bt-6060

@PostLeftWatch It's a lot like the dialog around Israel: You try to criticize Israel, and bam, "How dare you! This is anti-semitism, this is a crime against humanity!"

Ana Kasparian claims that in the period after George Floyd was murdered, there was "open racism against white people."

@LukeLea7 @HusseinAboubak That's rubbish. The whole thing got rolling when the Christian Church in Europe was stripped, often with great violence, of it's role as 'head-of-state'. And the Church fought that with all of it's might, and mostly lost.

@HusseinAboubak The liberal ideal of liberty and justice for all is biblical in origin. Even secular liberals of the Steven Pinker stripe must acknowledge this. There is no going from is to ought.

The defense of Western Civilization is back. A decade ago, the phrase was a minor embarrassment in educated company. It was the sort of thing a thoughtful person might believe but would not say at a faculty dinner, a sentiment confined to conservative magazines, Catholic intellectuals, and the diminishing population of Great Books enthusiasts who remembered what the curriculum had been before it was deconstructed. The intervening years have changed this. The sustained assault on the liberal arts from within the universities, conducted under various banners — CRT, decolonization, intersectionality, the whole apparatus that its opponents have learned to call ‘wokeness’ — has produced a counter-mobilization that now extends well beyond the conservative magazines where the concern was usually articulated. The rise of China as a competitor with no intention of adopting Western political norms, the importation of mass Islamist movements whose rejection of Western culture is their only identity, the realization, whether with joy or with tears, that the post-1945 liberal international order is collapsing from within — all of this has returned the question of Western civilization to the center of public argument with an urgency it has not possessed since the early Cold War or the publishing of Orientalism, and has generated a new library of books, manifestos, and institutional initiatives devoted to its defense, its redefinition, or its obsequies. But the defense, as it has taken shape, is starting to be riven by an internal contradiction that is likely to become another civil culture war between religious-cultural conservatives and Enlightenment liberals within the defense-of-the-West coalition. On one side stand the conservatives, the religious traditionalists, natural-law theorists, Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant intellectuals, and a growing number of secular thinkers who have arrived at religious conclusions by cultural rather than devotional routes and for whom Western civilization is fundamentally the civilization of the Bible and Athens, the long tradition of moral and metaphysical reflection that runs from Genesis and Homer through Augustine and Aquinas to the American founding, and for whom the Enlightenment, the scientific revolution, and the political achievements of modernity are intelligible only as fruits of this tradition, derivative accomplishments that cannot be sustained once they have been severed from the root that produced them. For these defenders, the crisis of the West is at bottom a spiritual crisis, a consequence of the abandonment of the theological and philosophical foundations on which the entire edifice was built, and the remedy is a recovery of the tradition’s deepest resources. On the other side stand the liberals — the heirs of the Enlightenment who have been mugged by the long revolution through the institutions they thought were theirs, thinkers like Steven Pinker, Francis Fukuyama, perhaps Jonathan Haidt, and the broader team of anti-woke classical liberals who watched in dismay as the institutions they had built and trusted turned against the principles of open inquiry, free speech, and rational discourse that they understood to be the core of the Western achievement. For these defenders, Western civilization is fundamentally the civilization of the Enlightenment — the tradition of critical reason, empirical science, individual liberty, and institutional self-correction that emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and whose greatest accomplishment was precisely the liberation of the human mind from the authority of tradition, scripture, and ecclesiastical power. The religious inheritance is, in this account, not the root but the darkness that the Enlightenment outgrew — historically important, perhaps even indispensable as a precondition, but not the thing itself, and certainly not something to which the civilization should return. For these defenders, the crisis of the West is a crisis of nerve and institutional capture, a failure to uphold the Enlightenment’s own standards against both the woke left that has abandoned reason for identity and the religious right that would replace one form of authority with another. If anything, the crisis is exactly the return of the darkness of religious dogmatism that the Bible-loving conservative wants to recover. The two camps, on occasion, cooperate tactically — they share enemies, they share platforms, they may co-sign letters — but their visions of what they are defending are not merely different but, at a fundamental level, incompatible, and the incompatibility becomes manifest at the point where the defense must move from opposition to affirmation, from what we are against to what we are for. The conservative cannot accept a definition of Western civilization that treats its theological foundations as outgrown scaffolding; the liberal cannot accept a definition that treats the Bible as a serious book. Each suspects the other of defending a truncated version of the whole, and each is right — though not in equal measure, and not for the reasons either supposes.

@hissgoescobra It's not a serious policy propsal, that's not it at all. It's a PR campaign to make California the boogie man of Republican politics.

This is completely illegal. You can’t deny an entire state Medicaid reimbursement. There are specific procedures when there’s an issue with an individual person’s claim. This will get shot down in court immediately. JD Vance is a dictator wanna-be without the charisma.

@AlexLuck9 The hospital ship never made it to Greenland. and The Trump Battlships will never happen.

USN now intends to keep buying Arleigh Burkes for maintaining fleet numbers while planning for the acquisition of 15 (now) nuclear powered "Trump battleships". This is complete lunacy. news.usni.org/2026/05/11/new…

@ericweinstein It's Bread and Circuses, my friend. Bread and Circuses. And we all know that this kind of shit is best when it's dribbled out, like Geraldo doing Al Capone's vault.

There are two eras of disclosure: A) Ambiguous Photos, Videos & Stories of poor quality. B) Material evidence made available to scientists. My take? Real disclosure hasn't started. A. can be dragged on forever. B. might move like lightning. That is, if it ever begins at all.

@diffrentpork @ContraPoints That's just wrong. A whole lot of white people saw a Black Man in The White House and went crazy. Sure, they were already racist. But many radicalized because of Obama, and that's been a bad thing. The GOP has not been shy to recruit them. "Obama to Trump" is a red herring.

@ContraPoints I don't believe in a "racist backlash" bc people were already racist, they didn't suddenly become racist bc of Obama. Democrats lost the independents. Nobody seems to want to even try to understand the Obama to Trump voters. I don't understand them either but I at least want to.

It’s become a standard leftist view that Trumpism was a backlash to Obama not being socialist enough and I… don’t think that’s what happened lol

@ContraPoints What happened is Reagan. And for the 50 years since he got the ball rolling, wealth has been going to the top. Every Fed Tax cut has been a gift to the rich. The GOP have relentlessly screwed everyone else.

@JGreg34 @atwaSDOK @SwannMarcus89 And then we have Trump, the single greatest dumpster fire-maker in US history. And Republicans adore Trump! - he's doing what they like.

@atwaSDOK @SwannMarcus89 The exact opposite occurs. Hoover ended his term in 1933 with the Great Depression, Reagan ended with the S&L Crash, Clinton left with a boomimg economy and 2 straight years of budget surpluses. Bush left with the Financial crisis. Obama fixed it and left a recovered economy.

I swear to Christ the Democratic Party’s message at this point is “all of the most progressive places are unaffordable shitholes where nobody can afford an apartment, therefore you should vote for us”

@SwannMarcus89 You don't think the fact that so many people DO want to live in Seattle or San Francisco, etc, doesn't mean anything?

They’re probably going to win this election anyway (although gerrymandering could fuck them) because Trump is a psycho, but long term progressive democrats have literally nothing to offer and can point to zero successes in any places where their policies are implemented

@tunguz @Noahpinion That's funny, because the deficit was much reduced during Obama (and Clinton). Trump, of course, is bankrupting America. Which is not surprising, because going bankrupt is how Trump rolls.

@Noahpinion He sucked. He normalized identity politics, borrowing our way out of problems, and vibes over substance. We are reaping the full “benefits” of that crap today.

A lot of people on this website have ODS. Normies love the man.

@NormOrnstein It happens to be a coincidence that the interpretation of the law always agrees with my personal preferences.

Roberts would be more appropriate as a judge on the South African apartheid Court

@CarolLeonnig @KDilanianMSNOW As others have pointed out, it's only a leak if it's true.

NEWWWW >>> FBI Director has hit panic button this week, FBI sources say, ordering his former and current detail be polygraphed and avoiding key staff. He's in race to find leakers -- and protect his job, they tell me and @KDilanianMSNOW ms.now/news/kash-pate…

@olivia1968jm @SeminoleScout7 @PatrickHeizer HW was the last of the Normies. Who could forget "Voodoo Economics?"

@6060Bt @SeminoleScout7 @PatrickHeizer He does deserve credit. He’s been the only decent republican president since Eisenhower. Not sure about Ford as he wasn’t there long enough.

Every Democrat since Carter has decreased the federal deficit. Every Republican since Eisenhower has increased the federal deficit.

@noclador No. It's not.

It's good to be allied with Israel.

@Noahpinion But dropping Nukes on the place you're trying to steal to grow your empire, and which you are downwind of, is the definition of shitting in your own bed.

Russia really has two options left: 1) accept a war outcome that everyone will recognize as a loss, or 2) use strategic nuclear weapons on Ukrainian cities. These bloggers are advocating for (2), but they are too scared to say it explicitly.

@smkn5z8fcx @queenie4rmnola @LEBassett You think you are smart, and everyone else is stupid.

@queenie4rmnola @LEBassett You mean the Jim Crow era that was run by democrats, right? Take a little bit of your TDS time and read about history. The civil rights act was passed by republicans, just as slavery was ended by republicans, but you go ahead and keep projecting.

This is how Reconstruction ended and Jim Crow began last time

@MultipolarA @Doveofwar @andrewsweiss @eugene_rumer You're right. The numbers are probably higher. It's like Covid, we pretend that it's not happening...

@6060Bt @Doveofwar @andrewsweiss @eugene_rumer Don’t be ridiculous. No where near those numbers

Big news - our team at the Carnegie Endowment has launched a multi-year effort to examine The Future of Russia Power. The first paper is an in-depth look by @eugene_rumer at how the war in Ukraine will transform Kremlin threat perceptions in profoundly destablizing ways. 1/x

@RonBrownstein That's because no matter how much Trump sets the world on fire, he's still the one who says the hateful things that they want to hear. When other GOP pols say the Trump words, it's not the same as when Trump does it - Because they know Trump really means it.

The Indiana results further reduces the limited odds that any Republican will separate from Trump, even in places where his agenda is deeply unpopular. The CA Gov debate, w/Hilton & Bianco hugging Trump in a state where his approval is ~30%, is a real world measure of that impact

@SeminoleScout7 @PatrickHeizer Right: And in an alternate reality, Newt Gingrich forced those income, corporate and fuel tax increases onto Bill Clinton. If anything, HW Bush gets some credit, he did a tax increase too, and then the GOP voted him off the island.

@PatrickHeizer Newt's Congress forced Bill Clinton to have a balance budget: Bush was a mixed bag. He took a balanced budget into a deficit and closed the gap leading into the Great Recession. Reagan was also a mixed bag and continued to close the gap as the economy improved.