Headline: America’s power is on a financial knife edge

Sub-headline: China’s online payment platforms are the real threat to US hegemony

Mr. Ferguson simply can’t let go of that old  Western and British straw-man of The Yellow Peril, and its racial and ethnic paranoia, mixed with a generous helping of political version of that same fixation.  Alibaba and Tencent  are the instruments of the unslakable Chinese will to political/economic hegemony on the world stage.

If America is smart, it will wake up and start competing for dominance in digital payments. The shortest cut to a system to rival Alibaba and Tencent is Libra, the digital currency proposed by Facebook, which, with its 2.4bn active users, is uniquely positioned to create something on a Chinese scale — and fast. This would not be a true blockchain cryptocurrency, but more like a digital currency in the Chinese style, with the difference that it would be backed by a reserve, held in Switzerland, of dollars and other main currencies.

In his overwrought political melodrama, its Facebook’s Libra that can, indeed must ride to the rescue of the American indispensable economic leadership!

A bit of honesty might just put Mr. Ferguson’s polemic in its proper perspective. First Mr. Zuckerberg and the Winklevoss Twins were looking for dates, that required the rating of women as to their ‘hotness’. So look for the origins of Libra to that of ‘Lean In’ evangelist Cheryl Sandberg, protege of Larry Summers. But can its save U.S. Economic dominance! Mr. Ferguson has some answers:

History teaches us power is inseparable from financial power. The country that leads in financial innovation leads in every way: from Renaissance Italy, through imperial Spain, the Dutch republic and the British Empire to post-1930s America. Only lose that financial leadership — just ask poor Mr Pound, once worth $4.86 — and you lose your place as global hegemon.

The US-China rivalry today (what I call the Second Cold War ) is too focused on trade and telecoms. Washington needs to turn its attention, as a matter of urgency, to the race for monetary leadership, which America is in danger of losing.

The New Cold War has been brewing for quite some time, without Mr. Ferguson’s help, one need only look to the Ukrainian Coup and the contentions in the South China Sea as two of its manifestations.

Old Socialist

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/bet-your-bottom-dollar-moneys-future-is-digital-stt96nthv

P. S. Not to forget the Western NGO inspired Hong Kong Riots:

Behind a made-for-TV Hong Kong protest narrative, Washington is backing nativism and mob violence

ORDER FROM CHAOS

FOREIGN POLICY IN A TROUBLED WORLD

A how-to guide for managing the end of the post-Cold War era.

Headline: The place of military history in today’s defense planning

From the highfalutin ‘Order From Chaos’, the rubric under which Mr. O’Hanlon’s essay is framed by its headline, to where?  Is this writer outside his area of expertise in matters military?  He began his career as a budget analyst.Yet Mr. O’Hanlon reviews James Mattis’s  Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead. 

As an example of O’Hanlon’s approach to this book, this quotation is demonstrative,  if a bit out of order of its presentation.

…

Without giving away too many of the book’s best nuggets, it is worth noting a couple examples of how Mattis used history to guide his thinking and leadership.

…

Exactly who is this  ‘review’s’ audience? Are we in the territory of BestSeller Fiction? ‘Giving away too many of the book’s best nuggets…’ assures the reader that O’Hanlon is not a reliable nor honest critic?  Further reading  proves that this writer is in the business of currying favor with powerful men. I’ve skipped ahead as the in-order-too of advancing into O’Hanlon’s argument , and the first actual clue about what might constitute the Mattis character.

…

After all, though Trump liked to call him “Mad Dog Mattis,” and though “Chaos” is the nickname that Mattis (and coauthor Bing West) chose to employ in the book’s title, the never-married and book-worm’ish Mattis also had a third sobriquet:  “warrior monk.”

…

The tendency is to dwell somewhat excessively on the lessons of World War II and the Cold War — which translates for many into an expectation of new cold or even hot wars with Russia and China. Again, the point is that this was a type of conversation you could have with Mattis (who liked to begin conversations by asking, “what am I getting wrong, what am I missing?”).

…

‘For many’ is the amorphous place holder, for a widely held opinion,without proof of its validity.

What is particularly impressive about these and other cases is not just that Mattis could dredge up these kinds of historical allusions and precedents when writing his memoirs at a quiet study in Washington State or Stanford University, where he often hangs his hat these days. Rather, he had the deep knowledge of history to think of its lessons quickly and easily even when under pressure — indeed, at times even when under fire. Among his other favorites are Thucydides’ accounts of the ancient Peloponnesian Wars; the writings and sayings of Marcus Aurelius, Clausewitz, and Napoleon; and the Paratrooper’s Prayer from a young French lieutenant in the desert campaign of World War II.

…

In sum Mattis as presented by O’Hanlon is an intellectual. Yet how can he be both of the intellect and remain a ‘warrior monk’ ? A conundrum that a Neo-Conservative, like O’Hanlon, feels to be an expression of kinship? Or the imagined propinquity between a clerk and a man of action?

…

The tendency is to dwell somewhat excessively on the lessons of World War II and the Cold War — which translates for many into an expectation of new cold or even hot wars with Russia and China. Again, the point is that this was a type of conversation you could have with Mattis (who liked to begin conversations by asking, “what am I getting wrong, what am I missing?”).

…

And note the New Cold War against both Russia and China are facts, and O’Hanlon one of its ideologists, who finds an abode at Brookings,  along with his fellow travelers.

…

While he may be among the best of them, Mattis is far from the only modern American officer who studies and expounds on military history. Retired Admiral Bill McRaven, the man who ultimately did “get bin Laden” when leading Special Operations Command, wrote a gem of a history of covert operations (mostly from World War II) in a book called Spec Ops. Retired Generals Stanley McChrystal, David Petraeus, and John Allen are among those who frequently consult U.S. Civil War history as a guide to all aspects of combat. Retired Admiral James Stavridis traces the evolution of U.S. naval strategy in his recent book, Sea Power. The U.S. military’s war colleges, where most mid-career officers headed for higher command spend a year or two in their careers, are still strong in these disciplines. The military service chiefs have required reading lists for their personnel with heavy representation by the tomes of history.

…

And O’Hanlon is not above some strategic genuflecting to some very powerful retired military men, that might be advantageous in future.

…

Even more so than is usually the case with hot new bestsellers that generate a political buzz, Mattis’s book is one you really should read, rather than simply read about.

The last sentence proves that O’Hanlon is not just a Technocrat, but a Courtier.

Political Observer

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2019/09/13/the-place-of-military-history-in-todays-defense-planning/

Cotton Mather was the first American Judge! This Historical Fact & his use of ‘Spectral Evidence’ was the precursor to American Jurists’ proclaiming the American Law Court as above Morality! Add to this Scalia’s on ‘innocence’ as explicated by Lee Kovarsky.

…

Justice Scalia’s position on actual innocence issues was inseparable from his hostility to death penalty “abolition,” and he viewed abolitionists as ringleaders of the wrongful- convictions movement. Sensing the threat that wrongful executions posed to the sanctity of state criminal process, he spent his latter years on the Bench arguing that estimates of
such events were inflated. He was unable, however, to command a majority on his more controversial ideas about actual innocence in death penalty cases. Instead, his officially
expressed views appear in a “tetralogy” of auxiliary opinions: opinions concurring with judgments in Herrera v. Collins4 and Kansas v. Marsh, 5 an opinion concurring with the denial of certiorari in Callins v. Collins, 6 and an opinion dissenting from
the order granting a fact-finding transfer to a district court in In re Troy Davis. 7
Collectively, the Tetralogy captures Justice Scalia at both his most and his least effective. His sometimes-dazzling epistemological critique forced a more analytically rigorous
restatement of actual innocence doctrine. His foundational premise, however, was that the reliability of state guilt determinations was not systematically overstated. As evidence
inconsistent with that premise mounted, however, he refused to acknowledge its enormous doctrinal implications. By the time of his death, his basic epistemological insight had become the most effective weapon against the deference to state criminal
process that he had originally used it to promote.

…

http://www.minnesotalawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Kovarsky.pdf

StephenKMackSD

I supply a selection of quotes from The Economist of September 5, 2019 :

Headline: How Britain’s staid Conservative Party became a radical insurgency

Sub-headline: The Tories’ transformation leaves surviving MPs feeling uneasy

The trio were among 21 Conservative mps to have the whip withdrawn and be barred from standing for the party again after they supported a plan to make Boris Johnson, the prime minister, seek a delay to Britain’s scheduled departure from the European Union on October 31st (see next story). The purge was only the most visible part of a revolution that is transforming the world’s oldest political party. Those who advocate fiscal prudence, social liberalism and an orderly departure from the eu have been routed. Those who demand free-spending authoritarianism and a “do-or-die” escape from the yoke of Brussels are ascendant. ConservativeHome, a blog for party activists, described this week as “the end of the Conservative Party as we have known it”. It proved too much for even the prime minister’s brother, Jo, who resigned as an mp on September 5th, “torn between family loyalty and the national interest”.

…

Setting the route is Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s chief adviser who will not even say whether he is a member of the Conservatives. When running for office, Mr Johnson promised an inclusive, “one nation” style of government. Instead, he has set about shaking the country’s institutions, suspending Parliament for the longest period since 1945 in order to reduce the time mps have to debate Brexit. Hitherto unimaginable tactics, such as asking the queen to veto anti-no-deal legislation, are now openly discussed. “This Conservative government…seems to not be very conservative, fiscally or institutionally,” noted Ryan Shorthouse of Bright Blue, a liberal Tory think-tank.

…

Sir Roger Gale, an mp since 1983, declared: “You have, at the heart of Number 10, as the prime minister’s senior adviser, an unelected, foul-mouthed oaf.” A “One Nation” group of about 100 moderate Conservative mps have demanded that Mr Johnson reinstate their sacked colleagues.

…

“What this country needs is sensible, moderate, progressive Conservative government,” declared Mr Johnson during a stilted performance in prime minister’s questions on September 4th. Yet with the Tory party in its current state, Britain will have to wait.

https://www.economist.com/britain/2019/09/05/how-britains-staid-conservative-party-became-a-radical-insurgency?cid1=cust/dailypicks1/n/bl/n/2019094n/owned/n/n/dailypicks1/n/n/NA/303692/n

Compare the above with Mr. Rachman’s world historical view:

Headline:Boris Johnson’s Britain is a test case for strongman politics

Sub-Headline: If the UK can resist the virus, it will do a service to democracy around the world

In recent years, strongman politics has flourished all over the world. It is no longer confined to authoritarian states such as China and Russia. As Mr Trump, Mr Orban and Mr Bolsonaro have all demonstrated, even democracies can elect leaders who revel in a cult of personality and delight in their willingness to trample over political and legal norms.

The strongman playbook is now well-established. Its key features include a willingness to bend or break the law; to fire public servants if they fail to demonstrate loyalty; and to delight supporters with “politically incorrect” comments on race and sex. The strongmen justify their contempt for liberal niceties by claiming that they represent the people against a corrupt and out-of-touch political class.

https://www.ft.com/content/8895ad84-d2d8-11e9-a0bd-ab8ec6435630

With the aid of some further politically valuable garnish, ‘strongman politics’ is the framing that allows Mr. Rachman to maintain his ‘world historicalism’ , the key to his Olympian view. Yet the Posh Boys and Girls of The Economist manage to speak, not in the patois of an Olympian, but in the politically demotic.

But note , what is utterly absent from both these political interventions, is the fact that  Neo-Liberalism, that caused the Depression of 2008, is the absent cause of the both the ‘Conservative Party became a radical insurgency’ of the Economist writers and the ‘strongman politics’ that Mr.  Rachman inveighs against, to engage myself a bit of well placed reductivism! 

StephenKMackSD

P.S.

Headline: It’s a bad week when BoJo’s bro Jo goes

Sub-headline:Jo Johnson’s resignation reminds us how fraternity can turn to enmity

The reader can only wonder at who wrote the headline to Mr. Ferguson’s essay? its an atrocity that should be emblazoned on the pages of a modern tabloid rag. Instead its about the editors of the good, grey Times trying to appeal to that younger demographic? That is restricted to that rarest of political breeds the Tory Hipster, like the Financial Times’ Janan Ganesh. But on further reading this appears:

“Blow for Bojo as bro Jo go goes,” was the London Evening Standard’s headline, which suggests that the chief sub-editor has been reading Dr Seuss’s Fox in Socks to the kids at bedtime.

To discuss Mr. Ferguson’s strategy , which is to evade in his circuitous literary way the Tories in political route. By way of the Johnson Family Melodrama in terms of the sibling rivalry of brothers.  Mr. Ferguson offers this revelation :

Never having had a brother, I have always rather envied my sons their fraternal relationships.

In the spirit of ‘Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals’, this reader wonders at what might have happened if Mr. Ferguson’s brother had shared John Maynard Keynes’ sexual orientation?

That ‘circuitous literary way’  is exemplified in this paragraph:

There are two truly great novels — both of Scottish provenance — that revolve around fraternal feuding: James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae. In each case, the rival brothers are chalk and cheese — one good-hearted, the other diabolical. Jo has probably read them. Boris probably hasn’t.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/its-a-bad-week-when-bojos-bro-jo-goes-dc7t79dgv

His political strategy of shifting the focus away from the Tory political route, by his use of the Johnson Family Melodrama, in which he uses his skill as writer, in an attempt to beguile the reader is so politically transparent of his motive…

Old Socialist

Here is the Real Landmark! Even ‘you’ gave Piketty’s Capital a five part review, plus the usual hysterical, but mercifully short dismissal.

Headline: Thomas Piketty’s “Capital”, summarised in four paragraphs

Sub-headline: A very brief summary of “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”

https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2014/05/04/thomas-pikettys-capital-summarised-in-four-paragraphs

Kudos to R.A. for her/his enlightening review that undermined the above Capitalist Apologetic! Part one:

https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2014/02/27/reading-capital-introduction

Old Socialist

As Yanis Varoufakis once observed ‘you don’t negotiate with the EU’ ! The Financial Times writers have a chance to repeat, and admire, in their own way, Variety’s review of the Movie Version of ‘Adults in the Room’ directed by Costa-Gavras. To say the least, Variety is not Cahiers du cinéma, or even the utterly pretentious American publication Film Comment!

In the midst of Boris Jonson’s manufactured crisis about Brexit, and its attendant political melodrama, played out in this newspaper: that has enlivened the comments section of its various ‘news stories’ on the vexing questions raised by Boris’ demonstrable incompetence- but Brussels Briefing supplies the reader with inner workings of the EU, while remaining fully vested in the Financial Times’ fealty to the highly evolved and rationalized Coal and Steel Cartel, founded by technocrat supreme Jean Monnet’s Neo-Liberalism before the fact.

Note too the use of photographs, and those evocative graphs, that drive those argumentative points home: technocrats, actual and just the pretenders, find this irresistible. See Deirdre McCloskey’s ‘The Rhetoric of Economics’ chapter 3 ‘Figures of Economic Speech’, for the hold that these explanatory devices have in economic reasoning.

StephenKMackSD

https://www.ft.com/content/f34f72d0-cdf2-11e9-99a4-b5ded7a7fe3f

___________________________________________________________

To The Posh Boys @FT

Printed the Spectator essay by Ivan Rogers, and read its eleven pages! Oxford and ENS:

Rogers was educated at Bournemouth School in his hometown, the south-coast town of Bournemouth in Dorset,^[2] at which his father taught history.^[2] After a gap year in Bremen, in north-western Germany, he studied History for three years at Balliol College at the University of Oxford, followed by the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. This was followed by another three years at Balliol, at which he pursued doctoral studies in the history of socio-biology and eugenic thinking on the political left, though he did not finish his degree.^[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Rogers

Establishes his credential as apologist for the Technocracy’s fealty to the Coal and Steel cartel: that ‘evolved’ into an ersatz Federalism. Although Mr. Rogers isn’t above a bit of hysteria mongering, of an almost genteel kind:

But if that is where we end up in a few weeks time, there is no politically credible path afterwards to where the Prime Minister says he wants to get. And the eventual outcome would be much worse for the UK, the EU and the entire West than it needed to be. Future political generations would excoriate this one for having let it happen – indeed in many cases for having worked assiduously to deliver, and celebrated delivering, this failure.

This era perhaps now bears more similarities with the gold standard era – with its free capital mobility, its open trade, and its staggering complacency – than any other. That era came to an abrupt and violent end with world war one and its key features could not be resuscitated for decades. Many sage figures bearing considerable similarity to our current political leadership confidently pronounced in the early 20^thcentury that conflict was now completely impossible between developed democratic states, given their economic interconnectedness. We know how that turned out.

The voice of the Eurocrat is heard:

Deep integration inevitably requires that we eliminate the transaction costs that traders and investors face in cross-border transactions, and end regulatory discontinuities at borders. To enforce, police and adjudicate this, by definition, requires supranational legislation and a supranational Court. And those necessarily undermine national autonomy in decision-making.

We used, across party lines, to be in favour of all that because we thought – and a massive extension of qualified majority voted to deliver it, supported by Margaret Thatcher – it a price worth paying for building a much larger and more open ‘home market’. The British were notorious, from Thatcher on, as the biggest enthusiasts for the Single Market.

Have we heard this before? The advocates for TPP, one being Barack Obama, recited from the Corporatist Hymnal. And Rogers is fluent in patois of the Eurocrat, and their concerns about the blessing of ‘deep integration’ and other conundrums of the European Mythology. The Greeks were the telling object lesson of the bankruptcy of the EU! Read your own newspaper:

Headline: A debt to history?

Sub-headline: To some, Germany faces a moral duty to help Greece, given the aid that it has previously enjoyed

For a couple of minutes Friedman then offered a brief review of western financial history, highlighting the unprecedented nature of Europe’s single currency experiment, and offering a description of sovereign and local government defaults in the 20th century. Then, with an edge to his voice, Friedman pointed out that one of the great beneficiaries of debt forgiveness throughout the last century was Germany: on multiple occasions (1924, 1929, 1932 and 1953), the western allies had restructured German debt.

So why couldn’t Germany do the same for others? “There is ample precedent within Europe for both debt relief and debt restructuring . . . There is no economic ground for Germany to be the only European country in modern times to be granted official debt relief on a massive scale and certainly no moral ground either.

https://www.ft.com/content/927efd1e-9c32-11e4-b9f8-00144feabdc0

Let me interject that what needs to happen, in tandem with Brexit, is a remaking of Britain into a revitalized Social Democratic State, with the welfare of its citizens and revitalization of its economy, and a renegotiation of trade deals with its partners,as hard as that may be is the wake of Brexit.

StephenKMackSD

Headline: Boris Johnson vows to purge rebels who vote against no-deal Brexit

Sub-headline: Threat to withdraw Tory whip and deselect former ministers such as Philip Hammond
…

The Tory rebels are planning to work with Labour and other opposition parties to try to seize control of the House of Commons order paper and then pass a law to stop Mr Johnson from executing a no-deal departure from the EU on October 31.

The prime minister agreed the dramatic deselection threat after talks with party whips and advisers at Chequers, his country residence, on Sunday; Mr Johnson’s aides believe the threat of deselection will burn off some of the rebels ahead of the critical votes this week.

But a source from the Tory whips’ office said: “If they fail to vote with the government on Tuesday they will be destroying the government’s negotiating position and handing control of parliament to Jeremy Corbyn.”

…

But Rory Stewart, former international development secretary, said: “If we want to stop no-deal, we have to stop it this week. I’m proud to be a Conservative, I want to stand as a Conservative in my constituency, but I can’t stand on a no-deal platform.”

Mr Hammond said on Saturday Mr Johnson was showing “staggering hypocrisy” in threatening to throw out Tory MPs who oppose no-deal, since eight serving cabinet ministers have rebelled on Brexit this year.

https://www.ft.com/content/92f6f320-cc87-11e9-b018-ca4456540ea6

Compare the above highly nuanced political melodrama, as deftly reported by George Parker, with Dominic Lawson’s essay in the good, grey Times of September 1, 2019

Headline: Johnson the proroguer is serving democracy

Sub-headline: In honouring the Brexit vote, the PM will save parliament from itself

…

The former chancellor Philip Hammond led the charge in describing the PM’s move as a denial of “democracy”. That might be true, if Westminster were the solitary repository of democratic legitimacy in the matter of Britain’s relationship with the EU. But it isn’t.

To understand why, read the words of the cabinet minister who introduced the second reading of the referendum bill in June 2015 — the then foreign secretary, one Philip Hammond. He began by declaring that the EU had “changed almost beyond recognition” from what the British had endorsed in the 1975 referendum, and that therefore another popular mandate was required.

He ended: “Whether you favour Britain being in or out, we surely should all be able to agree on the simple principle that the decision over our membership should be taken by the British people. Not by Whitehall bureaucrats; certainly not by Brussels Eurocrats; not even by government ministers or parliamentarians in this chamber. The decision must be for the common sense of the British people . . . For too long, powers have been handed to Brussels over their heads. For too long, their voice on Europe has not been heard. This bill puts that right. It delivers the simple in/out referendum that we promised and I commend it to the House.”

…

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/past-six-days/2019-09-01/comment/johnson-the-proroguer-is-serving-democracy-5x9s5rg6m

Is it possible to ignore that Johnson has by, his act of proroguing Parliament,  rendered null, the fact that the ‘how’ of the Brexit will take place, without one of the vital political actors, in this decision, will be forcibly excluded from the negotiation of that ‘how’.

But the above quote by Philip Hammond : Not by Whitehall bureaucrats; certainly not by Brussels Eurocrats; not even by government ministers or parliamentarians in this chamber. The decision must be for the common sense of the British people . . .

The Brexit will simply take place via a vote? Call Mr. Lawson employment of Hammond’s reductionism awash in political fantasy.

It is true the prime minister is more concerned to honour the referendum result than the will of parliament (which has been to oppose everything and back nothing). In the battle between two forms of democratic legitimacy, he has taken sides. But if parliament declares itself more sovereign than the people, it will do itself more damage than any bombs dropped on it by the real Hitler.

The balance between all of the three branches of government is the imperative that must be recognized as just that!

Old Socialist

Headline: This is Not Propaganda — how the information revolution was hijacked

Sub-headline: The Soviet-born writer warns of the ‘war against reality’ being waged by populist forces

Pomerantsev reviewed by Thornhill is instructive in terms of political melodrama , at its most gruesome, with the murder of Maria del Rosario Fuentes Rubio, described in vivid detail. At least as vivid as Financial Time’s might permit! Mr. Thornhill’s two paragraphs describes Pomerantsev’s realization:

…

The impetus for the book came from Pomerantsev’s realisation that although he had left Russia in 2010, Russia had somehow followed him. Having dismissed the country as a “sideshow, a curio pickled in its own agonies”, he began to notice how many of its pathologies were popping up elsewhere.

“Suddenly the Russia I had known appeared to be all around me: a radical relativism which implies truth is unknowable, the future dissolving into nasty nostalgias, conspiracy replacing ideology, facts equating to fibs, conversation collapsing into mutual accusations that every argument is just information warfare . . . and just this sense that everything under one’s feet is constantly moving, inherently unstable, liquid.”

…

The review sifts focus for just a paragraph to recount, in highly condensed form, Pomerantsev’s father’s story and posits the notion ‘new narratives’.

…

But the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the global financial crisis of 2008 exploded both narratives, throwing ideology up into the air. Smart populist politicians, including Putin and Donald Trump, have been quicker than many rivals to invent infectious new narratives, playing heavily on conspiracy theory and ethnic identity.

…

The story of the American intervention in the internal affairs of Russia, after the Fall of The Soviet Union, which placed manipulable drunkard Boris Yeltsin in power. That, then,  led directly to the rise of Putin is, and remains, subject to the political amnesia of both this author and his reviewer. Should ‘we’ thank Bill Clinton and Strobe Talbott for Putin, by way of the Yeltsin appointment?

To express it in terms of the current Political Mythology, why might Putin hate The West? Look to the infliction of  vengeful Market Discipline on the Russian People? Instead, what the reader receives from Pomerantsev, is another reheated version of The Populist Menace: this left-over has been reheated so many times, it smells like what it is fetid political garbage.

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/073057c0-c9a6-11e9-af46-b09e8bfe60c0

@Les Kaye votes Leave! @Lancaster Professional

Blonde in the Belly of the Beast is your first source! She is articulate, but she lapses into what can only be called a collection of straw-men,  a litany of bad actors favored by the Canadian Frontiersman Jordan Peterson: to call him a charlatan is an apt descriptor!  ‘Blonde’s‘ version of the Frankfurt School is pure fiction! Read Theodor W. Adorno : One Last Genius by Detlev Claussen:

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674057135

Adorno was an active advocate of democracy, in Germany in the face of student protests, when he returned to his home.

Also read The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno by Gillian Rose.

https://www.versobooks.com/books/1555-the-melancholy-science

Polemic has its place, and she is an accomplished practitioner of the art. Polemic in service to what? is the pressing question. Consider the practice of willful ignorance! ‘Blonde’s’ collection of bad actors, fills her audience with dread of The Enemy Within, a favorite trope of not the status quo, but of a politics cleansed of unruly dissidents: see Bloom, Kimball, D’Souza and its latest duo Lukianoff and Haidt for her precursors!

Regards

StephenKMackSD

https://on.ft.com/2ZvnFiI