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.
Comments from readers provide opportunities to further expand on a point. Brevity can lead to leaving some terms obscure – the “reprehensible ideas” for instance in a previous post. In the following exchange, I gave some sense about what I might mean by “reprehensible ideas”.
Respondent: Right now, the most important thing is character and decency. Period. No Faustian bargains with the likes of DT.
My reply:You make much of “character” but say nothing of character-destroying policies. Unleashing an unaccountable administrative state sets the stage for unaccountable government and irresponsible conduct. Class warfare policies puts the power of government agencies into the incitement of envy and envy-based confiscation. Modern progressivism’s lifestyle fascism is the single largest organized threat to faith institutions. Trump’s episodic insults to particular persons creates a much smaller universe of victims than the state’s massive and broad social destruction. Don’t be so animated about Trump’s boorish behavior while refusing to recognize the much more serious assault on our national health from lefty policies. That’s the “reprehensible ideas” part of our current dilemma.
For one, “free” isn’t “free”. It’s shorthand for the government making somebody else pay. For another, the whole idea is a mess. If you want to ruin college, unleash public debt, and wreck the lives of many young people, make college “free”.
Two things stand out in this latest crusade for “free”. First, the idea defiles colleges by roping into them marginal students which turns colleges into something resembling failing high schools, and lets loose a form of hyper-inflation … of degrees. It’s like the idea of making a country richer (more educated) simply by printing more dollars (degrees).
Second, it’s as if we can suspend the laws of human nature, as if there are no such laws. Economics can’t exist without them. It’s economics that is really being ridden out of the picture. “Free” means “subsidies”, and subsidies make anything more expensive. Take dairy price supports, or ethanol subsidies, and apply to college. You’ll end up with warehouses full of degrees, many of which have more to do with political activism than practicality and enlightenment. Watch costs escalate.
More troubling is the greater acceptance of the nonsense among normally conservative constituencies. The popularity of the balderdash is proof of debased education and the ascent of the juvenile love for “free” into age groups that should know better.
*”Why States Should Abandon the ‘Free College’ Movement”, Jennifer E. Walsh, NRO, 3/19/2018, https://www.nationalreview.com/…/why-states-should-abandon…/
Nancy Pelosi (D, San Francisco), House Minority Leader
Reprehensible behavior:
Donald Trump, President of the United States
The results of the soon-to-be-defunct Pennsylvania 18th congressional district election signals a rising tide for the Democrats in November, but not because of any great love for their lefty ideas.
Conor Lamb (D), winning candidate in the 18th congressional district race.
Their (Dems) fortunes rose in direct proportion to the repulsiveness and churlishness of a president with a “R” after his name. Trump is the accelerant for this state of affairs, not love for SDS-type values. (SDS: the 60’s Students for Democratic Society – Tom Hayden’s, et al, group for bringing socialism to America).
This is an election year that will pivot on the choice between reprehensible ideas (Democrats) vs. reprehensible behavior (Trump). Trump has soiled the “R” label. It’s a sad situation when people react to deplorable conduct by turning to people with deplorable ideas.
Time to recycle the wisdom of the historian Robert Blake: ““The right to misgovern oneself is as valid as any other political right, and it is exercised more often than most.” We might see it play out in November, and maybe two years later.
Robert Blake, historian, Queen’s College, Oxford University.
Say good-bye to your tax cut and guns; say hello to incessant impeachment dramas and the Californication of the federal government.
Sorry, I can’t leave the gun debate alone. The reason: the people most stridently supporting gun-control are simultaneously most ignorant about them. They say stupid things like, “These guns [AR-15’s] are killing machines” (Stephanie Ruhle of MSNBC, last week in a radio interview).
Stephanie Ruhle, MSNBC
Here’s a question: Comparing the 2 gun pictures below – #2 and #3 – which one is more likely to kill you? Answer: It depends on which one is pointing at you. Dahhhh! A bullet out of a “killing machine” (Stephanie’s words) acts the same way as one heading toward a deer.
Hunter with a bolt-action rifle.Sighting-in an AK-47.
Okay, one is a semi-auto AK-47 (pic #3) and the other is a bolt-action hunting rifle (pic #2). But many sport rifles are semi-auto. Depending on the direction of the barrel, either one could be a “killing machine” (Stephanie’s words). See below, pic #4, of a Browning semi-auto and an AR-15.
The following is a Facebook exchange about my latest post – “CNN’s Little Red Guards” – on both my blog and Facebook page. Check it out.
Respondent: Mao’s Red Guards? Good Lord. Take a chill pill, Roger, and stop stuffing so much wood into the stove. Go cross country ski for ten miles.
RogerG: Chill pill? Good Lord, Seth. A 17-year-old witness to a shooting spree does not a pundit make. That CNN lynching didn’t do anything but add a few more nominees for Warhol’s 15-minutes-of-fame museum. Now it turns out that the public employees and their bureaucracies in the vicinity, for whom our dependency would grow if gun-control zealots have their way, failed massively — from the FBI on down. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the model for the Broward County Sheriff’s Department is the California DMV – or maybe Caltrans. All the talk about robust nix lists, gun bans, licensing, expanded gun restrictions, etc., will be executed by the same people who can’t manage a downtown office, can’t restrain an out-of-control 18-year-old, can’t maintain the roads, won’t neutralize an active shooter, and is more concerned about public employee perks than job performance. Good Lord, Seth, get a grip. Layered security is the key: armed outside the buildings and armed inside the buildings.
Respondent: the Red Guard analogy was overwrought. Come on.
RogerG: No, not overwrought but dramatic — because kids are attracted to the dramatic. It’s in their DNA, so to speak. Their mental immaturity shows as unleavened opinions of stark over-simplicity. The Action Jackson of the Hitler Youth, Fascist Youth, and Mao’s Red Guards resonates much less among almost anyone old enough to have kids, a spouse, a mortgage, and freighted with the responsibilities of life. Kids occupy that space of free-wheeling innocence. Their opinions have a scent of irresponsibility about them while anxious to get on with the frenzy of the “movement”. You’re wrong in dismissing this cross-cultural predilection for blunt opinions and fevered activity. They are prime recruits for utopia-mongering, whether it be one of blissful equality or a nanny state managed gun-free existence. In a nutshell, they’re as crazy as moonbats.
SILVER SPRING, MARYLAND – FEBRUARY 21: Students from Montgomery Blair High School march down Colesville Road in support of gun reform legislation February 21, 2018 in Silver Spring, Maryland.Red Guards — high school and university students — wave copies of Chairman Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book during a parade in June 1966 in Beijing’s streets at the beginning of China’s Cultural Revolution.
CNN’s townhall (2/21/2018) on guns was staged in Broward County, the scene of the shooting, and also a Democrat bastion in a state trending Republican. Remember, Al Gore tried to cherry pick friendly counties like Broward County for never-ending recounts for manufacturing votes to reverse his loss of Florida in the 2000 election, only to be stopped by the Supreme Court.
Broward County canvassing board member Judge Robert Rosenberg looks over a questionable ballot, 25 November 2000, at the Broward County Courthouse in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. AFP PHOTO/RHONA WISE / AFP / RHONA WISE (Photo credit should read RHONA WISE/AFP/Getty Images)
On 2/21, CNN conducted a theatrical display of ritual humiliation reminiscent of Mao’s Red Guards during the weighty days of the Cultural Revolution. Go view CNN’s tape of their event and compare it to this 7-minute exhibit of rage, youthful exuberance, and inhumanity from Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
Today’s young firebrands, in their bullying antics towards Southern statues and the NRA/guns, has striking similarities to Red Guard attacks on bourgeois decadence and, of course, statues.
Toppling a statue in Durham, NC.
We don’t have to look far into the pages of history for evidence of adolescent cruelty. Movements built around coercive utopias have frequently found a receptive audience among the young. Italy’s Fascist Party youth, the National Socialist Hitler Youth, Stalin’s Young Pioneers, Mao’s Red Guards, Bela Kun’s Lenin’s Boys (Hungarian Soviet Republlic, 1919) show the capacity for enthusiastic intolerance among the young. The spectacle of orchestrated hate depicted on CNN is true to form.
Bela Kun’s Lenin’s Boys, the enforcers of the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919.
We must understand these things for what they are. They are not forums for calm deliberation, but devolve into kangaroo courts for compulsory humiliation. Let’s stop the pretense of calling it a “townhall”.
David Hogg has thrust himself into the difficult gun control debate. There’s a reason for the age distinction of minority/majority in law. There’s a reason for the separate existence of juvenile courts. There’s a reason for the determination of minors to be not fully capable in law of “consent”. It’s the same reason they cannot be a representative, senator, or president. Mental immaturity, raging hormones, and victim status aren’t qualifications for the seat of Solomon.
Hogg has been treated with “kid” gloves (pun intended) as he has thrust himself onto the public stage. His opinions have the depth of reasoning of a kid’s Christmas wish list. His demands should be confronted and dispatched, not indulged. There’s too much at stake for millions of others to let rantings go unanswered.
David, you wanted a debate; now you should get it.
Nikolas Cruz and Douglas Stoneman High School on the day opf the shooting spree, 2/14/2018.Missoula, Mt., student protest against guns, 2/21/2018.
The children’s marches in the wake of Douglas Stoneman High School shooting elicit gut-wrenching sympathy for them. Let the aggrieved have their mourning. But the traumatized may not be a proper catalyst for good public policy. It’s a reason for the elevation of the issue, not the dictate for a particular approach … if any.
Parents wait for news after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Joel Auerbach
I’m loathe to raise the matter as many are in the grips of great sadness. Nonetheless, many are exploiting the event to pursue their own pet causes. They must be confronted before trauma is allowed to escalate into bad policy.
Protest at the Florida State Capitol building on February 21.
Reasonable analysis of mass school shootings goes way beyond guns. We have created a breeding ground for alienated and disconnected young males. Girls infrequently appear on the lists of mass killers and suicide bombers. What’s happening to our young men?
Elliot Rodger, Dylann Roof, and Adam Lanza (l to r).
A toxic culture permeates: fatherless homes, the decline in traditional spirituality, a biased and incomplete education, the pervasive emotional detachment of a digital world, absentee parents, a girls-girls-girls contemporary obsession to the exclusion of boys, an emphasis on extreme behavior in pop culture, etc., etc. I could go on, but it is a culture of our own making.
Next, we have been softened to accepting state aggrandizement. This happenstance is partly a product of urban lifestyles, of a large part of the population acclimated to a coddling government. It goes further, though. Our schools propagate the benign state. As a result, our discussion is limited to the different ways to expand the powers of the state.
Progressivism’s view of government is approvingly taught in our classrooms (an advanced placement U.S. History teacher at Appomattox High School).
Lost in the debate is the reality of government’s potential for great malevolence and huge waste. “Civil servants” can be what Churchill was alleged to say of them: they can be neither civil nor servants. Whether a person is employed by the state or elsewhere, deep down we are the same, with all our flaws.
More waiting periods, gun bans, gun registrations, and liability regs will not repeal human nature, will not reorient the disoriented, or do anything to create an informed citizenry in dealing with traumatic situations. Until we get a handle on our toxic culture, all the state embellishments will be worse than wishful thinking.
What to do? First, up-armor the schools to survive in a toxic culture. Next, get parents back into the home and into the kids’ lives. Next, more church-going will help. Next, the relationship between an armed citizenry and a free state must be taught to counter progressivism’s state-love. And more could be done, before we ever get to the assault on “assault weapons” as a realistic option.
This whole Russia dust-up is only about one thing: the Dems were shocked on Nov. 8, 2016. Then, the deligitimization campaign kicked into high gear. Hillary oppo research was leveraged into a smear operation. They were assisted by bureaucratic sympathizers who stretched their authority and an ideologically sympathetic legacy media to keep the fantasy on the front burner.
The Russians weren’t anymore prescient about the election result than Gallup. Their efforts were really done on the cheap. As a matter of fact, we have been famous for interfering in foreign elections. Ask Brexit supporters or Benjamin Netanyahu. Or take a look at the 1980’s Soviet disinformation campaigns in support of the nuclear freeze movement and domestic efforts to block Reagan’s decision to install medium range missiles in Europe. Many lefties, including lefty Dems, benefited from the succor. The current Dem obsession is divorced of any context, except their displeasure about losing.
Really, it’s all about the election result. As for the Russians, they tried to weaken the clout of their expected winner: Hillary. Now, the Russkies are focused on delegitimizing Trump. Pardon me for noticing the commonality of purpose of our “loyal” opposition and the Kremlin. Collusion anyone?
Nikolas Cruz being subdued about an hour after the shooting spree.Students gather at a memorial in Pine Trails Park in Parkland, Fla., in honor of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting victims. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times).
A school shooting reflexively leads to calls for gun control, and currently for Trump to be a “Nixon-to-China” emissary to the NRA to make gun ownership more difficult. Lost in the noise is whether any of this will do any good, and any suggestion that there be a Pelosi-to-the-Gun-Control-Lobby or Schumer-to-the-Gun-Control-Lobby. It’s only Trump-to-the-NRA.
This boilerplate, one-sided prescription ran at the top in “Axios AM” for 2/16 by MIke Allen: “1 big thing: Why Trump drags his feet on guns”. According to Allen, a Trump delegation need only go to the NRA. I’m waiting for Bernie, Nancy, Chuck, and the rest of the Democratic Party apparatchiks to be envoys to the Brady Campaign. Allen’s blinders don’t seem to allow a place for moderation of gun control zealots in his field of vision.
Probably Allen’s blinders has much to do with the sociopolitical nest that he inhabits. Speaking of sociopolitical nests, we’ve got a national one that goes further to explain the gun violence than anything off the lips of Nancy Pelosi. The straws of the nest include: (1) many no-dad-in-the-home families; (2) insular lives in an obsessively digitized world; (3) a craven fixation on girls, girls, girls that leaves little room for boys – except for Ritalin; (4) the attempt to embed morals through secular means only; (5) the segregation of faith into the home and sanctuary; (6) absentee parents in pursuit of material comforts, etc., etc., etc.
The Dems’ only answer is some form of chant about gun control. If guns were confiscated or regulated and priced out of society, would we be any safer? In other words, would making the whole country into one big soft target be preferable? I doubt it. The preferred method of mayhem would shift to cars, machetes, pressure cookers, box cutter/commercial jets ….
Here’s a suggestion: Let’s turn our schools from soft to hard targets. It’s what we might have to do in a culture of our own making.
