A blast from the past from Barack Obama’s old press secretary Robert Gibbs in 2010:

During an interview with The Hill in his West Wing office, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs blasted liberal naysayers, whom he said would never regard anything the president did as good enough.

“I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs said. “I mean, it’s crazy.”

The press secretary dismissed the “professional left” in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right, saying, “They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality.”

And my response at the time:

He and his boss should have thought about all this when these left wingers became his base. Those of us who are products of the 1960’s and early 1970’s know that the modern (or more accurately post-modern) American left was birthed in that era, and has been working on making its tenets reality ever since. Gibbs is either exceedingly dense or intellectually dishonest not to know this…

Then there’s his statement that “They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality.” Isn’t eliminating the Pentagon what these people have been fighting for since the days of Berkeley and Kent State? Why should they give up now? Didn’t they vote for Obama believing that he would get us out of Iraq? (Let’s throw in Afghanistan and do it right!) As far as Canadian health care is concerned, that’s a compromise for a true leftist, because the real model is a Soviet style system, both single payer and single provider.

Now look who’s in the driver’s seat of the left…

In some ways the “defund the police” movement is an extension of the “abolish the Pentagon” movement of old, and the radicals of old didn’t have much use for the police either.  Most of their leaders had more sense than to call for the defunding/abolition of the police: they knew they’d need the police later if and when they came to power.

As the Moody Blues would say, yesterday’s dreams are tomorrow’s sighs, and if we elect Joe Biden, we’re going to find that out the hard way.

In view of California Governor Gavin Newsom’s signing into law the lightening of penalties for pedophilia, this prediction, from 2016, bears repeating:

What I am about to say will probably make some people blow their stack.   That isn’t hard to do these days.  But I think this is the time to say it.  We live in a society with two polar opposite ideas on this subject, and they cannot stay conjoined indefinitely.

I’ve consistently defended the Christian sexual ethic on this blog.  One important corollary to that is that everyone is inviolate in their person with regard to sexual activity, i.e., it’s entirely voluntary.  I want to make it clear that I support that corollary.  That’s the underlying assumption to things such as the prohibition against rape, molestation, and sexual harassment.  The persistence of these is part of our post-Christian condition.

On the other hand, we have the pervasive ethic these days that sexual activity is a necessity for life (not in a procreative sense,) and that one is defined by same.  A corollary to that is that people who refrain, temporarily or permanently, are a) not really human and b) need to be brought into line, most usually these days by peer pressure, or now the internet.

Given the realities of the human condition, I believe that sooner or later society will realise that, as my father would say, we “have a no-fit going here.”  Our educational system, which is expected in inculcate all kinds of values it was not designed to do, will be brought to bear on making sex education not only a “how-to” project but to make sure the lesson is carried out.

When that happens, the scandal such as is unfolding at St. Andrew’s will no longer be about doing something wrong as it will be about doing something outside of proper channels.  In other words, after all the years of such scandals rocking the Catholic Church, boarding schools, etc., they will no longer be scandals, and the victims who have not “kept up” with the times will be left in the lurch.

Whether our civilisation, such as it is, will survive to that point is another matter altogether.  But the business of same-sex civil marriage shows that public opinion, led by élite opinion, can turn around very quickly under the right conditions.  As always, I doubt most people are ready to face a societal flip of that kind, but just because we’re not ready to face it doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

John Law is possibly the most important man in history you’ve never heard of. He’s also the sort of character you’d find implausible if you read about him in a novel. A gambler who killed a man in a duel in Bloomsbury Square then escaped from jail and fled Britain. A Scottish economist who helped create modern finance, paved the way for Britain’s global domination and maybe even caused the French Revolution.

Imagine a world without the USA…