Last year I featured a Jordan Peterson video on the crimes of communism. This year, here’s a different Jordan B. Peterson video on the crimes of communism. This one takes a couple of minutes before he gets to the question.
Quick pull quote: “Here’s a fun story: Do you know that it is now illegal for physicians to list starvation as the cause of death for a Venezuelan child in a hospital?”
More information on the Holodomor can be found in Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. Conquest estimated that for the entire Collectivization/”De-Kulakization”/Holodomor period (including the Soviet suppression of the Kazakhs and the Crimean Tartars, etc.) some 14.5 million died due to the actions of the Soviet government.
I know that November 7 is also designated as Victims of Communism Day, but the crimes of communism are so vast that there’s no reason we can’t observe Victims of Communism Day twice a year.
Here’s a short, interesting interview segment of Jordan Peterson with Dave Ramsey talking about why he stopped being a socialist, and how conservatives have trouble articulating their principles.
“I was very young, when I was 16, 13 to 16, I worked with a Socialist Party in the province of Alberta, which is where I grew up. I was fortunate enough to know the leader of the Socialist Party in in my home province of Alberta, who was the only opposition member of parliament in the whole province. It was like 36 conservatives and one socialist, and the only reason the people in my home district voted for this man was because he was a good man. He was a labor leader, and most of the socialists at that time in Canada were former labor leaders, and they did stand at least in part for the genuine interests of the working class.
“I worked with them for a few years, and I got disenchanted, in part, because when I went to the conventions of the party, I met the radical types, and they were the same as they are now. I thought ‘What the hell’s up with you people? You’re just bitter and resentful.'”
“You claim to be caring for the poor but that’s just a lie. You’re just bitter and resentful.”
“So that set up cognitive dissonance in my imagination. I thought, well, if this end of the political distribution has the moral upper hand why the hell is it producing all these resentful activists?”
I served on the Board of Governors of this little college that I went to, Grand Prairie Regional College. And all of the people who were on the board were people, I presume, people like you. They were all owners of small businesses, and they’d been successful. And the towns that I grew up in in Northern Alberta were, like, 50 years old. You know, they’d just been scraped out of the prairie. It was the last of the frontier. And everyone there was an immigrant, so most of the people who had started these small businessmen were immigrants who came there with nothing and built something. And even though I didn’t share their political views, I found them individually admirable. And I also found that the same applied to the small businessman that I worked for at that point. I thought “Well, you’ve actually done something with life.” And there’s a solidity there, a productive solidity exactly. And so it was at that point that I realized I didn’t know anything, and just stopped working on the political front.
“I realized that it was the people who had built productively that had the moral upper hand. They might not have been very good at expressing their ethos, intellectually or explicitly, but in terms of their character, they had they had established a victory.”
“I think this is actually the problem on the conservative front broadly across the world. They’re people of solid character, but they’re not good at articulating the foundations of their ethos, and then when the radical leftists come along and take them apart ethically, they don’t know what to do.”
“Someone comes up to you on the street and says ‘Justify marriage!’ and you think, well, I thought we sorted that out like 25,000 years ago. You don’t know what to say, you have no idea how to justify marriage.”
Discussion of Christmas tree symbolism (light of Christ in the darkest time of the year) snipped.
“When you’re married, you’re acting out a very deep ethos as well, and you don’t know what it is, but everyone’s agreed on it. And a lot of your conservative virtues are things that everybody’s already agreed on. And so when an intellectual comes along and says justify that, you don’t know what the hell to say, and then you can be picked apart.”
Same thing for the profit motive. “If you’re generating profit, it’s obviously the case that that can be used by you for narrow personal reasons, right? You can buy a you can buy a yacht and fill it with supermodels and cocaine if you want. But people don’t.”
“We’re in a situation where you probably do have to learn to articulate it. Because what’s happening is that that central ethos, that traditional ethos, even voluntary exchange, it’s under such vicious attack that if you don’t learn to defend it and articulate it, it’s going to be taken from you.”
“The problem is, you probably have something better to do. But it is doesn’t matter, because at the moment if you abdicate that responsibility, then the radicals are going to take it.” As they did in education.
Bill Maher is a liberal Democrat who has been increasingly red-pilled following the Flu Manchu lockdowns and his party’s increasing embrace of censorship. So when I saw that he had Jordan Peterson, a veritable walking red-pill dispensing machine, on his interview show Club Random, that definitely piqued my interest.
I’ve only watched a small fraction thus far, but it looks like it’s going to be another busy day, so here it is.
BM: I read a quote from Justin Trudeau that was so dumb—
JP: Which one?
I was going to do a post rounding up the sudden spat of absolutely unhinged attacks on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has had the unmitigated gall to actually primary Slow Joe Biden. Only to find out that Tucker Carlson had already done it for me.
Some takeaways:
There’s never been a candidate for president the media hated more than Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. You thought that title belonged to Donald Trump. Of course it must! But go check the coverage. Trump got a gentle scalp massage by comparison when he announced. When Trump rolled out his presidential campaign in 2015, the New York Times waited until the 17th paragraph of the story to attack him. “But as well known as he is,” the paper said at the time, “Trump is also widely disliked.” Then they cited a poll to back it up. That was the attack on Trump. Eight years later, the Times attacked Bobby Kennedy in the very first sentence of the story. Quote, “Robert F Kennedy, Jr.” the paper declared, “announced a presidential campaign on Wednesday built on relitigating covid-19 shutdowns and shaking Americans faith in science.”
“You’d think Bobby Kennedy just declared war on the enlightenment!”
“NPR devoted an entire segment to savaging Kennedy, not just as a candidate, but as a human being. NPR described him as someone who, for his own perverse reasons, has made, quote, debunked and false and misleading claims that undermine trust in vaccines, and who in his spare time provides moral support to crazed extremists.”
“People magazine didn’t even bother to report a single word of anything Kennedy said at his announcement, and instead wrote an entire story about how his relatives hate him.” Having the entire Kennedy clan hate him would only increase my (admittedly low) estimation of him.
When did the Democratic Media Complex start hating him? July of 2005. “That’s the moment that Kennedy published a magazine article suggesting there might be a link between the rise in diagnosed autism cases and the ever-expending schedule of mandatory childhood vaccines.”
“The Pharma Lobby rolled out the most ferocious public relations campaign in memory and both [Rolling Stone and Salon] swiftly caved. Both pulled the story, and then disavowed it groveling as they did.” Both of those outlets were already on shaky ground, though neither was as bad as they become later.
No one in the national media bothered to explain why autism diagnoses had skyrocketed. If it wasn’t the vaccines, and maybe it wasn’t, then what was it? To this day there has not been a convincing explanation. Instead, reporters just attacked Bobby Kennedy. They’ve called him a lunatic and a Nazi. Instagram shut down his account YouTube just last week pulled down a perfectly reasonable interview he did with Jordan Peterson.
Speaking of which, here RFK Jr. explains to Jordan Petersen how he thinks ObamaCare got the Democratic Party in bed with Big Pharma.
I’ve omitted a lot of Carlson providing example after example of various Democratic Media Complex personalities viciously attacking Kennedy.
I’m no fan of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. His a lefty scumbag on many (perhaps most) issues, has more than a whiff of fringe lunacy about him, and (through no fault of his own) I find him hard to listen to, due to his spasmodic dysphonia. (Though obviously he’s much more coherent and articulate than Biden. As is the average third-grader.) And I think he’s more wrong than right on the vaccine-autism link.
Still, the degree to which the Democratic Media Complex has thrown away even the merest pretense of dispassion about him due to his threat to either a Biden second term or the wishes of Big Pharma (to the extent those two can be disentangled) makes me more inclined to listen to him, and more readily defend his right to speak in the public space. The DNC seems hellbent on presenting any fair challenge to Biden in the Democratic primary, which makes me very curious about just what they’re so scared of…
Here’s Jordan Peterson on the crimes of communism:
If you want a candidate for the sin against the holy ghost in the 21st century, the statement “communism, real communism, was never tried” with the underlying idea that if you had been the person implementing it, it would have worked, I think that’s a pretty good contender for something for which you should never be forgiven.
More information on the Holodomor can be found in Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. Conquest estimated that for the entire Collectivization/”De-Kulakization”/Holodomor period (including the Soviet suppression of the Kazakhs and the Crimean Tartars, etc.) some 14.5 million died due to the actions of the Soviet government.
I know that November 7 is also designated as Victims of Communism Day, but the crimes of communism are so vast that there’s no reason we can’t observe Victims of Communism Day twice a year.
Jordan Peterson always makes a great Joe Rogan guest, and the new interview they did last week is no exception.
Discussing the Twitter files, Critical Race Theory and Marxism, victimhood identity politics, postmodern theory, and falseness of reducing everything to power dynamics.
On the World Economic Forum:
“Globalist Utopian Tyranny” is a great phrase.
They follow in the wake of “Paul Ehrlich, in the 1960s, who really believe, really believe, truly, that maybe the planet should only have 500 million people on it.”
There then follows a devastating take-down of the immortality of pushing 350 million of the world’s poorest to the brink of death through higher energy prices in the hope that maybe 100 years from now life for the poor will be better. I encourage you to watch the entirety of this segment for that.
“It’s a little bit too convenient for me that your prescriptions to save the planet are accompanied by this insistence that the only way forward to that is to give you all the power. It’s like there’s a bit of a moral hazard in, that don’t you think?”
“Do you want to save the planet, or do you want the power? And let’s let’s put the second one first, because the probability that you’re a saint or the messiah is pretty damn low. So that’s the danger of the Davos crowd.”
I suspect I’ll be putting up more snippets from this interview sometime this week…
More moving trucks left from California than any other state in 2022 for the third year in a row, while more Americans are flocking to Republican-led states like Texas and Florida, a new study published on Jan. 3 has found.
The study was conducted by the moving truck rental company, U-Haul, and found that Texas, Florida, and the Carolinas were the preferred destinations for one-way moving trucks in 2022, with those states ranking as the top growth states on the annual U-Haul Growth Index.
U-Haul’s Growth Index is compiled according to the net gain of one-way U-Haul trucks arriving in a state or city, versus those departing from that state or city each calendar year across the U.S. and Canada and is a strong indicator of what kind of job states and cities are attracting and maintaining residents, according to the company.
Texas is the top destination for U-Haul trucks for the second consecutive year and the fifth time since 2016, according to the study. That is followed by Florida, which has been a top-three growth state for seven years in a row. South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Arizona, Georgia, Ohio, and Idaho also saw strong growth rates in 2022, the study found.
I think I’ve posted a variation on this story just about every year I’ve published this blog…
From July 2021 to July 2022, 300,000 more people moved out of the state than moved in. New York had the largest population loss—in both percentage and absolute terms—experienced by any state during that period.
Sadly, this was both predictable and preventable.
In March 2021, a study of New York found that its already staggeringly high tax burden had worsened due to an increase in the top marginal tax rate to almost 15% for those in New York City. The study projected that the flood of people leaving would only accelerate—and it did.
Even before that study, the Empire State lost so many people that it cost New York a seat in Congress after the 2020 census. This exodus is a direct response to New York’s obscenely high taxes.
Just how bad is it? Compared with other states, New Yorkers:
Pay the highest total tax burden and highest share of personal income (14%) in taxes.
Endure the second-worst overall business-tax climate.
Face the highest individual income-tax rate and income-tax collections per capita.
Pay the second-highest state and local corporate income tax collections per capita.
Have the fourth-highest property taxes and local sales-tax rate (on average).
Pay the highest cigarette taxes and ninth-highest gasoline taxes.
Remember how I’ve noted that semiconductor memory manufacturers make money hand-over-fist in boom times and barely break even during busts? “Samsung Profits Plunge 69% As Global Chip Demand In ‘Full-Fledged Ice Age.'”
Turnabout is fair play: “U. Houston Prof Tells Students to Report Teachers Berating ‘White People or Christians to DEI Office.'”
Denver Mayor Michael Hancock takes pride in virtue signaling his city as a refuge for illegal aliens. Guess what?
The idea of a Jordan B. Peterson music video sounds like an idea that might be wall-to-wall cringe. But this is actually a pretty effective ditty that combines early Kate Bush with The Wall-era Pink Floyd.
“Wake Up: Dedicated, under the current unfortunate conditions, to the Prime Minister of Canada, the Right Honorable Justin Trudeau. “
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Biden’s vaccine mandate receives another blow in court, Biden stumbles his way through another press conferences, and a Joe Rogan podcast lays bare social justice perfidy.
After SCOTUS last week rejected the administration’s attempt to force corporations to abide by the mandate via OSHA, a federal court in Texas has issued an injunction against Biden’s jab mandate for federal workers, the other part of his administration’s attempts to force vaccines on reluctant Americans – a strategy that Biden has already abandoned in favor of providing at-home COVID tests to all Americans.
Biden issued both mandates by executive order back in September.
Trump-appointed Judge Jeffrey Brown of the US Court for the Southern District of Texas said the case was not about whether individuals should be vaccinated or even about federal power more broadly. Instead, he said it’s about “whether the president can, with the stroke of a pen and without the input of Congress, require millions of federal employees to undergo a medical procedure as a condition of their employment,” Brown wrote.
“That, under the current state of the law as just recently expressed by the Supreme Court, is a bridge too far.”
James Lindsay (AKA @Conceptual James) did an interview with Joe Rogan that may be as devastating to Social Justice Warriors as Rogan’s McCullough and Malone interviews were to the Official Flu Manchu Narrative. Some excerpts:
On Joe Rogan, @ConceptualJames discusses how Neo-Marxist indoctrination in schools has frightening parallels with the Chinese Cultural Revolution. pic.twitter.com/T9eFBMS3Kr
Biden had a press conference where he mixed some lies in with the usual rambling.
‘My plan cuts the deficit, and it boosts the economy by getting more people into the workforce’
Biden and his aides received intense scrutiny in the fall after they clung to a line that claimed the president’s spending plans would cost zero dollars — even after multiple analyses found that was not the case.
Biden seemingly recycled that line during his press conference Wednesday when he claimed more than once that his proposals would not add to the deficit.
The Congressional Budget Office found that the Build Back Better Act would add $3 trillion to the deficit by 2031 if its programs were permanent rather than allowed to expire on what critics have described as artificially short time frames designed to give the bill the appearance of costing less.
If the programs expired as written by Democrats, the Build Back Better Act would still add $367 billion to the deficit by 2031, according to the CBO.
Experts have also debunked Biden’s claim that the bill would boost the economy overall.
The Penn-Wharton Budget Model from the University of Pennsylvania found that Biden’s plan would reduce America’s gross domestic product over several decades and would even slightly lower hourly wages over the same time period.
Focus group shows that independents (people who vote for both Obama and Trump) hate Biden’s America.
these independents are “resigned rejecters” — deeply pessimistic about the state of the country, deeply disappointed by President Biden, and about as dissatisfied with the status quo as one can get.
Alice, a 60-year-old Latina from New York who works as a supervisor for homeless services, described her community as returning to an almost-lawless Hobbesian state* of the strong dominating the weak through force, violence, and intimidation: “I think they’ve taken us back to cave-man time, where you would walk around with a club — ‘I want what you have.’ You’re not even safe to walk around and go to the train station, because somebody might throw you off the train, okay? It’s a regression.”
Dickie, a 38-year-old white financial analyst from Texas concurred: “When Alice was talking about the cave-man thing, I can agree with that. I’ve had my bike stolen here in Austin, in a very gentrified neighborhood, four different times in the last seven, eight months. Things are kind of chaotic. I feel like there’s no rules, really.”
Twelve of the 14 said the level of crime is up in America today compared to a year ago.
If statements like that aren’t a flashing neon sign declaring “DO SOMETHING ABOUT CRIME!” I don’t know what is.
“How well do the SARS-CoV-2 shots work against the Omicron virus variant? The Danish study results shown in the graph found the Pfizer and Moderna shots provide some protection for a couple months, followed by a higher risk of infection than no shots at all. I don’t call that ‘working.'” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
An exiting resident laments the decline of Portland:
This small business owner in Portland is being forced to close his restaurant because of constant break-ins by homeless addicts. He says crime is rising not despite progressive policies but because of them. He’s right. pic.twitter.com/Hkm1YSejG1
Speaking of Democrat-run hellholes in the Pacific northwest: “Meet The Seattle Schools Woke Indoctrination Czar Who Married A Child Molester.”
Despite decades of the most aggressive equity programs anyone could ask for, Seattle’s racial disparities are among the worst in the nation – and they’re getting worse, not better.
At the forefront of Seattle Public Schools’ (SPS) initiatives was Tracy Castro-Gill, until recently its director of ethnic studies, who represented herself as a fierce Chicana who overcame homelessness and was willing to take on racism no matter who she had to battle, turning schools into vehicles for social change.
Castro-Gill, it turned out, was a perennially unhappy toxic liar, one who misrepresented her background to the point that her own father compared her to Rachel Dolezal, and who was ultimately pushed out of her job for repeated misconduct. A focus on racial oppression did not create resiliency, but rather despondency, with Castro-Gill and three other racial justice leaders going on paid leave from SPS for mental health issues in 2019 alone.
As Castro-Gill used children for politics in the workplace, her personal life also raised questions about the costs that can incur. She married a convicted child molester and moved her young daughter in with him. Then, her previous ex-husband told me, she pressured her child, who had serious mental impairments, to become gender-nonbinary.
The academic achievement of Seattle’s youth plummeted as she implemented initiatives like replacing math instruction with courses on “power and oppression.” But in this world, there was no such thing as failing: Those gaps were used to justify still more jobs and efforts like hers.
Meatloaf, RIP. For a guy I thought of more as a singer, he had a long, active, and actually pretty impressive acting career. (“His name is Robert Paulsen!”) Only a small number of you will get this:
CBS’s “60 Minutes” deceptively edited an exchange that reporter Sharyn Alfonsi had with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) two weeks ago about the way the Sunshine State has rolled out its vaccination program.
In the clip, Alfonsi suggested that Publix, the largest grocery store chain in Florida, had engaged in a pay-to-play scheme with DeSantis where they donated money to his campaign in exchange for him awarding a contract to the grocery store chain to host vaccinations.
CBS edited the interaction between DeSantis and Alfonsi when she showed up to a press conference a few weeks ago and repeatedly confronted the governor. The network cut out a lengthy portion of DeSantis’ response in which he explains what happened and how decisions were made.
The Arkansas General Assembly voted Tuesday to enact a ban on gender transition surgery for minors, overriding a veto by Governor Asa Hutchinson.
Arkansas is the first state to ban transition surgery for minors, although similar legislation is under consideration in other states. The bill also prohibits doctors in Arkansas from administering hormones or puberty blockers to residents under age 18.
Here’s a word to every single Republican office holder in America: this is not an optional fight. You fight on this hill or we’ll replace you with someone who will.
Remember how President Trump “detaining kids in cages” was the Worst Thing In The World? Well, Joe Biden is detaining 18,000 illegal alien minors, almost seven times as many. And Democrats aren’t uttering a peep of protest because they never really cared about those kids anyway, they just wanted to: A.) Bash Trump, and B.) Open up the border so they can amnesty a new wave of illegals as Democratic Party voters.
Speaking of illegal aliens: “New York is reportedly going to spend $2.1 Billion on a fund to give illegal aliens COVID relief payments up to $15,600 per person.” Did any of these Democrats actively campaign on giving taxpayer money to illegal aliens? It’s like they want to live down to the most outlandish Republican parodies of Democrats.
Liberal writer Thomas Frank says that fellow liberals are deluding themselves if they think “misinformation” is the source of all their problems and censorship is the answer:
In liberal circles these days there is a palpable horror of the uncurated world, of thought spaces flourishing outside the consensus, of unauthorized voices blabbing freely in some arena where there is no moderator to whom someone might be turned in. The remedy for bad speech, we now believe, is not more speech, as per Justice Brandeis’s famous formula, but an “extremism expert” shushing the world.
What an enormous task that shushing will be! American political culture is and always has been a matter of myth and idealism and selective memory. Selling, not studying, is our peculiar national talent. Hollywood, not historians, is who writes our sacred national epics. There were liars-for-hire in this country long before Roger Stone came along. Our politics has been a bath in bullshit since forever. People pitching the dumbest of ideas prosper fantastically in this country if their ideas happen to be what the ruling class would prefer to believe.
Authorities have charged Adalberto Fructuoso Comparan-Rodriguez, whose nickname is “Fruto,” the former mayor of Aguililla, Mexico, and the reported leader of the United Cartels in Michoacán, Mexico, with drug trafficking crimes, according to the indictment.
Alfonso Rustrian, of Mexico, has also been charged as a co-conspirator. Another four defendants were charged for their roles in the alleged methamphetamine scheme.
According to court filings, Comparan-Rodriguez and Rustrian met in Cali, Colombia, with whom they believed were members of Hezbollah but were actually undercover DEA agents. Comparan-Rodriguez and Rustrian agreed to send 1,100 pounds of methamphetamine from Mexico through Texas to the Miami area, according to the charges.
Once the meth arrived in Miami, Comparan-Rodriguez and Rustrian allegedly cracked open the concrete tiles and dissolved the meth inside 5-gallon buckets of house paint. The men are alleged to have extracted the pure crystal meth from the paint.
The mysterious case of “Dr. Jialun,” an anti-Trump Twitter troll who got his account verified despite having a fake profile and all of 100 followers.
Legal Insurrection is suing SUNY Upstate Medical University for refusing to comply with a New York Freedom of Information Law request on information related to Critical Race Theory training.
Man tells his estranged girlfriend he’s driving to Florida to kill her, is shocked when he gets there and gets arrested.
Sgt. Charles H. Coolidge, previously America’s oldest living Congressional Medal of Honor winner, went to his final muster. I previously mentioned him here. That makes Hershel Woody Williams America’s last living Congressional Medal of Honor winner from World War II.
Golden Retriever has had enough of your fake news:
Weather report from Moscow streets was suddenly interrupted by a four-legged heckler. A dog stole the microphone from the reporter of a Russian broadcaster. A golden retriever jumped at Nadezhda Serezhkina, grabbed the microphone and ran away – during LIVE broadcast. pic.twitter.com/po16bUGazB
