commentary

It's our privilege to have a ringside seat to observe how half the population of a great power goes insane. Insanity cannot be understood. All you can do is observe it clinically. If I were an alien from outer space, I'd pay good money to be able to watch this up close.

I am not just calling my political enemies crazy. We are all being forced to pretend to believe something we know to be false. This makes us all crazy.

It is not being crazy that takes you away from reality. It's the other way around. Lying is pain for the mind: the more you pretend that a white lady can be a black person or that surgery can change a guy into a sexy chick, the more your brain struggles and fails make sense of it. When you deny reality, self-contradiction follows as night follows day. Those neurons can only take so much cognitive dissonance before they give up trying and shut down.

I used to be skeptical when people called liberalism a mental disorder. I still have my doubts, but it seems to be a risk factor.

Fertility rates in Russia and the United States, 1940-2012. In Russia, the decline in fertility preceded the collapse of communism in 1991. (Source: Rand Corporation, U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, and Indexmundi)

The craziness started well before the horror in South Carolina, but that psychopath brought it to the surface with its usual mad logic, with the libs holding the Confederate flag responsible. Conservatives helpfully reminded libs that Jefferson had slaves, some of the other founding fathers had slaves, and even Lincoln said some pretty ambiguous things, in the hope that a good reductio ad absurdum would bring them back to reality.

But that's like talking to person with a flame thrower who just incinerated their dog, saying “Look over there, there's the mayor, why don't you just kill him, too?” “Hey, there's your grandma, better get her, too!” Reductio ad absurdum doesn't work on people whose ideology is already beyond absurd.

In 1900 Congress decreed that Confederate soldiers are American war veterans. They were willing to work for national reconciliation. The idea of tearing down statues of Jefferson Davis and other Democrats in the name of unity would have been incomprehensible.

But this is not about a flag or the war. It's about who gets to inherit the earth. The libs know they're doomed, demographically, so their goal is to win the culture war by channeling their inner William Tecumseh Sherman.

The left loves symbols because they think they can redefine them to fit any cause. That makes it a freedom of speech issue. It's been argued that government shouldn't have freedom of speech: the only art we should see from them is those curvy black arrows—I mean arrows of color—on a privileged white background telling us there's a curve ahead. (Or is it yellow? Not like I ever paid any attention to them.)

Like any symbol, those signs mean what the person putting them up says they mean, not what you or I say they mean. That means they're not really targets, despite that wonderful clanging sound they make when you shoot them, but they really are (and I know some people may be skeptical about this) traffic instructions. What the battle is about is the right to redefine somebody else's symbol.

Libs don't get down South much, so they think the Confederate flag is a crucial symbol of their enemy, and they've glommed on to it in a typical mob action. If conservatives cave, it won't be long until the libs convert the Jefferson memorial into the Gay Transsexual Transracial Person of Color Memorial.

Not because they care much about GTTPoCs. They too are just symbols. The only thing these bakery scandals and the Bruce Jenner scandal and the Redskins scandal and the Rapey Mattress of Gender Inequality scandal and the phony microaggressions and the phony nooses and the phony racial epithets scrawled on some professor-of-color's car and all the other phony scandals prove is this: it's all about reproduction, demographics, and the future.

The issues liberals care about are abortion, overpopulation, homosexuality, and race and gender. What do these have in common? They are all about reproduction: with their low birth rates, the dissolution of the concept of objective truth and virtue, and the destruction of the family and marriage, the libs' death wish may condemn them to eventual extinction. But this also means that their ideology is self-limiting, and will eventually be overturned. And that knowledge drives them mad. The left's obsession with race is, for them, a hopeless battle of survival.

A lot has been said about declining birth rates in Western Europe and the USA. No one really understands it. Maybe it's economics, or a flaw in our genetic programming, or maybe it's the result of high taxes and government oppression-by-social-service. The best examples we have are Russia and the Great Depression.

The Rand Corporation studied this and concluded:

“The Great Depression was accompanied by a demographic depression, and public opinion was largely molded by an impressive comparison of numbers of ‘coffins’ (‘crosses’) to numbers of baby cradles. ... In all places and at all times, famine, war, and revolution have tended to bring about a postponement of marriages, a fall in births, and a rise in deaths.”

But in Russia, the decline in fertility preceded the collapse of communism in 1991. It's as if the people subconsciously knew what was coming. After the Soviet Union crumbled, the fertility rate went into a free-fall. By 1993, two years after the fall of communism, Russia had experienced a 5.1 per 1000 decline, or a 750,300 natural decrease in population.

Civilizations are part of our genome as much as our eye color. Without a culture, a people will disperse, stop reproducing, and eventually die out. We're programmed to create civilizations. Maybe we're also programmed, under some specific set of circumstances, to destroy them. If so, it's pre-programmed, and so it would happen without conscious awareness.

That's where leftists are headed. When a crisis occurs, they catch a glimpse of the future they are creating. And it drives them nuts to think that there are people who don't share their death wish. The knowledge of their own extinction is the animating force behind cultural fascism.

America has not really gone bananas. Not yet. But the cultural memes the libs are creating are pushing us in that direction. We should feel sympathy for the libs. They won't be around very much longer, and they know it. That would make anybody crazy.