Everything Is—Still—Fine

Michael Anton. 11/20/23

“Official conservatism would rather harumph about dissidence than address core issues”.

A consistent theme of my writing over the past seven years—that is to say, since the publication of “The Flight 93 Election”—is thata non-trivial number of the leaders of America’s legacy “conservative” institutions are either liars or fools. Since I can’t think of a better way to restate the point, I will just repeat what I wrote then:

One of the paradoxes—there are so many—of conservative thought over the last decade at least isthe unwillingness even to entertain the possibility that America and the West are on a trajectory toward something very bad. On the one hand, conservatives routinely present a litany of ills plaguing the body politic. Illegitimacy. Crime. Massive, expensive, intrusive, out-of-control government. Politically correct McCarthyism. Ever-higher taxes and ever-deteriorating services and infrastructure. Inability to win wars against tribal, sub-Third-World foes. A disastrously awful educational system that churns out kids who don’t know anything and, at the primary and secondary levels, can’t (or won’t) discipline disruptive punks, and at the higher levels saddles students with six figure debts for the privilege. And so on and drearily on. Like that portion of the mass where the priest asks for your private intentions, fill in any dismal fact about American decline that you want and I’ll stipulate it.

Conservatives spend at least several hundred million dollars a year on think-tanks, magazines, conferences, fellowships, and such, complaining about this, that, the other, and everything. And yet these same conservatives are, at root, keepers of the status quo. Oh, sure, they want some things to change. They want their pet ideas adopted—tax deductions for having more babies and the like. Many of them are even good ideas. But are any of them truly fundamental? Do they get to the heart of our problems?

If conservatives are right about the importance of virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, character and so on in the individual; if they are right about sexual morality or what came to be termed “family values”; if they are right about the importance of education to inculcate good character and to teach the fundamentals that have defined knowledge in the West for millennia; if they are right about societal norms and public order; if they are right about the centrality of initiative, enterprise, industry, and thrift to a sound economy and a healthy society; if they are right about the soul-sapping effects of paternalistic Big Government and its cannibalization of civil society and religious institutions; if they are right about the necessity of a strong defense and prudent statesmanship in the international sphere—if they are right about the importance of all this to national health and even survival, then they must believe—mustn’t they?—that we are headed off a cliff.

But it’s quite obvious that conservatives don’t believe any such thing, thatthey feel no such sense of urgency, of an immediate necessity to change course and avoid the cliff.

I won’t apologize for the length of that quote; every word of it is truer and more relevant now than it was when first published (September 5, 2016).

Indeed, by most measures, things today are worse. To the above list of catastrophes, we may add two categories of problems. The first encompasses trends that were already obvious then but which I didn’t enumerate for reasons of space; e.g., opioid addiction, drug cartels operating on American soil with impunity, and falling life expectancies. Add to those the many others that have emerged since or deteriorated considerably: a nationwide crime wave, rampant anti-white racism, the worst inflation since the 1970s, increasingly unaffordable housing, crashing birthrates, anti-constitutional biomedical tyranny imposed by fiat, state-enforced anti-family transgenderism, pornography deliberately stocked in grade school libraries, a wide-open border, the federal government spending taxpayer dollars to transport and dump illegal immigrants throughout Middle America, years of pretrial detention for walking into the Capitol and staying within the velvet ropes, and so on and on.

Also much worse—dumber, more in denial, more out of touch, more treacherous to its ostensible allies and more obsequious toward the ruling class—is the “conservative” intelligentsia, whose responses to all this range from “None of that is happening” to “You’re grossly exaggerating” to “Actually, all this is fine; good even” to (especially) “How dare you say that!”….

(Very long article, but well worth it)

https://americanmind.org/salvo/everything-is-still-fine/

26 Nov, 2023 01:58

Mass drone attack on Moscow repelled – mayor

Ukrainian UAVs have been shot down outside the Russian capital, according to Sergey Sobyanin

Ukrainian forces have targeted the Russian capital in an attempted coordinated drone attack, withalmost a dozen of UAVs intercepted over Moscow, Bryansk, Kaluga and Tula regionsearly Sunday morning, according to the mayor and the Defense Ministry.

“A massive drone attack was attempted tonight… The air defense forces shot down UAVs in the area of Naro-Fominsk and Odintsovo city district, en route to Moscow,”mayor Sergey Sobyanin said on Telegram on Sunday morning. Another drone was shot down near Podolsk.

The drones caused no casualties or significant damage on the ground in Moscow, Sobyanin said, adding that the emergency services were responding to the incident and locating the debris.

However, in Tula one of the jammed drones lost control and hit a residential highrise, slightly injuring one person, according to local governor Aleksey Dyumin.

The military said that yet another “attempted Ukrainian terrorist attack was thwarted”overnight, confirming that at least 11 drones were intercepted over four regions southwest of the Russian capital.

Kiev has repeatedly used drone strikes in what Russian officials described as “terrorist attacks” on civilian infrastructure, reaching as far as Moscow.

Earlier this month, a Ukrainian general in charge of UAV operations claimed that Kiev was gearing up for a massive drone bombing campaign against Russia this winter, as the fighting on the ground is expected to enter a lull due to harsh weather conditions.

On Saturday, Ukraine accused Russia of carrying out its biggest drone attack, with most of its targets located in the country’s capital, Kiev. The Ukrainian Air Force claimed to have intercepted over 70 Russian drones overnight. Moscow had previously blamed Kiev for vastly exaggerating its supposed successes, and claiming to take down more munitions than Russia actually fires.

(Ukraine counteroffensive fails so they go back to terrorist activites)

https://www.rt.com/russia/587989-moscow-drone-attack-sobyanin/

25 Nov, 2023 09:15

Ukrainians must ‘grow up’ – security chief

Aleksey Danilov warned his compatriots that the West would not be “feeding us” indefinitely, adding that harder times lie ahead

Ukrainians should not delude themselves by thinking that the West will happily pick up the tab for them in the long run, Aleksey Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, has warned. He has also predicted that the longer the conflict with Moscow lasts, the heavier the toll on Kiev will be.

The top security official’s latest comments came off the back of similar remarks made recently by his colleagues, including President Vladimir Zelensky, who recently acknowledged that the less-than-impressive Ukrainian summer counteroffensive might be dampening Western enthusiasm to further back Kiev.

In an interview with a local Lviv TV station on Friday, Danilov explained that at the outset of hostilities last February, very few in the West believed that Ukraine could withstand the Russian onslaught for long. He added that Western governments mostly did not expect the conflict to drag on for more than a year and a half, meaning that it is becoming ever more difficult for Kiev to get financial support and aid from them at this point.

“The further [we go], the more difficult it will be. We have to acknowledge this,” Danilov said.

The security chief advised his compatriots not to think that Ukraine’s backers “will be feeding us all our lives and that we’ll be receiving aid all our lives.”

=•“We need to grow up and decide how to develop our country,”== Danilov concluded.

Speaking to CNBC on Monday, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen described Ukraine as “utterly dependent” on Western financial aid.

Meanwhile, earlier this month, President Joe Biden’s administration failed to push a massive $105 billion spending package through Congress, a significant part of which was supposed to go to Kiev. The president was forced to sign a stopgap spending bill instead, which only included funding for domestic government agencies.

In June, the European Commission proposed a plan to create a special €50 billion ($54.4 billion) financial aid facility for Ukraine. However, it remains to be seen whether the scheme will materialize, with some member states, such as Hungary, voicing skepticism.

Last month, Ukrainian Finance Minister Sergey Marchenko told Reuters that Kiev had to make “twice the effort right now to convince our partners to provide us with support compared to the last annual meetings” in spring.

Marchenko linked this waning readiness to help Ukraine to looming elections in the US and Europe next year, as well as the escalation between Israel and Hamas in the Middle East.

(Danilov is directing his comments at Zelensky, guaranteed he’s going to run for Zelensky’s position. They are all tired of him.)

https://www.rt.com/news/587958-danilov-ukraine-west-support-hard-times/