Bill Maher’s “new rule” deals once again with why Democrats have lost power. Maher considers that we need a “liberal Joe Rogan,” but notes that Rogan doesn’t seem to have hewed too close to the Trumpian dogma. He adds that Musk, too, used to be more liberal, and explains their conversion, in part, due to the movement of the Dems farther to the Left, and from “the mean girl shit you get from the cool kids in Wokeville.”
Maher identifies with this kind of reaction, and expresses hopes that both Musk and Rogan can be won back as Democrats, since they were once near the Left but got “driven away” by a Democratic agenda that became too extreme (he means “woke”). His solution: Republicanism will cure itself. “Drunk with power,” as Maher characterizes Republicans, they’ve taken a lot of actions, like the imposition of tariffs, cuts in Medicaid, and the deportations of “moms”, that aren’t even widely popular with members of the GOP.
Well, it’s early days, and we shall see. But I’m not convinced that Republicans are going to implode. Neither Maher nor I are pundits, but Democrats do need to start putting forth some credible candidates.
You always have to ask “compared to what”. Republicans do a mixture of popular and unpopular things. So do Democrats. Now personally, I feel like the Democrats have embraced an even worse and more toxic ideology than the Trumpists, although both are bad.
I agree.
Any political party needs to understand and recognize this :
Sociognostic transformation is Hermetic alchemy originating with esotericists like Jakob Böhme, growing through Kant, Rousseau, Hegel, then – next stop a big one : Marx. Relatively modern weirdos include Blavatsky, Mead, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardins – but for more, nowadays one could simply watch Oprah. That entire tree is a romantic Leftism, even developing in reactions that appear politically “Right”.
This makes Leftism an esoteric, transformative cult religion – its faith, dialectic – even if it wears a suit and tie and repudiates all the intrusions of conventional religions-in-a-box – such as those displaying outward symbols like a crucifix or others – into politics.
That it remains hidden for whatever reason could garner the descriptive “occult”.
Any party acting out the will of such a parasitic, alchemical thought transformation virus has to repent, cease, and desist.
Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition
Glenn Alexander Magee
Cornell University Press
2001
I tried to reply to you earlier today, Bryan, but I ended up in that maddening loop in which WordPress chokes on an edit, never posts it, vanishes the comment, and then tells me I am posting a duplicate when I start over. Let’s see if this works now.
Those whose accomplishments rest in the manipulation and rearrangement of words seem most prone to this malady of the Left. It is as though they see within political and other social structures evidence of [semi]-intelligent design. But, in their arrogance, they always believe that they can build better despite rarely having ever built anything at all. There is little appreciation for or understanding of the long, slow, messy process of cultural evolution and its biological precursors. Sweep it all away; our faith says the Kingdom is ours to establish.
“they always believe that they can build better”
That’s the gnosis
Or as Bill Maher in fact quipped in a bit from long time ago, when some one doesn’t know as such, but they “just know”.
Not every herd of stampeding midwits is a cult. I might be missing some crucial distinction between the L ones and the R ones, but ISTM the prevalence of vicious cultic reality-denying apocalyptic delusion is pretty evenly distributed. YMMV.
Cults are ancient. They are peripheral to the church, with their own doctrines.
A popular misconception is that unless there’s a Charles Manson figure, there is no cult.
E.g. The Moonies. Looks pretty proper and modern for the 80s, leaders with suits and ties – but it was a cult Inner Circle.
Leaving a cult requires deprogramming.
It’s a creepy topic! Hasty literature :
Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism — A Study of “Brainwashing” in China
Robert J. Lifton
W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., New York
1961, 1989 (UNC Press)
See Margaret Thaler Singer’s Cults in our Midst, or Amanda Montell’s Cultish – the language of fanaticism, Steven Hassan’s writings…
And?
Bill (again) flashed Colin Wright’s cartoon of the abandoned soft leftist-centrist and how the political ground had shifted in the past decade.
Elon’s retweeting that cartoon (circa 2021-ish?) really put Colin on the map and the rest is fortunate history as the clicks and fame enabled RealitysLastStand to begin properly.
Worthy of note also – Elon’s “conversion” was a mix of his allegations the Biden DoJ were persecuting his businesses (which may be true) and the sneaky underhanded transing of Elon’s son.
D.A.
NYC
It’s very true that the Democrats more-or-less deliberately alienated and radicalised Musk.
At core, Musk is a classical liberal and moderate centrist, someone who voted for Obama, Obama, Clinton and then Biden. When his kid identified as trans, Musk went along with advice from doctors that the kid should medically transition (and Musk signed forms allowing that). But Musk came to think (likely correctly) that this transition was disastrous for the kid. He concluded that there was way too little open discussion of the merits and demerits of gender ideology.
A critical moment was when the Babylon Bee was banned from Twitter for the satirical headline calling Rachel Levine “man of the yeat” (in response to Time Magazine adopting him as “woman of the year). So he decided to buy Twitter to remove censorship.
The left then just attacked him, demonising him and trying to destroy Twitter by organising an advertising boycott, demanding the re-imposition of woke censorship (people, such as Graham Linehan and the feminist Megan Murphy had been permanently banned merely for using the “wrong” pronouns).
Biden did not invite Musk/Tesla to a White House summit on electric vehicles (!), the government launched probes into SpaceX accusing them of not hiring enough migrants (despite the fact that few migrants crossing the border have PhDs in aerospace engineering, despite the fact that SpaceX’s DoD contracts required that they oly hire US citizens), and when SpaceX applied for increased launches in California, they where turned down by Democrats who openly stated that it was because they didn’t like Musk’s way of running Twitter.
Also, Musk saw the effect of Democratic policies on downtown San Francisco (where Twitter’s headquarters were), the fact that the Democrats were spending $100,00 per year per homeless person on “solving” the problem of homelessness, and yet the numbers of homeless were just increasing, the fact that stores were shutting down in many districts because the authorities had decided to decriminalise the crime of shoplifting.
Musk decided that the “woke mind virus” (as he called it) must be slain, and decided that Trump was the one to do that, so he went all-in on getting Trump elected.
[He’s now fallen out with Trump/MAGA on the basis that, while he’s serious about solving the deficit, whereby the government spends $7 trillion a year but only raises $5 trillion in taxes, MAGA doesn’t care.]
The Democrats pretty much deliberately alienated Musk. If they had the slightest sense, they’d now try to build bridges with him.
I’m not exactly sure what it means to be “close to the left,” but I’m pretty sure that Joe Rogan giving medical advice (don’t get the shot, take ivermectin) and providing an outlet for esoteric health “professionals” doesn’t seem to follow from reacting to wokeness. Seems to fit better with a rejection of government, authority, and the dirty words “expert” or “scientist.” Similarly, I’m not clear how rejection of wokeness leads Elon Musk to take a wide-ranging sledge hammer to federal institutions, including the NIH. Sure there are projects that defy reason, including some related to perverse elements of DEI or treatment of gender dysphoria in kids, but does that warrant politicians and their agents deciding what gets funded? To explain what I mean by non-perverse, it seems worthwhile to know why minorities are less interested in or fail at scientific disciplines, or whether kids with gender dysphoria grow out of it. The trick is to excise the ideological work, but that requires professional judgment.
Republicans with the help of the Rogans, Musks, and like characters have created an authoritarian, top-down political environment more like what they imagined than existed under previous governments, Republican or Democrat.
To speculate as an outsider (Canadian here), seems possible that the ills and excesses of the Democrats (Liberals in Canada) come from responding to misguided “movements” in the population, including from some (too many) in academia, whereas the ills and excesses of the Republicans (Conservatives in Canada) may be more deliberately orchestrated by players in the back rooms, including some fitting labels like nationalist and religionist (Christian?).
In this program Maher is good to lump together Social Security, Medicare, interest payments on the national debt, and defense expenditures, throwing in for good measure quoting the sage Musk saying that Social Security is the biggest Ponzi scheme ever.
Vis-a-vis Social Security and Medicare, what additional taxes separate from federal income tax are paid by taxpayers (and borrowed from and effectively used as an additional income tax to issue government securities backed by “the good faith and credit” of the U.S. government, so as not to raise income taxes) to service the interest on the national debt and pay for (some fraction of) defense and other government expenditures? Are (government borrowing from) Social Security and Medicare to be somehow partially “blamed” for the increase in the national debt? How much money borrowed from SS and Medicare was loaned or granted to Elon Musk?
Why do we (the democrats) need support from Musk and Rogan? I consider them to be very flawed people. But if they ever did move in our general direction, that would at least signify that the Democratic Party has come to its senses.
I don’t get why is Maher so soft on Musk. He is a despicable human beign. We should not want a guy like that on “our side”.
I mean Musk is despicable, not Maher.
Get rid of all sociology 101 jargon. Talk person on the street. People who succeed, quit telling them they are privileged. You had all 3 kids with the same person and they are all college graduates because of your child-centric choices do not dismiss them with ‘it’s just privilege” The new twitter meme/catch-phrase on twitter is fatigue. Of the left. Do not fatigue the mainstream where elections are won with more of this nonsense.
I hope Musk follows through with supporting/financing a middle party where 60% of the voters lie.
There should be no rehabilitation of Musk – the body count from destroying USAID alone should land him in prison for the rest of his life. Then there’s his part in destroying the US state apparatus as a whole…