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.
Hillsdale College in Michigan.Student walks past statue of Ronald Reagan on the campus of Hillsdale College.Site of Hillsdale College campus in Placer County near Roseville.
I kid you not: Hillsdale College is coming to California and the true believers of the ruling groupthink are going bonkers. The state is hemorrhaging legacy-cost red ink, businesses, and residents as it is mired in COVID totalitarianism, homelessness everywhere, a crime wave, debased schools, welfare dependency, expensive everything, and public spaces that aren’t fit for children (and adults). And to think that they are frazzled beyond restraint by the appearance of a classical liberal arts college within their playpen. Amazing, absolutely amazing.
If you want to know the reason for the state’s looniness, no better candidate can be found than in the loopy thought processes of many of the state’s college graduates who then scatter into the state’s institutions for employment. An example of the phenomena is 24-year-old Hannah Holzer, “opinion assistant” at the Sacramento Bee. She penned an op ed – really, more of a screed – on January 23 titled “A conspiracy-peddling college is coming to Placer County. That should scare us all” (read here). What does she bring to the table other than vapid sloganeering and ad hominems? Let’s see.
Hannah Holzer
Her LinkedIn resume’ mentions a 4-year stint at UC Davis with an “English – professional writer” degree. Her post-graduate journey winds its way through a news internship at the Bee, a DC communications internship, editor of The California Aggie, editor at SF Weekly, and finally Bee assistant opinion editor/Sunset Beacon freelance reporter at the wizened age of 24. She had plenty of opportunity to ply her trade while infusing her journalism with left wing nuttery.
And it shows. Read the piece. It’s a mental fingerprint of unexamined assumptions and left-wing boilerplate. The opening paragraph is an unacknowledged tribute to the Unibomber’s Manifesto. It’s ripe with “ultra-conservative” (Hillsdale College) and this gem, “. . . extremist institution [Hillsdale College], perpetuating alternative facts and harmful conspiracy theories.” Plowing deeper into the tirade, one finds an excoriation of Hillsdale’s rejection of the lefty bromides of “social justice” and “multicultural diversity”. She then unabashedly and unthinkingly equates the two with “a just nation”. What? A “just nation” is created by the racial discrimination of a racial favoritism? For our intrepid reporterette, lady justice is not to wear a blindfold.
There’s more. She adopts the vocabulary – “dog whistle” – of Democratic Party electioneering. Of course, the phrase is attached to the opponents of the neo-Marxist critical theory and its offspring, critical race theory, leading to this whopper: “. . . they [Hillsdale] view the practice of accurately teaching America’s complex history to students as a threat to white supremacy.” There you have it. “White supremacy” has come full circle to include those who take Martin Luther King seriously.
Hillsdale’s sin is its unwillingness to kowtow to the fashionable tomfoolery that is so commonplace in the modern academy. Hillsdale is an unflinching advocate of classical education – classical means rooted in Western civilization. It’s the same civilization that gave birth to the university, the higher ed that has currently been bastardized to produce the youngins who can’t wait to dismantle it in their ignorance.
Hey, California, the doctor has arrived with a little tough love in the form of Hillsdale College.
“. . . nothing would be more fatal than for the Government of States to get in the hands of experts. Expert knowledge is limited knowledge, and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man who knows where it hurts is a safer guide than any rigorous direction of a specialized character.” ― Winston Churchill
Please watch a Virginia mom on February 3 lower the hammer on her school board’s policy of mandatory masks in school.
Something is afoot. In the first edition of the American Revolution, it was portrayed as a fight against aristocratic rule. That’s misleading. More correctly, it was a fight against violations of the rights of Englishmen. Key to the rights of Englishmen is self-rule. We rule ourselves though our elected representatives, thus the cry against taxation without representation. The king and Parliament were an ocean away and the colonists had no representation of their own choosing.
In this possibly emerging second edition, unaccountable experts have supplanted self-rule. The expertocracy, like the aristocracy of old, claim a kind of divine right, and too many of a leftist persuasion bend a knee before them. It’s the very essence of progressivism.
The pandemic is proving Churchill right. In an understandable reaction, moms and dads are raising the flag of opposition. Self-rule and the rights of Englishmen are making a comeback.
Biden and New York City mayor, Eric Adams, at yesterdays’ meeting (2/3/22).
Flummoxed: adj.; bewildered or perplexed.
I am flummoxed and so is our president. I am perplexed by young people, formally educated and from comfortable backgrounds, storming police stations, burning down central business districts, and imposing on us their warped views by defacing our monuments and memorials. I am further bewildered by a refusal to recognize the most elemental of things: if you don’t enforce the law, there is more law breaking. Our president is equally flummoxed and displays it regularly. He strode into New York City yesterday (2/3/22) and announced that he was going to lead an effort to arrest, wait for it . . . guns! Arrest guns, not the people who use them to commit heinous acts.
Yes, that’s right, President Biden declared a crackdown on inanimate objects. The favorite phrase in vogue among his people is “gun violence”. And they don’t mean violence committed by human beings WITH guns. They mean violence BY guns. It’s as if these metallic things have a mind, a will of their own. They jump from the coffee table to a person’s hand, take over the psyche, and drive the individual to commit horrifying acts with them.
Nary a word about blue-bubble public leaders vilifying the police, robbing their budgets, and refusing to prosecute lawbreakers. Check this out: mobs using phone calculators during smash-and-grabs to guarantee that their thefts don’t exceed $950, thanks to the voters and political establishment of California (Prop 47). And blue-bubble potentates don’t need a Prop 47 to set a baseline for allowable criminality. They’ve got Soros-funded henchmen as DA’s refusing to fulfill their oaths of office to faithfully enforce the laws, and thusly are deserving of impeachment. Sorry, “prosecutorial discretion” doesn’t cut it. This is not discretion; it’s essentially ripping pages out of the duly-passed code of laws.
Our exalted president says not a word about the vastly more significant contributions of his party to the mayhem. Get prepared for a campaign to hamper your ability to own a gun to protect yourself from the lawlessness that they inspired. Mr. President, you should be condemned for not lowering the boom on your party’s abettors of criminality while leaving the rest of us without any means to protect ourselves.
Watch yesterday’s disgusting spectacle on the video below.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky of the FDA and Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief White House medical adviser, testifying before the Senate Health Committee on Jan. 11, 2022.
In March of 2020, near the start of the government’s forceful reaction to the pandemic, I fretted that “We can’t do this!”, the this being the lockdowns and all the other strangulations of human interaction. I was worried that the virus would still get out and we would have nothing to show for it but a mutilation of our own well-being. Others more knowledgeable than I are starting to chime in. Most recently, a Johns Hopkins University study by Jonas Herby, Lars Jonung, and Steve H. Hanke paint a dismal picture of what we’ve done to ourselves in our COVID panic.
Cutting to the chase, the researchers concluded,
“They [lockdowns] have contributed to reducing economic activity, raising unemployment, reducing schooling, causing political unrest, contributing to domestic violence, and undermining liberal democracy. These costs to society must be compared to the benefits of lockdowns, which our meta-analysis has shown are marginal at best . . . . lockdowns should be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy instrument.”
Hindsight has not been kind to the “scientific consensus”. Fauci and company, and hyperactive and panic-riddled governors and mayors, mostly in the blue bubbles, have soiled themselves, and continue to do so. As a consequence, many people are coming to the realization that “scientific consensus” is not science. It’s an easy cover for people who don’t know science to lay claim to it for political advantage. As such, when the opinions hiding under the phrase’s veneer get exposed for their erroneousness, it starts to lack credibility . . . as if it ever had any.
Beware, beware of the “scientific consensus” on climate change. It is bandied about by the same actors pursuing similar goals in similar organizations with similar backgrounds and homogeneous worldviews.
Some have complained that the pandemic shouldn’t be about politics. Really? When has a “crisis too good to waste” not been about politics? Of all people, Clausewitz gave us the proper insight: “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” Just replace “war” with “scientific consensus”.
Former President Donald Trump gestures during a rally in Conroe, Texas, January 29, 2022. (photo: Go Nakamura/Reuters)
To say that we are a divided country down to our most fundamental beliefs is an understatement. Blue bubbles exist in a sea of red – the crimson color referring to people more well-grounded in our civilization’s norms of common sense. As the Left becomes more provocative, some on the right have responded in kind, almost to the point of laying themselves open to demagogues. For me, the repulsiveness of the Left is not an excuse to hitch my “wagon” to a narcissistic and hubristic “horse”, giving a special meaning to a horse’s a**.
Trump’s comments at a January 29 rally in Texas brings me to this point. He’s still peddling the line that he’s a victim of a cabal depriving him of an election that he constantly professes to have won. He goes as far to say that Vice President Pence had the power to throw out the electors of selected states to give the election back to him. He yelped, “Unfortunately, he [Pence] didn’t exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!” That’s poppycock.
Mike Pence announces Joe Biden’s victory after Congress completes electoral count, Jan. 7, 2021.
Why poppycock? There’s nothing in law or legal scholarship to support such a claim. Law professor and Trump lawyer John Eastman tried to establish the assertion but on later clarification said that he raised the theory for internal discussions only and called the idea “crazy” and not “viable”.
When it comes down to it, the silliness lies in a logical fallacy and affront to long-established principles of law that are written down in the Federal Rules of Evidence. Eastman’s theory (for “internal discussions” only) is based on proposals to reform the aged Electoral Count Act of 1887. Suggestions by some of Trump’s critics in the Congressional debate to clarify the vice president’s role in the law are assumed by Trump to be evidence that Pence had the power. It’s a real head-scratcher. As legal counsel, you couldn’t get this line of argument past a judge in a trial. If you persisted, you might be spending a night or two in the hoosegow.
And this is the thin reed that Trump uses to lambast Pence. This doesn’t mean that we should ever again conduct elections like we did in 2020. The panic of COVID was used to conduct a host of dubious election ploys: shot-gunning ballots through the mail, legalizing previously illegal practices like ballot harvesting, fungible ballot verification procedures, the repeal of the precinct system in anywhere-voting, unsupervised drop boxes, voting deadlines that varied with the conscience of a judge, etc. But that’s how some states decided to conduct their elections, something that’ll be hard to overturn in a federal court.
Shame on states for allowing this to happen. Shame on the hubristic and narcissistic Trump for peddling lies to his followers. Shame on his followers for allowing themselves to be manipulated so Trump can avoid the moniker of “loser”. The country deserves better.
RogerG
*Thanks to the work of Andrew C. McCarthy and Philip Klein in National Review Online.
2015 meeting of the American Historical Association.
Thomas Piketty, an academic apostle of the Left, once crowed in 2016 of the increasing correlation of higher educational attainment and the tendency to vote Democratic: high school graduates 44%, Bachelor degrees 51%, Masters 70%, and PhD degrees 76%. Does this mean that smarter people vote for the Democrats? Hogwash. The gap between smartness and possession of degrees has not been greater than in our time.
It’s fair to say that degrees and certificates in many cases just paper over human failings. We are still prone to unexamined and purely fashionable beliefs, an overwhelming desire to win at any cost, the penchant to make facts fit predetermined conclusions, and let hubris cloud our vision. Nothing much has changed for many of us after many years of schooling. Today, we have many such highly educated ideologues circulating amongst us.
It’s not necessarily a sign of brilliance to almost uniformly take crass positions on highly contentious issues. It heralds, if anything, a blind deference to peer group pressure. Not exactly evidence of high intellectual acumen. Abortion is one issue that brings to light a kind of organized intellectual debasement among the highly papered.
Justice Harry Blackmun (r), author of the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade.
Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is before the Supreme Court. The case has attracted amicus briefs like flies to a feed lot. Stepping into the fracas is the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians in support of the Roe decision and abortion as a right. That wasn’t the first time. In 1989, 400 of them displayed their pro-abortion bona fides in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services.
Strange thing, though, these doyens of historical truth based their position on a falsehood in the original Roe v. Wade decision that was allowed to marinate and pass into their “consensus”. The fallacy stems from the uncritical adoption of the historical exegesis of a lawyer and abortion activist, Cyril Means, Jr., back in 1973. Means contended that abortion was a common-law liberty before the 19th century. He mangled primary sources, such as Samuel Farr’s 1787 medical treatise, to make it sound like abortion was an acceptable practice back then. Instead, his source, Farr, makes the opposite point if Means had only turned a few more pages: “. . . unborn embryos . . . may be supposed indeed from the time of conception, to be living animated beings, there is no doubt but the destruction of them ought to be considered a capital crime.” Historians, of all people, should know better but these didn’t. Apparently, professional integrity must not be allowed to get in the way of prejudices.*
The issue has always been fraught with an emotional tug-of-war between the unborn child and the mother in distress, but it’s very probable that the practice was nonetheless condemned going back centuries. Scholars have uncovered indictments in the 13th century for the killing of unborn children. In 1602, a woman in Surrey, England, was indicted for ingesting poison to kill the “child in her womb”. Many such examples exist in the historical record.
One cause for the confusion has much to do with state of knowledge, or lack thereof at the time, of the embryo (discovered in 1827 and the beginning of embryology) and pregnancy in general which led to the complicated picture in regards to early pregnancy abortions. There were muddled attempts in a few instances at determining when the baby was “alive”, using the arcane language of the “quickening”. Remember, this was a time when medicine was under the sway of Aristotle’s four humors (body fluids). Confederate general Stonewall Jackson was said to ride into battle during the Civil War with one arm raised to keep the fluids in balance. Still, it’s fair to say that abortion has always been considered at least an “inchoate felony” in the common law. The “inchoate” part is tied to the limited pre-natal understanding of the era.
The four humors in a medieval text.
It’s scandalous that professional historians have become so ahistorical. It’s equally scandalous that legal experts are willing to use deceit to establish far-reaching precedents. An example is the factual fraud in Mapp v. Ohio in 1961. The SCOTUS decision extended the exclusionary rule (Weeks v. US, 1914) to state court cases. After Mapp, the most violent perps – these are 90% plus tried in state courts – have a new legal weapon in their arsenal to take a walk.
The legal chicanery revolved around the belated claim of a lack of a valid search warrant. The case went all the way to the US Supreme Court under the false assertion that there was no search warrant. A simple examination of past issues of the Cleveland Plain Dealer establish beyond doubt that a valid search warrant was issued to enter the apartment of Dollree Mapp whose boyfriend was a bombing suspect (later convicted). She was charged with the possession of obscene materials as a consequence of the search. Authorities couldn’t locate the warrant during the legal proceedings in her case, but that wasn’t unusual in the era before photocopying. At most, there might be one or two extra carbonized paper copies in a dank basement file room where decay was rampant. Anyway, it wasn’t thought to be relevant since the operative legal principle was that evidence was considered valid no matter how it got to the court if it had a bearing on the case.
Formal portrait of members of the United States Supreme Court,Washington DC, 1962. Pictured are, front row, from left, Justice Tom C Clark, Justice Hugo L Black, Chief Justice Earl Warren, Justice William O Douglas, and Justice John M Harlan; back row, from left, Justice Byron R White, Justice William J Brennan Jr, Justice Potter Stewart, and Justice Arthur J Goldberg.
Ohio was blindsided late in the game by the defense assertion of no valid search warrant and a call for the Court to apply the exclusionary rule in state jurisprudence. If it was understood to be a point of contention earlier in the process, more stringent efforts at storing and retrieving these documents would have been made. The Court took the side of Mapp: no warrant, no allowable evidence, perp takes a walk. Now, with its application in state courts, where the overwhelming number of violent suspects are tried, the rule is extended to a suspected serial killer as much as a porn enthusiast. And to think that it all rests on an untruth. So much for the integrity of the titans of the law.
Even in cases when the Court reaches the right conclusion, oftentimes the reasoning is littered with drivel. More than that, these decisions sometimes show the degree to which our judicial aristocrats get sucked into vogueish patterns of thought. A classic in how to meander in junk thought but end in the right place is 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education. To bolster their argument that racial segregation was unconstitutional, they resorted to the bag of tricks of ideologically charged social science researchers.
The married research team of Mamie and Kenneth Clark, MA student in psychology and CCNY prof respectively, conducted experiments that allegedly proved that black children were mentally and emotionally scarred to a greater degree by segregation. As proof, they conducted studies such as the famous doll test. A small group of children were given dolls of different skin and hair colors. The doll of the lighter shade was preferred by all children, including the black children. Based on these preferences and answers to follow-up questions, the Clarks concluded that black children were traumatized with self-hatred. They further asserted that it was more acute among black children in segregated environments such as segregated schools. The test’s claims were cited in Earl Warren’s majority opinion.
The Clarks’ doll experiment.The Clarks’ doll test with Kenneth Clark in the background.
Since that time, the failings of the experiment were laid bare. Everything from the small sampling to the biases of the researchers to the conclusions drawn from the children’s responses has drawn fire. Yet, there it was; a highly questionable study lassoed into the judgment of the most eminent jurists. The simple thought that crusading academics might not be the most reliable wasn’t a serious enough matter to avoid using them. Right conclusion in the decision, but a perplexing path to get there.
Later, the dam broke on using social science studies as a substitute and supplement to the law in judges’ decisions. The Coleman Report of 1966 proved to be a rich source to order forced busing, a court takeover of the management of the school districts in a region (St. Louis), and all sorts of incessant court and federal meddling in local schools. Earl Warren’s majority opinion in Brown set the precedent for incorporating activism, disguised as chic research, rather than the law, its text and history, into a court’s rulings. What’s next, filling court vacancies from the ranks of Harvard’s African and African-American Studies Department?
We are not well-served by the upper crust in many of our professions, our so-called best and brightest. Historians are ahistorical. The crème de la crème of the legal profession doesn’t hesitate to practice deceit to achieve the desired end. Shoddy social science studies are ingested into rulings that impact everyone in ways large and small. Maybe a civilization’s state of health is reflected in the state of health of its elites. Now that’s serious food for thought.
RogerG
*Read here: “The Corruption of History”, Ramesh Ponnuru, National Review, Nov. 29, 2021.
Justice Stephen Breyer is stepping down. Since the Supreme Court has insinuated itself in all matters of life, there’s much at stake when choosing a juridical potentate for a lifetime appointment. President Biden set down his criteria for filling the seat and, guess what, it has little to do with merit. It has everything to do with melanin count and genitalia. But does it, really?
In a pandering applause line to a radicalized party base in a debate, Biden boasted of a “black” and “women” choice. Do you think for a moment that’s what he’s really after? Do you think the “black” part is encapsulated in a Clarence Thomas? Do you think “black woman” means a Condoleezza Rice (NS advisor to Bush 43, former provost to Stanford University, Dir. of the Hoover Institution, and concert-quality pianist) or Winsome Sears (Lt. Gov. of Virginia)? No, the closest equivalent is Corey Bush, charter member of The Squad. Many of the women that he chooses are lefties, so much so that it’s hard to avoid the descriptor “socialist”.
Take for example his floundered choice for comptroller of the currency, Saul Omarova, a graduate of Moscow State University pre-Soviet collapse. This Cornell University prof favors a Fed takeover of banking, a proposal that would make Lenin’s corpse smile. Get the idea?
In a debate, Biden plaintively cried, “Do I look like a socialist?” I don’t know what a socialist “looks” like since many of them look like they stepped off the pages of style magazines. But I do expect a full-blown lefty of the kind that’ll produce the gibberish of a Sonia Sotomayor. Once installed, the appointee better have an army of clerks to clean up the mess in her opinions.
Get ready for a Supreme Court that looks like America: six sane ones, two Kool-Aid-drinking lefties, and one lefty trying to avoid the scat left by the other two.
It looks like two-thirds of the key elements for a woke Super Bowl are lined up: a woke team and a woke location (plus the racial anthem and BLM sloganeering on team attire). The NFC championship game will be represented by two urban dystopias in a dystopian state – San Francisco and Los Angeles in California. One woke city or another from a woke state will land in Inglewood, an enclave in one of the worst governed metropolitan areas in the worst governed state. Either the Bengals, Chiefs, or the Bills of the AFC will have to play in wokedom (Bills and Chiefs are tied as of this writing).
49ers celebrate after the winning field goal against the Packers, 1/22/22.Rams players celebrate after defeating the Buccaneers, 1/23/22.
That’s not the end of it. The geographic center of wokedom, the state of California, will get its grubby hands on a good chunk of the players’ earnings. Over half will be taken in income taxes once the tax-thirsty Sacramento goons with their highest state income tax in the nation thrust their mitts into each player’s till. It’d be better if the game was played in Texas or Florida. They don’t have a state income tax.
If you’re wondering how the scam works, California fine-tuned in 1991 the gambit of any professional athlete performing in the state to be subject to the state’s highest in the nation income tax. The state dubs the teams’ visits “duty days” which includes all days for the visit. The players for the Rams, 49ers, and Chargers really get whacked for at least 6 home games. All other teams face the ordeal at most only two times, absent any playoff games in the tax hellhole. The Woke Bowl in Inglewood may not be as joyous of an event if the players’ tax accountants run the numbers and get word to their clients.
As for me, the game is “Meh”. The Woke Bowl has little appeal. I’m not sure if I’ll watch it. It depends on what’s showing at the theater.
Ticker Carlson in early December when he raised the possibility of supporting Russia in its threats against the Ukraine.
Last night (1/20/22), I exploded – not literally, but emotionally. Tucker Carlson performed his now-familiar jeremiad against US overseas intervention. This time, it’s about US support for Ukraine. This guy appears to be so scarred by our recent “forever wars” that he can’t bring himself to ardently oppose naked aggression of the kind that has been abundantly on display throughout history with all their horrifying consequences. Carlson reminds me of Édouard Daladier of France and Neville Chamberlain of the United Kingdom, eager to avoid the bloodbath of World War I, hopping planes to Munich to sell out Czechoslovakia in 1938. Just replace Ukraine for Czechoslovakia.
British statesman and prime minister Neville Chamberlain (1869 – 1940) at Heston Airport on his return from Munich after meeting with Hitler, making his ‘peace in our time’ address. (photo: Central Press)
An accurate film about this disgraceful page in history appeared in 1988, “Munich: A Peace of Paper”. If you watch carefully, the parallels with events on Ukraine’s border are eye-opening. Please watch it if you have an hour to spare. It’s well worth it.
In the lead up to the invasion, Hitler infiltrated the German-speaking Czech population with his sponsorship of the Sudeten German Party (Sudetendeutsche Partei, SdP) and subsidized paramilitary and militia groups in the country. Hitler massed troops and conducted military exercises to raise tensions to incite an excuse to invade. Sound familiar, familiar to Putin’s activities along Russia’s border with Ukraine?
Daladier and Chamberlain traveled in a panic to Munich to cut a deal to desperately avoid war. They delayed war by sacrificing Czech territory to Germany, the part of Czechoslovakia with the best natural defenses against a German invasion, the so-called Sudetenland. Within seven months, Hitler took the rest of the country. Disgraceful.
From left to right: Neville Chamberlain, Daladier, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Galeazzo Ciano before signing the Munich Agreement. (Wikimedia Commons)
All of it was a prelude to the Nazi-Soviet pact and the invasion of Poland and the onset of WWII with its 60-85 million dead. Of course, our predecessors could have continued to evade war by following the Tucker Doctrine of “Why should Americans shed their blood for a group of German-speaking Czechs?” The US did and stayed on the sidelines till a much larger sacrifice was required.
The fact is, no one is calling for the introduction of the 101st Airborne into the Ukraine. Carlson’s predicate of Americans dying for the Ukraine is a straw man. The airlift of military supplies to the Ukraine doesn’t mean the US is at war with Russia. It means that we are doing what Putin and the CCP do regularly: support their foreign allies. We would be simply empowering Ukrainians to make Russians die for their country, all without US troops.
Hitler made a career of portraying Germany as a victim of Versailles and was surrounded by the “predatory” Allies. Carlson parrots Putin’s identical complaints about NATO. The Allies came together before the World Wars for the same reason that Poland, the Baltic States, and Ukraine are seeking the protective umbrella of NATO. For the former, it was fear of an aggressive and expansionistic Germany. For the latter, they have an understandable fear of the Kremlin seeking to reassemble the Soviet Empire. Their history is littered with Russian invasions, conquests, and depredations.
Russian tanks, artillery, armoured vehicles and trucks situated on the border with Ukraine at Valuyki, Belgorod Oblast. (Pictures: Google Earth)Russian tanks massed on the border with Ukraine in March 2020.The Russian paramilitary group known as the Wolves’ Hundred – “the little green men” – with their commander Evgeny Ponomaryov in the foreground, block the road near the checkpoint not far from Slavyansk, in eastern Ukraine, April 20, 2014 (photo: Maxim Dondyuk)
How calloused and duplicitous can a person be to exclaim, as Carlson did in an earlier broadcast, “Why don’t we take Russia’s side?” Indeed, why didn’t we take the Axis side? Either a moral obtuseness or outright ignorance is at work in the minds of some of our celebrities in front of a camera.
In 2021, Carlson was gung-ho about getting out of Afghanistan. We did and gave up a strategic outpost on the flank of our chief adversary, the CCP. Now, we’re worried about Red Chinese nuclear-tipped hyper-sonics and East Asia as a CCP empire. In 2019, Carlson favored a double-crossing of our Kurdish allies to the Turks who are equally enthralled by a return to Ottoman greatness. There doesn’t appear to be a US intervention that he won’t oppose. The parallels with history are too obvious to ignore.
Yet, he does. Wait for it: you’ll hear talk-radio callers parrot the line almost word-for-word. A significant segment of the right will fall for the nonsense. If Carlson has his way, Reagan’s famous dictum, “Trust but verify”, will be shoved to the side for “Get out and stay out”. This won’t end well.
On the same link you’ll find this gem of a headline: “Christian plumber under fire for refusing same-sex fittings.” Parody is an excellent vehicle to unmask the ditzy pretensions of the Left. The whole belief system is a slipshod amalgam of demonstrably proven silliness.
Long live satire, an admirable tradition going back to Aristophanes of the 5th century BC. I just hope that the lefty die-hards who permeate our cultural commanding heights can take it as well as conservatives in the past century and a half.
