Reader Andrew Philips comments on a recent post:
You’ve cautioned us against ascribing rational motives to the folks who are running things right now, so I won’t. Who knows if any of them believed all the things they said about angry white men, domestic terrorism, white supremacy, institutional racism, or any of the rest of it. Even if it was all just ritual cant, the folks whose fathers, grandfathers, and so forth, have served under a field of stars (in one configuration or another) haven’t had much reason to doubt their sincerity. They do give every indication of hating us. They told us we’re not wanted, not good enough, and that everything that’s going wrong is all our fault. They took a knee while Buy Large Mansions reveled in iconoclasm and damnatio memoriae.
While the civilians were doing that, the generals and admirals demonstrated to all the world they can’t steer ships or win wars. Why should anyone risk life and limb for leaders who can’t demonstrate competence, much less tell friend from foe? If they were trying to convince young, able-bodied Americans to reconsider their family traditions, or to transfer their loyalties back from the nation to their states, communities, or families, would they have done anything differently?
I noticed the other day that the latest Gallup poll shows institutional confidence is down across the board. That’s not a surprise, really, when it feels like society is coming part at the seems. The surprise to me is that confidence in the military is still as high as it is. It’s somewhere north of 60%, on average, but down significantly from last year, and more so among Republicans than Democrats. Confidence in the civilian institutions that control it, however, is in the toilet. Folks smart enough to be assets in military service know who gives the orders, so that might also explain their collective decision: “Don’t risk your life for people who hate you.”
My response:
The Death Cult’s organizational structure can be likened to a corporation’s. The CEO needn’t issue memos to every employee personally. Instead, there are layers of bureaucracy that delegate operations.
Corporate culture is another factor. Most Cultist behavior is learned through passive observation of other members. They come to sense and react to changes like a school of fish.
The Cult functions in a way that’s the diametric opposite of how they tell everyone else to act. Despite their avowed love for diversity, they are the most insular, cliquish people on Earth.
What they do is worm their way into gatekeeping positions in the institutions. Then they use nepotism to bring in their coreligionists. That’s when the secret email list collusion comes in.
Not that Death Cultists think of each other that way. They see their insane beliefs as the default and view other Cultists as normal folks just behaving as decent people do.
As with most things, we have to beware of false binaries, here. The enemies of Christendom may subscribe to a hysterical Death Cult. But that doesn’t mean all of them are acting on 100% irrational motives all the time. If they did, they couldn’t function at all.
We may be approaching that point, though.
Some institutional bigwigs aren’t full-on Kool Aid drinkers. Instead they’re accomplices who aid and abet the Cult for selfish reasons. Conservative pols and pundits tend to populate this category.
One thing Top Gun 2 proves is that mainstream entertainment has little, if any, relationship to the free market. The movie is a 90-minute commercial for military contractors, as the contractors who financed it are well aware. The billions they rake in from the government dwarfs their box office cut. A key principle of business is that you want to get as close to the source of the money as possible. The government now outpaces the people in terms of cash generation, so big businesses cater to the folks with the money printer.
You might observe that the Death Cult’s corporate stooges are rationalizing motives that make no sense in the long run. And that’s fair to say. Because it’s hard to argue someone out of a position his paycheck depends on.
But in the end, the result is the same. The Cult’s jihad on reality is advanced, and its enablers’ crusade for a quick buck is self-doomed.
Don’t pay people who enable cults that hate you.
