HALF-FULL REPORT 09/15/23
New Lamps for Old
The New Left Wants Your Freedom
Mitt Romney
Mitt announced that he would retire from politics at the end of his senate term. Conservatives in Utah hate the man because he backstabbed Trump and enabled Trump’s first impeachment, is deeply mired in Ukrainian corruption, and is a critical driver of mass immigration into the United States. His allegiance is to globalism through ESG capital controls, not the United States.
Romney is deeply tied to the same Ukrainian bribery scandal affecting the Biden family, and Mitt’s ties are the only reason Biden has not yet been impeached. Mitt profited at the expense of the United States, and his ties to Burisma, headed by a top Russian intelligence agent, helped give Putin the courage to attack Ukraine.
As the Babylon Bee puts it, the Democrats are now panicking as they try to find a replacement for Mitt.
I met Mitt during his presidential campaign, and my daughter created and directed the Students for Mitt campaign throughout Ohio. She worked her tail off, partly because I endorsed Mitt then.
Well, I was wrong. I failed to look beneath his story and publicity machine and did not see when I looked him in the eye.
Mitt is a fraud, and I fooled myself into supporting this inglorious Bast**rd. I directed my daughter down a blind alley with Mitt and cost her tremendous time when time in her life was most valuable. I can’t restore the loss.
If I am wrong, then let me know on the forum. But as I see it, Goodbye, Mitt, you were the Russian mole all alone. Burn in Hell with your 30 pieces of silver.
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Auto Workers Strike
First, it was Hollywood, then UPS, and now the UAW. Labor is frustrated and feeling its strength. For the first time, strikes against the Jeep Wrangler plant in Toledo, the Ford Bronco and Ranger plant in Michigan, and the Chevrolet midsize pickup truck plant in Missouri are underway at the same time.
The auto companies now offer a 20% wage increase and some benefit changes. The union wants a leveling of wages between junior and senior level workers more in line with European practices.
Only the paint shops in the targeted plants are on strike, a decision that might work in labor’s favor. Curiously, the UAW is not striking electric vehicle factories.
The United States is economically slipping, and Biden might not be a functional president much longer. The UAW did not, and does not endorse Biden. If Biden runs for reelection, he will need UAW support. The union is counting on White House intervention.
From the car company perspective, new cars are not moving, making it an excellent time to address labor practices. They constantly seek more freedom to control the workforce and make production rate changes in light of changing supply chains.
Automation continues to de-skill the shop floor, lowering the investment in individual workers. Just as with the Port of Long Beach strike, workers are trying to stop investments in automation. History says that their efforts will fail.
The union has seats on the boards of the big three, especially GM, as forced by Obama. These seats will influence the outcome.
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Modern Leftism
This HFR is Part Three in our series on the book and related material, Beautiful Trouble. The book, associated workbooks, games, flashcards, and online seminars are used to define a new leftist push within Western societies.
Chances are high that local Democrat operatives and media members near you have already been trained using the book. Leftists are playing online wargames based on their content and taking it seriously.
The following is a discussion of leftism as a theology that begets the religion of modern Marxism. Old-school Marxism was about economics; modern Marxism is far more spiritual. Hardly a word about economics is being taught to young leftists. They happily accept massive corruption among their leaders because the new Marxism defines corruption as anything moving the narrative right.
Extorting money through foreign aid is acceptable to leftists as long as the result aligns with their politics. Anything moving the needle towards individualism and self-determination is to attacked with tooth and nail.
Modern leftism is a theology built around the central heresy that God is in a state of becoming through a long struggle and spiral toward the Omega point or perfect state of nature. When the complete state of nature is achieved, mankind will enjoy a utopian state. If asked to interpret Genesis, they would find that the snake is the hero and God the villain for hiding the secret of the Tree of Knowledge. Power is realized by taking a second bite of the apple and becoming Woke to hidden knowledge.
This form of thinking is called progressivism and is a form of Gnosticism.
Contrast this with the Abrahamic theologies in which God is eternal, perfect, and now and forever, without end. He is the Alpha and the Omega already.
Leftism is theology with progressive Marxism as the actual religion because it explains the relationship of the Divine with the mundane and establishes the purpose of existence and those duties required by the goal. It has a morality and code of ethics, including values taught between generations.
The only thing it lacks is recognition by the Supreme Court that it is a religious theology and, therefore, should not be promoted and endorsed by the United States Government under the 1A.
The central concept overlooked by the courts is that the Divine is defined differently under Marxism than it is under systems. The sleight of hand, of course, is Marxism’s replacement of God with nature. It is common for a leftist to claim to be a spiritualist who finds their deity in the natural world, among the trees, stars, and mountains.
In the leftist view, the Divine is broken into untold millions of shards, and the leftist must find and assemble those shards. This is also a Hermetic belief system where practitioners seek to find the good within the criminal; the humanity within the self-indulgent drug user is much like Medieval alchemy. The purpose of alchemy was to find the gold within the lead or convert the lead to gold, as they shared the intersectionality of being heavy.
They call their theology “our democracy.” If there is one concrete purpose, it is to seize the means of production from the individual and place it in the commons. The Divine is the commons, the oneness that surrounds all. “Our democracy” is interested in stakeholder capitalism, a movement of the means of production one step closer to the commons.
The mission is to abolish hierarchy (privilege) and expand egalitarianism to free the shards of the Divine trapped in the prison of the mundane. Reordering society and replacing the rational with the purely emotive is their desired utopia.
Progressivism, leftism, and Marxism are forms of the theology of Pathos. It is a religion of emotional feeling.
But how can it be both Gnostic and Hermetic, as these are opposing concepts?
The interaction of the Gnostic and Hermetic forms the core of their knowledge system and path to discovery. It follows the familiar thesis-antithesis-synthesis path where the rational and factual become “something in the middle” when confronted with Pathos.
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How it Works
Leftism is a simple belief system. It must be, given its practitioners. It is also predictable as it moves through cycles of the commons to the material world and the culture in repeating cycles.
Here is an example of notice being given this week to the business world that the narrative has formally shifted from ESG (culture) to Sustainability (materialism) for the benefit of the commons (the deity).
The shift does not get more official than this:
First, leftism is triadic and has a high gamma function. If the reader is not a statistician, it has inherent stability. The great commons, the universe, or nature, creates the material and rational world and the cultural world of emotions, or Pathos. The commons substitute for God, although scattered throughout the universe in shards of The One. To be one with nature is to be in communion with the great commons. This natural truth is the essence of the faith in mind over matter, but emotion penetrates all like a field. Sometimes, this is called a resonance or aura.
Leftism is predictable as a cycle from the commons to the material and the culture before repeating the process. The recent ESG cycle emerged in 2005 and concludes with the transition to materialism.
Statism, or the expansion of state power, is considered the most superb form of materialism. We see this in Ukraine as the Russian state exerts a materialist claim on Ukraine, using the justification of the Pathos of Russian-speaking Ukrainians to enlarge the Russian commons:
Commons –→ State Power –→ Culture
Continental philosophers have long preferred the German word Geist to culture. It means the hegemonic spirit in this case.
Those who see justification in the old trope that Russia must continually expand its borders to natural land barriers and, therefore, thwart invasions miss a critical point. Russia seeks to expand state power over the commons, and it views the entire world, BRICS and all, as the commons.
There will not be peace should Ukraine be ceded to Russia. The leftist ideology will not allow peace. It cannot.
The state is to be expanded evangelically and, failing that, by force. The state grows until it becomes too cumbersome and suffocating, and then it is to be replaced with a new state harboring the same intent but with modern technology. This core Marxist ideology suggests that the old USSR was shut down and replaced with the new Russian Federation by design. The motivation was delivered by the Star Wars program, where it became clear that an economy based on slabs of steel poured cannot compete with an economy based on information pumped by microchips.
This is why the USSR ended peacefully. It was an evolutionary rebirth, not an end. As Russians see it, contradictions within the old Soviet system led to new ideas, a new commons, a new state, and a new society. The USSR did not die but was born again in the eternal spiral towards the Omega point.
This is important as Russia views itself as the next version of the former empire, intent on expanding the commons. Just look at their reaction to Western resistance in Ukraine. They expanded the commons through the BRICS.
Leftism is consistent and predictable. The opposite is agile. The response to the Left is agility. Conservatives must teach children the concept of agility in all things.
What happens when leftism overruns a culture? When China invaded Cambodia during the 1980s, they killed the men and masse raped the women to produce mixed-race offspring and assert dominance.
When Russia overran Berlin during the 1940s, they killed the men and masse raped the women to produce mixed-race offspring and assert dominance.
Why?
Because of the dialectic, the native and cultured population was the established thesis, and the invading soldiers directed to brutally rape with aggressive malice were the antithesis. The resulting mixed children are the synthesis.
Raping a culture into the dustbin of history is consistent with the Marxist philosophy of moving barbarians into the city center. The modern term for the practice of expanding the commons by replacing private property with the state in a geographic area was coined by Bill Ayers. The process is called community organizing.
Europe is having its community organized right now. So, too, are parts of Canada and the United States. Leftist mayors oppose migration into their cities because migrants generate resistance to the dialectic, which empowers their control over the culture. It is good, they say, when mass migration exposes contradictions in other states, initiating a dialectic cycle. But woke cities, such as New York, Paris, Chicago, or Toronto, already maintain a population of resident savages that force Western civilization back towards a more primitive condition.
From the leftist position, introducing savages into the cities forces the native culture to give up freedom in exchange for security. They use the example of traffic laws. One cannot just drive in any way in Western countries. There are laws, stop signs, speed limits, and such.
Giving up some freedom and property rights to maintain officially sanctioned freedom is called Sustainability. Freedom is turned over to the commons, which inculcates regulations through the state to produce a desired culture.
Abortion is critical to Sustainability, according to the Left. Some children must be killed for the benefit of the commons. This is primitive thinking and is consistent with sacrificing children to Moloch to benefit the commons or just throwing kids into volcanos. The more important and valuable an item that is returned to the commons, the more devoted and virtuous the giver of the sacrifice. The recent Supreme Court decision returning abortion law to the fifty states appears to have created a sustainability panic among the Left.
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Alchemy
The Dialectic process is a form of alchemy used to create gold from base metals. Human suffering and privation move the culture closer to a state of nature, where all the leftist deity shards are found. “Suffering for thee means goodness for me.”
Suffering increases social knowledge through reflexivity. Reflexivity appears to have a flexible definition but most often implies a feedback loop where an opinion held by the masses creates a new culture. For instance, the mass belief that an energy shortage is looming drives people towards energy sources that will create energy shortages.
Narrative control creates reflexive control as a form of dialectic. The narrative is the alchemist’s secret knowledge used to create value from nothing. Hidden knowledge behind the narrative, or propaganda, reorders society to free the divine from the mundane.
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Woke
To awaken, to become Woke, is to align with the alchemy in the form of the current dialectic. Whatever was woke last year might no longer be woke this year as the rate of cycling through the leftist triad of commons→state→culture is accelerating due to communication technology.
Alchemy, and therefore Wokism, requires the transition from science to scientism.
This 1:03 minute video of a Richard Feynman lecture explains science:
The core concept is that a theory is wrong if it disagrees with an experiment. Experimental results provide a truth test to the theory.
Scientism works differently and, in fact, just the opposite. In scientism, the originator of a theory matters more than actual experimental results. If experimental results disagree with the theory, the experiment is thrown out. Not the theory.
The global response to Covid-19 is an example. Never mind that the virus was not nearly as lethal as governments claimed or that the safe and effective jabs were far from this, global officials said that the jabs were necessary for survival.
How many people recognized the substitution of scientism for science and went on to take the jabs? It probably depends upon their political jurisdiction’s alignment with the leftist triad. Very few who skipped the jabs regret their decision.
Another example of scientism is seen in the 2020 elections. The Democrat Party and Mike Pence declared that the election counts were valid, regardless of the actual votes counted. Contradictory tallies were shredded. The commons demands that the state assert dominance over the culture and the number of votes. The full wrath of the state is being used reflexively to make the dialectic emerge as the truth.
Or, as Dr. Fauci expressed scientism so well, “I am the science.” Whatever the government declares is now the science, and those who object will be arrested, imprisoned, denied services, and killed.
The Left intends to build a perfect society by changing people and creating perfect people by changing society. This is reflexivity—loops within loops using circular time.
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The Social Contract
The social contract is Rousseau’s old and commonly used word, which today means the system of looping cycles that create the social construct. The social construct means the culture, as normies speak.
Russia is attempting to change the social construct of Ukraine and uses cultural norms as justification for the savagery.
Core Marxist beliefs insist that the social contract is only changed by overthrowing existing hierarchies. Whether it is that pesky blue-hair harping about the patriarchy, school boards asserting parental rights over children, or Russian artillery shells smashing everything within range, Marxism believes change requires destroying existing systems.
This is opposed to incremental growth or market-based change that occurs in millions or even billions of small steps, each evaluated immediately through economic calculations.
In summary, the master and slave must exist simultaneously; the civilized must be overrun by the savage; the rational must be challenged by the emotional so that the social contract advances and spirals to the Left’s final goal—the Omega Point. Russia’s expansion of the commons in Ukraine requires reducing the commons in the West. Introducing savagery into the city center forces the West to transform into a security state, reducing the Western commons.
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Hamaq and Hamas
These are Islamic concepts introduced into leftism. Hamaq means brutal, stupid anger, while Hamas means target, righteous anger. Changing the social contract requires turning anger into action. The Hamaq is observed as BLM burns and loots yet another city center. Hamas is more strategic and dangerous as it involves the replacement of public officials, rigging elections, or special military operations.
Consistent with leftist triadic thought, Hadaq and Hamas are the antithesis of an existing hierarchy. They are used as alchemical tools.
For example, the concept of Hamas placed radical leftists in the city halls and governorships of states and cities. The Hadaq was unleashed as riots and mobs intent on destroying cultural artifacts. This justified the Hamas to remove cultural artifacts and replace them with new ones, reflecting the new social contract.
Governments did not constrain or move against BLM rioters because they were considered the necessary hammer to blow against the hierarchical anvil, allowing the Hamas to act.
The state’s power is expanded over culture, and the commons expands by erasing knowledge of the prior world.
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Hashtag Politics
Hashtags like this “#” typically are proper nouns that social media use to organize ideas. They create interactivity, or intersections, between people and groups interested in the same topic.
Their purpose is to frame a narrative like a Hollywood movie often begins by framing a scene. They start conversations and have a significant impact on narrative control.
A new division within political science and propaganda has emerged through hashtags and related concepts like Facebook Friends, where expert hashtag curation establishes the boundaries of accepted conversation.
For instance, Twitter, now X, was directed by censors who were later outed as FBI agents to shadow-ban or block #vaccine if the phrase safe and effective was not included in the attached tweet. Shadow banning limits the distribution of a tweet; sometimes, only the original poster can see it.
Other tools change the order of tweets on a timeline based on the user’s prior hashtags. In this way, concepts are stacked and compounded so that, for instance, getting the jab is associated with a list of virtues, from saving children to supporting Ukraine.
When used skillfully, the hashtag creates the new universes leftists slide into. If it looks like they are constantly interacting with an imaginary world, they are.
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Intellectuals and Power
Intellectuals and academics are taught to expose the wheels of power behind hierarchies and become new agents of power. The idea is straight from the French philosopher Michel Foucault.
In this view, power is a force that exists everywhere in the universe and flows like a river. It is not quite a field like magnetism and is said to be the source of the Divine Cosmic consciousness. It is diffuse, decentralized, and invisible.
The intellectual communicates with this power, making it Gnostic, as it acts to shape everything in the world. While communicating with this consciousness, the intellectual creates knowledge to guide the path of power.
Intellectuals, therefore, provide the ideas, technology, and tools to direct the power in the service of the dialectic. They conceptualize new ways for the power to flow through the world and towards the commons by making it accessible.
When a university think tank or other government agency goes woke, their mission changes from discovering new knowledge, advancing policy, or enforcing laws to the new mission of directing the flow of power towards the collective by smashing through the resistance of past hierarchies.
Universities begin to fail at their primary mission as they first become Woke, and the slide continues. New York law enforcement guided BLM rioters to political targets instead of protecting the city. Implanted federal agents censored free and open scientific discussion and organized mass hysteria over COVID-19 so that their candidate would win the election.
Woke companies fail financially, but their leaders are praised for sacrificing the enterprise to promote the “common good.” Entire nations like China push investment into zombie enterprises to direct power towards their commons. Success is not measured economically.
Society begins to revert to a state of nature as systems fail and trust in institutions collapses. It’s not by accident or incompetence. The manipulation of power towards a collective mediocrity is by design and theological intent.
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Memes
Memes are self-replicating snippets of cultural information that spread from mind to mind, network to network, and generation to generation.
The word comes from the Ancient Greek mimena, meaning something imitated. Before the internet, a meme was known as an advertising jingle, a catchy phrase, or a fashion trend. Sticky, well-created political slogans are memes.
Memes are used on social media to rapidly and critically point out where the source of power is and where it is flowing. The best memes are brief and to the point, often funny.
Leftists the world over try to ban memes. For instance, posting a meme critical of the Russian government or military will land a person in jail for life. In North Korea, a meme will get a person killed.
But for conservatives, the meme is a sharp weapon that exposes scientism and corruption. The lack of truth due to the lack of fundamental science and the corruption of power tolerated among leftist officials creates a real problem.
An urgency to censor is running through the Left as their theology cannot tolerate an assault from rationalism.
In other words, the Left always and forever tries to drive the dialectic to the Left. Memes push it back to the right.
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Narrative Power Analysis
All power relations have a narrative dimension, and control of the narrative provides control over the actual power. English departments in woke universities teach students how to analyze literature for power dynamics and challenge them.
High schools in Ontario, Canada, are removing all library books written before 2008. The year 2008 to a leftist is much like 1776 to a conservative. It marks the grand return of power to the commons driven by the financial crash.
Humans are hardwired for stories, and stories, in turn, create culture.
A proper leftwing story creates meaning by channeling Pathos. Pathos, the emotional force, defines what is expected, legitimate, and authentic.
To be authentic is to allow the Pathos to flow through. Facts are not necessary; only the emotions felt in the heart matter. The currency of a story is, therefore, its effect, not its accuracy.
Where conservatives have the urge to protect the young from pornographic materials and other corrosive literature, the leftist uses literature and the narrative to attack social hierarchies, especially families, churches, and an individual’s concept of a unique, individual soul.
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What is to be Done
The Forum
Wow. Forum responses to this series of articles have been tremendous. Thank you!
Your valuable comments and insights have led me to analyze your thoughts for hours. Please critique this HFR aggressively; your insights will be used to help answer the question, What is to be Done?
We are almost finished with the current leftwing theory taught in Beautiful Trouble. Soon, we will discuss their strategy, tactics, logistics, and support systems. Leftist theory has advanced considerably since the 20th Century, yet it remains fundamentally cyclical and predictable. Borrowing from their concept of Hadaq and Hamas, by challenging their theories, we corrode their Hamas.
Mike Ryan is a chemical engineer servicing the Iron and Steel, Minerals, Heavy Chemicals, and Fiber industries.