FBI agents block one of the gates at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago during the raid on August 8.
What stinks? The FBI’s newly released affidavit in support of a search warrant, that’s what (see below). Oh, it’s heavily redacted but what it does expose is the insidious operational habits of the Washington Insiders Club, of which the upper echelons of the FBI are charter members. And to think that a judicial officer approved this monstrosity. Amazing.
The first big tip-off was the author and chief protagonist for the Trump investigation and the search warrant being “a Special Agent with the FBI assigned to the Washington Field Office”. I smell a rat, the same set of rodents that scamper the hallways of the J. Edgar Hoover Building (FBI), the Executive Office Building, Langley (CIA), and Pentagon, not to mention the incestuous political den of lobbyists and big-wheel legal eagles who wallow in the same rarified DC cauldron.
The second thing that glaringly stood out was the “referral” to the FBI from the administrators at the National Archives. It seems that, when it comes to Donald Trump, the big wheels in DC snap to 11, to borrow a little from “This is Spinal Tap”. They’re on a hair trigger. In January 2022, the Archives received 15 boxes of materials from Trump. Hardly did a month go by and they’re off to the FBI demanding a criminal investigation of Trump. Mmmm, does Hillary/Clinton in 2015 and 2016 remind you of anything?
This is completely unprecedented. The people who run the National Archives are not gods. Their demands do not attain the automatic status of the Ten Commandments from the hand of God. Implicitly recognizing this fact, there’s normally an extended period of negotiations after the transition from one administration to another. And Trump was cooperating. Who among that claque would have dared to behave in this manner with Barack Obama?
The statutory basis for the warrant is astoundingly absurd. The affidavit is junked-up with references to the Presidential Records Act and various provisions on the handling of classified materials. There’s even a startling mention of an executive order. What? Executive Orders exist at the whim of the president. They are a creature of him and his office. They only count if he chooses, or unchooses, to make them count. This only shows that the vigilantes wanted to throw the kitchen sink at Trump.
For the rest of the statutory laundry list, there’s the litany of what constitutes classified materials and the improper handling of them. When I read this part of the screed, the thought of Hillary Clinton kept popping into my head. Wasn’t she conducting the nation’s foreign policy from her own private server and cellphone? And, interestingly as it turned out, there was evidence of the hacking of her devices. Trump is accused of hypothetical carelessness; Hillary actually did it to the advantage of foreign adversaries. There’s evidence of it. And then-Director Comey goes before the press in 2016 to announce that “there really wasn’t a prosecutable case”. And there is on Trump? Incredible.
The lack of inquisitiveness and what constitutes a “prosecutable case” has an obvious partisan lean to them. The affidavit supporting a warrant on Hillary would sound much like the one served on Trump, except there was more evidentiary basis of actual harm to the nation on Hillary’s home server and her personal cellphone. This should have gone to trial. And the hush, hush in regards to the laptop of the scion of the Biden dynasty, Hunter, going so far as to troop out other DC partisans who never saw the laptop to tout the line that it was “Russian disinformation” without a shred of evidence, is execrable. The brazen double standard screams injustice.
Then, if you notice, the warrant’s author engages in an opinion spat with supporters of Trump. It’s something that belongs on Twitter or the op-ed pages of his/her favorite NY Times or WaPo, going so far as to cite a TV news report of “‘Moving Trucks Spotted At Mar-a-Lago” (item #30). That’s worse than hearsay. No one is placed under a presumption of legal sanction to tell the truth in such stories, and they are notorious for casting events to fit a preconceived view.
In what has all the appearances of petty spite, the producer of this gem writes like Paul Krugman picking a fight with Larry Kudlow on Twitter. He/she targets Breitbart and Kash Patel for special abuse (item #53). It’s very unseemly in a document meant to justify a government invasion of a person’s home. This kind of government behavior should anger any American as it did John Hancock, enough to have him sign with a flourish the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
What of the redactions in the affidavit? If the denizens of the DC snake pit can go before the press to tout the laptop as “Russian disinformation” with no proof, then this discredited crowd has no grounds to dismiss my speculation on the blotted-out names, sources, and methods of investigation. They boil down to Trump’s possession of classified materials or an assessment of Trump’s evil intent by a group of long-discredited people. The possession of classified materials by a recent ex-president shouldn’t be surprising. Negotiations, compromise, and a back-and-forth period are to be expected. Just because the demi-gods of the Archives in a pique of Trump animus want to go to 11 doesn’t mean that the public ought to tolerate this partisan jihad.
The affidavit still stinks to high heaven. I am convinced now more than ever that the FBI and the rest of the agencies, bureaus, departments in DC should be farmed out to rest of the country, far beyond the Beltway. Breakup DC! Only the most essential skeleton staff should remain. People like the “Special Agent with the FBI assigned to the Washington Field Office” should get a daily dose of what the rest of the country thinks of them.
RogerG
Source:
* The affidavit at https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.617854/gov.uscourts.flsd.617854.102.1.pdf
Parents protest the teaching of Critical Race Theory during a Placentia Yorba Linda School Board meeting in Yorba Linda, Calif., November 16, 2021. (Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
Our public and many private schools are a mess, but the vast majority of the blame shouldn’t be directed at the teachers. The onus should be shouldered by an intellectually bankrupted overclass that sits atop a sprawling education industry from coast to coast, much like the Janissaries of the old Ottoman Empire or the self-indulgent and self-serving aristocracy in 18th-century Versailles. Unexamined and unaware, its members reside in a world apart from the rest of society. It’s an isolated existence with its own values and assumptions about the workings of the world. Born of 19th century progressivism and its administrative state, their zeal for “reform” has bred a missionary class of consultants, hyped in the latest fads of thought driven by a near uniform set of ideological sympathies. Duly papered in now-devalued credentials and degrees, they descend upon the schools and make a real hash of things.
Parents might be waking up. Zooming to their children during the pandemic by means of the family computer, right in front of them, was the chic radicalism from a world apart where lefty radicalism is assumed to be a virtue. The veil of secrecy was blown off. The fashionable neo-Marxist theory of systemic group oppression and guilt flashed before their eyes. Racism was mangled into a public good as a means to fight purely hypothetical but politically useful villains. They saw how adolescent feelings of gender confusion became the rigid theory of transgender ideology. Now, their daughters are no longer safe in the bathroom or locker room.
Other fancies were exposed such as the religion of environmentalism, a mystical faith masquerading as a not-to-be-challenged scientific fact. The crooked timber of humanity was somehow, magically straightened depending on your self-professed identity. Bankers bad, workers always and forever angelic. Whenever a woman or racial, sexual, or ethnic minority graces the page, it’s always in the context of exploitation. Tradition is lambasted and morality is fashioned to serve the interests of the latest chic reform. America is evil and in need of a revolution. That’s what they’re attempting to groom: little revolutionaries.
As a teacher in the public schools for almost 30 years, I’ve witnessed it firsthand. Teachers are forced through “professional growth” mandates to be constantly exposed to the latest in stylish radicalism emanating from the academic bubble. School districts regularly take their teachers away from their students for multiple days of the school year – sometimes called “inservice days” – to get steady doses of the latest in leftist dogma. Students lose a few days of learning so their teachers can be indoctrinated. The result is almost always a few steps backward for both the students and teachers.
Teacher training
To boot, many of the presenters don’t know the radical philosophical roots of what they’re presenting. It says volumes about the academic preparation and forethought of those pretending to be Zeus on Mt. Olympus. Two incidents stand out in my long career. In one, a richly paid consultant was brought in to instruct us on his favorite pedological pet, “cooperative learning”. Midway through the presentation I got the drift of where this was heading. I politely asked him if the basis for his approach was “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” If you’re wondering, it’s straight out of Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto”. He said, “Yes”, apparently unaware, or maybe quite aware, of his idea’s ideological parentage. Shortly after that, I quietly slipped away to my classroom to grade papers and prepare instruction for the week, a much better use of the time.
Another example came about as a result of administrative pressure to attend a paid training session on a Saturday, which I was reluctantly to do for certain reasons. Well, this session just so happened to be founded on the theory of multiple intelligences, a highly contestable notion for which the presenter was unfamiliar with the debate. Common sense tells us that kids can have excellences in different skill and knowledge areas. But these aren’t “intelligences”. They are talents. In contrast, intelligence is a unique measure of cognitive ability that is innate to a person for various biological and social reasons. The interplay of the two is open to much debate.
All of this is glossed over to get to the hidden purpose of this questionable idea: everyone gets a trophy, which is born of Marx’s obsession with equality of result. For people following in the footsteps of Karl Marx, a society of goodness and light can only be achieved if everyone is equal in everything from intelligence to possessions, just institutionally redefine intelligence in a multitude of ways for instance. Without saying it, but following the logic, unequal performances among students in the form of grades or scores is automatically and morally suspect. So, classrooms and instruction must be refashioned to make them more equal. How? Design and implement multifarious instructional approaches to access the hard to determine but assumed to be numerous “intelligences” in the classroom. If the task is too cumbersome or inequalities persist, the burden is on the teacher to make things equal. Marx blames the social system, the educrats blame classroom teaching, i.e., the teacher. Thus, the schools engage in the perpetual search to weed out systemic oppression in the form of inequalities through incessant “training”. No time here for placing responsibility on the student or home life.
The Marxian equality of result permeates everywhere in the school. Merit – a sense of deserving through hard work – is disparaged and replaced with racial, gender, and sexual orientational reparatory contrivances in discipline, instruction, management, and grading (or no grades). As a teacher scrambles to devise an ever-increasing number of pedagogies for an ever-increasing number of “intelligences” in the classroom, if hell busts loose, punishment is made to adhere to the god of equality of result like everything else. If someone tallies the expulsions and discovers a “protected-class” excess beyond its demographic proportion, the school is turned upside down by conforming to the newest euphemism to downgrade the effectiveness of a school: restorative justice. Watch the ratio of non-teachers to teachers explode. The biggest building in the school will no longer be the one for Language Arts but the sprawling one housing the army of functionaries of the social services for the multitude of interventions required to create the illusion of identity-group equality.
If you think it’s such a great idea, this thing called “restorative justice”, then move to LA, SF, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Chicago, New York City, or any place suffering under permissive Soros-backed DA’s. They’re all into “restorative justice” and all that goes with it. You’ve just endorsed the transplanting of the chaos of San Francisco streets to your kids’ classrooms.
Nothing escapes the Marxist obsession with equality of result. It’s embedded in your teacher’s training in college, and it’s constantly dragged before staffs every school year by an army of consultants. It’s a very lucrative flim-flam as CRT evangelists like Ibram X. Kendi can attest. He got $20,000 from Fairfax County taxpayers for a 45-minute virtual training video for the Virginia county’s public schools. His fellow grifter, Robin DeAngelo, author of “White Fragility”, rakes in $14,000 per event earning a lusty $700,000 a year. It’s a sweet gig if you can get it. (See the column below by the American Enterprise Institute’s Frederick M. Hess.)
What do they really have to offer? Nothing good, and everything deeply troublesome. If you think that statue-toppling or joining the ranks of the militant wings of the Democratic Party is not an appropriate career path for your children, it is incumbent on parents to help bring to heel this wayward mass of detached educrats by electing state and local public officials who’ll clean house at the governing boards and make our colleges accountable for the undermining of our way of life.
There, we have our task.
RogerG
Sources:
* “Defund the Teacher-Trainers”, Frederick M. Hess, Aug. 11, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/08/29/defund-the-teacher-trainers/?fbclid=IwAR10uTGkoMNTRebq74lRN6aC2638Z8-Mhw_rhuuJpzbnVSysv8ciOB6LHHg
Pres. Biden signs the Green New Deal LIte, also grotesquely misnamed as the Inflation Reduction Act.
“There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers but defeat is an orphan.” It was the response of President Kennedy to NBC reporter Sander Vanocor at a press conference on April 21, 1961 as his way of taking responsibility for the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation. Where did JFK get it? The line of descent can be traced to the movie “The Desert Fox” and before that to Count Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s Foreign Minister.
Why mention it? It could apply to popular manias and their failures. A fashionable idea is embedded in the imagination of a sizeable segment of the population, i.e., fathers, and once it falls out of fashion due to its real-world effects, its parentage is forgotten, i.e., an orphan. It disappears into deep space.
The paramount craze of today is “going green”. It is both science and anti-science: a blending of real science – but without cost/benefit modification – and many pop-culture phobias. They are sourced in ideological, theological, and secular-utopian notions. We are experiencing the frenzies in everything from forest management, food production, energy renewables, zero-carbon, and the eco-iconic electric vehicle. We are quickly learning unfortunately that, contra to a one-with-nature ecotopia, the reality is obsolete water projects, massive fire storms, an unreliable grid producing rolling blackouts, decaying energy infrastructure, skyrocketing energy prices, outrageously expensive grid-dependent and unreliable personal transportation, and a smaller and more costly food supply. If you haven’t noticed, some of this “future” is playing out in Sri Lanka.
Protesters in Sri Lanka in July 2022 force the resignation of the country’s president after the onset of an economic collapse due to the adoption of many green policies such as bans on the use of many ag chemicals.
In many conversations going back decades, I’ve heard people express the most fanciful beliefs. Do you remember the cliché of those fleets of oil tankers anchored of the coast during the oil embargos of the 1970’s supposedly as part of the oil companies’ conspiracy to jack up fuel prices? It’s baaaack! Or how about the Non-GMO, Whole Foods fever of today? Or the fanatical and popular in elite circles preservationist forestry policies that produced vast landscapes of dead trees in a drought-prone, dry-summer climate, just waiting for the poorly maintained electrical grid or dry lightning to spark a conflagration? Or the popular war on herbicides, pesticides, and synthetic fertilizers that promises famine and economic and social collapse (once again, Sri Lanka)? Or the pricey but government-preferred electric vehicle running low on juice that’ll ensure that you can’t get out of the path of a hurricane because of the blackout from category-five winds and a monstrous sea surge? Or the huge forests of windmill towers and seas of solar panels scarring the landscape that can’t keep the lights on? “Going green” is a rediscovery of life in the Middle Ages. It’s a future of going backwards.
The Dark Ages looms as we fancy a food supply without Safeway – or Kroger, Albertsons, Walmart, General Mills, the Great Plains ocean of grain, and meat packing plants, etc. Anything produced on an industrial scale whether it be lettuce, eggs, bacon, burgers, fryers, Minute Rice, or bread is made suspect. But anything “free range” means less of it and more expensive. Ditto for Non-GMO. The world cannot be fed with farmer’s markets and Jeff Bezos’s boutique Whole Foods. The eco-stuff rots which limit its range of availability. It may taste better and be marginally healthier, but what difference does that make if you can’t get it, or is priced out of the family budget? How are barren cupboards healthier?
Do you think that the equivalent of victory gardens will make a dent? Farmers markets would collapse and quickly run out of product if the throngs who filled the parking lots of Walmart flocked to the stalls and easy-ups on a few acres off I-95. Some actually think that we ought to live on what we personally grow. To do that, everyone must have the equivalent of “40 acres and a mule”, er, tractor (Civil War Order No. 15, Gen. Wm. T. Sherman). But what eco-nut would tolerate the invasion of 330 million people scattered over their wilderness hiking paths? They’re already up in arms about people choosing to live in the land of bears and chipmunks. They even have their own arcane vocabulary for it: Wild Urban Interface (WUI). In other words, places where you oughtn’t be if they get their way. Of course, the irony is that all places at one time or another were WUI’s.
Anyway, who could afford the real estate? Let’s face it, these are the fancies of a hyper-wealthy society with a large cohort of people who can afford to live expensively. Coincidentally, small family size tracks the lifestyle: the fewer disruptive mouths to feed in the family unit, the easier it is to indulge in eccentric, pricey, and ideologically laced lifestyle choices. Speaking of fewer mouths, guess the demographic with one of the lowest fertilities. Non-Hispanic whites dredge near the bottom of all groups at 1.64 children per woman (2018). Non-Hispanic whites in the District of Columbia are even less productive at 1.012, demographic suicide levels. This element – government workers, white collar and overwhelmingly college educated – has much in common with the residents of college communities, bi-coastal exclusive developments, Silicon Valley, and other areas of like complexion. Maybe this is the reason for their enthusiasm for massive immigration, legal or illegal, since they can’t rely on their own organically produced offspring to provide the medical supports and entitlement contributions to keep them comfortable in the autumn of their lives.
So, they grow old and are free to wallow in the hang-ups of their youth. Prominent among them is the “nuclear” bogeyman. A steady diet of movies (“Them”, Godzilla, The China Syndrome, et al) and classroom atomic bomb drills in their youth nurtured nightmares of looming apocalyptic dooms. The boomers and X’ers transmitted the aversion to their sparse offspring. A nearly permanent political base against nuclear power has arrived.
“Nuclear” was a monster like Godzilla, but their depiction of it is in open conflict with the worship of the newest deity in an increasingly secular age, Gaia. Combine the fear with the climate-change hype and we have only the latest in a long line of self-negating philosophies. Don’t like nuclear power because characters played by Jack Lemmon, Jane Fonda, and Michael Douglas said so in a movie (The China Syndrome)? Well, we still can’t have it even if it’s carbon-free and safe and will help address all manner of Chicken Little catastrophes that’ll befall mankind like category ten hurricanes and the oceans lapping onto the Obamas’ estate on Martha’s Vineyard, and further reinforced in another movie (An Inconvenient Truth) produced by the politician-Moses of our time, Al Gore, and followed by a steady stream of more (The Day After Tomorrow, etc.).
So, the message is no abundant and affordable energy, and we must accept less and live with more aggravation and disruption in our lives. We are told that we can’t have fossil fuels, which is plentiful in our own backyard. Thoughts of R & D in carbon capture are verboten, still born in the crib. And don’t dare build those efficient, safe, cost-effective Small Modular Reactors (SMR’s) for carbon-free and plentiful electricity. Instead, it’s small in everything from calorie intake to living space to appliances to travel distances.
Nowhere to charge the Tesla?
With the political assault on more land for housing, we’ll be crammed into more Hell’s Kitchens, infected with crime due to DA’s who are committed to ending incarceration, infested with pandemic-level contagions, and public transportation where the filth, threats, and smells of the outside envelop you on the inside. Is this where Pete Buttigieg plans to bike to work?
Going green isn’t a better world. If we’re not careful, the DNC plans to give it to us. We may wake up one morning with the urge to escape the workers’ paradise, but the all-electric Chevy Bolt is dead because of the regular blackout from a grid connected to overburdened windmills and solar panels. Anyway, where are you going to go? The roads are unpassable because of striking road workers and less of the infrastructure money going to asphalt and more to expanding the Diversity/Equity/Inclusion Department. You’ll have to invest in a Sharpie and carboard to beg your way to the expanding homeless camps on the outskirts adjacent to the lavish, walled, and secure estates of the DNC donor class.
Now, all of this assumes that you still have a job in a country governed by the fairy tale principles of Modern Monetary Theory. And if you did, would it make any difference in the chronic inflation from the fire-hosing of the country in paper money? What began as a scheme with many fathers will soon be orphaned. The parentage relegated to the misty past.
RogerG
Sources:
* “Fertility Rates In The United States By Ethnicity”, World Atlas, at https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/fertility-rates-in-the-united-states-by-ethnicity.html
College students in Seattle protest Trump’s victory in the 2016 election.
We are suffocating in air saturated in government money like the leaves blasted off the hardwood forests of the Blue Ridge by a hurricane in fall (which I saw in 2018). Waste, oh the waste! Much of it fire-hosed to the colleges in the form of profligate student loans, grants, subsidies, etc. – which is contributing to a national debt of $30.6 trillion and counting. The aftermath is a college bubble like a market one, or the housing bubble of 2008-9.
Over the last ten years, total college enrollment has dropped by 4 million. Why? College was oversold. The realization began to sink in that $120,000 spent (the average price tag) on four years of lefty bromides and degree fields that neither advanced the students’ understanding nor added to their skills is a winning proposition for their future. We are in for a much-deserved market correction.
NBC is alarmed when they reported on the fall off recently (see below). It’s as if a civilizational collapse is imminent because we don’t have enough gender studies majors and people who still can’t put a decent sentence together. The network reports the findings of the left-leaning Hechinger Report which declares that the decline will “diminish people’s quality of life and the nation’s economic competitiveness”, as if all those graduates were chemistry majors and not the more likely situation of people who sat through interminable hours of woke claptrap and eroding rigor.
Don’t blame changing demographics for the slump. Within the same demographic, from 2016 to 2020, the percentage of high school graduates going to college dropped 7% from 70% to 63%. In many states, it’s worse, much worse. Blame the colleges for cementing the view that they’re a nest of radical vipers, incompetents, and pointless, if not harmful, instruction. NBC must have been flabbergasted to learn that fewer than 1 in 3 adults thought that college was worth the cost. A mortgage-sized debt is hardly a come-on for a public watching statue-topplers, Antifa, BLM, and campus censorship and intimidation on abundant display.
College has given itself a black eye. And, boy, what a shiner it is.
RogerG
Sources:
* “Why Americans are increasingly dubious about going to college”, NBC News, Aug. 10, 2022, at https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/americans-are-increasingly-dubious-going-college-rcna40935
*The Hechinger Report in “How higher education lost its shine” at https://hechingerreport.org/how-higher-education-lost-its-shine/
Sound towers collapsing in scenes of aimless rage at Woodstock ‘99.
Look around you today and you’ll see all the signs of existential social malfunction. Urban areas are riven with crime, filth, and homelessness. Grids are dysfunctional operating more as fire starters and plagued by blackouts. Energy prices are through the roof. Housing is unaffordable. Massive government overspending abounds in pursuit of utopian unicorns. The language is bastardized by an ideology that seeks to repeal the divine, or evolutionary, plan for the two sexes, making a mockery of anything designated boy/girl. Essential racism in the form of “equity” and doctrines of essential oppression in the rhetorical incantations of “systemic” and “critical theory” are everywhere in the media and schools, infecting young minds as early as kindergarten. The sciences are not immune which raises serious questions about the future efficacy of our medical institutions (see Heather McDonald’s piece below). That’s just for starters.
Where does this lead? Watch Netflix’s “Trainwreck: Woodstock ‘99” for a glimpse into our future (see the trailer below). After showing the consequences of the loss of standards and self-restraint, the flick tries to detour what you are viewing into a condemnation of machismo – or the male patriarchy – and greed and endorsement of wokeness and Me Too. Still, the images are there, just strip away the juvenile punditry. Go ahead, watch it.
The trailer:
Woodstock ’99 was a classic attempt to recreate Woodstock ’69 after 30 years of glamorizing that first edition. Some of the organizers and workers at ’99 were patrons of ’69 and describe it as a harmonious and tranquil love-in. It wasn’t. Many of the screw-ups at ’99 was present at ’69. Shortages of food and sanitation, rampant drug use, lack of crowd control, event personnel exchanging privileges for drugs, and the rain and mud that exacerbated the sanitation problems. The only thing missing was the riot of ’99 (see below for an abreviated account of ’69).
Fast forward to ’99. Michael Lange, the organizer of ’69, tried to resuscitate Woodstock with an eye to making money – Surprise! – which ’69 did not. The mellow rock of the Yardbirds was replaced with headliners such as the edgy, high-energy heavy metal of Limp Bizskit, Korn, Kid Rock, and Red Hot Chili Peppers. Drugs and nudity in the crowd and on stage were commonplace. One cannot think of a clearer signal of the loss of self-restraint and norms of decency. The visual cues of forbearance were absent.
Red Hot Chili Peppers on stage at Woodstock ‘99.
More troubling is the fact that the crowd that you get is a product of the musical acts that perform. The fan of Limp Bizkit and the Red Hot Chili Peppers is not the fan of Joan Baez and Blood, Sweat, and Tears. An important element of rock by the end of the millennium had slid off into atavistic rage with a fanbase to match – emblematic in the name of the popular group at the time, Rage Against the Machine. Fans were overwhelmingly male, of high physicality, with a cage-fighting personality.
The festival by the third day reminded me of the worst of a Daytona Spring Break. Violence and rampant public fornication, including sexual assault, frequently go together and should not be a surprise in an intoxicated, drug-addled assemblage of 300,000 teens and early twenty-somethings. Add the music and the type of fan that it attracts and the tinder for chaos is present. The blame cannot be solely placed at the feet of greedy vendors. For this crowd, we must add “riot hard” to “party hard”.
When standards of decency and the normal guideposts and expectations of life are erased, life becomes a free-for-all. We are experiencing this happenstance across the board. A walk through downtown San Francisco is a health hazard, as it is in most of our urban centers. One can no longer be sure that the girls’ locker room and bathroom will be filled with only girls of the expected chromosomal makeup, essentially ending girls’ sports. A toxic racial favoritism has been magically turned into a public good. Flights of fancy replace sober deliberation in policy debates when inflation is said to be cured by more inflation. Military readiness is said to be amazingly advanced by racial witch hunts in the ranks, self-flagellation, and identity politics from the Pentagon to West Point to the barracks. We are a mess like those fans at Woodstock ’69 and ’99.
Has there ever been a superpower when at the height of power and influence, it commits suicide? The gun went to the temple with little advanced warning. It was sudden, nearly overnight, taking less than two years. Woodstock ’99 is a warning.
RogerG
Sources:
* “The Corruption of Medicine”, Heather McDonald, City Journal, Summer 2022, at https://www.city-journal.org/the-corruption-of-medicine?wallit_nosession=1
* “The Messed Up Things That Happened In Woodstock 1969”, Rock Pasta, at https://rockpasta.com/the-messed-up-things-that-happened-in-woodstock-1969/
We are in an age of personality cults. Maybe we always have been to one extent or another. Regardless, we are in one, big time.
The decline in religiosity could be a partial explanation for people who need something to look up to after they have relegated heaven to myth. It’s easier to replace God with a human being. It’s evident across the political spectrum. The Left has theirs in the many academic offshoots of Karl Marx. On the Right, icons have arisen in the person of people from Jordan Peterson to Donald Trump. They may be correct in much that they say, but being human, they occasionally step on a rake. Then, the followers parrot the mistake while jettisoning their brain, the same brain that God gave them, that they don’t recognize that it was God who gave it to them.
Today’s brain is ill-informed of history. The schools have failed. We study history for what it says about human nature. And, yes, there is such a thing as human nature. Many won’t recognize the errors of the present because they are unaware that we’ve committed the blunders many times before. For instance, some of what today’s Right seems to be saying about the Ukraine War is an imitation of the rhetoric of the 60’s radical Left. Jean Kirkpatrick, a longtime Democrat and a defector from the looming socialistic, neo-Marxist takeover of her party, spoke to the 1984 Republican Convention nominating Ronald Reagan for a second term (see below). Her speech was a bold rejection of the “San Francisco Democrats” (Sound familiar?) and the Left’s “blame America First”.
Today, you’ll hear echoes of the same condemnable language of the 60’s radical Left coming from the likes of Donald Trump, Jordan Peterson, and their media apologists.
Trump introduced the Left’s oratory to the Right when he morphed the Left’s “blame America First” into “American First”. His 2015-2016 bombast against the Bushes led to a harangue about “endless wars”, i.e., the War on Terror, almost identical to the Left’s complaint about the Vietnam War. Trump made the chant of “America First” and its cousin “MAGA” into a reflex for isolationism, something ever-present in the GOP going back to 1940 and Lindbergh’s America First. Don’t’ forget, implicit in “Make America Great Again” is the claim that we aren’t great, which for the Right is due to our decadence. For the Left, we are censured as “exploiters”. As decadent or “exploiters”, the Right has made common cause with Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda.
Seemingly taking their cue from Trump in his odd admiration for Putin, some on the Right chide our support for Ukraine. The culture war is used as the excuse to criticize support for Ukraine. Tucker Carlson is scornful of the Zelenskyy government for its alleged autocratic tendencies; Laura Ingraham complains of our aid lost in purported Ukrainian corruption; and Jordan Peterson provides an alibi for Putin’s invasion as Putin fending of western decadence, a decadence resplendent in transgenderism. He comes close to aligning with Putin and when confronted backs off. The quote that got him into trouble was as follows:
“The culture war is now truly part of why we have a war [in Ukraine]. It is certainly the case that we do not therefore have all the moral high ground…. In fact, how much of it we have at all is something rightly subject to the most serious debate.”
In my view, transgenderism is a civilizational catastrophe, but to mingle it with Ukraine is sophistry. That puts Putin as a defender of goodness and light. If so, where does that put the CCP’s Xi? After all, Xi is leading a campaign to stop the feminization of men. Have you seen those PLA recruitment ads? They’re nothing like those gushing rainbow LGBTQ+ ads by our Marine Corps. Carlson, Ingraham, and Peterson would find themselves boxed into the corner of opposing US support for Taiwan against a Red Chinese invasion just to remain consistent. What kind of world would we have if our decadence or any other domestic policy failing is a straitjacket on our ability to stop this generation’s fascist and communist aggressors? Look to history for the answer.
Jean Kirkpatrick in 1984 outlines the stakes of a Trump/Carlson/Ingraham/Peterson foreign policy. It’s the same one advanced by the “San Francisco Democrats”. If you have 21 minutes, please listen to her riveting speech. It’s the antidote to the bile in this new era of personality cults.
Former President Donald Trump speaks during a rally to boost Ohio Republican candidates ahead of their May 3 primary election at the county fairgrounds in Delaware, Ohio, April 23, 2022. (Gaelen Morse/Reuters)
Based on what I’ve seen of Trump’s public performances, I would not seek his company. Loud, overbearing braggarts are not my cup of tea. That aside, a vendetta, clearly partisan and dripping in class condescension, has accompanied him since the day he rode down the escalator at Trump Tower in June of 2015. If nothing else, the presence of Trump on the stage has exposed a persistent campaign to get Trump and almost any Republican of consequence by the powers-that-be. Now, the raid. How should we view any subsequent prosecution of him?
“Find a room full of Americans without college degrees, one in which partisan Democrats are scarce. In three minutes or less, lay out your best evidence and explain why what Trump has done is clearly and obviously against the law — obvious not just to lawyers, but to everyone. If the room is convinced, then and only then will you know that the case demands you cross the Rubicon.”
Given all that has been done to him by partisan, bureaucratic, and cultural elite interests in the Manhattan-Beltway union, anything less than an obvious and unambiguous case would be seen by at least half the country as a coup. And that includes the current civil suit pursued by the den of Democrat legal militia in New York under the suzerainty of the state’s Democrat AG, Letitia James. At work is more than an insidious institutional Democrat favoritism but a trampling of the equal application of the laws. Nothing galls an observant public more than selective prosecution for political gain.
Batten down the hatches and get prepared for a hurricane.
FBI agents block a point of egress at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate early morning 8/8/22.
Two days ago, the FBI conducted a raid on President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. All agree that it was unprecedented. More than that, it was shocking. We’ll have to wait for more information before anything more can be definitively concluded. Still, given all that has happened from 2015 to the present, maybe even going back further to the 1990’s, I am worried for my country.
Yes, we are divided. The red/blue thing is real. No surprise. Also, no surprise, DC is deep, deep blue, almost to the color of deep space, and it just so happens to be the seat of immense federal powers. DC down to its lowliest employee is as one-party as California. The District is a big seat for the Democratic Party, the party of government, alongside the DNC’s other seats in dysfunctional urban nodes, college campuses, most of corporate media, and Fortune 500 boardrooms – the narrow, isolated cultural satraps of America.
What we know at this point is that a DC-headquartered Justice Department directed the DC headquarters of the FBI to pursue a search warrant before a DC federal magistrate so that the DC FBI could fly down to Palm Beach to search the home of a DC-detested ex-president. These dysfunctional urban nodes already have an outsized and sometimes malignant influence on the rest of the country, and none is more noxious than DC, similar in toxicity to Mordor.
DC or Mordor?
Why the sanctioned incursion into Trump’s home? Frankly, it’s odd if we ignore the inordinate bias in the District. Andrew C. McCarthy in a piece yesterday morning reasonably speculates that Biden’s people and their natural allies in the bureaucracy are out to pin criminal charges on Trump. It’s about January 6 and not some classified materials in Trump’s possession. The documents and the Presidential Records Act were just a pretext. Breaking into an ex-president’s personal safe and seizing boxes of documents is actually about using the big net of a broad search to capture pieces of incriminating evidence of other flashier criminality for a big show trial later, a common prosecutorial tactic.
Now, think about it. If it’s about January 6, charges in the capitol riot up to now have centered on obstruction of a federal proceeding (counting electoral votes) and defrauding the government (perpetrating lies in order to obstruct). The AG Garland cabal would have to show that Trump plotted the riot and disseminated knowing falsehoods to encourage the criminal actions. That’s a big mountain to climb. Fraud requires a personal understanding that the theories are false. But they’re theories, maybe goofy ones but still theories. Belief in an exotic legal theory is not a crime.
After all, the henchmen of the Democratic Party have been foisting on the public racist anti-racism, CRT, identity favoritism as “equity”, the disjunction of gender from chromosomes, blatant discrimination against people of faith, defund the police, non-prosecution as public safety, and fighting inflation by opening up the fire hose of government money. If eccentric legal theories are fraud, well, how do you rate these? If that is our standard, search warrants could be easily acquired on the Pentagon, CIA headquarters at Langley, the J. Edgar Hoover Building (FBI headquarters in DC), the Justice Department offices, the Treasury Department, the White House, other DC federal office buildings, and almost any college humanities department in the country.
Hanging the prosecution hat on the peg of legal foolhardiness is an exercise in futility. Taking an active part in the riot has equal difficulties. Reveling in the scenes on TV is neither evidence of obstruction or fraud. Unseemly, yes, but not criminal. The anticipated smoking gun may turn out to be a pop gun that a kid put in the oven.
All in all, it’s a risky venture on the part of the donkey party. If nothing comes of this but embarrassment for Trump, red America will be enflamed. What a trade-off: Great dangers in exchange for the likelihood of little reward. The plebes in the hinterlands could very well conclude that the Democratic Party in their DC redoubt is at war with them. And, in a way, they’d be right.
After all, the historical record going back to the 1990’s would encourage the conclusion that a monumental threat to the people arises from DC’s cultural and physical cocoon. Remember Ruby Ridge and Waco? In both cases, DC-headquartered federal law enforcement in their isolation conducted military-style raids with disastrous results. DC FBI agents on a plane to Ruby Ridge wrote down broad rules of engagement to shoot anyone with a gun at Weaver’s home. And, that they did, killing Weaver’s 14-year-old son and his wife as she was holding their infant daughter. A federal agent in commando-style gear was also killed. The ATF for its part conducted a Battle of Kursk operation against a religious sect outside Waco culminating in a lethal fire. The stage for the cataclysms was set in the secluded environs of DC offices.
Staging area for federal agents next to Randy Weaver’s home at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, 1993.The Branch Davidian dormitories consumed in fire after nearly a 2-month siege by federal agents in 1993.
The barbaric overreaction took place in Oklahoma City in 1995, the second anniversary of the Branch Dividian debacle.
The destruction of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City after the bombing in 1995.
Fast forward to 2016, and DC and its patron, the Democratic Party, are at war with the results of the 2016 presidential election. The nexus of the Clinton campaign, the DNC, Obama operatives, the FBI, the CIA, the administrative agencies at one time or another conspired to remove, thwart, and hogtie Trump throughout his term . . . and after. The Clinton Campaign’s Steele dossier. The fraudulent FISC warrants based on it. Crossfire Hurricane. The impeachments, one based on a donkey party agent in the Pentagon. The Joint Chiefs chairman subverting the authority of the president as commander in chief to our biggest foreign adversary. And now the hunt for criminal charges against him. It’s monomaniacal.
This latest episode smells as bad as the others. If nothing else, any return of the people’s government back to the people demands that DC be broken up. Other than the immediate staff of the three branches, the rest should disburse into the boondocks.
Disband or move the DC Circuit Court of Appeals and DC District Court outside the District. Leave just a municipal court to handle judicial matters for the District’s residents. Currently, a double system of justice – one for R’s and one for D’s – is clearly evident in the District. No good has come of federal judges, prosecutors, juries, and grand juries fully marinated in the DC socio-political eco-system. Till that time, routine changes of venue should be the order of the day. It’s the only way to stop the inherent partisan weaponization of the District’s justice system.
Trump, as personally repugnant as he is, has given us the time of day. The clock says it’s time to give Mordor (DC) an induced coma, or induced recession, in order to save our constitutional republic. Having Mordor look more like today’s Detroit is far healthier for the country than a city with a burgeoning workforce that has forgotten “servant” in public servant. If allowed to fester untreated, a dark time awaits. I don’t think that people outside the blue bubbles are going to tolerate for long an oligarchy run out of Mordor.
Republicans are bedeviled by the spawn of Trump and Democrats are enthralled by neo-Marxism in their combination of rank socialism and malignant identity pandering. While Democrats engage in a headlong rush into college-campus extremism, many Republicans seem intent on adopting the philosophy of Smoot-Hawley, ignoring Adam Smith’s lessons on the inherent foolishness of politicians managing trade or the general economy, shunting Hayek’s knowledge problem to the corner, and an emulation of Soviet Gosplan (central planning) only with them in the catbird seat. As a Republican in the Buckley-Reagan tradition, it’s galling. Trump is responsible for unloading this hash of blustery claptrap on the sole remaining party that should know better.
The steamy love affair with government by some of today’s Republicans shouldn’t catch anyone by surprise. Every politician loves to bring home the bacon, so politics can make hypocrites of us all. Yet, this is different. An orthodoxy developed around Trump’s buffoonery. Suddenly, Republicans and others on the Right started walking around proclaiming the evils of the free market.
It’s not surprising that Trump should be their spiritual leader. Here’s a man who made fame and fortune in real estate, the economic sector most debased by politics and government at every level. Government can help you make millions, indeed billions. Government is a partner for a big developer who needs local potentates to eliminate competitors, get approvals, and steamroll recalcitrant homeowners. Trump happened to have a career in an industry that found government not necessarily an obstacle but just another factor of production. The transition from Big Government Developer to Big Government Republican is easy in that matrix. Add a little 60’s Queens street tuff to the public persona and you too can have people walk over broken glass to attend your rallies.
The Republican slide into incoherence came to the fore at the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s American Economic Forum on July 29. Billed as the antidote to Davos’s left-leaning World Economic Forum, it interestingly emulated Davos. Both confabs provided ample grist for government control of the economy. The only difference is the targeted beneficiaries.
A defensible role for government as referee against brute force and monopoly in the market is one thing. It’s quite another to play Karl Marx in distorting economic activity to the advantage of one class. For Rick Santorum, it’s blue-collar workers – not much different from Marx’s Cinderella class of the proletariat. Subsidies, the tax code, and regulatory powers should be geared to cementing the working class to the GOP in Santorum’s grand design – admirable as a political goal, but lousy economic advice. Did it ever grace his mind that blue-collar workers need blue-collar industries? And blue-collar industries need investment, i.e., capital, i.e., Wall Street. The economy is a synergistic whole. The only answer from Santorum and company is to grease the skids for manufacturing, mindless of the effect on the rest of the economic web.
Rick Santorum
It doesn’t work. Thomas Sowell’s famous dictum cannot be repealed: “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” The reality is that some manufacturers get favored treatment over others. Some get the resources that are sucked away from others.
And what of those labor unions who turned themselves into the false champions of those blue collars? Remember, the same unions that drove two of the big three automakers into the arms of a government bailout in 2008-9 are manifestations of the one currently aggravating the supply-chain crisis at west coast ports, the featherbedding International Longshoreman and Warehouse Union. Anchored cargo ships are visible over the horizon. A blue-collar organization meant to benefit blue-collars does so at the expense of every other facet of economic life, and other workers. Government has a congenital habit of only turning its gaze to the squeaky wheel and to heck with the other three. Try driving a car with three flat tires. Trade-offs anyone, aggravated by government winner-picking?
How do tariffs fit into Santorum’s quest for the blue-collar vote? Good question, but another participant at the talkfest, Trump’s trade czar Robert Lighthizer, is a fanboy of them. He is a practitioner of economic snake oil, just like his patron, Donald J. Trump. With “balanced trade” as code for tariffs, he proclaimed that they wrought “astonishing results”. Really? I hear “post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy” (two events happening chronologically with the earliest one mistakenly assumed to be the cause) in the bombast. So many reforms were swirling around in 2017-2018, thanks to a Republican Congress, to overwhelm the impact of the tariff silliness.
Robert Lighthizer
Thus, attributing the so-called “Trump economy”, pre-COVID, to the orange man’s tariffs is demagogic self-puffery. Take the “Trump” tax cuts. They were really the Paul Ryan/Republican-caucus tax cuts, a distillation of ideas running around Republican policy circles since at least the 1990’s. Trump just happened to be in office to put his signature to something that was mostly the work of others. The business tax reductions were testosterone for economic muscle growth. And it showed according to AEI’s James Pethokoukis. Let’s just call the “Trump” tax cuts what they really were: the “Paul Ryan/Republican” tax cuts.
Oftentimes, cutting regulations can act like tax cuts. Remember the Congressional Review Act (CRA) of 1996? It codified a Congressional veto power over the administrative state’s rule-making juggernaut. Keep in mind that the Democrats love the administrative state going back to Woodrow Wilson so don’t expect them to exploit the power. Thus, Congress’s successful use of the CRA is dependent on the vagaries of presidential elections. A repeal requires a president’s signature like any bill. From 1996 to 2001, a repeal succeeded only once when a Republican, George W. Bush, was in the Oval Office. We’d have to wait another 16 years for a Republican-controlled Congress to remind itself of its power. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell in 2017 jumped at the chance and sent to Trump’s desk 14 veto resolutions bringing to heel the federal eco-agencies, FCC, Department of Labor, SEC, the Ed Department, etc., of our community-organizer-in-chief, Barack Obama. Trump simply put his signature to a political impetus that began elsewhere by other people.
For Lighthizer to bully his way to the podium at the American Economic Forum to take credit brings braggadocio to new heights, like his mentor, the prince of Mar-a-Lago.
The tax cuts, reining-in the pit bulls of the Left’s administrative state, and unleashing American energy production have long been Republican talking points and planks in the party platform, and not the lab creatures of Trump, Robert Lighthizer, or Peter Navarro (by the way, a former SoCal Dem no-growther). The GOP has long been a booster of opening up ANWAR, fracking, horizontal drilling, pipelines, refineries, offshore platforms, things that would incite conniptions in Silicon Valley lunchrooms. Trump just happened to be the sympathetic warm body to not stand in the way of affordable energy.
As for Trump’s beloved tariffs, they are sand tossed into the economy’s gears. They are a drag since tariffs are taxes. Surprise! Impose them and you just increased the burden on consumers and businesses. The Trump 25% tariff on imported steel slabs is a case in point. American steel producers remanufacture these slabs into sheet metal for fenders and appliance housings among other American-made desirables. Well, guess what? Since March 2020, the price of steel ballooned by 215%. While Biden’s eco-craziness and socialism has a role, Trump’s contribution to our current travails is his mindless worship at the altar of “balanced trade”, i.e., tariffs. If business tax cuts are testosterone, then tariffs are a flesh-eating virus. Give ‘em a little time before we end up in intensive care. The Republican Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 showed the way.
Smoot-Hawley Tariff in the newspaper, June 17, 1930
Not only that, tariffs needlessly make enemies, especially at a time when you need allies, unless, of course, you want America First to be America Alone. Red China has discovered its inner hegemon. Many Pacific countries are fearful of entering the maw of the CCP and are turning to the US as the only counterforce. The relationship between trade ties and military ones is well known. Just as we were about to draw much of the Pacific rim into a closer cooperation with us, 2016, a presidential election year, came upon us. The Dems practiced their usual fealty to the AFL-CIO and Hillary trashed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), something negotiated across multiple administrations. Not to be outdone, Trump in his usual bombast blasted the deal as “a continuing rape of our country”.
Well, what is this “rape”? The pact would slash tariffs all around the Pacific rim from the US to Brunei to Chile. For an America First/Alone enthusiast like Trump, the TPP is the perfect whipping boy. He torpedoed the deal and then boasted about it, repeatedly. But he made it harder to begin a “pivot to Asia” by initiating a trade war with our natural allies. His economic advisors must have been aghast and suggested their own pivot from “rape” to “bilateral”. The rhetorical gimmick was to disparage the adjective “multilateral” (TPP) and substitute “bilateral” in agreements. So, Trump’s people scrambled around the region to cement a smorgasbord of individual pacts to substitute for the omnibus one, all to save face from admitting to the slander.
One way to prevent the much-hated “forever wars” and bankruptcy of the US treasury is to have many allies. Their contributions may be small but together think of them as forcing upon Red China a weakening by a thousand cuts. We provide the biggest military piece but it’s better than having to pay for the whole piece which would be the consequence of the America Aloners.
The Aloner evangelists such as Tucker Carlson or Tulsi Gabbard, or even the conservative Tom McClintock (R, Ca.), stray into the logical dead end of more-allies-means-more-wars. Actually, that is only one possibility, and the least likely one. More allies mean more deterrence. A worse buzzsaw cannot be imagined for Putin’s Russia and Xi’s CCP for them to venture into an attempted reconstitution of the USSR and a Red Chinese-led Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The addition of Sweden and Finland to NATO intensify deterrence on Russia and trade pacts with miliary cooperation in the Pacific rim makes Xi’s Middle Kingdom dream seem more like a nightmare.
Coups are frequently associated with costly adventurism by despots. Everyone does cost-benefit analysis, unless they’re crazy. Even then, deterrence raises the costs to prohibitive levels for any compadres-of-convenience in the regime to continue to follow the lunatics. Still, anyway, if the crazy should practice a Nigh of the Long Knives (Hitler’s 1934 elimination of his rivals), you’ll definitely need those allies more than ever.
Foreign relations and a nation’s economy are intricately connected. Our national prosperity cannot survive a world with the renminbi as the world’s reserve currency, the World Bank headquartered in Beijing, the world’s shipping lanes policed by the PLA Navy, a NATO decaying in its nearly vacant Brussels headquarters, and a new USSR bullying its way westward and southward. Then we will be really alone. And it begins when we start to mangle economics and our recent history to fit the ambitions of narcissists and the hucksters of economic nostrums. I am worried that we are seeing too many of both among the people who should know better.
PLA Navy on maneuvers 2022
Specifically, the golden years, pre-COVID, from 2017 to early 2020 should not be referred to as the Trump economy. It was the Republican economy, all of it emanating from the Republican “establishment”. Anyone but Tucker Carlson fanboys should realize it.
RogerG
Sources:
*“Did the Trump Tax Cuts Work? The Answer May Not Be What You Think”, James Pethokoukis, American Enterprise Institute, at https://www.aei.org/economics/did-the-trump-tax-cuts-work-the-answer-may-not-be-what-you-think/
*” Trump’s Steel Tariffs Still Harming Producers and Consumers”, Bob Luddy, Brownstone Institute, at https://brownstone.org/articles/trumps-steel-tariffs-still-harming-producers-and-consumers/
*”Congressional Review Act”, Ballotpedia, at https://ballotpedia.org/Congressional_Review_Act
*”Where Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump stand on Obama’s legacy trade deal”, Business Insider, at https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-tpp-2016-9
*” Central Planning with Conservative Characteristics”, Dominic Pino, National Review Online, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/08/central-planning-with-conservative-characteristics/
*Tom McClintock’s vote against support for adding Finland and Sweden to NATO in “One California congressman voted against Finland and Sweden joining NATO. Here’s why”, in the Sacramento Bee, at https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article263626043.html
Yard signs in Kansas regarding the upcoming vote on Amendment 2, August 2, 2022.
I’m reminded of the truism in military strategy of knowing your enemy. In the arena of great policy debates, it takes the form of knowing and being able to summarize your opponent’s arguments. Don’t expect such awareness among the general public. They have neither the time nor inclination to do the homework. More commonly, they have vague analogies and precepts in their heads to help them make sense of the world. The origins of these ideas are unknown, just blindly accepted as fact, and for which they have adapted their lives around. Thus, not knowing that these fuzzy ideas have a birthdate, it’s very hard to get the electorate to reverse a notion maybe born in their childhood but one that they have grown accustomed to.
We are simply stuck with the democracy that we have.
Yesterday, Kansas voters soundly rejected Amendment 2, an attempt to remove an earlier exercise of raw judicial power when the state’s high court wrote into the Kansas constitution something that isn’t there, namely the right to abortion. “Raw judicial power”, yes!
That gets to the crux of the matter. The general public is mostly unaware that the Kansas high court was egregiously out of their lane, actually to the point of deserving impeachment and removal from office. They legislated from the bench, a habit taught to them by the Warren Court and its federal progeny.
Formerly, new rights, powers, and privileges were in the wheelhouse of our elected representatives, our legislators. If you can’t get an idea past our elected representatives, well, that’s called a democratic republic. Don’t run to black-robed jurists trained in the application of laws to make the laws for you on the fly. That’s called autocracy. Distinctions in the basic functions of government aren’t taught and, therefore, most people only have the experience of their limited experience to guide them. Our instructional and informational organs have fallen flat on their face.
As a result, relatively new ideas – new in the sense of a lifespan of only a generation or two – have an extended grip for an understandably oblivious public. They do their duty, go to the polls, and express a discomfort in reversing something whose origin and basis is mostly unknown to them.
No, don’t mistake this for popular “wisdom”. It’s always “wisdom” if your side wins. It’s “racism” or some other scapegoat if your side loses. Welcome to the airheads of The Squad and fans of Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Who is to blame? Not the general public, for how can we expect them to exhibit a mental acuity that large groups have never shown before? If you have a desire to point fingers, aim them in the direction of the media and schools, or maybe the proponents for not doing the necessary groundwork.
The media and schools have been particularly derelict. Don’t expect your teacher or mediagenic news personality to patiently explain “raw judicial power”. That would require knowing the existence of the first three articles of the US Constitution. They establish three branches with their own lanes of competence: to legislate, to carry out the law, and to apply the law. Today, the appliers now legislate, ergo “raw judicial power”. How? The propagandists of the imperial courts claim the law says something that it doesn’t. Well, it doesn’t say it in clear words, they say, but the words that do exist can be stretched to cover what it doesn’t say. Got it?
For those 17-year-olds taking US History, it’s called “The Living Constitution”, and in the high school where I did the bulk of my teaching, the textbook has an entire chapter devoted to it. The “grooming” starts early.
No wonder people get attached to The Living Constitution. Yet, opinion polls consistently show disapproval of its consequences. How else can one get to racism as anti-racism from equal protection in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments? How else can one get to defund the police, no-cash bail, non-prosecution of crimes, blanket early releases from prison, and filthy, homeless, dangerous, and drug-addled streets and parks? How else can one codify in court opinions the newly minted wall of separation between gender and chromosomes? And as a result, get masturbation, new ideas for playtime, and drag queens in elementary school and public libraries? How else can sports designed for one set of chromosomes be destroyed by the forced acceptance of those with a different set? How else can we get to Obama and Biden Justice Department letters threatening Title IX actions against schools who insist on keeping distinct bathrooms for each set of chromosomes? Want your ten-year-old daughter to share a bathroom with a twelve-year-old XY “girl”? The Living Constitution folks do. The malformation of the Constitution knows no bounds.
It doesn’t stop there. Try to announce the obvious and you’ll face condemnation, maybe prosecution, disciplinary action, termination of employment, ostracism, and a life under the chronic threat of Twitter-hell. There are dire consequences for speaking truth to . . . .
If we are ever to get back to law being law, and not just an utterance of the zeitgeist, people who are cognizant of the nonsense must stand up and work to correct the miseducation coming from our educrats and telegenic poseurs. Strap on your waiters for this is going to be a long hard slog.
