism has really developed as an identity and a community, with a growing online presence, bestselling books and popular documentaries, and regular and growing conferences and conventions for non-believers to congregate in. 

. . . . 

We are not content simply to not believe, but are outspoken and aggressive in pointing out the logical fallacies of belief while also criticizing the negative influence faith has on society.

Leave aside her characterizing the ridicule and abuse, whether moderate or extreme, that make up the bulk of popular atheist polemics as "pointing out fallacies of belief" and "criticizing the negative influence" of faith.

Historically, a good many atheists have viewed religion as at least in net or often or sometimes a force for peace and social cohesion among humans otherwise little inclined to either.

But the contemporary atheist movement to which AM belongs is in some degree tainted by a different atheist tradition that has viewed religion as in net and sometimes entirely pernicious.

And revolutions of the left and revolutionary movements from the 18th Century through the 20th, at least, have often engaged in very serious and extensive anti-religious violence intended to combat this evil, or even rid the world of it.

Not that I mean to say she or today's atheist movement in general would favor any such thing.

Just a point in passing.

Hacktivist declares war on Jihaders

Story at The Telegraph

At Le Monde

Anarchist meddlers vs Jihaders?

I suppose it makes some sort of sense.

Surprising balls for a pack of nerds.

And this is only North Korea. What about Russia? What about China?

Think of this when when libertarians and knot-head Republicans cheer that hackers ought to be better at cyber-war than the US government, or when anarchists cheer they ought to be better at it than any private organizations as well as the US government.

North Korea has 6,000-strong cyber-army, says South

Nor am I pleased to read that this lunatic state could actually nuke us.

Anti-Feminism

Proudhon was an anti-feminist ?

Reading Fathers and Sons.

Turgenev off-handedly presents a physically unattractive, radical, liberated woman as a reader of Fenimore Cooper and an admirer of Emerson, who says that about the French anarchist.

Reportedly, Nietzsche was also a great fan of the American clerical essayist.

Makes sense.

How he flattered intellectuals !

Secular prophets, they conceive themselves.

Or secular mullahs, more like.

What a vast will to power in these people !

That is how they differ, these intelligentsia, as Marx practically admitted, from real philosophers.

One third of the way through it, the story is about fathers and sons; there are no fathers and daughters in it, though there are several women and one recognizes women have fathers.

The narrator tells us what the men think and feel, speaking almost only of what one could observe - what a man could observe - of the women.

Mostly he does not presume to venture inside their heads, or hearts.

For the censors ?

Bazarov to Arkady about Odintsova.

"Whoever she may be, simply a provincial lioness or an 'emancipated woman' like Kukshina, she still has the nicest pair of shoulders I've seen in a long time."

The next day after a visit he exclaims, "What a body ! Perfect for the dissecting table."

And then, in case you mistook him, "I tell you, she has a delectable body !"

A few days later, Bazarov says this to her, accounting for the difference between the stupid and the clever.

"We know more or less what causes physical ailments; moral illnesses result from bad upbringing, all the nonsense that gets stuffed into people's heads from childhood, in a word, the deformed condition of society. If you correct society you won't have any more illnesses."

Such stupidities have never deserted the left.

When the government of men has been replaced by the enlightened administration of things there will be no coercion and no need for prisons.

They say.

ISIS members are not nihilists; the 9/11 terrorists were not cowards.

After communism, ultra-violence

Despite what the media and the American president have said and no doubt will repeatedly say, it just isn’t so.

[And neither Islam nor narco-terrorism is an "alternative to capitalism," of course.]

Still, though the analogy is far from perfect, Islam has replaced left wing revolution as the cause of some of our more profoundly alienated youth.

Unlike anarchism and Marxism, Islam is not a rationalization or expression of hatred of capitalism, and it is just silly to say that.

But it has become, especially through the halfway house of Black Muslim ideology, a rationalization and expression of the hatred felt so fiercely by so many black American youth for white America.

And for some recent Muslim immigrants to America and Europe, as well as a relative handful of white kids from Christian or non-religious families, it has become a rationalization and expression of hatred for the Occident.

But that does not in all cases mean the participants are moved by religious fervor or even, necessarily, by any degree of specifically religious sentiment.

Not every Russian patriotically engaged in The Second World War or the subsequent Cold War was moved by Communist fervor.

And not every Muslim moved to oppose what he perceives to be a war against Muslims by Christians is moved by actual religious fervor, any more than Catholics of the IRA or Protestants of the UDL were.

Tribal loyalty is different from religious motivation, though religion may partially define the tribe.

But all the same, the magnetic attraction of ISIS for some alienated youth of the Occident reminds one of the foreign volunteers of the International Brigades fighting Franco during the Spanish Civil War under the false flag of republicanism but in truth for the sake of secular utopian hallucinations.

[For those who might have missed it, the Spanish Republic of 1931 was dead when the Nationalist forces stepped ashore from Morocco in 1936, and had been born as an unstable regime supported almost exclusively by its enemies.]

Another point of imperfect analogy, just as Christians have characterized Islam as a Christian heresy, they and others before and during the Cold War so characterized both Marxism and anarchism.

But the terms can be changed, and we can see also an imperfect analogy between on the one side the pair of reforming and revolutionary Marxism and on the other the pair of pacific or moderate and revolutionary Islam.

And that leads to another parallel between the Cold War and the current struggle with Islam.

During the Cold War, the consensus was that the enemy of the Occident was not socialism or even Marxism in general, but specifically revolutionary Marxism, aka Leninism, Communism, Maoism, and so on.

And both GW and O have done everything they can to establish a consensus that today’s enemy of the Occident is not Islam but Jihader, terrorist Islam.

And just as, during the Cold War, non-revolutionary Marxists and socialists sometimes found themselves torn between East and West, today non-revolutionary Muslims are torn, sometimes opposing their own allies and allying themselves with their enemies.

You are not the enemy because you think someday Islam will dominate the world or the proletarian revolution will finally end history and the exploitation of man by man, or even because you long for that day.

You are the enemy because you take up arms, sincerely or not, to make it happen.

PS.

Yes, by the way, I am saying that, retrospectively, it would have made more sense to fight for Franco than the zombie 2nd Republic (though best, of course, would have been to flee the country, if possible without too great loss), and that generally right wing dictatorships from the interwar years through the end of the Cold War were much preferable to left wing ones, basing this solely on the measure of harm done to their own countries.

But even if we count all harm done, in general, against them I think Mao and Stalin still beat out Hitler, don't they?

And Hitler, both overall and purely domestically, was very far from typical of dictators of the right, probably being among them the grand champion of slaughter.

Of course, if he had defeated Stalin, just the harm he is believed to have intended for "slavdom" might have set a record even the worst reds would never beat. 

PPS.

Yes, I know,  there is a current of propaganda on the right that insists Fascism and even Nazism are ideologies of the left.

But it depends on the ridiculous and baseless claim that only fiscal conservatives and libertarians count as right wing, leaving totally out of account numerous Christian monarchs and such loyal supporters as Otto von Bismarck. 

And the distinguishing trait of Hitlerism, its genocidal anti-Semitism and bloody minded anti-slavism, are not even on the left-right continuum.

Razzzzzberry.

Ignoratio Elenchi

The Latin name of the fallacy is sometimes loosely translated "irrelevant conclusion."

Libertarians before now have written denunciations of government and attacks on any supposed right to rule of great force, as have anarchists and even mere Objectivists.

But perhaps they draw the wrong conclusions, that minimalist government, or none at all, is best.

Perhaps a more pertinent conclusion would be that governments are all of them on all fours with pirate kingdoms, were that "moral equivalence" not too unfair to the pirates.

Or perhaps the lesson is that the criminals are right, in that respect, anyway.

Or at any rate that the rest of us are merely hoodwinked.

And to get to this we did not have to invoke either atheism or amoralism.

And many are those who do invoke atheism and amoralism, either or both, and still somehow they never get here.

Psst. You can't always take Wikipedia as gospel.

Stirner vs. Nietzsche

Compared to N, Max Stirner was far less talented a writer but he was also, in a nutshell, far less mad.

He was more consistently a frank amoralist and less - though not quite to no extent - a would-be prophet of a new morality for a new society and even a new humanity.

His egoism was not an ethical egoism.

Nor, for that matter, a rational or economic egoism.

Nor even, strictly, a psychological egoism.

It seems, in the end, he was only defending the sort of egoism to which humans are generally and spontaneously given - the sort I have before referred to as "empirical egoism."

If defending is truly what he was doing.

On the other hand, the anarchist ideal of a society without coercion is an absurd utopia.

Logically or metaphysically possible though it is alleged to be -  as the Christian philosophers say a world of humans who in complete and uncoerced freedom always choose to do right is logically or metaphysically possible - belief in it and pursuit of it are even more fantastic than the delusions S attacks.

And equally fantastic is a society without a rich elaboration of pious fraud in reciprocal support with machinery of coercion.

In truth, for normal humans no such world is possible, at all.

No more than a world in which chickens in summertime do Shakespeare in the Park is possible for normal chickens.

But maybe it would be possible for chickens from outer space.

Yes, that was a joke. 

Du Contrat Social

Rousseau says at the outset that man's first law is to look out for his own conservation, his first cares are those he owes himself, and as soon as he reaches the age of reason, being sole judge of the means of his conservation, he becomes his own master.

How like Hobbes he sounds.

But there are many differences.

For one, Hobbes everywhere repeats the evils of anarchy are worse than the worst despotism.

Rousseau stoutly maintains tyranny can indeed be worse than anarchy.

He reminds us the slave is governed and lives or dies for his owner's good.

But legitimate government is erected by a people for their good.

Not an easy distinction for either Rousseau or Hobbes to maintain given, as they both say, people accept imposed rule so as not to be killed.

And that is exactly Seneca's - and Rousseau's, and Hobbes's - understanding of how people become or remain slaves.  

For another,  Rousseau denies the state of nature is a state of war, pitting each and every against each and every man - basing this on the unfortunate and false claim that war is a relation only among states, because "among things of diverse natures there can be no true relation."