News of the Week (October 18th, 2026)

Posted on October 18, 2026 by The Political Hat
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Firing Line Friday: The Failure of Organized Religion

Posted on October 16, 2026 by The Political Hat

     In the hopes of encouraging a more civil, and illuminating, discourse, here is another episode of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s “Firing Line”.

     The question of personal faith and organized religion can be a deeply personal one. Let us look back sixty years ago when William F. Buckley, Jr. debated his old philosophy teacher, Paul Weiss, who posed as a question the failure of organized religion.

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Quick Takes – Canada Keeps Killing: Can’t Cook? Death! Eating Disorder? Death! Demented? Death!

Posted on October 15, 2026 by The Political Hat

     Another “quick takes” on items where there is too little to say to make a complete article, but is still important enough to comment on.

     The focus this time: In America it’s “give me liberty or give me death”; in Canada it’s “give me a sensible culinary experience or give me death”.

     First, a little mood music:

     Carrying on…

Death, Rx

     Remember when euthanasia was sold as being for the terminally ill who were suffering in pain?   Apparently not being able to cook for your family is considered suffering worthy of death.

“Top Canadian doctors are raising alarm bells over the country’s seemingly quick approval for assisted dying requests, after one elderly woman was accepted based on the fact that she lost the ability to cook meals for her family.

“…

“One such case saw a woman in her 70s struggling with losing her ability to cook for her family, something she prided herself on as the matriarch of her family.

“When she was approved for assisted dying, she told doctors that she felt she had lost her value to her family. “

     Thankfully, she received legitimate counciling that convinced her that her life’s worth was more than the sum of the meals she can cook.

“Through counseling, she came to understand that her family valued who she was, not what she did for them. She decided not to go through with ending her life, at least for now.

“That Christmas, her family gathered and she sat proudly at the table while others did the cooking and serving.”

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Why Postliberalism Failed

Posted on October 13, 2026 by The Political Hat

     Patrick Deneen is a Leftist. He invents a reductio ad absurdum that all “liberalism”, from Locke to Marx, are based on a near eschcatalogial obsession of atomized autonomous individuals freed from “family, tradition, religion, local community and even the limits of nature” to reach some religious apotheosis. This false dilemma fallacy ignores that Deneen’s critique is the same critique the collectivist Leftists use against classical liberalism more broadly, and conservatism in the American and Burkean vein more specifically. It isn’t that Locke and Marx are alike, but that they are different that explains why the later fails then, just as Deneen’s ideology fails nascently, as Kim R. Holmes observes (which is quoted in full due to the limitations of Twitter’s/X’s embeds).

I have a shorter and more correct answer. “Liberalism” failed because it deviated from classical liberalism (limited government and all that) and drifted into progressive socialist and Identitarian territory, derived not from Locke but from Marx, Gramsci and Marcuse. A reason why many post-liberals like Deneen don’t acknowledge that is because their social and economic worldview is functionally closer to those guys than to Locke, Jefferson and Madison.

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Camouflage Socialism

Posted on October 12, 2026 by The Political Hat

     The embrace of literal socialism by many on the purported “Right” is, at this point, hard to ignore. Yet the word “socialism” remains so toxic to so many outside of the Left, so the Socialist Right must deceive, inveigle, and obfuscate their socialism by trying to redefine it as “stuff we don’t like”. or more specifically using the state to control society other than they’d direct.

     Case in point is this rambling incoherent answer from J.D. Vance on how he’s define “socialism”:

     Organizing society to benefit the domestic worker is quintessential socialism. To many, it’s clear that it’s just a catch-all for social outcome they don’t fancy, and that it’s not socialism when they do it for the “common good”.

“Contrary to the vice president, ‘socialism,’ a theory of socioeconomic organization in which the state, to varying degrees, owns property and enterprise and redistributes private wealth and goods based on central planners’ determinations, is not a ‘hard term to define these days.’

“‘Classically, you would think, socialism is about prioritizing workers,’ Vance said. That sounds nice! But in the vice president’s view, today’s self-proclaimed socialists have perverted the philosophy’s noble intentions. ‘So, I don’t know what the term means anymore.’”

     Socialism becomes the opposite of what it is in order to justify socialism in deed while condemning it in name, much like how war is peace or up is down.

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News of the Week (October 11th, 2026)

Posted on October 11, 2026 by The Political Hat
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Firing Line Friday: The Death Penalty

Posted on October 9, 2026 by The Political Hat

     In the hopes of encouraging a more civil, and illuminating, discourse, here is another episode of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s “Firing Line”.

     With the recent botched execution in Tennessee, let us look back half-a-century when the question of the death penalty was an even more contentious question that it was now, as this debate between William F. Buckley, Jr., Ernest van den Haag, and Donald E. Shapiro demonstrates.

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Quick Takes – Hiding DEI: DEI Payroll; DEI Over Editing; DEI Without Statements

Posted on October 8, 2026 by The Political Hat

     Another “quick takes” on items where there is too little to say to make a complete article, but is still important enough to comment on.

     The focus this time: They’re not saying it’s DEI, but it’s DEI

     First, a little mood music:

     Carrying on…

     When you have to cut your budget… you keep your DEI payroll?

“Portland State University is eliminating two academic departments and 36 full-time positions as it confronts a $35 million deficit, while it and two other Oregon public universities maintain more than 90 DEI-related positions costing more than $7.2 million annually.

“PSU will eliminate its Conflict Resolution and University Studies departments and reduce six others under its final plan. The university says 36 full-time positions will be involuntarily eliminated and three more reduced to part time.

“Meanwhile, PSU, Oregon State University, and the University of Oregon maintain 92 DEI-related positions costing a combined $7,255,758, an Oregon Scholars analysis of university salary data found.”

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The Totalitarianism Of The Friend-Enemy Distinction

Posted on October 6, 2026 by The Political Hat

     Herbert Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance” and Carl Schmitt’s “Friend-Enemy Distinction” ultimately echo each other. Both, also, are dependent on an unconstrained and totalitarian government to determine who is to benefit and who is to suffer, as James Lindsay explains, which is quoted in full below due to the limitations of Twitter’s/X’s embed feature.

Carl Schmitt’s Friend-Enemy Distinction is not just “there are enemies, so we should band together to fight them.”

Schmitt’s theory of politics, which is exactly the Friend-Enemy Distinction, relies upon that idea plus two others: authoritarian submission and totalizing scope.

Schmitt’s theory is predicated on his other political theorizing, which begins with his model of political sovereignty. The sovereign is he who decides the exception, including when to declare and fight the enemy.

In his Friend-Enemy Distinction, the enemy is a public enemy who is declared by some recognized authority structure. This is a totalizing and polarizing declaration. Everyone subject to that authority structure is required to recognize the enemy and fight it or else be declared an enemy as well. That is, it’s basically cancel culture.

The enemy is who the authority structure (or sovereign) declares, and the friends are the friends who fight the enemy. Anyone who doesn’t fight the enemy is complicit, thus also an enemy.

This is totalizing and polarizing. You don’t have an option to disengage, and you don’t have authority to question the declaration. The authority structure declares the enemy, and you pick a side. That’s it. No questions, no disagreement, nothing.

We call this totalitarianism, by the way, so it’s not surprising Schmitt used it to justify the Nazi judicial methodologies.

This is also how the “democratic centralism” of Communism works, by the way, in the dictatorship’s declared primary function, which is suppressing and destroying enemies.

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“Bleeding Heart Postliberals” — Making Welfare Great Again?

Posted on October 5, 2026 by The Political Hat

     Once upon a time in the halcyon 1950s and early 1960s, the ascendant Left, with only a still nascent conservative intellectual movement to yell “stop”, decided that for the greater, or common, good the Federal government would declare a “war on poverty” by helping those who were poor or disadvantaged, and by doing so would allow them to rise above their station in life while also making sure that no one would fall into and get trapped in poverty or worse via a robust social safety net. Why, universal healthcare and a universal basic income were discusses with wide acceptance, even amongst Republicans.

     The inevitable failure was blamed, not on the welfare state getting more of what is was subsidizing or the distortions in society it created, but on those mean-spirited conservatives! Obviously, the Left stated with certainty, those pesky conservatives just hated the poor! How dare they blame poor people for making the decisions and living the lifestyle that resulted in their own poverty! Why, to them, it was obvious that this was unconstrained free-market Darwinism, with greedy elites not caring about the people or the common good of the country!

     It was racist even!   How dare those bigots blame Blacks for living in ghettos, joining gangs, having kids out of wedlock, or getting involved with drugs! Why, they even demanded these poor unfortunates word, train, or educate themselves in order to receive assistance!

     Back in reality, actual conservatives called these Leftists “Bleeding Heart Liberals” and championed reformers such as Star Parker. They rightly believed that the welfare state, as unreformed as it was back then, was itself the problem and it did not matter what the race of the people involved were.

     Today, we have the same thing, but race flipped, complete with what could be termed “Bleeding Heart Postliberals”.

     Such “Bleedin Heart Postliberals” showed the same knee jerk defense of poor communities filled with drug abuse, out-of-wedlock births, and crime… as well as love of welfare as a tool to elevate people and make society better. A quick look to the histrionic reaction to Kevin Williamson is proof enough of that. Now, they have found a poster boy to defend welfare: Brad.

     Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders put out a campaign commercial saying that taxpayers shouldn’t cover welfare for people who choose not to work. The welfare-to-work requirements had—or at least had—been one of the many examples of how Leftism was combated and rolled back.

     Note that the able-bodied young man in the commercial was White and represented the largest group, racially, of people on welfare in Arkansas.

     The response was exactly what you’d expect from those “Bleeding Heart Liberals” from the 1970s and 1980s, except in this case it was the “Bleeding Heart Postliberals” complaining about the racial hate against White people.

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