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I have always had, even at the times I sympathized most with the Left -- such as its opposition to the wars of the 21st century and the various outrages that went with them -- a visceral reaction to communism in general. Communism never "sounded good to me on paper." It was never "a beautiful dream, for another age." It was always just a nightmare to me. I just never held my own social class in any special esteem. There is me, I, and then the rest of the world, and that's how it's always been. Not by choice; by configuration. That is how I was wired at birth: as an individualist.

I always liked Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie and the Grapes of Wrath and sympathized with these strolling dustbowl troubadours and the like, many of which were communists, or fellow travelers, or at least pink around the edges.

This caused me an amazing amount of cognitive dissonance because there's a lot of interesting stuff in Lefty culture - the Wobblies and the early 20th century labor movement, and the music, in particular. I like that stuff. My collection of Phil Ochs and Billy Bragg and the Broadside stuff could stand up against that of even the most stubborn Red Diaper Baby.

I had this funny experience in college -- as a political science undergrad, I took a course - Introduction to Labor Studies, with a visiting professor who described himself, on the first day, as the only "actual card-carrying Red" in the department. He'd been an organizer, had been arrested, and I liked the guy very much. He was a lot different from the ivory tower socialists I was used to in the rest of the political science department.

Most of my profs were very obviously privileged, from a higher social caste than I was, and yet lecturing me about this working class concern, or that working class concern, their smooth fingers pushing up expensive designer eyeglass frames periodically.

But this Labor prof was sunburned, calloused. A lot more like those dustbowl types, but, Puerto Rican.

Anyway so one of the things going on in the class is a discussion of the culture - the anarchists - (Goldman, etc.), and the teacher, who by this point knew I'd grown up a young conservative, was somewhat irked that I was the only one in class who knew the songs, the history, because I'd been fascinated with it since a kid. I've watched the Left anthropologically (if informally) and occasionally rubbed shoulders on those few specific issues where paleoconservatism, libertarianism, and socialism meet -- generally as relates to foreign policy.

And it is amazing how few people I'd meet who were like this professor, or those Dust Bowl types. No -- the kinds of communists I'd meet were inevitably these lily-white, upper-middle class types.

I want to use the word "poseur" to describe them, except that's unfair to them -- a lot of them were, at least at the time, committed and emotionally invested to the point of frothing at the mouth. But there was, especially when they got going, a kind of meanness to them, a kind of misanthropy directed at anyone outside what at the time I thought was their political set.

I got it wrong: not their political set, their social set. It took years for me to understand why I found these people so damn objectionable, beyond their obvious privilege: it was like a social clique. Young modern Leftists party with each other, drink with each other, fuck each other, do drugs with each other, march with each other. There was a whiff of high school to it. (See any Leftie subreddit - in particular the catty lunchtable of /r/ShitRedditSays.)

The other thing about these people was just how little actual real work they'd done. Tom Joad and that set were working in agricultural fields breaking their backs. And more than once I got the sense that, "come the revolution..." these people were under the impression they'd get their bread and roses for being propagandists. Like they'd deserve it as much as the people who had to till the fields, work on assembly lines -- all of the things communists sing songs about and wax nostalgic about (because communists have a specific streak of conservatism that is always nostalgically looking at the past -- in large part because, given the marginal nature of these movements, it is necessary to connect oneself to these great historical moments like the Spanish Civil War in order to take oneself seriously. Or maybe I'm just being snarky.)

This part of the interview was particularly interesting:

> FP: You mention that your dad was a communist. Tell us about his world view and how this affected your family and your own intellectual journey.

> Dalrymple: My father was a communist though he was also a businessman. Our house was full of communist literature from the 1930s and 40s, and I remember such authors as Plekhanov and Maurice Hindus and Edgar Snow. It was always clear that my father's concern for humanity was not always matched by his concern for men, to put it mildly, for whom (as individuals) he often expressed contempt. He found it difficult to enter an equal relationship with anyone, and preferred to play Stalin to their Molotov. We had The Short Course in the house, incidentally, and one of my favourite books (which I used to leaf through as a child) was a vast picture book of the Soviet Union in 1947.

> I think the great disjunction between my father's expressed ideas (and ideals) and his everyday conduct affected me, and made me suspicious of people with grand schemes of universal improvement.

The Left is in love with the Left, and, on paper at least, with the people whose plight it purports to join in solidarity with. It would be interesting to see exactly how far the comradeship would go between a young communist from Bard College, and some po'bucker Pentecostal miner in Appalachia -- and more to the point, what the po'bucker Pentecostal miner would make of the inevitably soft, effete communist from the Northeast.

Speaking of Frontpage, I'd spent a lot of years reading these books about the New Left - the SDS, Weather Underground, and groups like this. They're very self-aggrandizing -- especially see Bill Ayers's Fugitive Days, his truthy book about his days with the Weathermen. The book itself is a spectacle. I have to believe there are modern communists out there who want to say something like, "Well that's Billy Ayers," but I strongly suspect (I lurk in a lot of Leftish forums) that this is quite typical of the way most of the Left sees itself in the mirror.

It's not what I see.

Speaking of Frontpage, if I could recommend one book by David Horowitz (and Peter Collier), it's Destructive Generation - the only counterpoint to the dozens of self-congratulatory books the New Left has written about itself.

For those who don't know, Horowitz is the founder of Frontpage magazine, and an ex-Leftie himself, once writing for the 60s and 70s New Left publication Ramparts. In it, he reflects back on all of these Leftish heroes (like Huey Newton). I'm sure people all over the Left think it's a smear. But why I liked it is, in reading all of these self-congratulatory memoirs about the 60s and the Left, I always got the sense of whitewash -- even by the best writers. Something about Destructive Generation rings true -- not because I was there, but because of what I always sensed in between the lines of those self-satisfied reminiscences and hagiographies of 60s personalities.

Some other great stuff in here:

> Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better.

Speaking of /r/shitredditsays...

I probably break from the conservative majority here but I don't think HuffPo or NYT were deliberately lying when they made that 95% confidence interval about Hillary winning. Nor do I think Nate Silver's analysis was fundamentally wrong.

Nate's prediction was "incorrect" in the same way as me saying "I'm 75% sure you won't draw a spade from that deck" could be proven "wrong" on any one draw. The uncertainty of not knowing the deck is the stand in for a polling error here -- you can make an educated guess, but you can't know. Nate Silver pretty much said "Trump is one normal polling error away from winning" and then that happened. Crowing about landslide victory aside, the victories within the battleground states were not particularly large.

Idiots who assumed 70% was as good as a victory deserved to get the disappointment they got.

NYT and HuffPo read the same polls, but they assumed that the errors in each state would be independent -- sure Wisconsin might be an overestimate for Hillary but then Michigan might be an underestimate for Hillary, and what are the odds that the polls are all wrong in the same direction? Nate Silver assumed the errors would correlate. Nate's assumption was correct -- the errors correlated.

Having seen the analysis, I find it higher quality than people who confidently asserted Trump would win based on whatever intuitive feeling they had about the situation. It knew the limitations of its own analysis. Someone like Scott Adams who made weasel predictions like "Trump will win unless something changes" -- hilarious for someone who wrote this book https://www.amazon.com/Dilbert-Way-Weasel-Outwitting-Pants-Wearing/dp/006052149X -- comes across as looking better, but he had a narrative for if he was wrong that would have played almost as well.

So yeah, the people saying Hillary would win fucked up. No malice, just basic mathematical mistakes. Shockingly the guy who used to put money on the line with his odds-reading is better at it.

The people who "knew" Hillary would win were overconfident about their ability to predict in a world of uncertainty, and deserve to get their ass kicked.

Disclaimer: I read Nate's book "The Signal and the Noise" after the 2012 election and found it grounded my assumptions of everything he said after that, so I probably didn't read as much certainty or hubris into anything he said in 2016.

We ordered one tonight. The reviews on Amazon are so low. We need to band together and write good reviews. Hasbro Monopoly Socialism Board Game Parody Adult Party Game https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07VPRNZJB/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_GxlyDb4N3PJ43

Are you asking plainly, or insinuating some kind of "conservatives are nazis" thing?

In either case, look up Antony C. Sutton - especially his bibliography.

• Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development: 1917–1930 (1968)
  
  
• Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development: 1930–1945 (1971)
  
  
• Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development: 1945–1965 (1973)
  
  
• Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution (1974, 1999)
  
  
• Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler (1976, 1999)
  
  
• Wall Street and FDR (1976, 1999)
  
  Bonus:
  
  America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones

Liked this piece a lot.

>Dependent children tend to seek freedom without responsibility; independent adults embrace both.

Democrats want people without freedom or responsibility, for this guarantees their rule. Obama never takes personal responsibility, and as the leader of the free world sets the example of a dependent child.

>Such moments of seeming freedom were portrayed as acts of benevolence by the slaveholders, but were in fact deployed as “safety-valves, to carry off the rebellious spirit of enslaved humanity.” The slaveholders sought to sink their captives in depravity, rather than offer them a respite from slavery:

Douglas here reminds me of Necromancer in the Childe Cycle by Gordon R. Dickson in which a future oppressive society permits stamping protests as a safety valve. This notion that the state doles out to you little pieces of liberty is fundamentally abhorrent, and like taxation, is an inversion of the reality in which one should expect to be free, and any intrusion of government into this state viewed as tyranny.

So is this the next evolution of Hillary's It Take's A Village?

Also see the book, Liberal Racism

Here is the mobile version of your link

There's a book called "Three Felonies a Day", which makes the case that the average person unwittingly & often commits federal crimes.

President Trump, far from being an average person, was targeted by a ruthless federal prosecutor, aided by assistants that were 100% leftists, with an unlimited budget, could find nothing after 2 years of really looking.

Like it or not, that's how you can know Trump didn't do anything wrong.

There are already so many Federal laws that no one knows what they all are. When the Government was asked to count them a few years ago, it gave up after 3 years.

When nobody knows what all the laws are, much less what they are, we stop living in a country of laws, and begin living in a country of arbitrary enforcement, where the government chooses someone or something to go after and then looks to see what laws they might have broken.

In short, we don't need more Federal laws - we need Congress to start repealing them until we know what they are.

Here's a book for you