Category Archives: Culture war

Meghan Markle and the aristocracy of victimhood

How Meghan became the Princess of Postmodernism.

Article by Brendan O’Neill, in which he reviews Tom Bower’s new book, Revenge: Meghan, Harry and the War Between the Windsors.

Excerpts:

Isn’t it striking that the Trump administration was continually slammed by liberals for its promotion of ‘alternative facts’, whereas Meghan is loved by liberals despite also seeming to deal in ‘alternative facts’? The Trumpite Orwellian category of ‘alternative facts’ really means pushing ‘claims that do not conform to objective reality’, raged USA Today. ‘Traditionally known as false or misleading claims; also, lies’, it continued. Does that apply to the Duchess of Sussex, too? Are her claims about being an only child and getting married three days before she actually got married also ‘alternative facts’, false claims, misinformation?

[…]

This is not to say Meghan Markle is a liar. It is more complicated than that, and in a sense more sinister. She appears to be a product of the end of truth. She seems symbolic of a postmodern culture in which self-definition now takes precedence over objective reality. In which our narcissistic description of ourselves carries more weight than any anchored, measurable facts about ourselves. In which one can ‘identify’ as anything one chooses, however estranged your identification might be from material reality. A man can be a woman, despite having a penis, and Meghan Markle can be an only child, despite having siblings. That’s their truth, man.

[…]

Together Meghan and Harry have become globe-trotting moral reprimanders, with often unwittingly hilarious results. Meghan guest-edited Vogue, using it as a pulpit to preach about the evils of climate change. Yet she takes private jets the way the rest of us order Ubers, says Bower. Harry flew in a private jet to a Google camp in Sicily to speak about climate change. ‘His plane was just one of the 114 private jets, as well as a fleet of super yachts, that had ferried billionaires and celebrities to the festival.’ Later, at a press conference in Amsterdam to promote an eco-travel campaign (!), Harry is outraged when a journalist asks him about his private jet-setting. Ninety-nine per cent of my flights are commercial, he says. Actually, at least 60 per cent of your flights are private, he is informed. ‘No one is perfect’, he replies. A few days later the pair flew by private jet to attend the wedding of a close friend who was getting hitched to the son of an oil billionaire.

[…]

We may never know all the facts about some of these stories. But we should bear in mind a point Bower makes well – that in the woke ‘religion’ of Hollywood celebrities, ‘the concept of “universal truth” [is] false’. Indeed, Meghan herself has said that ‘life is about storytelling, about the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we’re told, what we buy into’. We all have the right to ‘create our own truth about the world’, she says. Behold the Princess of Postmodernism, for whom truth is whatever she says it is. I am the Truth – the final rallying cry of the narcissistic new aristocracy.

Our woke civil service is frustrating democracy

A "regime of managers" is taking hold

In 1941, an American author called James Burnham wrote a very perceptive book called “The Managerial Revolution”. Basically, he said that “regime of managers” was taking over the world. Meaning, in government, civil servants and, in business, the managers in the classical sense.

They were taking away power from the politicians (the representatives of the people) and from the business owners.

The result is a self-centred short-termism. This is on full display in the examples described by Ian Acheson here. He mentions the scandal of the Tavistock Centre for gender-identity services.

During her time as equalities minister, Badenoch was assured by senior officials that everything was just fine at the clinic and that there was more than a hint of ‘transphobia’ in the many concerning reports that were leaking out. She writes that she was advised ‘repeatedly’ that meeting Keira Bell, one of the victims of this state-funded ideology, would be ‘inappropriate’.

This is a familiar theme from my years as a senior government official. Civil servants will sometimes do everything possible to stop or at least slow the designs of the elected politicians who are supposed to be running their departments.

[…]

This Whitehall groupthink will be a problem for the new administration when we get our next prime minister. Many senior public-sector leaders now take their instructions on policy from internal networks of activists. This is not endemic, but it is entrenched. Myriad publicly funded pressure groups, like Stonewall, are now a part of the policymaking machine. But even the current government’s efforts to divest from them will not be enough. Officials that don’t agree are still held in thrall to these groups through fear of career-cancelling allegations of anything ending in ‘phobia’.

Waking Up in a Nightmare

Due to our loss of a connection to God

Article by Todd Hayen

Excerpts (my emphases):

This topic is complicated. Of course the powers that be want us all to think that if it weren’t for the WHO, doctors, vaccines, and medical science, half the world would be dead by now.

That may actually be true, but what exactly would be killing us?—the natural world?—or the man-made world? It would be difficult to make this assessment, due, obviously, to the fact that there is no place on earth not infected by the greedy, and often evil, hand of man.

Other than medical issues, how else has technology diminished our lives? From a very broad perspective, what has gone down hill as technology has advanced up hill? Violence? Disease? Depression? Suicide? Anxiety? A feeling of meaninglessness? Less true happiness (being high with adrenalin and other ingested drugs doesn’t count), Loss of family values? Child abuse? Drug abuse? Alcoholism? Pedophilia? Isolation and abandonment?

[…]

Technology has attributed, maybe more indirectly, to gun violence in all the fundamental ways this article suggests: the degradation of the culture, the focus on consumerism and materialism rather than human values and character, the isolation and abandonment of the young (particularly young males) the loss of soul and spirit, and thus the loss of human morals, i.e. the loss of love.

[…]

Can we train ourselves to not be so obsessed with consumerism? Or not be so obsessed with living forever (our relentless pursuit to perfect the human body with technology), or avoiding the commonly experienced pains and sufferings of the body? What is it from the past that we had that we no longer have that kept all of this in some sort of sublime order?

I believe we had more of an understanding of our spirit and soul than we do now. Yes, a lot of that awareness was brought to us through religion, but unfortunately as the materialist paradigm descended upon us religion lost its stature. We need to come back to a deep awareness of nature, and our part in it, to understand that we were designed to live and subsequently die a particular way (in harmony with nature and with an acute awareness of the mystery of creation surrounding us). We must learn to love again.

[…]

Not many people seem to be concerned about our loss of soul, our loss of humanity, our loss of being human, and our loss of a connection to God. Yes, I said it, the “God” word. I mean it too.

That, to me, is the real threat, and if not addressed properly, it will be responsible for our eventual demise.

The churches, at least those in the West, are failing to see this or, if they do, are failing to act on it. They will have to change course, and soon.

Jordan Peterson’s message to CEOs

Ditch the evil, satanic "woke" stuff, the DIE and the ESG

He rains down fire, brimstone and pro-free market slaps in the face. He quotes Jesus to them: “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked” (but then mistakenly seems to say that this is from the Sermon on the Mount – it’s not, it’s from Luke 12:48, but that’s just a minor quibble).

Here it is, the full 25 minutes in all their glory.

When you remove the sovereignty of God

you transfer this sovereignty to a totalitarian state

James Delingpole interviews Reverend Jamie Franklin about “Lessons On Freedom From [Fyodor] Dostoyevsky “.

At the 1:50 minute mark, Franklin summarises the insight of the Russian thinker and author with regard to the episode “The Grand Inquisitor” from “The Brothers Karamazov” thus:

Dostoyevsky realised that when you remove the sovereignty of God from a nation, a civilisation, you inevitably transfer this sovereignty to a totalitarian state . . . It’s what’s happening now in our country [the United Kingdom].

How to combat this? Near the end of the 9 minute video, Franklin explains:

Dostoyevsky says that you will often encounter objectionable thoughts [of others]. You will be tempted to take them by force. Jesus teaches us to take them by humble love.

Fourth Letter to My Vaccinated Friend

Article by James Kullander

It’s one thing that you got the jabs in the first place. It’s one thing if you’d been quiet about it. It’s one thing that you ignored my warnings about the health hazards of the jabs and about the sinister scheme to control and destroy humanity that’s been behind the entire injection campaign all along. But the main thing—the really big thing—is I still feel utterly bewildered by your jab-happy, proud, virtue-signaling collusion in this choreographed death march, which you’d joined right out of the gate with drum and fife and flag to show the world that you cared. You not only let it happen. You marched lockstep into the tyrannical maelstrom with self-righteous glee and a touch of cruelty for those of us who refused to turn our bodies over to the state to become guinea pigs in a vast and deadly experiment. How could you have been so misled?

Now open your eyes. Look around you. See what you’ve done? With your supposed compassion for your fellow man and imploring others to “do the right thing,” you and millions of others got suckered into participating with the dark forces that have ruined beyond comprehension so much of what’s precious and beautiful about life on Earth—free will, social connections, civil liberties, loving relationships, bodily autonomy, meaningful and rewarding work—on account of the lockdowns and fear-mongering predators ordering everyone to stay home, shut down our businesses, close our churches, shutter our schools, keep away from each other all the time. And get injected or else. The psychological and physical wounds are widespread, deep, and traumatic. And in many ways, especially with those of you who got the jabs, permanent. There’s no undoing what you’ve allowed to be done to you. The toxins in those jabs are there to stay.

[…]

I fear for your life. With so many unsuspecting jabbed victims of all ages dropping dead all over the world in streets, in offices, at home, on soccer fields and basketball courts, in hotels, in cars, I wonder if you, too, will be among them one day. There’s a little trick the unconscious mind sometimes plays. If we know someone we love is going to leave us, say a child going off to college or a spouse who’s decided to get a divorce, we can find ourselves either shutting down our emotions or picking a fight to dull the pain of being left. There are moments when I wonder if all the anger I’m harboring has something to do with me trying to dull the pain I’ll feel if you die from what you allowed to be injected into the blessed sanctuary that is your body.

More of this here.