This was originally published on Conatus News, now Uncommon Ground.

I recently came across an older article critiquing the Trumpian Right’s “affirmative action” for conservatives. Much of that article was laudable, and I recommend reading it. But there ιs a fundamental blind spot in most of these left vs right discussions that goes unaddressed by the author. This concerns the fundamental problem driving the culture war today.

The author writes:

“I do not think the left’s and right’s respective positions on this are of equal moral and factual merit. …

There’s this old joke that Ph.D. actually stands for Partial Head Damage. If you’ve met enough people with doctorates this starts to seem fair. Dr. Kendi seems to be one of them. I dare you to go read his Twitter feed and try to convince yourself this is a functioning adult writing these things.

But a better use of your time would be to read something by Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Glen Loury, John McWhorter, Shelby Steele, or Jason Riley. If you don’t know who those dudes are you need to.

RBG was a worthy adversary of the constitution and I will miss her presence. Not because I agreed with her on anything but because she was a person, with a lot of personality and in many ways a great Lincolnian American. As the Lincolnian age comes to an end, as the involuntary union is slowly collapsing before our eyes, all those who represent the unfortunate empire of enforced equality forged by the involuntary union of states can be seen for what they were and are. RBG was a lover of abstract ideology, an idealist who believed that government could in fact save us. She believed civic religion was in some sense true religion. And while I find that abysmal, the human heart can’t help but admire the sort of Renegade RBG was. There’s a kind of romanticism to people like her, and the era she represents. A leftist worldview is fundamentally a struggle with the natural order, in some sense it is really a wrestling with the Divine. God made the world with certain things built in, differences between men and women, differences between persons, etc. The lefist and progressive mentality seeks fundamentally to overthrow God by defeating nature. Often this is only possible with the advancement of technology, RBG sought to do it with the Law. …

I’m stealing these from Gary Chapman (the five love languages guy) and blogging about them for my own sake. I’m going through something right now, a struggle I always new was coming, and it’s a lot harder than I thought it would be. Thankfully, due to God’s grace, I think I’ve been better prepared for it than I thought I was.

Myth One: my environment determines me

We believe that what surrounds us is totally determinative of who and what we are from moment to moment. I used to hate living in California so much that it gave me constant anxiety. Now that it’s an even worse place to live I don’t mind being here. This is part of the reason I joined the CalExit movement. Circumstances were such that moving really wasn’t an option and I realized that I didn’t know how long I would have to live in California. So I chose to love California. I chose to commit to California, despite the fact that this state’s politics quite literally think I am a Nazi, I chose to love that which hated me and now I’m at peace living here. This method won’t work for everything. You can’t choose to love being abused after all. But your environment is not controlling what and who you are. It does not determine you. Eugene Genovese showed in Roll, Jordan, Roll that while enslaved, black Americans built an entire world. They created culture, fought for rights, and extended their existence. They did that as slaves. …

Some poor soul posted this on Medium

“I wrote earlier about trying to express my reasons to my dad in a calm and intellectual manner. I actually thought I had been calm and well-reasoned. I thought I might even be making progress.

Today I found out he put a Trump sign in his yard.

I got pissed. Really pissed. And I sent him and my mom a text message. Hands shaking, tears in eyes. This is what it said:

Due to the signs in the yard, the kids and I will not be down. The current occupant of the White House is preaching hate and violence, endangering the lives and safety of many of my friends. This is not acceptable to me at all. There is a complete disregard for women, minorities, science, ethics, and morality. Please consider if you support Trump that much. Because I hate him that much. …

I love Cobra Kai. I love everything about it. And apparently like most of the world I only became a fan a few moments ago. Paying for YouTube seems ridiculous right?

Well maybe I should have been paying for YouTube because Cobra Kai has probably knocked Stranger Things out of my Top Five favorite tv shows. And its not because I’m replacing Nostalgia with nostalgia. Cobra Kai barely relies on Nostalgia, and to be fair ST isn’t nearly as dependent on that ineffable emotion as many think. The main thing that makes ST so wonderful is how it depicts friendship.

No, what makes Cobra Kai so good, so absolutely beautiful, is how seriously it takes its characters. And these characters are not deep. They are very simple, normal people. This isn’t complex. What each character needs and wants is clear from the get go. That in itself is very rare in contemporary TV writing. It’s what made Breaking Bad, and makes its spinoff Better Call Saul, the best TV show yet produced. …

This morning a good friend sent me an article from The Imaginative Conservative (easily one of the best “blogs”) that outlined Robert Nisbet’s ten conditions of revolution. The piece is excellent and very worth reading in its entirety.

I’m not going to comment on all of the conditions, or even discuss revolution really, but what stuck out to me was Nisbet’s famous distinction between power and authority.

“By authority, Nisbet meant not power (which is presumed and assumed), but a mutual and consensual understanding of respect both given and earned. An example would be a professor who earned the respect of his students and thus has established his authority by teaching well, knowing his subject, and treating the students with dignity. …

The coronavirus crisis is a purely anti ideological moment. It doesn’t belong to the Anarcho-Capitalists or the Bernie Bros because it’s a genuine crisis based in something real, something that came from outside the political maelstrom. Yes the chinese communist party can and should be blamed for some of this, as Chad Felix Greene argued, but plagues have been with us for a long time. They are not respecters of persons or national boundaries, and it’s clear that no country has handled this perfectly.

Almost every major crisis of the last hundred years has been directly linked to ideology, in other words they came from inside some political system. Sovietism, Nazism, Islamofascism, NeoConservativism, Keynesianism, Globalism, etc. If you look at any major happening from the 2008 meltdown to the oil crisis in 73 there’s almost always an ideology lurking behind it somewhere, pushing and nudging the world off a cliff. The great Conservative writer James Burnham defined ideology as a closed system of thought that already knew the answer before any questions had been asked. The last hundred years have consistently been dominated by that kind of thinking, by ideological thinking. …