A blog in defense of western civilization by Roger Graf
Author: RogerG
I am a retired teacher and coach, Social Science Department chairman, community college instructor in Physical and Human Geography. I have attended 4 colleges with relevant degrees and certificates in History, Religious Studies/Philosophy, Education, and Planning and Community Development. I am also a 3rd generation native Californian, now refugee living in northwest Montana.
Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, on July 6, 2021: “Let’s be clear: critical race theory is not taught in elementary schools or high schools.” Not only is this statement not true. It borders on a lie. CRT and its ideological home in critical theory are ingrained throughout teacher training programs and much of the college curriculum. No “CRT 101”, but it’s everywhere in college instruction and course syllabi. Young adults come out of the colleges marinated in the stuff and into your child’s classroom.
Pease read a study on CRT in teacher prep programs by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal (JMC).
In the late 1970s when I went through teacher training at UC, Santa Barbara, John Dewey’s “child-centeredness” – synonymous with the inmates running the asylum, make no mistake about it – was all the rage with “democracy in the classroom” and “values clarification”. Forget about the nuts and bolts of delivering curriculum and maintaining order. Instead, we got expositions on message therapy and hypnosis in helping us to discover our “true teaching selves”.
Turning to the 1980s, the field of education was polluted with “cooperative learning” (Marxism as pedagogy) and Howard Gardner’s “multiple intelligences” (a falsehood to make people believe that everyone is equally smart). Today, it’s another neo-Marxism in full flower.
Randi Weingarten, AFT head, vows legal action against parents for challenging CRT in schools at press conference in July of 2021.
The JMC study found, low and behold, topping the course reading lists Gloria Ladson-Billings, who pioneered back in 1995 the injection of the neo-Marxist CRT into pedagogy. She’s an Ed prof’s favorite. Also, right alongside her as another crowd favorite in the faculty lounge is Paulo Freire and his unabashed “critical pedagogy”. It’s a scandal, and a profoundly neo-Marxist worldview.
As a teacher of almost 30 years, I’ve been there as these corrosive ideologies wash over the teacher candidate. Unless you are inoculated by a rock-solid set of beliefs, the poison will creep into your mental framework, lying there as a lurking suspicion that the “system” is rigged against the “oppressed”. The whole theoretical mishmash is great if your goal is revolution. What better way to train little Lenins for a new Bolshevik Revolution?
Don’t kid yourself in hoping that private, parochial, and a better neighborhood makes a difference. I’ve seen the same colleagues teaching out of the same textbooks with the same approaches in all three settings. The students might be more well-mannered and better dressed, but it’s the same crap washing over them as it washed over their teachers in all-too-many instances.
Parents, don’t be cowed by the lies. There’s a reason for many of our schools’ mediocrity. It began in college and is everywhere from the administrative office to the classroom. Get real.
KBJ before the Senate Judiciary Committee considering her nomination for the Supreme Court.
We have reached the point of personal ideology being a disqualification for office. Progressivism has long been subversive of the rule of law. One commentator of recent memory called the progressive’s “living constitution” an ongoing, never-ending constitutional convention. Jurists under its sway can make and enforce law at will. No longer content with simply applying the law in court cases, they’ll force us back into the jungle of the rule of men (or women, or . . .), and away from the rule of law. We don’t need any more judges as potentates. That means a healthy “No” to KBJ.
KBJ is an embodiment of the threat to our civilizational order. It’s more than her refusal to define a woman when asked. Some of her rulings are just way out there, as in contortions to ignore the restraints in the job description in order to achieve long-sought lefty ends. She’s more of a revolutionary than a judge.
One example of the radical’s monstrous rationale came to the fore in committee hearings considering her nomination. Sen. Grassley (R, Iowa) brought to light her ruling as a DC District Court judge in Make the Road New York v. McAleenan, (2019). She, with a stroke of her pen, made a ruling in violation of the law. At issue is the power of the AG or Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS) to exercise “unreviewable” (by the courts) discretion to determine the classes of aliens eligible for expedited removal from the country (Immigration and Naturalization Act, section 1225). So, what did she do? She went ahead and “reviewed” the DHS decision.
She tried to hang her hat on the Administrative Procedures Act (APA), as if it was the wormhole to make reviewable what was clearly not reviewable. So astounded was the normally liberal DC Circuit Court of Appeals that a panel of the Court reversed and admonished her by ruling that,
“There could hardly be a more definitive expression of congressional intent to leave the decision about the scope of expedited removal, within statutory bounds, to the Secretary’s independent judgment.”
She was so intent on bashing the Trump administration’s immigration policies that she violated the law when making a decision on the law. Try to make sense of that. Some could try, given that many are completely unaware that Article III of the Constitution gives to Congress the power to set the federal courts’ appellate jurisdiction. In other words, by statute, “unreviewable” means “unreviewable” by KBJ, et al.
The APA is not to be confused, as she apparently did, with the Constitution. This person is a radical, an unhinged progressive, or maybe even a revolutionary. As such, her nomination should be rejected, if not setting her to face impeachment.
Changing prices at a Shell station in Southern California, March 22, 2022.
Economic inelasticity: a measure of an economic activity’s responsiveness to price changes. Inelastic supply is production made unresponsive to price fluctuations.
Market: the spontaneous arrangements that brings buyers and sellers together. Markets can be constrained by natural barriers (geography, availability of resources, etc.) and interventions (government).
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Some elements of the Right are deserving of condemnation for their forays into imbecilic isolationism. Their tariff nationalism and sophomoric hostility to our present and natural allies stagger the mind. That said, the biggest and most persistent threat to the welfare of the nation by far is the Democratic Party and its congregation of the Left.
Nuttery has little effect without powerful, organizational patrons. The donkey party has turned itself into the institutional home of the Left; the faculty lounge is the home seminary of the Left; and the seminary’s gospel is a fanciful, semi-religious, but material and messianic apocalyptism. Don’t mistake this for the traditional Second Coming. This endtime arises from glib Gaia-worship, a faith that angles to translate prophesies of doom into power. Its doctrine is in actuality an ideology and the attendant politics amounts to a missionary zeal for conversion, forcible or voluntary.
Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) introduces her Green New Deal, translating alarmism into policy, 2019.
But the appeal of this new faith is limited. Unlike Christianity that has a natural allure to all groups – the equality of all souls – this substitute creed is most attractive to the demographic product of its seminaries (college graduates), who are most prominently, but not solely, the degreed halfwits in the super zips (codes). Their half-wittedness is the fruit of the degraded and narrow education in the tenets of this debased secular faith. These people aren’t trained to question their assumptions. They are zealots that occupy the cultural commanding heights to influence and obtain office to force their form of salvation on the reluctant.
Church/state separation be damned, they declare war on prosperity, independent consumer choices, entire industries, and the Constitution while they herd the population into cramped dwellings, ev’s, and mass transit. Freedom is the freedom to live only their way. I’m reminded of Orwell’s 1984:
“War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.”
And so the zealots march off and into elected office, the staffs of the elected, government employment, techie enterprises, the corporate boardroom, ad agencies, the press, law firms, Hollywood, and into the teacher corps of our schools – what G.K. Chesterton called the “chattering classes”.
The fruit of their endeavors, among other things, is a disfigured economic life, and more misery than what would occur without them running the show. Supply and demand get malformed, made inflexible to the unexpected twists and turns of existence. A pandemic hits and, voilà, we have empty store shelves, supply chain disruptions, inflation, a suppressed work ethic, fiscal insolvency, and the doldrums’ persistence into the foreseeable future.
That’s the thing, it doesn’t take much to maul the gears of an economy and hamper recovery. Demand remains pretty consistent (inelastic) for things like fossil fuels, rising with growth, and only declining when a recession hits, with its lost jobs and business closures. Not good. Supply is hamstrung (made inelastic) to respond to the demands of prosperity after the imposition of utopia. Not good.
And utopia is what it’s all about. Wherever the Dems hold sway in the halls of power – local, state, federal – they are running full speed toward their mirage of eco-nirvana. Democrat state-level fiefdoms are famous for it. The grid is target numero uno. California concocted its 100 Percent Clean Energy Act to command the state’s electricity to be carbon-free by 2045. Washington State’s Clean Energy Transformation Act commands its utilities to be carbon neutral in eight years. New York passed the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act that commands a net-zero economy by 2050. Hawaii jumps into the fray with its House Bill 623 that commands a 100% renewable energy grid by California’s year. They are declarations of war on fossil fuels, and the energy supply gets bulldozed.
Gov. Jerry Brown signs SB 100, mandating 100 percent renewable energy in California by 2045, on Sept. 10, 2018.
Notice the use of the word “command”, as in “command economy”? Karl Marx would be proud.
These lords of the state capital have jerry-rigged all manner of means to achieve the desired end. All of them, however, take the same tack of regulating traditional energy to death. Jerry Brown (as in jerry-rigged) and Gavin Newsom of the not-so-golden state are gung-ho. Brown, after signing the previously mentioned ukase, boasted, “California is committed to doing whatever is necessary to meet the existential threat of climate change.” There you have it: semi-theological apocalyptics combined with a newly inaugurated command economy.
Not to be outdone, Governors Cuomo and Hochul of New York read from the same prayer book. They, like the suzerains of the San Diego-to-San Francisco corridor (the rest of the state has little political pull), are enthusiasts for bans and regulatory dead weights. No fracking, no new permits, no new gas hookups for homes, and no pipelines. Thus, the residents of New York and anybody east of them get the privilege of paying six times more for natural gas than, say, the lucky folks of Texas or Louisiana. No pipelines are allowed across the empire state to possibly carry the fuel the 400 miles from the Marcellus Shale. Instead, it must be shipped from distant kleptocracies.
Protest against the fossil fuel industry – pipelines, et al – in New York in 2012.
The same price penalty applies to everyone living in California. Like everything else in the state – housing, electricity, food, cars, you name it – gasoline runs at a buck-and-half clip above the national average ($5.85 vs. $4.33/gal.) for the commuters on Newsom’s roads, which happen to be among the worst in the nation. What a deal? The “bargain” combines a doom-premium (“existential threat of climate change”) in the form of high taxes and exorbitantly priced energy with crappy pavement. No wonder it’s hard to find a U-Haul to flee the state. Demand has outstripped supply.
If it’s obviously such a great deal for the country, with the utopians professing to be on the same team with the angels, why do they have to wallow in falsehoods? In Biden-speak, he said on March 14, “Make no mistake, the current spike in gas prices is largely the fault of Vladimir Putin — it has nothing to do with the American Rescue Plan.” Translation: It ain’t me! But it is . . . to a great degree. He’s doing his best to make energy supplies inelastic and prone to shocks, whether it be a virus run amok or Putin’s dream of a Greater Russia.
Biden blames Putin and the Ukraine War for high gas prices, March 2022.
The only truism in his corner is cause-and-delayed-effect. Societies don’t operate like toggle switches – instant-on/instant-off. It takes time for policy changes to translate into behavior and effects, both positive and negative. Time is necessary for people to get their act together in the form of land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship. Since California is his model, the complete effect of Biden’s pummeling of the energy sector will take years for the whole country to fully feel California’s chronically high energy rates, blackouts, shortages, stagflation, deteriorating roads, trains to nowhere, and bottomless spending on expensive-but-decrepit mass transit, and, lest we forget, the brewing campaign against homes with yards (single-family residential). No space privacy for you and your kids, peasants!
Likewise, it took a number of years for the widespread use of fracking beginning around 2011 and the repeal of the ban on the export of domestic crude in 2015 to turn into Trump’s bluster about energy independence and the US as net exporter. Sometimes, occupying the seat of power at the moment of good times is sufficient to enjoy the afterglow of public adulation.
But Trump and Congressional Republicans are actually deserving of praise because they greased the economic skids instead of throwing sand in the gears as Biden and the donkey party are currently doing. The thinking of Republicans is in the right place. For the R’s, pipelines (XL, Dakota Access) are a good deal. For the R’s, drilling on public lands is a great thing for supply and cheap prices. For the R’s, subsidy briberies for solar and wind and the purchase of Teslas are viewed correctly as an assault on freedom and the public purse, and move us closer to a grid that operates with all the reliability of a utility in Lagos, Nigeria, or California. Not good.
Rolling blackout in California, 2021.
You can only get so much out of wind and solar. It’s called low energy density, an inherent characteristic of the two. As a result, low density must be compensated by the construction of vast plantations of panels and forests of huge propeller towers marring the earth’s surface. Lurking behind the scenes is natural-gas peaker plants to deal with the erratic production (the wind and sun are variable). The whole mammoth charade demands colossal sunk costs in redesigning the grid and the development of a storage system to make the massive contraption the complete energy source for your Netflix streaming addiction. Wouldn’t it be much easier with fewer lost opportunities (i.e., opportunity cost, the real meaning of the word “cost”) to clean up fossil fuels?
Certainly, Biden and the episcopate of the Church of Climate Change are aware of the monstrous costs and disruptions. It’s just that they don’t care. When you’re a believer, you’re a believer. And so, when American voters let Biden and company into command of the executive branch, they are going to get the full effect of the reunion of church and state, California style. It’s Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy all over again.
He didn’t disappoint the faithful from the get-go. Fresh from the chilly inauguration on the west front of the Capitol, Biden ordered an assault on domestic crude oil production by halting new leases, permits, and mining on federal lands, onshore, offshore, anywhere under federal control. Chad Padgett, former senior executive for BLM in Alaska, put it succinctly when he described an Interior Department memo, pursuant to Biden’s ukase, barring the issuance of “any onshore or offshore fossil fuel authorization, including but not limited to a lease, amendment to a lease, affirmative extension of a lease, contract, or other agreement, or permit to drill.” Half the 23 million acres of the Alaska National Petroleum Preserve was made off-limits. Authority over the process was centralized in the hands of Commissar Laura Daniel Davis, then-acting assistant secretary for Lands and Minerals at BLM, creating industrial death from bureaucratic atherosclerosis. Now, inelasticity applies to bureaucracy’s arteries as well as energy supplies.
Operating well in ANPR.
Biden’s recent blame-Putin schtick to avoid responsibility for his stake in the mess rings hollow. Having spent his entire career in demagoguery and electoral pandering, the guy exhibits little understanding of enterprise of the free variety. People in the real world of business look over the horizon before they sink big bank on a venture. What they see into the near future, and maybe beyond, is Biden’s declaration in a 2020 debate:
“No more drilling on federal lands. No more drilling, including offshore. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period. Ends.”
Biden announces his opposition to fossil fuels in 2020 debate.
Can’t get much plainer than that. The delay normally accompanying a policy is reduced when demagogic hostility is combined with the accelerant of pandemic-inspired cuts in production at a time of quick recovery from the nightmare. Why invest in an industry that the donkey party and its administration declared to be the equivalent of kiddie porn?
That’s not all. We’ll enjoy the benefits of California’s sclerotic supplies alongside California’s high-priced everything. All of this will be wrapped in an increasingly feudal way of life. As in the old Soviet Union, a new aristocracy of the party and its nomenklatura will ride on top of a beleaguered class of commoners. Thank you, Democrats.
The normally sensible Brit Hume on Bret Baier’s Special Report on Wednesday (3/16/22) asked the salient question on Ukraine: What is our national interest in Ukraine? It’s the same question every government has to ask when facing an international dilemma such as this one. For Hume, his inflection and posture inferred skepticism about a major US national interest in support of Ukraine. Take a tour around much of the Fox News primetime lineup and you’ll get commentary heavily dowsed in doubt with some bordering on complete rejection of any. Are they right? No, a hundred times “No”.
In addressing the query, one factor corrupts the popular media that influences much public opinion. A competent answer rarely lends itself to cable show compression – i.e., soundbites. The setting favors the cynic and hampers proponents. It’s much easier for a detractor to ask the question and force proponents to contrive a response to fit 10 seconds. Is that how we want overriding issues to be treated? Hardly.
Any intelligent consideration of the national interest in Ukraine begs particular questions. What would Europe and the world be like after a Russian conquest of Ukraine? Would it be a friendlier world for the US? An additional and related question: What would Russia under a reenergized Putin be like after a Ukraine conquest? Is a cooperative, agreeable, and contented Putin a likelihood? Oh, what will the CCP be left to think?
We study history for its clues on human nature.
As such, one could be excused for having a dim view of our prospects in this return to a world of contending hyper-powers. History is not encouraging. It’s rhyming in the cadences of the 1930’s. Once again, we have revanchist powers in Europe and Asia, and they have the additional liability of having nuclear arsenals. Their actions should focus the mind in a sterner way than a border dispute between two small satraps. A bear leaves more evidence of its passage than a mouse. Watch for the bear, not the mouse.
Trundling to the way-back machine, fascist Germany and Italy weren’t satisfied with the Rhineland and Abyssinia. Japan wasn’t made sanguine with Manchuria. League of Nations protests and sanctions didn’t halt Imperial Japan’s behavior and the Munich appeasement of forcing Czechoslovakia to surrender the Sudetenland didn’t whet Hitler’s appetite. The West had dug itself into such a deep hole by 1939 that it took six years and 75-80 million deaths, 3% of the world’s population, to bring the malefactors to heel.
Signing ceremony for the Axis Powers Tripartite Pact, January 1940; seated at front left (left to right) are Japan’s Ambassador Saburō Kurusu (leaning forward), Italy’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Galeazzo Ciano and Germany’s Führer Adolf Hitler (slumping in his chair).Putin and Xi meet in June of 2018.
A new axis has taken shape reminding us of that old one. The 1930’s edition began in 1936 with treaties of cooperation among the serial aggressors and ended with the full-blown military Tripartite Pact in 1940. Acting in historical lockstep, Putin and Xi met on February 4 to announced a bipartite pact with world-hogging spheres of influence. The joint statement reads as follows:
“The new inter-State relations between Russia and China are superior to political and military alliances of the Cold War era. Friendship between the two States has no limits, there are no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation . . . . Russia and China stand against attempts by external forces to undermine security and stability in their common adjacent regions, intend to counter interference by outside forces in the internal affairs of sovereign countries under any pretext, oppose colour [sic] revolutions, and will increase cooperation in the aforementioned areas.”
They are angling for a resuscitated Soviet Empire for Putin and Xi’s rendition of Japan’s old Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere – “Asia for the Asians”, er CCP, so to speak.
And, simultaneously, as in that bygone era, we have a recurrence of an anti-war Right. We are quite familiar with the Left’s aversion for anything nationally muscular. They have a habitual zeal for opposition to the military and for the peddling of facile “peace” – of the better-red-than-dead variety – and the accompanying disparagement of any nation deserving of our sympathies. Such was evident on the 1930’s Right – Lindbergh’s America First Committee and leading congressional figures like Sen. Robert Taft (R, Ohio) – and increasingly appears to be true today. Scan the Right’s media offerings (Fox News primetime, Newsmax, and a host of other digital offerings) and you’ll see the smearing of Ukraine, fears of a military-industrial complex, the dangers of spilt American blood on foreign soil, and the hyperbole of a new World War III at every turn. At the end of the day, it’s a repackaged 1930’s playbook that calls for unilateral abandonment of a national interest if a foreign thug threatens.
The now-worn playbook shows in a diminished military capacity, both then and now. Today’s defense doctrine went from simultaneously fighting two wars to one. In order to fulfill the “pivot to Asia”, we had relegated ourselves to abandoning Afghanistan. Defense spending as a share of GDP gradually declined from 9% in the 1960s to under 4% today. We are doing our best to recreate the circumstances that led to Pearl Harbor. This time, we may not have the time to build up. As Congress begins the debate of a new draft law, the nukes had already left their silos and advanced divisions of the People’s Liberation Army have landed on the shores of Taiwan and the Senkaku Islands.
So, how will a disquisition like this one be shoehorned into a Laura Ingraham or Joy Reid segment? Hmmm.
Something lurks behind the paralyzing alarms of our celebrities on the Right (and maybe the Left). One thing might be the hankering for the type of international dealings of the sailing-ship era. It was a time when oceans blocked anyone but the most capable and determined assailant. The 21 miles of the English Channel’s Dover Strait proved to be insurmountable even for Napoleon at his height of power. Today, an airborne division can be dropped on Albany in a matter of hours; 30 minutes is the time from an ICBM launch from its Aleysk silo to Chicago (faster for sub-launched and hyper-sonics); WMD can come in a suitcase; and cyber invasions to bollix our grid are nearly instantaneous from Beijing keystroke to PG&E. Someone tell Tucker Carlson.
Russia’s new mach 9 Tsirkon hypersonic missile
Secondly, in a display of obeisance to simple-minded Trump-talk, they have a 1950’s template for America. It was a time when the U.S. was riding high, alone in the world, as Europe and much of Asia were in rubble. In a way, they are right to admire the time because those were the halcyon days before environmentalist triumphalism and the regnant belief that federal spending can cure deep-seated personal problems, alongside its attendant and economy-dragging trillion-dollar deficits. But, by clinging to Trump’s rhetorical apron strings, they take it much further in bashing a trade deficit that neither he nor they understand. In a clear example of foot-shooting, their targets include trading relationships with our allies and the ones that we’ll need to counter China’s latest edition of Asia for the Asians. It’s as if they chucked Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Statecraft for Dummies out the window and are winging it.
It won’t end well after the rampages and the torching of 12% of US GDP (US exports’ contribution to GDP). Gazing back into the history, the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff and the Great Depression share the same womb.
Mothballed US Navy ships in Suisun Bay, Ca.
The doom of repeating history, in Descartes famous words, looms large. Don’t expect expansionistic predators-with-nukes to be impressed by an economic and military retreat to fortress America. We will quickly learn that the world as a playground for powerful rogues will not be to our liking. We’ve seen it before, déjà vu all over again. Thus, we have a national interest in keeping Putin and the CCP at bay, if for no other reason than to avoid the accusation of flunking high school History. The sooner we discredit the anti-war Right and Left and its incipient isolationism, the sooner our national interest will come into focus.
Let’s hope at this momentous hour that we don’t shrug our shoulders and say under our breath, c’est la vie. We will live to regret it if we do.
Eau Claire Area School District Administration Building, Eau Claire, Wisconsin.Naval War College, Newport, R.I., and near Barrington, R.I.
What are they doing to our soldiers? Indeed, what are they doing to our children? The “they”? They go by various titles: “cultural curators (Salena Zito), “cultural commanding heights” (mine), “elites”, “limousine liberals”, “establishment”, “progressives”, “blue-check Twitter”, alongside a host of disparaging terms for anyone outside these tightly-packed super zip codes in the cartography of America. A tell-tale sign is glaringly evident in almost any place with a college of extortionate social and economic (and by extension political) influence. Three recent incidents are case studies of their baleful clout.
Who’s educating our children? It might be the same people like the staff of University of Wisconsin Eau Claire’s Gender & Sexuality Research Center (GSRC) who conducted a teacher training session for the Eau Claire Area School District in late February on the whole gamut of woke ideology. Safe spaces, the evils of heteronormativity and meritocracy and systemic racism and white privilege, and the need to freeze parents out of their children’s gender identity issues were taught as unassailable truths to the government employees who have the residents’ children under their control for 6-8 hours per weekday. The whole thing might have flown under the residents’ radar, pre-pandemic, but parent groups, post-pandemic, were tipped off.
Thankfully, word got out. Parents learned that teachers were told in power-point slides,
“. . . parents are not entitled to know their kids’ identities. That knowledge must be earned. Teachers are often straddling this complex situation. In ECASD, our priority is supporting the student.”
In essence, the area’s children were treated as property of the school district. The arrogance is startling. Chris Jorgenson, the director of the GSRC, was impertinent enough to declare to the throng of teachers, “But much like we wouldn’t act as stand-ins for abuse in other circumstances, we cannot let parents’ rejection of their children guide teachers’ reactions and actions and advocacy for our students.” If you can make sense of the word salad, the presentation of gender-identity ideology – sometimes referred to as transgenderism – makes an enemy of parents who understandably reject the ideology by calling the repudiation parental “child abuse”. The whole falderol was sanctioned by the district’s superintendent, Michael Johnson, in classic bureaucratese when he said the district “prides itself on being a school district that makes all students feel welcome and safe in our schools.” The effrontery of our cultural curators was on full display.
Culprit #1: Chris Jorgenson, director of UW Eau Claire’s Gender & Sexuality Research Center
It doesn’t end there. Barrington, R.I., is home for many veterans and staff of the Naval War College (NWC), and what we see in the faculty lounge of UW Eau Claire is clearly evident among its professoriate, and it spills over into the town of Barrington. Don’t forget, the NWC educates the officer corps of one of the institutions that is assigned the sole task of protecting us from foreign aggressors who wish to inflict abject harm on us. The first decades of this century have made the threat abundantly clear.
Instead, like the teachers and children of Eau Claire, Marine and Naval officers are being indoctrinated with the same ideology of self-flagellation. Think about it: what effect will it have on morale in the ranks? General George C. Marshal warned us in the tumultuous days of World War II, “It is not enough to fight. It is the spirit we bring to the fight that decides the issue. It is morale that wins the victory.” Who would want to defend a nation that has been characterized barely this side of Nazi Germany?
At issue in Barrington is the sponsorship of this year’s Memorial Day activities. For the past number of years, it was the Barrington United Veterans Coalition (BUVC). Well, not this year. The town’s Master of Ceremonies will not be the head of BUVC but the role will be turned over to a NWC professor, Frank Douglas, who previously spoke in favor of flying the Black Lives Matter flag at city hall. The Veterans Coalition had opposed the proposal to grant BLM the same honor as the POW-MIA banner. Douglas, according to town council minutes, played the trite “diversity” card when he said, “… there is diversity in the veteran community because they [BUVC] do not speak for all veterans.”
Culprit #2: Frank Douglas, Naval War College professor
Our intrepid NWC prof, Frank Douglas, is probably confusing the neologism BLM as a concept with the group. But flying a flag is quite different from simply endorsing the obvious truth that black lives matter. A flag denotes a group, and the BLM group is a scandal in belief and practice. A person who isn’t aware of the group’s neo-Marxist program has been living in a closet. Ditto for the bookkeeping shenanigans. Flying the BLM flag isn’t much different from flying the Viet Cong flag.
I’m not surprised. Douglas’s resume’ reads like a travelogue through academic bubbles – Georgetown U. (BSFS, Int. Affairs, 1993), Johns Hopkins U. (MA, Int. Relations, 1997), Harriman Institute (M.Phil., PoliSci, 2001), and Columbia U. (PhD, PoliSci, 2005). Clearly, this guy has the impression that some form of wisdom and competence is granted to someone with a litany of letters after their name . . . or it simply could be the desire for a cushy job.
As for his uniformed experience – he’s a commissioned officer in the Naval Reserve – his bio on the NWC’s website lists staff jobs in and out of theater from 2004 to 2018. Actual combat experience isn’t evident. I could be wrong but he appears to be a desk jockey. He might be the military’s version of a teacher quickly transitioning to administration. The old saying in education has a ring of truth: If you can’t teach, administrate. In the social ecosystem of the Pentagon, if you find the life of the grunt personally repellant, cram your resume’ with academic honors and be above the grime of actual combat, and, while you’re at it, engorge yourself on the thought-fads of academia.
If I’ve got it wrong, Douglas, please tell me.
The staff overhead of the Pentagon and its academic appurtenances frequently show the very same neo-Marxist influence as in Eau Claire Area School District’s headquarters. Who can forget General Mark Milley’s (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) statement before the House Armed Services Committee in June of 2021: “I want to understand white rage, and I’m white”? The pinning of “white rage” on the January 6 rioters and protesters sounds like The Squad’s camera-hogging howls. The lunch room at the Pentagon may not be much different from the UW Eau Claire’s faculty lounge.
Culprit #3: Pauline Shanks Kaurin, Naval War College professor
Back to the NWC, another prof, Pauline Shanks Kaurin, delivered a lecture to sailors in June of 2021 that treated Meghan Markle’s fully unsubstantiated accusations of racism in the royal family as analogous to the alleged systemic racism in American society. She went further in slamming classical liberalism in its focus on the individual. If you want more of the mental gobbledygook, she continued to ineptly wax as follows:
“… [racism] is not a case of a few bad apples. This is, as the Duchess of Sussex said, she said, racism, racist is not rude….
This is not a matter of people who are being mean or rude or ignorant individuals. We tend to think of racism or sexism as, ‘this is a problem with individuals’. It’s not a problem with individuals. It’s not a problem with individuals only, it’s a problem of individuals within a structure, within a society, within a system.”
This is the stuff promulgated to the people trained to kill. Those in charge should be held accountable for wrongly presenting this bombast. And if they won’t be responsible, keep it out entirely. The nonsense should be treated as the bone of contention that it is. That means that you don’t deliver it from a lectern, as from a pulpit, even if discussion is permitted. The setting grants to the presenter the power to frame the discussion. Rather, it only deserves the full debate treatment: two sides cognitively armed to argue the merits, or lack thereof.
If not, keep it away from our troops, and keep it away from our children. It’s noxious neo-Marxism whether flying under the BLM banner or anti-racism ideology in teacher training, and needs to be confronted, and not in any way presented as truth. Our men and women in uniform and school-age children merit better. Schooling should not be a national suicide pill.
Ask yourself a couple of simple questions. How could a governor coldly announce the end of the internal combustion in 15 years without any recognition of the upheaval – i.e., human cost – that it’ll create? In September of 2020, Governor Newson of California did:
“In the next 15 years we will eliminate in the state of California the sales of internal combustion engines. We will move forward to green and decarbonize our vehicle fleet … substantially reducing greenhouse gas emissions as well as oxide nitrogen, in so doing, we’ll improve air quality and improve the economic climate here in the state of California.”
Governor Gavin Newsom announces an end to the sale of the cars with internal combustion engines.
How could Black Lives Matter declare economic war on white-owned businesses? Oh, but they did on Twitter in December 2021:
“Time to: #BuildBlack – Support Black-led-Black-serving organizations. #BuyBlack – Skip the Black Friday sales and buy exclusively from Black-owned businesses. #BankBlack – Move your money out of white-corporate banks that finance our oppression and open accounts with Black-owned banks. . . . White-supremacist-capitalism uses policing to protect profits and steal Black life. . . . Let’s use every tool in our toolbox…including our dollars…to end white-supremacist-capitalism.”
When not announcing an end to the traditional family, calling for the death of cops (“fry ‘em like bacon”), or excusing riots and murder in our cities, they applied the same old tired rhetoric in declaring their own version of apartheid nirvana.
Businesses torched in downtown Minneapolis during the George Floyd riots of 2020.
What’s happening? Well, it’s what happens when a person becomes incapable of examining their own assumptions. They blindly accept a set of propositions and then act upon them.
Something is missing from their mental comportment. The thing that is absent is the life of the personal. The life of the personal – also referred to as interiority – involves reflection, comprehension, and the private space to do it. For these avatars of a new world order, no time for that. That private space is to be treated as suspicious pods of conspiracy to stop them. The personal life is branded “counterrevolutionary”. For them, it’s time to light up the Molotov cocktails and torch the entire civilization and end the life of the personal.
However, it’s out of the life of the personal that arises all those things that we call private. You know, the private sector, private property, civil society, church. The life of the personal is more than emotions and the arts, even though it certainly encompasses them. It incorporates our tendency to gravitate to form family, a deeper form of intimacy than mere eroticism can satisfy. It includes our personal choices to make a living, whether to follow in the footsteps of mom and dad or not. It encompasses the natural inclination to acquire things unto ourselves – private property, private enterprise. It embraces the grappling to understand the nature of things, which includes the spiritual. Thus, churches arise.
All these things lie outside the revolution, because revolution is what these people are all about. They’re not into deep private reflection. They are consumed by ends (a complete revolution) sanctioning means (unbridled callousness). They desire to let loose an eruption to overturn nearly everything to make life conform to their unexamined vision.
No better illustration can be found than in a clip from director David Lean’s film from 1965, “Dr. Zhivago”, based on Boris Pasternak’s novel. In the scene, Dr. Yuri Zhivago is brought before the revolutionary commander Strelnikov in the heady days of the Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War (Whites vs. Reds). They met earlier before the Revolution but only briefly. The exchange is enlightening. Please watch the clip.
While ruminating on the latest thought-fad emanating from the Left, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), I was reminded of the tendency of people to hide their real intentions behind a flurry of academic jargon. Thus, the convoluted and incoherent MMT. Economists – left, right and center – have dubbed it “Calvinball” (Paul Krugman), “not ready for primetime” (Scott Summer), “sounded like lunacy” (Michael Strain), and “a political [not economic] manifesto” (report for France’s central bank). Frankly, MMT boils down to this: if the government wants to do something, go ahead and print the money and do it. No problem, the MMT priesthood would sing in chorus. Everything will be hunky-dory.
But what are they really after? Pure and simple, they want a humongous government with the power to tax, regulate, and spend at will; no restraints; socialism. MMT is just another tangled oratorical path to get there. Please, fans of socialism, cut the crap.
The same mental gymnastics are at work on the right. Events in Ukraine have exposed a segment of the right’s own rhetorical curtain. Tucker Carlson babbles on about “just asking questions”, “neocons”, “Ukrainian corruption”, “World War III”, “Americans dying”, and “America first”. Laura Ingraham joins the chorus. What are they really after?
The normally sensible Mollie Hemingway also seems to practice this form of mental subterfuge when talking about Ukraine. In a recent interview on the Hugh Hewitt show, she incessantly rambled about “knowing the risks” of US support for Ukraine, as if the thought was original to her; nobody but her is aware of it. But everybody intuitively does it when doing simple things like deciding to go to an ATM in crime-ridden LA under DA Gascon or proposing to prick the nose of the CCP with tariffs (they’ve got nukes too).
What’s up? Two motivations lie buried in the verbiage: they are paralyzed in fear of Russia and have a hankering for a “fortress America” national defense strategy. Goatherders with boxcutters (9/11) proved the latter to be foolish. On the former, I fail to understand the gripping dread of Putin’s nukes over, say, those of Chairman Xi. Tucker, Laura, and Mollie are gung-ho in respect to China and have said so ad nauseam, but can’t bring themselves to support actions to forestall a mauling by a power wishing to resuscitate the Soviet empire on a continent historically beset by world-shattering aggressors. Speaking of spent blood and treasure to put thugs back in the box, recall WWI and WWII?
Hardly does an episode go by without two straw-man choices to bolster the cognitive inanity. Tucker presents the choices as either staying out, completely out, or body bags/nuked American cities. What happened to simply arming our friends? Putin and Xi do it regularly, and American soldiers have paid the price in such disparate places as Syria, Fellujah, and the Hindu-Kush. The Tucker-to-Laura axis’s response would be “no more forever-wars” or run and hide after, as Mollie would have it, tortuously “assessing the risks”.
The thinking boggles the mind. They are quick to “assess the risks” of a bungled Afghan bugout but have no desire to “assess the risks” of a bludgeoned Ukraine, and possible defeat, as we sit idly by, safe in our “fortress America”.
Which brings to mind another hidden motive: pure cult-of-personality politics. Trump-love could be clouding their eyesight and mind. Biden, who defeated their master, did the Afghan bugout and is at the helm when Putin unleashed his doddering Wehrmacht on the Ukraine. They’re quick to blame Biden’s Afghanistan-appeasement for Putin’s invasion – and they’d be right – while at the same time they hawk appeasement in regards to Ukraine. Putin saw Kabul airport and Xi is watching Ukraine. A failure to stop Putin at the borders of the Ukraine could lead to a failure to stop Xi at the shores of Taiwan. If so, we’ll be really forced into “fortress America”. A self-fulfilled prophecy anyone, one not likely to be satisfying to most Americans?
I wish that they’d get their appeasement angles straight before they blather to us.
The modern punditry class is a disgrace. Previously, most of the sensible among us had no recourse in legacy media. The networks, CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WaPo, AP are mostly lefty propaganda organs. Now, it turns out, the primetime lineup on Fox News can’t be trusted. All of them prove that human fallibility is evident everywhere and academic degrees, party registration, ideology, race, gender, age, and telegenic qualities accord no fix. Fact.
Really, Tucker, Laura, and Mollie, tell us what actually lurks behind your wordiness. If it’s abject fear of Putin, say it. If it’s a sincere belief in the veracity of Russian propaganda, say it. If it’s a derivative of knee-jerk Trump-love, say it. If it’s an undying faith in oceans as our best defense, say it. If it’s a secret admiration of Putin as a fellow nationalist-populist, say it. If it’s the fright of “forever wars” trumping all other thoughts, say it. And, by all means, cut the crap.
My previous post (see below) contained my explanation for the devolution of the cinematic musical. The same commentary could apply to Hollywood in general. Another DC/Marvel regurgitation, rich in CGI visuals and not much else, is today’s theatrical high point. Sad.
To get a sense of the sublime that Hollywood was capable of producing, watch this scene from “My Fair Lady” of Audrey Hepburn and cast performing “I Could Have Danced All Night” (Hepburn’s voice is dubbed, but nonetheless….).
Once again, if you can, run it through a set of speakers.
Is our culture exhausted? I’m of two minds, but there are signs of fatigue, if not decline. Last night, I finished watching “My Fair Lady” on Netflix in HD and through my stereo system, as close as I can get to a theater experience for a film from 1964. It was magnificent and got me to wondering why we seem incapable of producing such cinematic grandeur today.
Not that there haven’t been attempts, but for me, they don’t measure up. Sorry, “La La Land” and “Chicago”, the two most recent endeavors to capture the magic, are poor knock-offs. The material elements are present in the physical choreography and vocalizations, and, yet, the whole package appears as a cheap imitation.
One factor for the debasement might have something to do with Hollywood’s zeal to be edgy. By edgy, I mean norm-busting: the unrelenting pressure to be a challenge to what used to be considered wholesome. It’s oft-putting and takes away from the synergistic combination of artistry, craftsmanship, and cinematography.
The zenith of the musical probably was the 1950s-60s. After that, it’s all downhill to the CGI/rapid-imagery, stale scripts, and unremarkable and uninspiring music of today. It’s so bad that the downfall of the musical coincides with the downfall of the Oscars. Who cares, except for the old stuff?
Please watch this performance of the wonderful song “On the Street Where You Live” from “My Fair Lady”. If you can, run it through a set of good speakers. Nothing from Hollywood’s current repertoire compares.
Lest we find ourselves distracted by all things Ukraine at the moment, we should not suffer temporary blindness to the ongoing threats closer to home. If you’ll recall, we are engaged in a wholesale demolition of our cultural inheritance under the guise of a landslide of hackneyed buzzwords: diversity, equity, inclusion (curiously in that order to avoid the acronym DIE), social justice, systemic racism, white supremacy, et al. An older but truer meaning of the word stewardship comes to mind.
See 1 Peter 4:10:
“As every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same one to another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.”
See Genisis 2:15:
“The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.”
The ransacking of the legacy flies in the face of the obvious meaning of stewardship. Throughout the Bible it is used to remind us that God is the ultimate source of all gifts (broadly defined) and His expectation that we are to wisely use these favors. It is not a cover for political enthusiasms such as recycling regimes, anti-plastic crusades, climate-change manias, the assault on fossil fuels, government handouts for windmills and solar panels, the punishment of workers in certain commodity industries, the promotion of guilt-trips for owning an SUV, the policies of herding families en masse into cramped apartments, the demonization of single-family-residential, and the relegation of the public lands to mere hikers’ paradises and no one else need enter. God’s gifts are conferred on a businessman exercising property rights to extract mineral wealth from the earth as they are for white collar public employees wealthy and organized enough to politically force everyone else to live according to their preferences. At present, there the mutilated corpse of stewardship lies.
If I hear another clergyman spout from the pulpit stewardship as the guise for greenie agendas, I’ll scream.
The insipid mangling of stewardship has manifested beyond Green New Deals and into a frenzy for an inflated race-consciousness. Hyper-sensitive race-awareness tars everything to the point of a wholesale dismantlement of our grand cultural inheritance. Statue-toppling, the insidious doctrines of race-obsessiveness in instruction to the young, the rantings and bullying in social media, the loud advocacy of the extinction of personal freedoms in free markets, and the espousal of life under massively intrusive government commands will mean the death knell for God’s gifts. “Stewardship” undermining stewardship. Go figure.
A rereading of the writings of Zora Neale Hurston are the antidote to what she referred to as the “race man”, the carnival barkers for perpetual race-victimhood, people like the barely coherent Ibram X. Kendi or the insufferable Maxine Waters.
Ibram X. KendiMaxine Waters
Check out this gem from Hurston’s essay “Art and Such”, wherein she decries the tendency of the “race man” to reduce the entire black experience to oppression and sorrow:
“Can the black poet sing a song to the morning? Upsprings the song to his lips but it is fought back. He says to himself, . . . ‘Ought I not to be singing of our sorrows? That is what is expected of me and . . . if I do not some will even call me a coward. The one subject for a Negro is the Race and its sufferings and so the song of the morning must be choked back. I will write of a lynching instead.’ So the same old theme, the same old phrases get done again. . . . The writer thinks that he has been brave in following in the groove of the Race champions, when the truth is, it is the line of least resistance and least originality.”
Zora sets the record straight. This latest campaign to ravage our inheritance is absolutely mind-numbing. The soul-destroying dogmas reduce thought to mindless chants. These people aren’t capable of originality and can add nothing to our inheritance. They only pillage. A painter’s palette is replaced by a sledge hammer.
