‘The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary’
HL Mencken
So in Orwellian fashion, apparently most media-owning, left-wing billionaires are good? But one social media-owning, non-left-wing billionaire is bad?
Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness, 28/04/22
We are watching a rare laboratory experiment in which the traditional American fringe is now in control of the government. In pursuit of its utopian omelet, the Left cares little about the millions of middle-class Americans it must break to make it. The result is an unmitigated disaster
Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness, 03/04/22
Should the Democrats wish, or be forced, to keelhaul Biden, however, such a decision will come with a hefty price tag. They’ll have to explain to their black voters why Harris was discarded without ever being able to articulate the reason that dare not speak its name: she’s simply too stupid to function
Michael Walsh, The Pipeline, 04/04/22
No one has ever bribed the unemployable crack addict Hunter Biden. Any money that wound up with him was a transaction cost
John Hinderaker, Powerline blog, 08/04/22
Nothing personal, but the Mouse must die
Kurt Schlichter (re Disney), Townhall.com, 07/04/22
Biden has made a lifelong career of saying anything. He will say anything.
Scott Johnson, Powerline blog, 28/03/22
There are life experiences that, if you miss them, separate you from those who did have them in a thousand ways. One of the most obvious is having children. And definitely another one is going to war
Ammo Grrrll, Powerline blog, 11/03/22
At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child — miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats
PJ O’Rourke
It was vintage Hillary Clinton, lacking in nuance, subtext or humility.
Maureen Callahan, New York Post, 17/02/22
Hyper-liberalism is the ideology of an aspirant ruling class that aims to hoard wealth and position while flaunting its immaculate progressive credentials. Intractable culture wars and an epistemic crisis in which key factual and scientific questions have been politicised are a part of a bid for power by these counter-elites
John Gray, New Statesman, 28/07/21
“In solitude you’re happy—you’re a poet.”
Pushkin
Support for “green” energy is a mile wide and an inch deep. Most people express favorable opinions of “green” energy, which is not surprising since the propaganda begins in kindergarten. But support for wind and solar evaporates quickly when energy prices triple or quadruple, and most of all, when blackouts begin.
Electing Joe Biden was an essentially unserious act by essentially unserious people applying essentially unserious criteria.
Kurt Schlichter, 30/08/21, Townhall.com
America risks being seen as harmless as an enemy, and treacherous as a friend
Bernard Lewis a while ago – prophetic indeed
The Democrats in 2021 have a reputation for being a bunch of out-of-touch scolds who believe that reality conforms to language and who tend to leverage the same tone and vocabulary when discussing agrarian warlords as they would during a Harvard symposium on intersectionality
Charles CW Cooke, NRO, 17/08/21
Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket
Eric Hoffer
As ever, leadership falls to whomever actually leads….In short, wherever real leadership arises, the people reward it by following it
Angelo Codevilla, American Greatness, 12/08/21
Wokeness is many things. But increasingly it seems a cover for careerism, profiteering and utter incompetence
Victor Davis Hanson, Townhall.com, 29/07/21
Virtually everything is disputed. Liberals used to grasp that the way to win an argument is to have the facts on your side, not appeal to an authority figure to gag your opponent.
Kyle Smith, NRO, 16/07/21
…this is an unrivalled chance to turn Britain permanently into a country where people who think they are good and clever can boss the rest of us around.
Peter Hitchens on Covid, Mail on Sunday, 11/07/21
No political victory is permanent and the only teleological principle of history (in the long term) is that of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Until that Law’s denouement, we shall have to live with historical surprises.
Theodore Dalrymple, Law & Liberty, 12/05/21
…the Aspen Ideas Festival, the annual woke, oxygen-deprived hajj for the left-media elites.
Andrew Sullivan, The Weekly Dish, 04/06/21
“the map is not the terrain”
Clausewitz
Romans before the fall were as certain as we are today that their world would continue forever substantially unchanged. They were wrong. We would be wise not to repeat their complacency
Bryan Ward-Perkins, archaeologist, 2005
Labour doesn’t really try to reach out to the voters. It attempts to choreograph them
Dan Hodges, Mail on Sunday, 16/05/21
With material progress often comes moral regress
Hesiod
There is also an element of the scientific and public-health world that is a little bit drunk on the power
Prof Robert Dingwall, Spiked!, 07/05/21
It is too bad when a severely ailing 85-year-old doesn’t live to be 86. But the fact that we have devastated the lives of our young people over the Wuhan epidemic is a crime
John Hinderaker, Powerline, 22/04/21
You guys control every form of media known to man except carrier pigeons and I’m sure George Soros is quietly buying up all the pigeons and slating them for termination
Ammo Grrrll on the Democrats, Powerline, 23/04/21
When economists failed to predict the global financial crisis, they did not so out of malice or political bias. But their Brexit forecasts were not an innocent mistake – nor will they be remembered as such.
Wolfgang Munchau, Evro Intelligence, 16/04/21
Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.
Aristotle
Once thought of as an untameable jungle of free speech, the internet is now a walled garden, increasingly monitored and controlled by a handful of unregulated monopolies
Andy Yen, blogger
Political correctness has always had a silly as well as a minatory side. The silly side is evident in its juvenile narcissism. It is so obviously a product of a rich and leisured society that it is hard to take its antics seriously
Roger Kimball, American Greatness, 03/04/21
There have been legendary epochs in human history before now where everything changed for the better. The Age of Pericles. The Pax Romana. The Renaissance. The Obama years. And now joining these fabled eras, is the era of No Mean Tweets
Kurt Schlichter, Townhall.com, 25/02/21
Everything about Joe Biden is false, from his teeth to the random musings that float past them
Dominic Green, Spectator USA, 11/02/21
Twenty four hour news coverage would have been a living hell
Bob Dylan, Chronicles vol 1
“I have made a pact with my tongue, not to speak when my heart is disturbed. Half an hour a day of meditation is essential, except when busy. Then a full hour is needed.”
Saint Francis de Sales
The powers that be have decided that the best thing for America—and, by extension, the world—is an ersatz democracy. We are all to pretend, however, that we are still enjoying the real thing. It remains to be seen how far America will be willing to support this fantasy—to what extent will we all be willing to make believe.
Dan Gelernter, American Greatness, 19/01/21
Liberals have got to learn that their neuroses are not proof of their opponents’ perfidy.
Ann Coulter, Townhall.com, 20/01/21
Trump certainly made his share of mistakes, especially during the post-election period, but the most provocative thing he did was refuse to surrender
Michael Goodwin, New York Post, 16/01/21
“The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children”
G.K. Chesterton
It is better to remain silent and to be than to talk and not be
St Ignatius of Antioch
The choice was like, what would you rather have live in your house with you, a loud barking dog that poops on all of the furniture, or a giant, poisonous, fanged spider that never sleeps?
Ace of Spades on the 2016 election, 15/01/21
Trump is hated because he will not play the role the left has assigned to him in its historic morality play, in which the left is always the triumphant star.
Pat Buchanan, Townhall.com, 15/01/21
‘scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the unpardonable sin’
Thomas Henry Huxley
‘All I know is that I know nothing’
Socrates.
It often appears that moral crusaders have become so familiar with acts of denial that they can no longer tell what a difference in opinion looks like.
Frank Furedi, Spiked!, 08/01/21
…the dominant strain of American liberalism is not economic socialism but political authoritarianism. Liberals now want to use the force of corporate power to silence those with different ideologies.
Glenn Greenwald, Substack, 12/01/21
No authoritarians believe they are authoritarians
Glenn Greenwald, Substack, 12/01/21
“evil never rests.”
Ace of Spades’ late mother
“When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When governments fear the people, there is liberty.”
attr. Thomas Jefferson.
What the mob hates above all is the individual, insisting on his own mind, his own morals, and his own priorities. The mob hates him less for the content of his views than for the fact that he holds them without the mob’s permission and declines to abandon them at the mob’s command. Democracy has always been the enemy of minority rights. It always will be. And the biggest democracies will always be a dangerous place for the smallest minority
Kevin D Williamson, The Smallest Minority, 2019
Kamala Harris—the president-in-waiting—is what Joe promises: the living instantiation of all that is woke, grasping, and cynical.
Roger Kimball, American Greatness, 19/12/20
It’s clear Joe Biden is not the type whose intelligence, competence, or mastery of even a single topic has ever been a point of envy
Donald L Finley, American Thinker, 17/12/20
They were fuelled less by love for the EU – no one loves the EU – than by hatred for the apparently ignorant British masses
Brendan O’Neill on the hardcore Remainers, Spiked! 08/12/20
Six months of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will generate vertiginous nostalgia for Donald Trump. Then will come the third and final round of the Great Trump War.
Conrad Black, American Greatness, 30/11/20
For some, a little voter fraud is just the cost of doing business. The best is the enemy of the good, don’t you know
Roger Kimball, American Greatness, 28/11/20
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities
Aristotle’s terse view of political spin
Necessity hath no law. Feigned necessities, imagined necessities… are the greatest cozenage that men can put upon the Providence of God, and make pretenses to break known rules by.
Oliver Cromwell, predicting climate change, Covid etc
From a sociological standpoint, it is quite interesting that in some elitist circles being pro-Trump has caused me more grief than carrying the name bin Ladin.
Noor bin Ladin, Spectator, 08/10/20
..the two places where you don’t try to save money are helicopter pilots and accountants
Donald Trump
The whole population cannot be turned into hermits at the Government’s command.
Lord Sumption, Mail on Sunday, 27/09/20
‘Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.’
Milton Friedman
Normally a fluent and facile if easily forgettable speaker, Obama was an obnoxious, pompous, scold and myth-maker.
Conrad M Black says the unsayable, American Greatness, 24/08/20
The most common symptom of Covid-19 is that you feel just fine
Peter Hitchens, Mail on Sunday, 02/08/20
Community organizers are people who start clubs to give themselves something to be in charge of
Kevin D Williamson, NRO, 20/07/20
‘They issue stern ultimata to the public on almost a monthly basis, and sometimes no other basis.’
George Stigler, economist, on those folk who style themselves as intellectuals
“Everything is what it is, and not another thing.”
Joseph, Bishop Butler, Sermons, 1726
These are dark times. More important, these are stupid times
The Editors, National Review Online, 09/07/20
Among them there are plenty of people disguised as judges seeking revenge. They always have the word “Justice” in their mouths, like poisonous saliva, with their mouths always pursed, constantly ready to spit at anything which does not look discontented and goes on its way in good spirits.
Friedrich Nietzsche
“Scotland’s tinpot despot, Nicola Sturgeon…”
Peter Hitchens, Mail on Sunday, 05/07/20
Rather than aiming for a better future, woke militants seek a cathartic present. Cleansing themselves and others of sin is their goal. Amidst vast inequalities of power and wealth, the woke generation bask in the eternal sunshine of their spotless virtue.
John Gray, UnHerd, 17/06/20
To circumvent or undermine a valid election denies the legitimacy and sovereignty of popular rule. What appears to have been done to Mr. Flynn and the incoming Trump administration at the hands of the intelligence agencies of the Obama administration may seem merely another partisan squabble but is ultimately a rejection of republican government.
Matthew Spalding, Real Clear Policy, 26/06/20
“liberals don’t care what you do, so long as it’s mandatory.”
M Stanton Evans
…Germany is the most dark, tricky one, they [Germany] also have a great strategic discipline, they’re so identified with an authoritarian state, in their blood they have this, they love China so much, you can see all those [German] politicians, they go to China more than they go to see their grandma. Germany is leading the whole Europe, they’re so ambitious, they want to be leader but morally they are so collapsed
Ai Weiwei not pulling his punches, La Repubblica, 01/06/20
It feels liberating to say after years of tiptoeing around the fact, but the American left has lost its mind. It’s become a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres who move from discipline to discipline torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness.
Matt Tabibi (a smart leftie), Rolling Stone, 12/06/20
“A great many things keep happening, some good, some bad.”
― Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum, c590AD
Despite what the lockdown fanatics might think, man cannot live by Morrison’s microwave meals and dog-walking alone. We need connection, engagement, touch, art, religion. It is testament to the nanny state’s successful reduction of human beings to units of health that so many in officialdom think it is acceptable to deprive us of social, spiritual and sexual interaction for so long.
Brendan O’Neill, Spiked!, 25/05/20
“When this is all over, look for massive confirmation bias and pyrrhic celebration by elites. There will be vain cheering in the halls of power as Main Street sits in pieces. Expect no apology, that would be political suicide. Rather, expect to be given a Jedi mind trick of ‘I’m the government and I helped.’”
The much derided Aaron Ginn had a point in March 2020
…it’s good to remember that for every insufferable snob in England, there’s an equally insufferable inverted snob in Scotland
Madeleine Kearns, Standpoint, 22/05/20
“The only means to fight the plague is honesty”
Albert Camus, La Peste, 1947
A pandemic is a deadly serious business. But we would do well to remember that bureaucracies have their own interests, quite apart from the public interest that is their official brief and warrant
Matthew Crawford, Unherd, 15/05/20
We can make shift to live under a debauchee or even under a tyrant, but to be ruled by a busybody is more than human nature can bear
Thomas Macaulay
We have learned to recognize, to esteem, and often to admire our doctors, caregivers, and researchers. This is a boon during this sinister springtime. We have also discovered the politics of science, which is no more innocent than regular politics. Expertise provides no immunity against the desire for power
Pierre Manent, French political scientist, Le Figaro, 23/04/20
…there is a small group of people taking the responsibility, making the tough decisions, trying to listen to a variety of “experts” (who invariably are all over the map and working from wrong or incomplete data), and there are the nitpicking and contradictory snipers, blamers, and attention junkies
Ammo Grrrll, over at PowerLine, describing the Coronavirus crisis in the states, 10/04/20. Sound familiar?
Elizabeth Warren reminds me of somebody’s grandma who ruined the Thanksgiving turkey and ran out of meds in the same disastrous afternoon.
EM Cadwaladr, American Thinker, 26/02/20
The EU spends its ossified budget wastefully, even egregiously. Over 40 per cent of expenditures are for agricultural subsidies.
Ashoka Mody, Spectattor Coffee House, 18/02/20
Remainerism is not a political ideology so much as a cultural identity. It is a mechanism for moral distinction. It is a means of distancing oneself from the problematic little people and from populism — which, as the Oxford English Dictionary reminds us, merely means ‘policies or principles… which seek to represent the interests of ordinary people’
Brendan O’Neill, Spectator Coffee House, 27/01/20
‘Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea’.
Samuel Johnson
“When stupidity seems a sufficient explanation, there is no need for recourse to any more elaborate analysis.”
Michael Martin Uhlmann, Requiescat in pace.
The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs
George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1872
In its historic heartlands the end of Labour can’t come soon enough. It is a stillborn populist movement that has mummified hideously into a metropolitan protest group. Its story is tragic. Within 30 years of its launch,ch, bohemian Bolshebvism had smother the hopeful pragmatism of its rank-and-file. But if socialism crushed Labour’s spirit, Blairism sucked out its soul
Sherelle Jacobs, Daily Telegraph, 14/11/19
…the hardcore hypocrisy of racist, misogynist Corbynites who believe that they can never do wrong because they have ticked the box marked Brotherhood Of Man
Julie Burchill, Spectator, 18/11/19
”Wherever an altar is found, there civilisation exists.”
Joseph de Maistre
I won’t claim to understand the intricacies of British politics, but here is how Brexit looks from America: it looks like a great mass of people trying to throw off the rule and influence of a foreign, imperious power in the EU. And here is how Remain looks: like loyalists trying to maintain this rule and keep the coin and cachet they derive from things staying roughly the way that they are right now.
Jeremy Lott, Spectator, 12/11/19
…what appears legal is not necessarily legitimate …. being in office but not in power produces the worst kind of tyranny
Nizam al-Mulk, 11th century Persian statesman
The Houthis, the Assad clan, Hezbollah, PMF and kindred groups are puppets in a surrealistic show scripted by faceless puppet-masters in Tehran
Amir Taheri, Gatestone Institute, 03/11/19
Consider the enormity of this. The Prime Minister is facing prison if he dares to attempt implementing something which was promised in the General Election manifestos of both main parties, endorsed by Parliament, and — more importantly — voted for in a referendum by the largest single number of people in our history.
Richard Littlejohn, Daily Mail, 09/09/19
There are many Remainers who would feel perfectly at home in Bratislava or Vilnius – yet have little knowledge of, say, Scunthorpe. Their world revolves around the centres of capitals and other large cities. It does not include industrial towns, remote rural places of even the suburbia of major cities. They are not ‘Anywhere’; they are ‘Anywhere with a Prada’.
Ross Clark, Spectator Coffee House, 09/09/19
Democracy only worked, first in the US and later in the UK and other countries, because the power of government to make laws – for good or for bad – was limited by the rule of law. The rule of law isn’t primarily about regulating the behaviour of ordinary citizens. It’s about regulating the behaviour of the government…
…The law must not be used to thwart the popular will.
Salvatore Babones, Spiked!, 30/08/19
Sir Richard Evans, formerly Regius professor of History at Cambridge, has done his best in the past few days to prove the saying that there is no one so stupid as an intellectual.
Andrew Roberts, Mail on Sunday, 01/09/19
The question of what exactly we are meant to do now – other than get rich and have fun – was going to have to be answered by something. The answer that has presented itself in recent years has been to live in a permanent state of outrage
Douglas Murray, Mail on Sunday, 01/09/19
The General Election of 1929, 110 years after the march to St Peter’s Field, was the first election in which all adults had the right to vote….
…That the 200th anniversary of Peterloo coincides with the largest assault on British democracy in living memory – the assault on Brexit – points to the unfinished business of the struggle for democracy.
Brendan O’Neill, Spiked!, 16/08/19
It should be clear to the meanest intelligence that if there were any economic case for EU membership, the EU (an overtly political project) would not be the world’s economic basket-case, which it is.
Nigel Lawson, The Spectator, 03/08/19
“..if I have seen further than others it is because I am surrounded by dwarfs”.
Murray Gell-Mann
I am simply of the opinion that we need to leave the EU, as the public asked, and can foresee no economic or social situation so dire that it is worse than the societal repercussions that would follow from overriding the public vote.
Douglas Murray, Spectator Coffee House, 31/07/19
“..when political science is severed from its ancient rootage in the humanities and ‘enriched’ by the wisdom of sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists, the result is frequently a pre-occupation with minutiae which obscures the grand and tragic outlines of contemporary history, and offers vapid solutions for profound problems.”
Reinhold Niebuhr, 1952
Private Eye, in recent times, had become ‘95 per cent groupthink and devoid of satire’
Christopher Booker (a founder) quoted in Spiked online, 05/07/19
Put yourselves on the ways of long ago and enquire about the ancient paths: which was the good way? Take it then, and you shall find rest.
Jeremiah 6:16 (from ~2,600 years ago)
The sort of person who names Love Actually as his favourite film before you’ve even finished asking the question.
Henry Deedes describes Jeremy Hunt, Daily Mail, 12/07/19
‘Mozart is a garden; Schubert is a forest – in sunlight and shadow; Beethoven is a mountain range’
Artur Schnabel
They were, pretty much to a man and a woman, on the make. And they loved, loved the EU.
David Starkey describes Blair and his coterie, Mail on Sunday, 17/03/19
For the common run of mankind, I suspect, the highest earthly pleasure is self-righteous moral infatuation
Roger Kimball, Imprimis, February 2019
Homer has more to teach us about governance than Harvard, and always will.
Michael Walsh, American Spectator, 19/06/18
Coltrane’s quartet is the Moby-Dick of American popular music
Dominic Green, The Weekly Standard, 26/08/18
“The honest man must be a perpetual renegade, the life of an honest man a perpetual infidelity. For the man who wishes to remain faithful must take himself perpetually unfaithful to all the continual, successive, indefatigable, renascent errors.”
Charles Peguy
In whichever way I might like to relate my life to the rest of the world, my path takes me across a great battlefield; unless I enter upon it, no permanent happiness can be mine
Carl von Clausewitz
“I lingered a little and left the world.”
St Francis of Assisi
I’ve begun to wonder whether social media was almost entirely a mistake. I can’t find any level of using it low enough that it doesn’t corrupt the experience of my own life.
Michael Brendan Dougherty, NRO, 20/07/18
“One thing is sure. If you stand still and think that the fire is still far from your borders, then your lands will become the stage upon which the tragedy is performed”
Frederick William, The Great Elector of Brandenburg-Prussia, Political Testament, 19/05/1667
You may drive out Nature with a pitchfork, yet she still will hurry back
Horace, Epistles, Book 1
“Well, we all make mistakes”
Maudlin pickled traitor Guy Burgess, on his Moscow death bed, 1963
Wordly men talk of ‘simple people’ as they do of ‘humble people’, with the same indulgent smile. But they should speak of them as kings
Georges Bernanos
“I am a socialist”
Adolf Hitler
The most poetical thing in the world is not being sick
GK Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday, 1908
Never be in a hurry; do everything quietly and in a calm spirit. Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever, even if your whole world seems upset.
St Francis de Sales
The Knife and me 