When we hear someone say crazy things, we might say “Yeah, right” and shrug it off. But when a group of people say crazy things and a group of people agree with said crazy things, we wonder “What in the world is going on?”
Objective reality – the existence of things as they are – is obvious to everyone. And so are the values, accumulated over several millennia, of what is true and of what works and what hasn’t. But not everyone accepts the obvious and the values based on time proven objective reality. Some see themselves as Progressive in rejecting both.
Today’s academic, artistic, media, and political elites, a vanguard of Progressive Groupthink, reject the existence of things as they are and do so within the safe space of their ranks thereby creating an illusion of invulnerability and inherent morality. Members of this vanguard suppress dissenting opinions and avoid critically evaluated alternatives so as to maintain the group’s shared illusion of unanimity.
The vanguard’s conformity is maintained with mind guards – the media reports “right thinking” about a matter – and with self-censorship of deviations from shared beliefs and with shared views of the enemy – those who present a reality contrary to the groups’ notion of reality.
When we hear the vanguard’s irrational take on what is going on in the world, its roiling Doublethink, its name calling and shunning of voices outside its collective choir, and its dysfunctional decision-making which objective reality tells us will result in disastrous, dehumanizing, and even deadly outcomes, we ask “Where is this coming from and where is this going?
Those of us who keep an ear to the ground in order to hear what is approaching will answer “History is repeating itself.”
The objective reality of the murderous totalitarian regimes of the last century, which Progressives willfully ignore to promote their glorious future of equality via the same means, will help us understand the denial-of-reality collaboration of today’s intelligentsia – those who hold to one way of thinking – and their quest for total domination of the body, mind, and soul with Progressive Groupthink.
Specifically, Russian Soviet history will help us understand the conformity dynamic behind today’s intelligentsia. For this understanding I turn to one of the most informed scholars of the Russian history of ideas as communicated in its literature: Northwestern Professor Gary Saul Morson.
He describes Soviet thinking that rejected the realism and the real people depicted in nineteenth-century Russian fiction and required that reality be written to include “not only of the observable present but also the inevitable future in the making” and with Socialist Realist heroes – utopianism made flesh.
Writers of Russian realism – Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Solzhenitsyn, and others – wrote about what they saw and experienced. They are the “wonder” in the title. They represented the world as it was in their writings about the Gulag, mass starvation, torture, unspeakable violence, about how people thought about and dealt with what was going on, and about how many succumbed to the imposed Soviet mindset.
Russian realist authors confronted those of the “certainty,” those who wrote redefined reality in terms of the “observable present and the inevitable future in the making” and in terms of “positive heroes.”
The “positive hero” was to set an example for the reader’s behavior. A Soviet cosmonaut, for one example, became a “positive hero.” A cosmonaut’s space trip was seen as science, materialism, and atheism triumphing over the transcendent values held in the U.S., the enemy of the Soviet Union.
The “certainty” writers followed the lead of the embodiment of “certainty” – Vladimir Lenin. Lenin mocked his opponents’ self-characterization as ‘seekers’ of truth. He held that dialectical materialists do not seek truth; they already possess it. And so, the party-minded “positive hero” refused dialogue, refused to see any alternatives to the Marxist-Leninist-materialist-atheistic “truth” espoused by the party, the representatives of Karl Marx’s class-struggling proletariat.
From Wonder Confronts Certainty:
“The Soviets would label fidelity to present facts “bourgeois objectivism.” It was the best that could be expected from the age of realism, but must give way to socialist realism, which shows the ideal world inevitably coming. The socialist realist author was expected to focus on the people of the future, “positive heroes” exhibiting complete “Party-mindedness.” True positive heroes do not have bring their thinking into accord with the party, a process requiring effort; they exhibit Party-mindedness so thorough that no effort is required”
“Party-mindedness”, we learn from the writings of Russian realist authors, was propagated through the means of propaganda, show trials, random arrests, and the constant terror that there might be any hint, any innuendo, any false statement that would convict one of not being party-minded.
The “party-mindedness” of the 20th century Russian intelligentsia, its conformity to only one way of thinking, is replicated today.
“I happened to witness two professors waiting for an elevator. To make conversation, one voiced an opinion on some political question to see if the other agreed. When she did, they chattered away on a dozen other topics with perfect assurance that they agreed on those, too. Evidently, their beliefs came as a package. Subsequently I noticed this way of thinking many times, as I imagine many of my readers have.
The process works something like this: a person first chooses the group with whom he wishes to identify and then adopts its opinions. He believes as strongly in gun control, let us say, as he does in supporting Planned Parenthood, defunding the police, and banning fossil fuels. It is evident that no arguments or evidence can shake his opinions on any of these topics because arguments or evidence had nothing to do with why they were adopted.
To be sure, a person who thinks this way can cite facts and reasons to justify his opinion, but they have been acquired in the same way as the opinion itself. They are the same reasons others in the group have learned to give. I used to find it eerie to hear repeatedly the same arguments expressed in the same phrases, as if I were listening to a recording rather than to highly educated people who imagined that, unlike their intellectual inferiors, they had arrived at opinions rationally and would change them as evidence warranted. I thought of Jonathan Swift’s observation that no one was ever talked out of an opinion he was not first talked into.”
***
Reading Morson’s article, I was reminded of the easy-going liberal mindset of the Stiva Oblonsky character in Tolstoy’s Russian realism novel Anna Karenina.
Behind Stiva’s smile, his self-possessed mannerisms and hedonism is what Tolstoy described as “the liberalism of the blood.”
From the novel:
“Stepan Arkadyevitch took and read a liberal newspaper, not a radical one, but one advocating the viewpoint maintained by the majority. And even though neither science, nor art or politics held any particular interest for him, he firmly maintained the same views on all these subjects that were maintained by the majority and by his paper, and he changed them only when the majority changed them, or, better put, he did not change them at all; they imperceptibly changed within him . . .
“And so liberalism had become a habit of Stepan Arkadyevitch’s, and he liked his newspaper, as he did his cigar after dinner, for the slight fog it diffused in his brain.”
Stiva, we learn in in the novel, does not recognize his conscious when it speaks to him. And that is aided by his living-in-the-moment forgetting. He did not want to remember any unpleasant thing.
Self-deception and romantic ideology play key roles in Anna’s life.
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Czeslaw Milosz, Polish American poet, novelist, translator, critic, and diplomat, is best known for The Captive Mind (1953). His essay collection focuses on intellectuals, specifically poets and other writers.
As Charles Haywood writes in his 2019 article The Captive Mind (Czeslaw Milosz), [Milosz’s] “book shows how mental gymnastics, rather than coercion, caused writers under Communism to adhere to Communism. Thereby, indirectly, it congratulates writers who believe their minds free from such, or other, contortions.
“The West incorrectly sees “might and coercion” as the reasons those in Eastern Europe submit to Communism. But, rather, unwilling to face either physical or spiritual death, many choose instead to be “reborn” through taking these metaphorical pills, because “[t]here is an internal longing for harmony and happiness that lies deeper than ordinary fear or the desire to escape misery or physical destruction.” Intellectuals, and artists especially,do not want to be “internal exiles, irreconcilable, non-participating, eroded by hatred.” So they swallow the pills and adopt the “New Faith” (a term Milosz uses throughout the book) which offers the intellectual the certainty he is both correct and virtuous, and therefore gives him a sense of belonging, gives him a feeling of being “warm-hearted and good . . . a friend of mankind—not mankind as it is, but as it should be.”” (Emphasis mine.)
Returning to Morson’s article about package thinking, Morson relates
“What really matters, [Czeslaw} Milosz explains, is “the intellectual’s feeling of belonging.” His defining “characteristic is his fear of thinking for himself.” For this reason, as well as to prosper, he must root out all the old ways of thinking. Milosz describes a phenomenon with which university people are all too familiar, the always incomplete process of teaching oneself to say the right things (in the right words), and avoid saying the wrong ones, so that one never makes a slip entailing ostracism or worse. Of course, the best way to do this is to get oneself actually to share the prescribed views. Milosz describes how
after long acquaintance with his role, a man grows into it so closely that he can no longer differentiate his true self from the self he simulates, so that even the most intimate of individuals speak to each other in Party slogans. To identify self with the role one is obliged to play . . . permits a relaxation of one’s vigilance. Proper reflexes at the proper time become truly automatic.”
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One obvious feature of our culture’s downward trend toward mindless conformity is critical thinking’s easy alternative: clicking on a machine to receive packaged thoughts.
Why think when packaged thoughts are there for the clicking? And why expand one’s personal bandwidth when you can reaffirm your tribal identity with a click?
Why research and consider a range of ideas and thoughts when clicking on machine AI is ready to do away with mystery and your curiosity, wonder, and impatience? And why think outside package thinking when life is short – shortened by every minute clicking on a machine.
Why read classic literature to gain wisdom, insight, and understanding from other people in other places and in other times, when you can click on a remote for package thinking entertainment.
Have you bought into the globalist, academic, secular and progressive (GASP) package (a feature of Wikipedia) that censors alternative views as “extremist” or “fringe theories” or “conspiracy theories” or “racist?”
Did you buy into the globalist open borders “welcoming the stranger” package where millions of unvetted illegal invaders entered the country as simple or criminal or terrorism opportunists? Did you accept the package thinking that allows third world invaders into our country to replace American workers and American values and do all manner of harm to its citizens as empathy, as what Jesus would do? Take a look at the strangers welcomed: Arrested: Worst of the Worst | Homeland Security And, there’s this: They Called It ‘Compassion’ — But it was Child Trafficking – American Thinker
Are you buying into the central planning democratic socialism package where everyone, except certain individuals who hold more power and privilege, must be made equal no matter the human cost? Are you buying into the central planning democratic socialism package and willfully forgetting the objective reality of the horrors of socialism/communism? Are you willfully handing over your life, your thoughts, to “Party-mindedness”?
Did you accept the “don’t question the science” COVID package thinking of mandates, masking, social distancing, vaccine passports, isolation camps, vaccine efficacy, and of COVID’s origin lies? America’s COVID Response Was Based on Lies
Likewise, did you not question the package thinking of “climate experts” who announced their verdict that the world would end if we didn’t act now. Not long ago, woven into almost every weather report on local and mainstream media when major weather events (floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, droughts, and wildfires) occurred was the narrative that climate change was behind them – without ever mentioning large-scale natural phenomena such as solar cycles, ocean currents and volcanoes that have been affecting weather for many millennia.
Do you go along with the package thinking of the [John] Rawlsian theory of ad hoc justice that, for example, releases someone arrested 40 times, is not considered a “criminal” because of their minority status, and is released by a judge back onto the street where he sets a woman on fire?
Do you buy philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s notion that “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” – the package thinking that says that people are entirely products of their environment, of their society, of their age, and that’s why they do what they do. Therefore, they are not responsible for what they do because of external influence. That’s the package thinking behind the Rawlsian theory of justice and behind the executions and horrors of the French revolution working to change social environment.
Have you agreed with the insurrection thought package being espoused by The Seditious Six imploring military service members to “refuse illegal orders” thereby implying that orders coming out of the Trump administration are considered illegal by them and therefore military service members should disobey their commanding officer and join the club of the “Party-minded.” Remember, package thinking has only one train of thought – gaining and maintaining power over reality.
Have you agreed with the insurrection package thinking espoused previously by NYT’s op-ed columnist David Brooks? Do the values of your party-minded package thinking allow you to hamstring a DEMOCRACY! elected president with the rulings of party-minded federal court judges that will be overturned. Do the values of your party-minded package thinking justify the deep state, in the labyrinth of government, to sabotage the efforts of a Democratically elected President?
Do the values of your package thinking allow you to call for uprisings by any means necessary, to burn down buildings, to destroy property, to destroy businesses, to steal, do violence on others, to defund the police, to create pipe bombs, to assassinate? To ignore your conscience?
Did you accept the “Danger to our Democracy” thought package the media delivered during the last presidential election cycle? It should be obvious from the likes of David Brooks, that the “guardians of democracy” are the ones who want to tear it down.
Have bought into the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) playbook that conforms and coerces everyone to identify with Soviet style party-mindedness package thinking?
Have bought into viewing everything including humans through the lens of materialism?
Have you bought into package thinking so as to not be considered an outsider? Have you bought into conformity for conformity’s sake?
Is censorship the worst thing that can happen to a people? Or, is it “Party-mindedness?”
When we hear someone say crazy things, we might say “Yeah, right” and shrug it off. But when a group of people say crazy things with the smug air of certainty and people agree with said crazy things, we wonder “What in the world is going on?” and “Where is this coming from and where is it going?”
What happened in Russia didn’t stay in Russia. And a mind is still a terrible thing to hand over.
You can put your ear to the road and hear what is quickly approaching. Download and listen to the following podcasts:
London is falling – or has it fallen already?
Liz Truss, the 56th prime minister of the United Kingdom, in her very first episode of The Liz Truss Show discusses how bad things are in Britain with a mass migration and economic doom loop – and how to defeat the deep state who have let this happen
Interview with Professor Gary Saul Morson on Tolstoy, Faith, Package Thinking, and The Importance of Critical Thinking
Professor Gary Saul Morson shares his thought-provoking definition of an intellectual—someone who seeks truth independently, values ideas for their own sake, and stands apart from identity-driven thinking. Whether discussing classic Russian Literature or analyzing modern society, Professor Morson is one of the most insightful and consequential scholars of our time. Discover how this interview, and its exploration of timeless topics, can inspire bold, principled leadership and innovation within today’s business environment.
Gary Saul Morson on Tolstoy, Faith, Package Thinking, and The Importance of Critical Thinking
Vladimir Lenin’s ideas are alive and well today: Party-ness, politics as win-lose, zero-sum game, Who-Whom, rejection of truth, ideology, violence, philosophical materialism, adherence to lying.
Is Hope Naïve in a World Like Ours? | Esau McCaulley & Gary Saul Morson at Northwestern
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Quotes:
In the long run my observations have convinced me that some men, reasoning preposterously, first establish some conclusion in their minds which, either because of its being their own or because of their having received it from some person who has their entire confidence, impresses them so deeply that one finds it impossible ever to get it out of their heads. Such arguments in support of their fixed idea … gain their instant acceptance and applause. On the other hand whatever is brought forward against it, however ingenious and conclusive, they receive with disdain or with hot rage – if indeed it does not make them ill. Beside themselves with passion, some of them would not be backward even about scheming to suppress and silence their adversaries. I have had some experience of this myself. … No good can come of dealing with such people, especially to the extent that their company may be not only unpleasant but dangerous. Galileo Galilei
If the Brave New World cannot insert a square peg into a round hole, it will redefine “roundness” until a perfect fit results.
-Jerome Meckier, from Aldous Huxley: Satire and Structure
…a sense of unity is opposite of a sense of uniformity. Uniformity, where everyone “belongs”, uses the same cliches, thinks alike and behaves alike, produces a society which seems comfortable at first but is totally lacking in human dignity. Real unity tolerates dissent and rejoices in variety of outlook and tradition, realizes that it is man’s destiny to unite and not divide… Unity, so understood, is the extra dimension that raises the sense of belonging into genuine human life.
-Northrop Frye, from The Bush Garden
Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something. -Plato
“The past is our always-available counterculture, and it’s a rich one. Every minute you spend attending to something not-immediately-present, you are helping to build a counterculture.” ― Alan Jacobs
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Links:
Why are intellectuals — those whose thinking is supposed to be most refined — so susceptible to totalitarianism? Gary Saul Morson offers three explanations from the treasury of Russian literature.
Anti-Communism Week has been marked for November 2025. Writer-producer Julie Behling’s documentary “Beneath Sheep’s Clothing” warns of communism’s devastation: “Globally, communism claimed the lives of approximately 150 million people in the 20th century.”
Totalitarian governments cannot afford that its citizens remain autonomous persons. This poses a threat to their quest to consolidate power. Individual liberty threatens the theoretical, utopian foundations of promising the re-distribution of goods, and equality; communism ultimately fails to re-distribute the essence of human nature.
New York City, home to about one million Jews, voted in the Democratic mayoral primary for a Shia Muslim deeply critical of Israel.
Zohran Mamdani wants to “globalize the intifada” – a slogan used by pro-Palestinian activists that calls for worldwide support for Palestinian resistance against Israel and Jews involving violence. Mamdani does this with the handwashing tact of standing up for Palestinian human rights.
The hook for NYC’s wealthy champagne socialists who need to virtue signal eyes away from their wealth and for the young and restless urbanites who can’t afford rent in NYC: Mamdani is a 33-year-old member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Andrew Cuomo dominated the voting among those making under $50K, but Mamdani beat Cuomo by 20 points among voters earning more than $100,000 a year.
Americans were stunned last week when foreign-born, self-proclaimed socialist Zohran Mamdani used CNN as a platform to denounce capitalism—the very system that transformed this country from frontier towns into a global superpower. Capitalism has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, built a middle class, and fueled rapid technological innovation—outcomes impossible under socialist regimes, as evidenced by an imploding Europe adopting welfare-state models or failed communist states like Cuba.
Like all communist organizers (cf. Obama), the 33-year-old progressive democratic socialist promises an anticapitalism world (with no rising seas or costs) if you just give up all common sense and any understanding of free-market economics (I, Pencil provides understanding) and vote (and pay dearly later) for the revolution. (It’s no secret that capitalism’s profits pay for socialism’s follies.)
Mandani, in order to control costs (read seize the means of production and central planning), says that he wants to freeze rents and provide free transportation and universal childcare, create city-owned grocery stores and construct 200,00 affordable housing units.
He also wants to raise New York City’s minimum wage to $30 by 2030, thereby pricing people out of jobs.
“Shift the tax burden from overtaxed homeowners in the outer boroughs to more expensive homes in richer and whiter neighborhoods.” – Zohran for New York City policy memo.
Mamdani, using the narrative of the left, wants to defund the NYPD and abolish prisons.
He promises to work against U.S. laws to continue Welcoming the Stranger/Fellow Traveler from other failed socialist countries. He will double down on sanctuary city protections for illegals and end cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Welcome to the revolution.
Like fellow travelers Tim Waltz and Kamala Harris, Mamdani defended the Black Lives Matter riots in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 2020. He described the violence (read intifada struggle) as necessary and grounded in racial justice solidarity.
Did NYC Democrats not see the destruction of the palisades and LA by the incompetent leadership of California’s Governor Gavin Newsom and inclusion’s DEI hire Mayor Karen Bass? With this recent vote, do NYC Democrats also approve of the wholesale destruction of their blue city?
Do Democrats in NYC not remember Gavin Newsom eating without mask or social distancing at the French Laundry during the COVID lockdowns? With this recent vote, do NYC Democrats also approve of the hypocrisy of a society that claims to promote equality while allowing a ruling class to dominate?
Mamdani was born in Uganda and briefly lived in South Africa. He became a U.S. citizen in 2018. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Africana studies from Bowdoin College.
No doubt the 33-year-old has been steeped in the anti-American anti-Capitalism rhetoric and Islamic Jihad teaching. It appears that he knows nothing of American history or of Communism’s deadly and destructive track record.
“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” -George Santayana
From Welcoming Jihad in NYC to Globalized Intifada – The Holy War Against Christians in Nigeria
I’m sure you’ve heard the following reported in the main stream media.
But then again, the reactionary MSM is busy defending the globalist Jihad of the “Welcoming the Stranger” open borders narrative and dissing the law-and-order activity of the Trump administration done to secure the integrity of the United States and the wellbeing of its citizens.
(No doubt some, including some Christians, believe that the morally relativistic “social justice” is a permissive that allows them moral authority to break laws created by representatives of our Republic’s Democracy to maintain order and the common good.)
What’s happening and been happening in Nigeria is Jihad. But it’s not the ghetto-uprising kind of a NYC socialist Jihadist. Here are five articles describing the horrors of Islamist Jihad:
Beneath the silence of the Western press, a genocide is unfolding — one that has claimed the lives of over 3,100 Christians in Nigeria this year alone. And yet, for all the blood spilled, for all the churches burned and children slain, one would be hard-pressed to find even a whisper of coverage from CNN, the BBC, or The New York Times. The slaughter of Christians, it seems, is not newsworthy in today’s media economy. (Emphasis mine.)
In a horrifying escalation of violence, between 100 and 200 Christians were murdered by Fulani jihadist herdsmen in Nigeria’s Benue State, according to multiple sources. (Emphasis mine.)
Jihadist violence continues to escalate in Nigeria, and Christians are particularly at risk from targeted attacks by Islamist militants, including Fulani fighters, Boko Haram and ISWAP (Islamic State West Africa Province). These increased under the rule of former president Muhammadu Buhari, putting Nigeria at the epicentre of targeted violence against the church. The government’s failure to protect Christians and punish perpetrators has only strengthened the militants’ influence. (Emphasis mine.)
Nigeria, the most populated country in Africa, faces a harsh reality for its Christian population. Since the early 2000s, over 62,000 Christians have lost their lives to violence driven by extremist groups like Boko Haram, Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), and Fulani militias. (Emphasis mine.)
[Bishop Wilfred Anagbe] added that for his people, their experience today “can be summed up as that of a Church under Islamist extermination.” (Emphasis mine.)
Nigerian martyrs cry out in a loud voice, “Holy and true Master! How much longer are you going to put off giving judgement, and avenging our blood on the earth-dwellers?” -Revelation 6:10
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No more word games. How are we to understand intifada and jihad? As merely a personal struggle against, say, cigarette smoking? As a struggle against an oppressor? As a non-violent ghetto uprising involving work stoppages, boycotts and demonstrations that might involve small weapons such as rocks or Molotov cocktails, and on some occasions firearms or grenades?
Are we to understand intifada as the October 7th attack on Israel when Gaza militants fired thousands of rockets towards Israeli towns killing more than 1,400 people, including civilians and soldiers, and took up to 150 hostages.
Some, like Daniel Lefkowitz, consider “intifada and genocide” in the same sentence to be “an unreasonable stretch.” But looking at what happened on October 7th and at what has been happening in Nigeria, is it a stretch?
“Globalize the intifada” is a call for a Muslim holy war or spiritual struggle for the propagation or defense of Islam that involves genocide and now wants to employ the unholy terror of Communism.
The New York mayoral Democratic primary candidate defends “Globalize the intifada.”
(I don’t hear pro-Israel war hawk “Tel Aviv Levin” decrying the violence done to Christians in Nigeria by Jihadists.)
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AI – Act Now Before the Bill Passes!
Email your senators and ask them to remove a 10-year moratorium on enforcing state and local artificial intelligence laws from the GOP’s megabill. The moratorium infringes on states’ rights.
Removing the 10-year moratorium on enforcing state and local artificial intelligence laws
-will protect citizens from the harm the technology could cause, and the lack of “thoughtful” public debate over the measure.
-will protect our citizens from the misuse of artificial intelligence.
Toru Takemitsu (1931-1996) was a self-taught Japanese composer who combined elements of Eastern and Western music and philosophy to create a unique sound world.
(I played the trumpet for many years. My ears perked up when I heard Paths.)
Witold Roman Lutosławski was a Polish composer and conductor. He was one of the major composers of 20th-century classical music.
For a long while now the main stream media has been staging professional wrestling matches with day-of-reckoning plots. The scrappers include Hurricane Climate Change, Mysterio Misinformation, Equalizer Inequality, Undertaker Pandemic, and The Hammer “Democracy!” Opponents will take the fall.
A lot of sponsor money is backing the theater. So, a team of writers pen the storylines. And though the plots are predetermined and the moves choreographed, the staged spectacle must appear real to wrest control of the public’s interest. The rigged and scripted matches must provide the illusion of legitimacy of an actual unprecedented threat.
The wrestlers’ character and in-ring actions must look authentic and connect with the audience. Even so, Joe Blow is not watching as a critical thinker. He’s partaking in the bloodlust.
The nature of the high-stakes fiction captures his full attention. He is soon whipped into a state of frenzy. Animal spirits, “the spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction” (M. Keynes), are released. He can barely contain himself.
What’s this! In tonight’s audience is another professional wrestler. The Snake! wants in on the action:
Former FBI Director James Comey posted a photo of sea shells arranged into the numbers “86 47” on his Instagram account today, before shortly deleting the post.
OK. The pro wrestling imagery is not perfect, but here’s the thing . . .
High-stakes fiction – existential threats posed by climate change, misinformation, inequality, democracy, and who knows what’s next – is meant not only to capture the full attention of Joe Blow but also to overwhelm and exhaust his resolve. Such is the nature of psychological oppression. To wit:
“A gleeful, self-satisfied Mr Punch was often heard to remark: “That’s the way to do it.” Today we examine how Mark Poynting, one of the BBC’s top doom-mongering Net Zero activists, uses the trusted ‘scientists say’ message to turn a centennial sea level rise of around 30 cm into prose stating: “The world could see hugely damaging sea-level rises of several metres or more over the coming centuries””
The constant messaging of threats – “It creates a state of utter helplessness, a state in which you are far more pliant.” So writes Thomas Buckley, of the Brownstone Institute in the web article The Existential Threat of the Existential Threat. Why do this? Buckley continues:
And those invoking that dread are waiting nearby to do just that – take society by the shoulder, offer it comfort on the form of entertainment, medication, and basic sustenance, and lead it away.
The real existential threat, as Buckley notes, is that which denies our individual human agency and seeks to combine us into communitarian compliancy with “the ethereal economy of government agencies, civil society actors, non-governmental organizations, foundations, and academia, all aided by the information cabal. Together they do, in fact, currently have the power to foist something upon civilization that truly is transgenerational, global, and terminal.
The benefit of a pliant public is all theirs, as Buckley writes:
The climate being threatened is their silver sheened scrubbed personal environment – the actual environmental destruction that is occurring is out of sight, the denigrating of the sub-Deltas who inhabit other places, is immaterial.
A new paper by Dr. Judith Curry, one of the world’s most prominent scientists skeptical of a looming human-caused climate catastrophe, and economist Harry DeAngelo cautions investors and the public that “the apocalyptic climate narrative is a seriously flawed guide for public policy.” Why? “Because it radically overstates the risks to humanity from continued global warming.” Wide-scale suppression of fossil fuel use will not measurably change future temperatures, but “a sharp decline in quality of life would surely ensue.”
“The past 24 hours have been something of a Rorschach Test for the Supreme Court. In the birthright citizenship case, the Court made clear that in emergencies, the judiciary must retain the power to enter universal injunctions, even if Article III does not otherwise permit such injunctions. And in A.A.R.P. v. Trump, the Court made clear that in emergencies, the court should certify a class without going through Rule 23, and grant an ex parte tro without considering any of the usual TRO factors.
“What lesson should lower court judges take away? In cases of perceived emergencies, forget all the rules and make stuff up. When the executive branch takes such actions we call it an autocracy. When the courts do it, they call it the “rule of law.””
Turn the Page on The Kamalians, the horror anthology involving predator alien species on earth. Haven’t we had enough of these elite power-seeking hunters stalking us? Haven’t we had enough of their media cloaking devices and social-imaging technology?
The formidable Kamalians are cruel and brutal in their quest. For their trophies, they primarily target the vulnerable little guy – low and middle-class individuals such as the working-class male. Their target’s collateral damage has included the cities of Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, and Minneapolis.
The Kamalians are capable of both mercy and reason but have not shown either during the course of their stalking us. Their weapons include auto-targeting name calling, lecturing whips, and netguns of injustice. You know they are nearby when you hear their annoying tongue clicking and loud cackling
Sadly, Dutch (Arnold Schwarzenegger), who at one time battled the vicious Kamalians, has joined the Kamalians (Brain damage?).
Reliable word on the street has it that the horror anthology is about to come to an end. Wall Street knows who will win the election. Trillions of dollars are moving into one corner of the market – energy. Smart money is preparing for a Trump landslide and Republicans taking the house. The looming predatory threat portrayed by The Kamalians is about to be put in check by a new Dutch and a new anthology. (Don’t take this news for granted! Go vote early!The Kamaliansplay smashmouth, they are not bound by strict codes of honor.)
The New York Times runs through several scenarios to “neutralize” the so-called Trump threat, finally landing on their fifth and most desperate option—which just so happens to be the one we’re likely facing right now. This last-ditch scenario should scare the living daylights out of any sane American. This is the “color revolution” or “civil war” option. (Emphasis mine.)
American Citizenship and Its Decline: The Unelected Deep State
On this episode of The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast, Jeremiah and Juan discuss the rapid growth of the federal government introducing Victor Davis Hanson.
Citizenship is rare in human history but essential to free government. Today, the constitutional rule of citizens in America is threatened by a new form of government, unaccountable to the people, in which power is held by a ruling class that seeks to transform our society. In this eight-lecture course, students will examine the origins and history of citizenship in the West and the grave challenges American citizenship faces today.
The growth of an administrative deep state in America places massive government power outside the control of American citizens. These unaccountable agencies determine the rules that govern society, execute those rules, and settle disputes, and they wield these combined powers to undermine the constitutional operations of American government.
Character counts: The Character of the Kamala Party
Low and middle-class individuals who espouse the end of being lectured to, the end of high inflation, the end of the forced anti-God anti-reality secularization of the country, and the end of the administrative state are being called “fascists”, “nazis”, “chumps”, “deplorables”, irredeemables”, “dregs”, “clingers”, “white supremacists” by Democrat elitists who are so used to talking down to people they think beneath them.
And now we are called “garbage.”
President Biden raged against “Kill Tony” podcast host Tony Hinchcliffe’s joke about Puerto Rico being a “floating island of garbage” and suggested that was a good description for supporters of former President Donald Trump.
“Donald Trump has no character. He doesn’t give a damn about the Latino community,” Biden said during a campaign call at the White House Tuesday first reported by NBC. “Just the other day, a speaker at his rally called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage.”
“The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters. His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s unAmerican.”
Biden’s remark, as it was understood by many on the right, mirrored Clinton’s infamous 2016 denunciation of Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables,” a comment that Clinton later said she regretted and helped energize Trump’s base in the weeks before that election.
The safety and livelihood of women and girls have been increasingly threatened and encroached upon. Embarrassingly few government officials seem to really care, much less do anything about it – including the administration that’s currently propping up the sitting Vice President as the champion for change, despite her having done virtually nothing in the last four years. If this seems severe, it’s because we’re living in a dire situation that stands to get worse.
What was done to us by our government during the COVID crisis was deeply, morally wrong. It was more than wrong, it was evil. It violated virtually every previously established principle of medical ethics. It sought to weaponize a falsely inflated risk of an infectious disease to promote fear of death, and then exploit that fear to shape behavior, reprogram our minds, and advance a series of financial, political and organizational objectives.
Evangelicals For Harris is not even pretending to be a Christian organization. But despite their theological failings and their recent Zoom meeting where their female pastors clucked over how pro-abortion they were, Evangelical For Harris is not actually a movement within the church. Rather, it is a clumsy yet well-funded attempt to counterfeit Christianity. But even its founder, Jim Ball, a long time environmentalist is not nearly as smooth or cunning as many liberals in Evangelicalism.
In a recent interview on News Nation, a liberal cable news channel, Jim Ball waffled on a question about trangenderism indoctrination in schools.
For the past year State media apparatchiks have set up the public for the overthrow of democracy with its “Threat to democracy” psyop narrative.
Providing the State media narrative is the Blob: Democrat actors in the State Department, the Department of Defense, the “deep state”, the administrative state, the bureaucracy. These unaccountable rulers unto themselves want to solidify their North Korean version of a “Democratic Republic” and will use any means necessary including tools of oppression.
The issuance of Directive 5240.01 “allows for direct military involvement in civilian law enforcement operations under emergency conditions, including situations where there is an imminent threat.”
“Given the current administration’s utter disdain for anyone who supports President Trump, would anyone doubt, especially considering the zeal with which they have pursued January 6 protesters, anti-abortion advocates, and groups such as Moms for Liberty, that they wouldn’t use the military against those same folks?”
Is the “Save Democracy” party planning a coup with boots on the ground?
Blob Democrats have tried, by any means necessary, to suppress the voice of Donald J. Trump who represents the voice of those the Blob elites detest and Democrats take for granted. They will do so again and again and again.
And when Trump wins the election, they will use their previous psyop set up: calling what happened on J6 an “insurrection” (Note: no one charged has been charged with insurrection.) Democrats will claim that Trump is an “insurrectionist” to keep him out of the White House.
Beside the military boots on the ground, the Blob plan includes another “election security force” to make it look like they care about Democracy. But it’s really to ensure that there’s just enough overthrow of the government so they can have total power.
The 2025 Counting and Certification of Electoral Votes in Washington, DC on Jan. 6, 2025, has been designated a National Special Security Event by the Secretary of Homeland Security.
This marks the first time a National Special Security Event designation has been granted for a Certification of Electoral Votes and follows a request made by the DC Mayor to designate this event a National Special Security Event. Various reports including from the House Select January 6 Committee and the Government Accountability Office also called for the DHS Secretary to consider a National Special Security Event designation for future Certification of Electoral Votes.
“The U.S. Secret Service, in collaboration with our federal, state, and local partners are committed to developing and implementing a comprehensive and integrated security plan to ensure the safety and security of this event and its participants.”
The scripted voice of one screaming in the wilderness, preparing the way for the totalitarian state:
Added 10-27-2024:
Something is up
An outfit called the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association International (AFCEA) has scheduled an “exercise simulating a cyber-attack on critical infrastructure” for November 5 in Atlanta, Georgia.
That’s election day. In a big swing state. Whose idea was that?
And . . .
It's stunning that, just 11 days before the presidential election, a federal judge is ordering Virginia to reinstate individuals who have self-identified as noncitizens on the voter rolls. Virginia is prepared to take this to the U.S. Supreme Court if needed! pic.twitter.com/fyjlWBUlnQ
I repeat: the choice is between a conservative President, who is paying with his very life for his fight against the deep state, and an infernal monster who obeys Satan. For a Catholic, there can be no question: voting for Kamala Harris is morally inadmissible and constitutes a very grave sin. Nor is it morally possible to abstain, because in this war declaring oneself neutral means allying oneself with the enemy.
Thinking Like Lenin, with Gary Saul Morson” from The Moral Imagination by Michael Matheson Miller. Released: 2019.
“These days, Vladimir Lenin’s ideas are alive and well today: Party-ness, politics as win-lose, zero-sum game, Who-Whom, rejection of truth, ideology, violence, philosophical materialism, adherence to lying.”
Victor Davis Hanson and cohost Sami Winc look at the week’s news: Bret Baier interviews Harris, media coverup of so many things left, the theater of Kamala, close Senate races, and Gallup poll on Republican newcomers.
The election is finally shaping up to be not only liberal Democrat Kamala Harris versus conservative Republican Donald Trump.
Instead, it has become a larger contest between those who talk down to their fellow Americans and those who are increasingly sick and tired of being lectured. How smart is it, for example, for Harris supporters to claim nonstop that ex-president Trump is a fascist dictator — and thus, by extension, those also who vote for him? (Emphasis mine.)
Never Trumpers and Evangelicals for Harris will support the Demoncratic party because they say “Character Counts!” (But not, apparently, when it comes to the character of the party they support or of its empty pant suit candidate.)
Character of the country matters more than ever (And not their self-righteous hubris.)
Tucker Carlson blistering highlight from tonight's TP Action rally for Trump in Georgia. Tucker is spitting fire.pic.twitter.com/kb51gpu8m8
Dr. [Peter] Hotez is demanding that the police forces of the world join together to neutralize the vaccine hesitant people he hates and fears so much.
It gives a whole new meaning to the battle cry of globalists: ONE WORLD, ONE HEALTH!
. . . he called the vaccine hesitant a “lethal force” and an international “security problem” and then wildly suggested during an international medical symposium that the US Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Department of Justice, US Department of Commerce, and the United Nations, including the World Health Organization, plus the largest intergovernmental military alliance in the world – the North Atlantic Treaty Organization – take action to eradicate “anti-vaccine aggression [and] anti-science aggression, . . .”
Professor Hotez called on the U.S. government and G20 nations to take steps to “snuff out” the American anti-vaccine movement, which he said may have “sufficient strength and momentum to affect vaccine coverage globally,” while reluctantly noting that vaccine hesitancy was linked to smart people with “high educational attainment and socioeconomic status.
When Amaryllis Fox Kennedy says the intel agencies are a threat to our country, she’s not guessing. She spent ten years as a CIA officer before running Bobby Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign. She’s now campaigning for Trump.
Evangelicals For Harris is not even pretending to be a Christian organization. But despite their theological failings and their recent Zoom meeting where their female pastors clucked over how pro-abortion they were, Evangelical For Harris is not actually a movement within the church. Rather, it is a clumsy yet well-funded attempt to counterfeit Christianity. But even its founder, Jim Ball, a long-time environmentalist is not nearly as smooth or cunning as many liberals in Evangelicalism.
In a recent interview on News Nation, a liberal cable news channel, Jim Ball waffled on a question about trangenderism indoctrination in schools.
“We have entered, as I see it, a spiritual limbo. Our educational institutions are no longer the bearers of high culture, and public life has been deliberately moronised. But here and there, sheltered from the noise and glare of the media, the old spiritual forces are at work” Roger Scruton
*****
“When a common culture declines, the ethical life can be sustained and renewed only by a work of the imagination.”-Roger Scruton
*****
“Jesus prayed, “This is eternal life, that they may know You . . .” (John 17:3). The real meaning of eternal life is a life that can face anything it has to face without wavering. If we will take this view, life will become one great romance— a glorious opportunity of seeing wonderful things all the time. God is disciplining us to get us into this central place of power.” Oswald Chambers
*****
“No power on earth or in hell can conquer the Spirit of God in a human spirit, it is an inner unconquerableness.” Oswald Chambers
*****
To those who have had no agony Jesus says, “I have nothing for you; stand on your own feet, square your own shoulders. I have come for the man who knows he has a bigger handful than he can cope with, who knows there are forces he cannot touch; I will do everything for him if he will let Me. Only let a man grant he needs it, and I will do it for him.” The Shadow of an Agony,Oswald Chambers
*****
“If we wish to erect new structures, we must have a definite knowledge of the old foundations.” John Calvin Coolidge
*****
Atheism is a post-Christian phenomenon.
*****
If social justice looks like your hand in someone else’s pocket then you are stealing.
*****
“In Sweden, giving to charity, absurdly, came to be considered a lack of solidarity, since it undermined the need for the welfare state.” – Roland Martinsson
*****
“…to love democracy well, it is necessary to love it moderately.” Alexis de Tocqueville
*****
Capitalism seeks to help others through a servce or product it provides. Free Market Capitalism is the most moral and fair economic system available to man. Capitalism augments personal growth, responsibility and ownership. Charity flourishes under capitalism. Charity dies under subjective “fair share” government confiscatory policies. Socialism redistributes ambivalence and greed.
*****
“We are to regard existence as a raid or great adventure; it is to be judged, therefore, not by what calamities it encounters, but by what flag it follows and what high town it assaults. The most dangerous thing in the world is to be alive; one is always in danger of one’s life. But anyone who shrinks from that is a traitor to the great scheme and experiment of being.” G.K. Chesterton
*****
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent.
It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction. Albert Einstein
*****
“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.” Flannery O’Connor
*****
“There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.” C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
*****
“Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him” (Job 13:15).
*****
God’s grace is not about the allowance for sin. God’s grace is about the conversation God allows regarding sin.
*****
From the book of Proverbs: We are not to favor the rich or the poor. We are to pursue justice.
*****
“Always keep in contact with those books and those people that enlarge your horizon and make it possible for you to stretch yourself mentally.” Oswald Chambers
*****
One goldfish says to another, “If there is no God who keeps changing the water?”
*****
“The truth is always there in the morning.”
From Cat On A Hot Tin Roof script – playwright Tennessee Williams
*****
God blesses those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they will be satisfied.
*****
“America’s greatness has been the greatness of a free people who shared certain moral commitments. Freedom without moral commitment is aimless and promptly self-destructive.” John W. Gardner
**
“Men of integrity, by their very existence, rekindle the belief that as a people we can live above the level of moral squalor. We need that belief; a cynical community is a corrupt community.” John W. Gardner
*****
“In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair, the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.” Dorothy L. Sayers
*****
“Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”
G. K. Chesterton
*****
“The battle line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn
*****
This is what the LORD says:
“Stand at the crossroads and look;
ask for the ancient paths,
ask where the good way is, and walk in it,
and you will find rest for your souls.
But you said, ‘We will not walk in it.’
-The prophet Jeremiah, 6:16
*****
“…our common task is not so much discovering a truth hiding among contrary viewpoints as it is coming to possess a selfhood that no longer evades and eludes the truth with which it is importunately confronted.” James McClendon, Ethics: Systematic Theology, Vol. 1
*****
Cindy Wity 
A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Hand Over
December 8, 2025 Leave a comment
When we hear someone say crazy things, we might say “Yeah, right” and shrug it off. But when a group of people say crazy things and a group of people agree with said crazy things, we wonder “What in the world is going on?”
Objective reality – the existence of things as they are – is obvious to everyone. And so are the values, accumulated over several millennia, of what is true and of what works and what hasn’t. But not everyone accepts the obvious and the values based on time proven objective reality. Some see themselves as Progressive in rejecting both.
Today’s academic, artistic, media, and political elites, a vanguard of Progressive Groupthink, reject the existence of things as they are and do so within the safe space of their ranks thereby creating an illusion of invulnerability and inherent morality. Members of this vanguard suppress dissenting opinions and avoid critically evaluated alternatives so as to maintain the group’s shared illusion of unanimity.
The vanguard’s conformity is maintained with mind guards – the media reports “right thinking” about a matter – and with self-censorship of deviations from shared beliefs and with shared views of the enemy – those who present a reality contrary to the groups’ notion of reality.
When we hear the vanguard’s irrational take on what is going on in the world, its roiling Doublethink, its name calling and shunning of voices outside its collective choir, and its dysfunctional decision-making which objective reality tells us will result in disastrous, dehumanizing, and even deadly outcomes, we ask “Where is this coming from and where is this going?
Those of us who keep an ear to the ground in order to hear what is approaching will answer “History is repeating itself.”
The objective reality of the murderous totalitarian regimes of the last century, which Progressives willfully ignore to promote their glorious future of equality via the same means, will help us understand the denial-of-reality collaboration of today’s intelligentsia – those who hold to one way of thinking – and their quest for total domination of the body, mind, and soul with Progressive Groupthink.
Specifically, Russian Soviet history will help us understand the conformity dynamic behind today’s intelligentsia. For this understanding I turn to one of the most informed scholars of the Russian history of ideas as communicated in its literature: Northwestern Professor Gary Saul Morson.
***
In Morson’s magnum opus Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter Morson details how politics and literature, in the writings of realists, idealists, and revolutionaries, played against each other during the Soviet period.
He describes Soviet thinking that rejected the realism and the real people depicted in nineteenth-century Russian fiction and required that reality be written to include “not only of the observable present but also the inevitable future in the making” and with Socialist Realist heroes – utopianism made flesh.
Writers of Russian realism – Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Solzhenitsyn, and others – wrote about what they saw and experienced. They are the “wonder” in the title. They represented the world as it was in their writings about the Gulag, mass starvation, torture, unspeakable violence, about how people thought about and dealt with what was going on, and about how many succumbed to the imposed Soviet mindset.
Russian realist authors confronted those of the “certainty,” those who wrote redefined reality in terms of the “observable present and the inevitable future in the making” and in terms of “positive heroes.”
The “positive hero” was to set an example for the reader’s behavior. A Soviet cosmonaut, for one example, became a “positive hero.” A cosmonaut’s space trip was seen as science, materialism, and atheism triumphing over the transcendent values held in the U.S., the enemy of the Soviet Union.
The “certainty” writers followed the lead of the embodiment of “certainty” – Vladimir Lenin. Lenin mocked his opponents’ self-characterization as ‘seekers’ of truth. He held that dialectical materialists do not seek truth; they already possess it. And so, the party-minded “positive hero” refused dialogue, refused to see any alternatives to the Marxist-Leninist-materialist-atheistic “truth” espoused by the party, the representatives of Karl Marx’s class-struggling proletariat.
From Wonder Confronts Certainty:
“The Soviets would label fidelity to present facts “bourgeois objectivism.” It was the best that could be expected from the age of realism, but must give way to socialist realism, which shows the ideal world inevitably coming. The socialist realist author was expected to focus on the people of the future, “positive heroes” exhibiting complete “Party-mindedness.” True positive heroes do not have bring their thinking into accord with the party, a process requiring effort; they exhibit Party-mindedness so thorough that no effort is required”
“Party-mindedness”, we learn from the writings of Russian realist authors, was propagated through the means of propaganda, show trials, random arrests, and the constant terror that there might be any hint, any innuendo, any false statement that would convict one of not being party-minded.
The “party-mindedness” of the 20th century Russian intelligentsia, its conformity to only one way of thinking, is replicated today.
***
Here’s Morson in his Touchtone article Beyond Belief: Literary Reflections on Thoughtless Conformity:
“I happened to witness two professors waiting for an elevator. To make conversation, one voiced an opinion on some political question to see if the other agreed. When she did, they chattered away on a dozen other topics with perfect assurance that they agreed on those, too. Evidently, their beliefs came as a package. Subsequently I noticed this way of thinking many times, as I imagine many of my readers have.
The process works something like this: a person first chooses the group with whom he wishes to identify and then adopts its opinions. He believes as strongly in gun control, let us say, as he does in supporting Planned Parenthood, defunding the police, and banning fossil fuels. It is evident that no arguments or evidence can shake his opinions on any of these topics because arguments or evidence had nothing to do with why they were adopted.
To be sure, a person who thinks this way can cite facts and reasons to justify his opinion, but they have been acquired in the same way as the opinion itself. They are the same reasons others in the group have learned to give. I used to find it eerie to hear repeatedly the same arguments expressed in the same phrases, as if I were listening to a recording rather than to highly educated people who imagined that, unlike their intellectual inferiors, they had arrived at opinions rationally and would change them as evidence warranted. I thought of Jonathan Swift’s observation that no one was ever talked out of an opinion he was not first talked into.”
***
Reading Morson’s article, I was reminded of the easy-going liberal mindset of the Stiva Oblonsky character in Tolstoy’s Russian realism novel Anna Karenina.
Behind Stiva’s smile, his self-possessed mannerisms and hedonism is what Tolstoy described as “the liberalism of the blood.”
From the novel:
“Stepan Arkadyevitch took and read a liberal newspaper, not a radical one, but one advocating the viewpoint maintained by the majority. And even though neither science, nor art or politics held any particular interest for him, he firmly maintained the same views on all these subjects that were maintained by the majority and by his paper, and he changed them only when the majority changed them, or, better put, he did not change them at all; they imperceptibly changed within him . . .
“And so liberalism had become a habit of Stepan Arkadyevitch’s, and he liked his newspaper, as he did his cigar after dinner, for the slight fog it diffused in his brain.”
Stiva, we learn in in the novel, does not recognize his conscious when it speaks to him. And that is aided by his living-in-the-moment forgetting. He did not want to remember any unpleasant thing.
Self-deception and romantic ideology play key roles in Anna’s life.
***
Czeslaw Milosz, Polish American poet, novelist, translator, critic, and diplomat, is best known for The Captive Mind (1953). His essay collection focuses on intellectuals, specifically poets and other writers.
As Charles Haywood writes in his 2019 article The Captive Mind (Czeslaw Milosz), [Milosz’s] “book shows how mental gymnastics, rather than coercion, caused writers under Communism to adhere to Communism. Thereby, indirectly, it congratulates writers who believe their minds free from such, or other, contortions.
“The West incorrectly sees “might and coercion” as the reasons those in Eastern Europe submit to Communism. But, rather, unwilling to face either physical or spiritual death, many choose instead to be “reborn” through taking these metaphorical pills, because “[t]here is an internal longing for harmony and happiness that lies deeper than ordinary fear or the desire to escape misery or physical destruction.” Intellectuals, and artists especially, do not want to be “internal exiles, irreconcilable, non-participating, eroded by hatred.” So they swallow the pills and adopt the “New Faith” (a term Milosz uses throughout the book) which offers the intellectual the certainty he is both correct and virtuous, and therefore gives him a sense of belonging, gives him a feeling of being “warm-hearted and good . . . a friend of mankind—not mankind as it is, but as it should be.”” (Emphasis mine.)
Returning to Morson’s article about package thinking, Morson relates
“What really matters, [Czeslaw} Milosz explains, is “the intellectual’s feeling of belonging.” His defining “characteristic is his fear of thinking for himself.” For this reason, as well as to prosper, he must root out all the old ways of thinking. Milosz describes a phenomenon with which university people are all too familiar, the always incomplete process of teaching oneself to say the right things (in the right words), and avoid saying the wrong ones, so that one never makes a slip entailing ostracism or worse. Of course, the best way to do this is to get oneself actually to share the prescribed views. Milosz describes how
after long acquaintance with his role, a man grows into it so closely that he can no longer differentiate his true self from the self he simulates, so that even the most intimate of individuals speak to each other in Party slogans. To identify self with the role one is obliged to play . . . permits a relaxation of one’s vigilance. Proper reflexes at the proper time become truly automatic.”
***
One obvious feature of our culture’s downward trend toward mindless conformity is critical thinking’s easy alternative: clicking on a machine to receive packaged thoughts.
Why think when packaged thoughts are there for the clicking? And why expand one’s personal bandwidth when you can reaffirm your tribal identity with a click?
Why research and consider a range of ideas and thoughts when clicking on machine AI is ready to do away with mystery and your curiosity, wonder, and impatience? And why think outside package thinking when life is short – shortened by every minute clicking on a machine.
Why read classic literature to gain wisdom, insight, and understanding from other people in other places and in other times, when you can click on a remote for package thinking entertainment.
Have you bought into the globalist, academic, secular and progressive (GASP) package (a feature of Wikipedia) that censors alternative views as “extremist” or “fringe theories” or “conspiracy theories” or “racist?”
Did you buy into the globalist open borders “welcoming the stranger” package where millions of unvetted illegal invaders entered the country as simple or criminal or terrorism opportunists? Did you accept the package thinking that allows third world invaders into our country to replace American workers and American values and do all manner of harm to its citizens as empathy, as what Jesus would do? Take a look at the strangers welcomed: Arrested: Worst of the Worst | Homeland Security And, there’s this: They Called It ‘Compassion’ — But it was Child Trafficking – American Thinker
Are you buying into the central planning democratic socialism package where everyone, except certain individuals who hold more power and privilege, must be made equal no matter the human cost? Are you buying into the central planning democratic socialism package and willfully forgetting the objective reality of the horrors of socialism/communism? Are you willfully handing over your life, your thoughts, to “Party-mindedness”?
Did you accept the “don’t question the science” COVID package thinking of mandates, masking, social distancing, vaccine passports, isolation camps, vaccine efficacy, and of COVID’s origin lies? America’s COVID Response Was Based on Lies
Likewise, did you not question the package thinking of “climate experts” who announced their verdict that the world would end if we didn’t act now. Not long ago, woven into almost every weather report on local and mainstream media when major weather events (floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, droughts, and wildfires) occurred was the narrative that climate change was behind them – without ever mentioning large-scale natural phenomena such as solar cycles, ocean currents and volcanoes that have been affecting weather for many millennia.
The Green New scam was behind Biden’s $93 Billion Crony Climate Heist. Will declassifying carbon dioxide (necessary for all of life) as a pollutant and the end of carbon dioxide regulation mean the end of the Green New scam? Are we now seeing The End of the Green New Scam? | The Rude Awakening? Matt Ridely thinks so: The end of the climate cult – The Spectator World
(A climate expert I trust: https://judithcurry.com/about/)
Do you go along with the package thinking of the [John] Rawlsian theory of ad hoc justice that, for example, releases someone arrested 40 times, is not considered a “criminal” because of their minority status, and is released by a judge back onto the street where he sets a woman on fire?
Do you buy philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s notion that “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” – the package thinking that says that people are entirely products of their environment, of their society, of their age, and that’s why they do what they do. Therefore, they are not responsible for what they do because of external influence. That’s the package thinking behind the Rawlsian theory of justice and behind the executions and horrors of the French revolution working to change social environment.
Have you agreed with the insurrection thought package being espoused by The Seditious Six imploring military service members to “refuse illegal orders” thereby implying that orders coming out of the Trump administration are considered illegal by them and therefore military service members should disobey their commanding officer and join the club of the “Party-minded.” Remember, package thinking has only one train of thought – gaining and maintaining power over reality.
Have you agreed with the insurrection package thinking espoused previously by NYT’s op-ed columnist David Brooks? Do the values of your party-minded package thinking allow you to hamstring a DEMOCRACY! elected president with the rulings of party-minded federal court judges that will be overturned. Do the values of your party-minded package thinking justify the deep state, in the labyrinth of government, to sabotage the efforts of a Democratically elected President?
Do the values of your package thinking allow you to call for uprisings by any means necessary, to burn down buildings, to destroy property, to destroy businesses, to steal, do violence on others, to defund the police, to create pipe bombs, to assassinate? To ignore your conscience?
Did you accept the “Danger to our Democracy” thought package the media delivered during the last presidential election cycle? It should be obvious from the likes of David Brooks, that the “guardians of democracy” are the ones who want to tear it down.
Have bought into the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) playbook that conforms and coerces everyone to identify with Soviet style party-mindedness package thinking?
Have bought into viewing everything including humans through the lens of materialism?
Have you bought into package thinking so as to not be considered an outsider? Have you bought into conformity for conformity’s sake?
Is censorship the worst thing that can happen to a people? Or, is it “Party-mindedness?”
When we hear someone say crazy things, we might say “Yeah, right” and shrug it off. But when a group of people say crazy things with the smug air of certainty and people agree with said crazy things, we wonder “What in the world is going on?” and “Where is this coming from and where is it going?”
What happened in Russia didn’t stay in Russia. And a mind is still a terrible thing to hand over.
What happened in Russia didn’t stay in Russia . . . Britain Is Lost | ZeroHedge
~~~~~
You can put your ear to the road and hear what is quickly approaching. Download and listen to the following podcasts:
London is falling – or has it fallen already?
Liz Truss, the 56th prime minister of the United Kingdom, in her very first episode of The Liz Truss Show discusses how bad things are in Britain with a mass migration and economic doom loop – and how to defeat the deep state who have let this happen
https://justthenews.com/podcasts/liz-truss-show/london-falling-or-has-it-fallen-already
~~~
Interview with Professor Gary Saul Morson on Tolstoy, Faith, Package Thinking, and The Importance of Critical Thinking
Professor Gary Saul Morson shares his thought-provoking definition of an intellectual—someone who seeks truth independently, values ideas for their own sake, and stands apart from identity-driven thinking. Whether discussing classic Russian Literature or analyzing modern society, Professor Morson is one of the most insightful and consequential scholars of our time. Discover how this interview, and its exploration of timeless topics, can inspire bold, principled leadership and innovation within today’s business environment.
Interview with Professor Gary Saul Morson on Tolstoy, Faith, and The Importance of Critical Thinking – The Profitable Table Fed by Woolco Foods | Acast
~~~
The Moral Imagination – Michael Matheson Miller
Gary Saul Morson Ph.D.: Thinking Like Lenin
Vladimir Lenin’s ideas are alive and well today: Party-ness, politics as win-lose, zero-sum game, Who-Whom, rejection of truth, ideology, violence, philosophical materialism, adherence to lying.
Ep. 15: Thinking Like Lenin, with Gary Saul Morson
Is Hope Naïve in a World Like Ours? | Esau McCaulley & Gary Saul Morson at Northwestern
~~~~~
Quotes:
In the long run my observations have convinced me that some men, reasoning preposterously, first establish some conclusion in their minds which, either because of its being their own or because of their having received it from some person who has their entire confidence, impresses them so deeply that one finds it impossible ever to get it out of their heads. Such arguments in support of their fixed idea … gain their instant acceptance and applause. On the other hand whatever is brought forward against it, however ingenious and conclusive, they receive with disdain or with hot rage – if indeed it does not make them ill. Beside themselves with passion, some of them would not be backward even about scheming to suppress and silence their adversaries. I have had some experience of this myself. … No good can come of dealing with such people, especially to the extent that their company may be not only unpleasant but dangerous. Galileo Galilei
If the Brave New World cannot insert a square peg into a round hole, it will redefine “roundness” until a perfect fit results.
-Jerome Meckier, from Aldous Huxley: Satire and Structure
…a sense of unity is opposite of a sense of uniformity. Uniformity, where everyone “belongs”, uses the same cliches, thinks alike and behaves alike, produces a society which seems comfortable at first but is totally lacking in human dignity. Real unity tolerates dissent and rejoices in variety of outlook and tradition, realizes that it is man’s destiny to unite and not divide… Unity, so understood, is the extra dimension that raises the sense of belonging into genuine human life.
-Northrop Frye, from The Bush Garden
Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something. -Plato
“The past is our always-available counterculture, and it’s a rich one. Every minute you spend attending to something not-immediately-present, you are helping to build a counterculture.” ― Alan Jacobs
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Links:
Why are intellectuals — those whose thinking is supposed to be most refined — so susceptible to totalitarianism? Gary Saul Morson offers three explanations from the treasury of Russian literature.
https://tomklingenstein.com/mind-forgd-manacles-why-intellectuals-conform/
The greatest depiction of woke totalitarianism was written 150 years ago in Russia
Anti-Communism Week has been marked for November 2025. Writer-producer Julie Behling’s documentary “Beneath Sheep’s Clothing” warns of communism’s devastation: “Globally, communism claimed the lives of approximately 150 million people in the 20th century.”
‘Beneath Sheep’s Clothing’: Communism’s Capture Of America | ZeroHedge
Totalitarian governments cannot afford that its citizens remain autonomous persons. This poses a threat to their quest to consolidate power. Individual liberty threatens the theoretical, utopian foundations of promising the re-distribution of goods, and equality; communism ultimately fails to re-distribute the essence of human nature.
10 Habits of Mind to Avoid Ideological Thinking
Everyday Habits That Reveal a Low IQ (Backed by Psychology)
Everyday Habits That Reveal a Low IQ (Backed by Psychology) – YouTube
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Added 12-15-2025:
Sam Faddis (formerly with the CIA) sits down to talk about the reality of the ongoing Marxist revolution in America.
The Revolution Right Here At Home – by Sam Faddis
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Filed under 2025 Current Events, Communism, cultural Marxism, Culture, Democracy, History, Political Commentary, Politics, social commentary, totalitarianism Tagged with Communism, Democracy, groupthink, history, Marxism, mind control, package thinking, party-mindedness, politics, progressivism, russia, Soviet Union, totalitarianism, Valdimir Lenin