Christopher Chantrill
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NYC's DSA Political Wave

Reporting on the wins of NYC Mayor Mamdani’s hard-left mostly DSA candidates in the House Democratic Primary on Tuesday, the results include:

7th District: Hard-left DSA Claire Valdez
10th District: Hard-left Jewish Brad Lander over incumbent far-left Dan Goldman
12th District: Hard-left Micah Lasher
13th District: Hard-left DSA Darializa Avila Chevalier.

But whatabout the racism?

7th District: 36.5% White; 35.9% Hispanic (Brooklyn, Queens)
10th District: 48.7% White; 21.7% Asian (includes Lower East Side)
12th District: 65.2% White; 14.1% Asian (midtown Manhattan)
13th District: 52.3% Hispanic; 23.4% Black (upper Manhattan, Bronx)

Isn’t this kinda racist? With whites winning in the white districts and a Hispanic doctoral student winning in the Hispanic district? And whatabout the Asians? But look at House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries district:

8th District: 42.2% Black; 27.4% White (west of JFK airport)

I am shocked, shocked that the districts are so race-aligned. I believe in Hope and Change.

Now the question we hard-right racist-sexist-homophobes are asking: is this the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning?

My belief is that the left is, and has always been, the faith of educated rich kids. You know: Marx, son of the leading lawyer in Trier. Hey Chuck, why don’t you go get a job, instead of leeching off the son-of-a-cotton-magnate Fritz Engels!

The eternal cry of the left is that “we are fighting for the oppressed against the oppressors.” First it was the workers, then women, then blacks. Then the whole thing turned into a racket with gays and transgenders, as prophesied by the philosopher Eric Hoffer.

But today, I suspect, the educated left is fighting for themselves, due to what Peter Turchin, of Ages of Discord, calls “overproduction of elites.” You know, kids getting useless degrees in “underwater activism” and finding that all the good NGO jobs are taken by rich kids with connections.

Problem is, of course, that the traditional victims — workers, blacks — don’t see any percentage in the new game. Tish James, the scourge of Donald Trump, said:

Some of the candidates that he has supported are individuals who do not understand the politics of New York City, the cultural differences from district to district, who have not been part of the history and the struggle of some of these districts, and are relatively new to the body politic,” James told CNN, pointing particularly to what she said was Mamdani’s lack of understanding of race and class issues that run deep.

Shall I translate? The idea of “differences from district to district” and “understanding of race and class issues” is French for “pay attention to the handouts, buster.”

I don’t know any philosophers and social scientists that might be studying the current stage in the Allyism saga, where the Allies are fighting for the oppressed woke-studies graduates against the white male billionaire Musk-adjacent oppressors. But I certainly will be signing up to read their analyses after it’s all over. One way or the other.

| Wed, 24 Jun 2026 22:01:43 GMT |


Let's Fix All our Modern Religions

I just read a review of JD Vance’s new book Communion, about how he abandoned the “religion of status,” the “arrogant desire to rise above others,” and became a Catholic.

Back in the day when he was being raised by Mamaw, he believed in her “mainstream evangelical Protestantism.” But then he lost his faith in the military and adopted the religion of credentials, for as a child he had “envied people who had wealth, power, status, influence, prestige, and celebrity.”

But then he noticed, in the age of wokeness, that status depended enormously on having “right-think” rather than “wrong-think.” And his wife Usha wanted him “to be a good person, a good husband, and a good father (eventually).”

Yeah, I know. It’s all very well for people at the top of the status ranking to sneer at status, but…

I suppose we could say that, in our age as in all others, people want to live a meaningful life.

Now I am reading a thorough analysis of German Philosophy from Kant to Adorno. And the key thing that I am noticing is the question of God. From Kant to Schopenhauer the philosophers tried to weave God — usually rather clumsily — into their philosophical meaning of life.

But then comes Feuerbach and The Essence of Christianity — first translated into English by My Girl George Eliot. He’s the first guy to say that God is a mere projection of human values like “reason, will, love, and other perfections.” He opened the way for Nietzsche to go the whole hog and declare that “God is Dead and we have killed him.”

To me, this is all about the consequence of modern science developing a universe that just doesn’t fit the Christian idea of God and a seven-day Creation. We humans are not in Kansas anymore.

I think that, for the last nearly 200 years, the Death of God has freed humans to invent whole new secular religions and politics to imagine the meaning of life and the structure of society — in absolutely crazy ways from Marxism to fascism to the administrative state to wokism.

Which just shows that every human has some sort of a belief in a godlike concept, the way things oughta be, or will be, or can be, despite everything. I’d say that the reason the last century or so has been so chaotic is that, with “God is Dead” and the extinction of belief in a traditional God and the associated belief systems, the arena was opened to every crazy possibility — especially for people that believe in the religion of status and its corollary, the religion of equality.

Dare I say that a couple of centuries later we wise ones are beginning to think that the old traditional beliefs help to direct a life away from the craziness towards sanity, and that the secular cults have not exactly freed humans from the shackles of injustice and age-old bigotry by killing God and loosing upon the world the glories of secularism.

In the bad old days we had religious wars over whose God was true. Now we have secular religious wars over whose ideology is true. Nothing has changed.

Meanwhile we get, every generation or so, a technological revolution that blows up the conventional experience of reality.

What is to be done?

My line is the request of Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion / My Fair Lady for Professor Higgins to treat her “more friendly like.”

Hey, why not base our culture and society on the notion of “more friendly like?” We could do worse.

| Wed, 24 Jun 2026 01:20:56 GMT |


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Christopher Chantrill Follow chrischantrill on Twitter

Christopher Chantrill (@chrischantrill) is a writer and conservative.

He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.


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A Commoner Manifesto

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TODAY’S MAXIMS:

Some people work for a living; other people vote for a living.

Kant: We cannot know things-in-themselves, but only appearances. Me.

all maxims...

BIG IDEAS:

The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.

My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.

I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.

And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.

The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.

But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.

The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.

The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.

IN BRIEF:
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