A man in a Hamas terrorist costume this week at Stanford University (photo from Daniel Gordis’s post)
Irving Kristol once wrote, “[A neoconservative is] a liberal who has been mugged by reality. A neoliberal is a liberal who got mugged by reality but has not pressed charges.”
Below (Sources #1) is a link to a liberal Israeli PhD student at Stanford who was “mugged by reality”. His account is enlightening because it comes from the ground at one of America’s “elite” universities (the word “elite” is in quotes because they are tarnishing the title).
A key takeaway from his piece is his sudden realization of the popularity of Donald Trump, from a person who would never vote for him if he could.
“This year I finally got it [Trump’s popularity in America]. No, if I were an American I still wouldn’t vote for Trump. But I now understand those who vote for him. Donald Trump is some Americans’ answer to the madness on the other side, a madness I didn’t notice until it turned its face in my direction. A madness no less terrible than Trumps’s madness. No, if I had the right to vote, I would not vote for Donald Trump. But America deserves him.”
The madness isn’t only epidemic on college campuses. High schoolers are seeking to join the madness (see #2 below). Chicago area high schools are a hotbed of pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas activism, many of them “elite” prep schools. Add Seattle schools to the educational sink hole. How did we get to a place where 16 and 17-year-olds rush to join the madness in higher ed? The answer lies in the curricular rot from teacher training and their undergrad coursework to the textbooks. When you drop your kid off at school or the bus stop, your kid is getting a steady diet of the oppressor/oppressed Marxist schtick.
And you thought your kid was learning the three R’s. Let me clue you, they’re getting much more than Algebra.
It’s everywhere. It’s on YouTube. For example, recently I watched a Gen X or Millennial academic who was commenting on something as innocuous as British castles and couldn’t resist continual references to the oppression of the lower classes. It’s a highly distorted portrayal of a period that lasted half a millennium or more. No concession was made to the possible benefits of socio-political hierarchy, let alone a moral hierarchy (some things are objectively good or bad). It was a simple message repeated ad nauseum: the rich and powerful bad, poor folk good. 16-year-old kiddies sitting in their desks, imbibing this blinkered view of the world, have their minds prepped for tramping on over to DePaul or University of Chicago in the “Chicago Youth For Justice” to link arms with an “abolitionist, anti-imperialist network of students”. You know the banter.
This Israeli PHD student noticed the mental rot right away. Most fundamentally, these firebrands are attacking more than Israel but lurking underneath is an assault on logic and reason itself. For these young people, everything is subjective, there being no objective truth, no facts, only feelings. Quoting him:
“I’m not referring here to those who express the opinion that it is difficult to get to the truth, or who think that the courts do not always succeed in finding out what the facts are, or who hold that different ideas are perceived differently through different eyes. I’m speaking about those who say unequivocally that there is no such thing as truth. They are not interested in presenting facts to support their arguments because they do not believe there is such a thing as facts, and they say so explicitly. They think that it is forbidden to use the term “jihadist” in front of jihadists, or to call supporters of terrorism by their names, because feelings are more important than facts (although, of course, first and foremost their feelings).”
Parents, sit down with your kids and query them about whether they believe in objective truth. You might be surprised at the answer.
There’s nothing like being mugged by reality to focus the mind. The sad reality is that this foreign student was mugged by American college students who, in turn, were mugged by their schooling in the good ol’ USA.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “I saw the American progressive movement … as an ally. That was a mistake.”, by Yotam Berger, in Daniel Gordis’s Israel from the Inside, at https://danielgordis.substack.com/p/i-saw-the-american-progressive-movement
2. “Pro-Hamas Craze Starts in K–12”, Haley Strack, National Review Online, 5/2/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/pro-hamas-craze-starts-in-k-12/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first
During the Cold War, the Soviets in their efforts to harness to their side the so-called Third World – mostly poorer, developing and nominally nonaligned countries (at least officially not tied to the western or communist bloc) – created a “university” to train the next generation of Marxist revolutionaries. Modeled on Soviet “education”, the schooling is premised, straitjacketed, on the absolute truth of Karl Marx’s revolutionary dialectic. Deeply implanted is the alleged Marxist reality of systemic oppression, the same kind of thing now commonplace in our schools of higher ed, and lower.
The Soviet tactic was to hide the indoctrination behind the name of a popular “hero” like Patrice Lumumba. Officially titled Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow implanted Marxist thought in the next generation of revolutionaries and activists from around the world. Notable alumni include a long list of murderous malcontents such as the terrorist Carlos the Jackal, Iran’s totalitarian mullah Ali Khamenei, the Sandinista dictator Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, and the one-man-one-vote-one-time ruler Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority.
Students at Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, 1985Carlos the Jackal
The politicized heirs could include much of the college graduating classes in the U.S. going back at least a decade or two. The Marxist-thought concept is infectious and is now established ideological orthodoxy throughout the college landscape across America. Scholarship is bastardized by Marxist jargon, politically weighted vocabulary for which no one is allowed question. Thought begins with the boilerplate, ends with the boilerplate. This passes for learning in America (and elsewhere).
In a previous post, I wrote of the troubles at Bakersfield College, the Kern Community College District, and the Community College System in California. Clearly, the intellectual rot doesn’t begin or end there. The results are found in the polling of the under-24s. The recent Harvard/Harris poll shows 51% of the 18-to-24 cohort supported the ending of the state of Israel and turning it over “to Hamas and the Palestinians”. Increasingly, these people aren’t just liberal; they’re Marxist, having applied the Marxist rhetoric of oppressor and colonizer to Israel. It is what is meant by “not being liberal enough”. Translation: being Marxist. Welcome to America’s future.
We’d be much more honest with ourselves if we renamed all American higher ed Patrice Lumumba Universities because that is what they are. Parents, beware, you might be subsidizing the future authors of the next holocaust.
The bodies of people, some of them elderly, lie on a street after they were killed during a mass-infiltration by Hamas gunmen from the Gaza Strip, in Sderot, southern Israel, Oct. 7, 2023. (Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad)
RogerG
Sources:
* “Poll: Most young Americans think Israel should be ‘ended and given to Hamas’”, Toi Staff, The Times of Israel, 12/17/23, at https://www.timesofisrael.com/poll-most-young-americans-back-ending-israel-many-find-jewish-genocide-calls-okay/
J. Robert Oppenheimer is back in the news with the movie “Oppenheimer” hitting screens across the country. As a movie, I give it “thumbs up”. It was well-scripted, acted, and moved at a captivating pace. Hats off to Christopher Nolan.
As history, I have my doubts.
Oppenheimer’s place in the period before, during, and after World War II is a much more contentious topic and should be. Was he a man of dubious loyalty, maybe even going so far as to engage in espionage? More interestingly, could his philosophical sympathies cloud his judgment in managing Los Alamos? These questions cannot be answered in a movie. Sympathy for the man abounds, possibly richly deserved, but some aspects of the real story are missing. One thing is glaringly clear: nothing, absolutely nothing was mentioned, or in any way referenced, of the Venona project and its WWII decrypts of Soviet communications from the US to Moscow, or the confirmatory information gleaned from the briefly opened Soviet archives after the downfall of the Soviet regime in 1991.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
PBS added to the Oppenheimer lore with a recent American Experience documentary, “The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer”, with the same blank spots as the movie. Number one, the “trial” wasn’t a trial. It was a panel to determine whether to pull Oppenheimer’s security clearance. Step back one moment from the Hollywood-made aura about the man, however, and look at the facts. Fact number one, no evidence has come to light of Oppenheimer’s involvement in espionage. So, as a matter of law and logic, the claim of alleged treason is simply a suspicion at best. On the other hand, the raw insights gleaned from Venona and Soviet archives presents a more complicated picture.
For a clearer assessment of the period, PBS ironically came to the rescue some years back with Nova’s “Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spies” which was primarily based on the historical work of John Haynes and Harvey Klehr (watch it below). The documentary and the book, “Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America”, point to serious Soviet penetration of the US government and the Manhattan Project. The movie mentions the espionage of Klaus Fuchs, but the reality is that the illicit activity didn’t end there.
Arlington Hall, Va., where the decrypting took place.
Americans acting as Soviet agents were littered throughout Roosevelt’s administration. Lauchlin Currie, FDR’s chief economic adviser, Harry Dexter White, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Alger Hiss at the State Department, and a smattering of others in intelligence and federal law enforcement agencies were identified in Venona decrypts and later confirmed in Soviet archives as sources of America’s most important secrets. Some 300 Soviet cover names were identified in the decrypts with only about 100 attached to specific individuals. One of the unidentified was “Quantum”, and he was clearly somebody very, very important at Los Alamos.
The movie to its credit mentioned Klaus Fuchs, but there was more at Los Alamos. One such person was Theodore Hall and his friend and Harvard confidant, Saville Sax. Fuchs and Hall, independent of each other, provided sketches and descriptions to the Soviets of the plutonium bomb used on Nagasaki. Shortly after the successful Trinity test in July 1945, the Soviets and the head of their nuclear effort, Igor Kurchatov, had in their hands what we had achieved and how. Possibly this explains Stalin’s nonchalance when informed by Truman of this “super weapon” at Potsdam.
Lauchlin CurrieTheordore Hall
For me, the media productions unwittingly say more about the cultural milieu in our academic communities at that time as well as today. Already left leaning, the onset of the Depression confirmed Marx’s critique of capitalism for many academics, just like today’s Great neo-Marxist Awakening on our campuses. Is it all that surprising that Oppenheimer, like many others, was swimming with the subcultural current?
Who was “Quantum” and what role did Oppenheimer’s well-documented interaction with known communists and involvement in communist front activities have on his standing as a possible security risk? Suspicions were heightened, especially after the Venona decrypts were making the rounds through federal authorities.
Yet, until informed otherwise, sympathies doth not necessarily make a traitor. Oppenheimer was a man constantly torn between his deep-seated beliefs and his work. It was probably true for many at Los Alamos. Some let their sympathies get the better of them. Fuchs was captured at Heathrow airport trying to escape. Ted Hall escaped prosecution most likely due to the difficulty of using the decrypts in court and the reluctance of US authorities to expose our decrypting activities. Many others were fingered but avoided the bar of justice for the same reason.
It’s a story that at the very least would add greater depth to the movie, not only making a good movie but also better history.
Please watch “Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spies”. You’ll find it interesting in light of the movie.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company founder Morris Chang (Sam Yeh/Getty Images)
Mr. Chang’s comment in the title came a mere matter of months after a much-ballyhooed opening of a new Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC) facility in Phoenix, Arizona, a heavily subsidized joint effort with the state of Arizona and the federal government’s CHIPS Act. President Biden gushed during the opening ceremonies that manufacturing in the U.S. “is back, folks.” However, Mr. Chang had a hard look at the financials and concluded that the Arizona plant was a loser and the CHIPS Act ($52 billion in chip subsidies) was a “very expensive exercise in futility.” TSMC is scaling back operations at the new plant.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. is building its first fabrication plant in North Phoenix. (TSMC)
Why the harsh assessment? The “folks” at TSMC came to realize that business activity in America is a much more expensive proposition than they had earlier contemplated. We are simply uncompetitive and the freebies – free infrastructure, other giveaways, tax goodies, etc. – can’t make up for the cultural, social, political, and economic deficits. The Rust Belt, California’s economic decrepitude, and the other blue states’ dismal economic futures are not magical, accidental happenstances. They are a byproduct of America’s current – and past – infatuation with government intervention for an ever-expanding list of excuses.
The Democratic Party is the institutional gatekeeper of this our bumbling central planning, with some Republicans tagging along in the hope of sharing in the reflected glory of a big and splashy event. But for the donkey party, they see themselves as the keeper of the lodestar – a sort of Ark of the Covenant – of their vision, and it is none other than the New Deal. It’s a forever template to be repeated endlessly. Of course, one must ignore the fact that it was a disaster. The depression became a Great Depression which persisted for a decade, was interrupted by the emergency of World War II, and was set to resume if subsequent Republican Congresses in the late 1940’s hadn’t interceded to quash much of the madness
Men pushing wheel barrows in Civil Works Administration project in the 1930’s.In spite of the tremendous federal government interventions, unemployment remained high throughout the 1930’s. One can conclude that FDR’s New Deal was a massive failure, hugely ineffectual, or helped to prolong the Depression. Whichever, it was a disaster.
Whenever the donkey party ascends the grimy pole of power, their favorite ploy is to imitate FDR. So, concerns of declining domestic manufacturing – which, if true, was a result of government interventions – is to be addressed by . . . more government intervention. Thus, the CHIPS Act is just another exercise in flooding the zone with taxpayer moneys like in the heady days of FDR’s meddling.
True, today, Trump and his cadre of “populist” Republicans also love the idea of slathering gobs of the public treasury on favorite obsessions such as manufacturing and employing the stick of government intervention in tariffs to protect their golden boy. They don’t have the smarts to understand that it’s central planning by another name. Call it “industrial policy”. It’s a rebranded New Deal for a new era of demagogues and nitwits.
Why did this latest effort at what doesn’t work fail? Mr. Chang belatedly noticed that he entered the snake pit that is America. The Rust Belt of the Upper Midwest became a rusty belt of abandoned factories, expanding slums, chronic unemployment, and a declining tax base because of the unrestrained greed of government-empowered labor unions, onerous taxation, and the country’s ascent to the zenith of reregulating its economy. Much of what made the Rust Belt rusty remains, and gets a boost whenever the donkey party is granted the keys to the kingdom.
Think about all the ways that America is an economic snake pit. Ever since FDR’s New Deal lavishly spent and bullied farmers, workers, and entrepreneurs for a decade, Democrats have assiduously worked to revive the monster. The 1970’s rise of environmentalism replaced the 1930’s corporatism and socialism as the go-to excuse to bring back the Leviathan. Out came the well-intentioned Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), and their subsequent amendments, and herd of agencies and regulations.
California has a housing crisis for the same reason that Mr. Chang has a gloomy attitude about chip manufacturing in Arizona, or any other place in America. Permitting and the host of other approvals easily doubles the cost of plant construction as compared to Taiwan. Additionally, labor costs are through the roof: triple, maybe four times the cost of Taiwanese workers when you factor in all the mandated benefits alongside the higher wages and salaries. Don’t expect these numbers to remain the same for long if local lefties discover America’s proven appetite for hiking the minimum wage. The jump in wages for fast food workers ripples through the economy all the way to the plant floor.
The quality of what economists call human capital is another troubling factor. Chief among the attributes of human capital is a robust work ethic, which includes timely, quick responses to problems at work. Shang-yi Chiang, TSMC’s head of research and development, was quoted as saying, “people worked so much harder in Taiwan.” He cites the example of an equipment failure at 1 a.m. being immediately repaired by 2 a.m. in Taiwan. In America, the plant has to wait till 10 a.m. He concludes about the island’s workforce, “They [workers] do not complain, and their spouse does not complain either.”
SEIU picketers chant while sitting and marching during the county union workers (SEIU 1021) strike held at the Solano County Governement Center plaza, Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2015, in Fairfield. (Steve Reczkowski/Daliy Republic)
Of course, panderers at Fox News or MSNBC, and “populists” everywhere, would counter with something about Americans not being wage slaves, or similar rhetoric. But they ignore the time when Taiwan’s Horatio Algierses were actually Americans of the 19th century. A cursory biographical reading of the lives of Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Ford, etc., reads like Chaing’s depiction of the average Taiwanese employee. Did we lose our va-va-voom in an avalanche of modern self-satisfaction, self-esteem, and victimhood indoctrination?
Indeed, indoctrination is the watchword in describing much of American public education today. As for teaching math, science, reading, history, literature, and civics, the academic core, NAEP scores have stagnated at embarrassing levels if not fallen. Proficiency in U.S. History and Civics by eighth-graders currently hovers around 14% and 22% respectively. The OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) shows a significant step down from Taiwan to the U.S. in academic performance in math and science.
The differential would probably be much worse if the U.S. hadn’t experienced a large influx of Asians over the past few decades who are still somewhat immune from our pop-cultural depredations. They dominate enrollments in elite high schools and college programs in math and science to such an extent that Big Academia practices covert reverse discrimination against them, treating them as “white” in this new era of blatant DEI racial favoritism.
Yes, friendly foreign investors face a snake pit of an ill-prepared labor pool, one with a declining appreciation for hard work, and an economic environment plagued by a host of collectivist busy bodies who are heavily bankrolled by the hyper-wealthy possessing the means to insulate themselves from the insipid consequences of their lofty ideals. Analogies work best in describing this state of affairs. A snake pit is an accurate depiction of the economic ecosystem but flies-to-cow-paddies or maybe piranhas-in-a-feeding-frenzy is a much better fit for our government interventions of regulation and subsidies. American government brings to the table its retinue of rent seekers and socialistic/neo-Marxist partisans to muck up the works. Throw out the money and regulatory power and like flies or piranha this brood shows up to feed on the carcass. Apparently, TSMC doesn’t relish being viewed as cold meat on the side of the road.
Welcoming TSMC with the CHIPS Act, our government hid the regulatory “guardrails” (Biden’s word) that turned the well-intentioned into a feeding frenzy. The law to replant chip manufacturing in the U.S. was saddled with mandates for favored demographics, our adversarial labor unions, greenie canards, and DEI and ESG and all the other acronyms of the hard left’s political project. As in “Arbeit Macht Frei” over the gates of Auschwitz, the “CHIPS Act Notice of Funding Opportunity” welcomes recipients of this government largesse. This gamut of insidiousness in the “Notice” was the translation of the Act’s language by the Department of Commerce and the National Institute of Standards and Technology into an expensive regulatory morass.
Since analogies work best, quicksand is more accurate than “revitalization”. “Revitalization” means to make healthy again, but health isn’t the actual goal. The CHIPS Act was just another vehicle to advance a political and cultural revolution. And these revolutions are expensive, and two centuries of experience shows them to be descents into a life of, in Thomas Hobbes’s words, the “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.
Beware of our government’s handouts. Our dole didn’t benefit the poor – if their neighborhoods are any indication – and they won’t benefit anyone operating with a bottom line.
RogerG
Read more here:
* For a account of the New Deal, go to the following: The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, Amity Shlaes, Harper, 2008. The “forgotten man” in the title is a reference to the average worker, taxpayer, and businessman, not to the Left’s litany of the “oppressed”.
* The situation involving TSMC’s Arizona chips plant is appraised in “Why the CHIPS Act Will Fail”, Jordan McGillis (Manhattan Institute) and Clay Robinson (Arizona State graduate student), National Review, 5/11/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/05/29/why-the-chips-act-will-fail/
* For American student academic performance turn to “US eighth-grade history, civics scores fall to 1990s levels”, NewsNation, 5/3/2023; “Reading and mathematics scores decline during COVID-19 pandemic”, NAEP, National Center for Education Statistics, 2022, at https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/ltt/2022/
* “Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology”, Chris Miller, Scribner, 2022.
Over 100 children and parents with Informed Parents of California (IPOC) protest in Costa Mesa on Friday, May 17, 2019 against the state’s approval of a comprehensive sex education curriculum that includes discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity. (Photo by Michael Fernandez)
Terry McAuliffe, 2021 Democratic candidate for Virginia governor, in a debate said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” It probably cost McAuliffe the election. Today, what was once a huge faux pas is now a plank in the California Democratic Party platform. California is barging ahead full speed to turn McAuliffe’s blunder into policy reality. California parents, if you didn’t have any more reasons, follow the lead of London’s parents during the 1940 Blitz who removed their children to the countryside and get your kids out of the state. That may be the only recourse left to you to protect them.
Don’t think for a moment that a private school will be any refuge. Many of them are infected by the same ideological smog that dominates the rest of the state’s Education Borg. Any holdouts will probably be squashed. Sorry, there’s not likely to be any escape from the psychological scars and indoctrination if you remain within the borders of the state.
What prompts this warning? Two things sound the alarm: the all-powerful California teachers unions are four-square behind porn in school libraries and curricular reading lists, and the introduction of AB 1078. The former illustrates the monopoly power of a special interest in support of psychological scarring of tender young minds, and the latter would handcuff the parents’ ability to stop it.
Regarding the former, the Orange Unified School District Board of Trustees in Orange County, Ca., had a parent come forward to express concerns about some of the approved selections on the district’s reading list for elementary students. The meeting was raucous with the room filled with teachers’ union activists protesting “book burning”, a rhetorical pseudonym for attempts to clean school libraries and curricular reading lists of blatant porn. One parent braved the insults and catcalls of the union activists to step forward to express her concerns about subjecting her children to material that used to be found only on the pages of Hustler magazine. Then the room gradually fell silent as she began to read from one selection, “The Music of What Happens”, which was found on the approved reading list app Sora. To their credit, the board acted with dispatch by removing it the next day. But it took an act of great personal courage to weather the abuse just to get a wildly inappropriate book from reaching the eyes of her kids.
Orange Unified School District School Board listens to parents and teacher union activists Jan. 19, 2023A parent at the school board meeting read sexually explicit passages from The Music of What Happens.
A good part of the problem is the reliance on “experts” who are enthused about pushing the sexual revolution. You can find them throughout the Education Borg, public and private, like Sora. Sora “experts” approved the selections, school districts buy the app, and an “expert”-inspired revolution is advanced with the kids as guinea pigs.
If you as a parent don’t like it, AB 1078, if passed, will stop you from acting on your need to protect your children. Introduced by Assemblyman Corey Jackson (D-Riverside), the bill would prevent local school boards from removing “any instructional materials or books from classrooms and school libraries or ‘ceasing to teach any curriculum’” without approval of the state board of education, which is under the thumb of the California teachers unions.
Assemblyman Corey Jackson (D-Riverside)
With AB 1078, locally elected school boards would become toothless and parent presentations before them would be meaningless. In a one-party state of near totalitarian control of all facets of life, the constitutional guarantees of a republican form of government and the right to petition your government will be trampled to maintain power for a special interest in the vanguard of the sexual revolution. If you’re not onboard the revolution, you’ll be run over.
It’s a war on parents, a war on California parents by California’s state government. Sorry for stating the obvious but you’re only option if you have kids may be to leave the state. The stranglehold of the one-party state government and its featherbedding abettor – a public sector union – might be too strong to break in time to save your kids.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “AB 1078 would strip school boards’ authority over curriculum”, California Policy Center, at https://mailchi.mp/calpolicycenter/join-us-for-cpcs-parent-union-legislative-summit-june-22-376361?e=5436867e20
* “A Parent Complained About A Digital Book. Then An Orange County School Board Suspended The Whole Library”, Jill Replogle and Michael Flores, LAist, 2/3/2023, at https://laist.com/news/education/school-district-book-banning-censorship-app-conservatives-orange-unifed
* “Will Swaim: Here’s what’s really going on at the Orange Unified School District”, Will Swaim, Orange County Register, 2/5/2023, at https://www.ocregister.com/2023/02/05/will-swaim-heres-whats-really-going-on-at-the-orange-unified-school-district/
Teacher union organizer and Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson speaks after being projected winner as mayor on April 4, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois. (Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)Janet Protasiewicz speaks at her election night party in Milwaukee after she defeated former Justice Dan Kelly for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat. (Mike De Sisti / Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel)
Our national decomposition shows little sign of abating. Elections in Wisconsin and Chicago indicate that there remains an appetite for decay.
Another word for decline or decomposition of a culture, civilization, or nation is degringolade. Whichever word is used, however, we are experiencing it. Nature isn’t doing it to us. We are doing it to ourselves. The precipitating factor is what is bouncing between our ears. A sizeable chunk of the electorate, without even knowing it in many cases, is sold on toxic neo-Marxism in the guise of modern progressivism. Today, progressivism and this updated Marxism are synonymous. I’m beginning to sound like a broken record since I’ve certainly mentioned it often enough but can’t get away from it. It’s constantly resurfacing in many places around the country.
This isn’t the progressivism of Woodrow Wilson. As a refresher, this current edition is a relatively modern refashioning of Karl Marx’s paradigm: the systemic oppression of the oppressed who are defined by an ever-fungible list of outgroups covering everything from XY girls to the poor to anyone with high melanin counts. To the rescue in this blinkered ideological schematic is a complete, top to bottom, inside and out, overhaul of all societal arrangements from the family to property, a thoroughgoing Marxist revolution. Sound familiar? Read BLM’s mission statement before it was scrubbed clean of too much revelatory information (see below). We’ve proven to be quite creative in defining the “oppressed”, or victim groups. For greenies, you might add the mother goddess Gaia (earth) to the list. Anyway, this latest edition fairs no better than the kind that lurked behind the Iron Curtain or Mao’s China or is lurking in North Korea and Cuba. It is a sacking of our heritage and thrusting the country into despair.
The canary passing out in the coal mine in this moment of our evisceration is urban America. Our cities are crumbling, and so are the states dominated by them. The story has been acted out before. We are historically rhyming with 4th and 5th-century AD Rome. The Roman Empire didn’t go out in a boom but a whimper. The cities became unlivable, mired in high taxes, crumbling infrastructure, a deterioration of services, lack of security, and overburdening controls. Who’d want to live there? Apparently, many didn’t by the 5th century. The population of the city nearly emptied from over a million in the 1st century AD to 30,000 by the 5th. Other similarly weakened urban places suffered. People flocked to fortified estates, monasteries, and towns with natural defenses. It’s the beginning of feudalism.
Feudalism is returning. Today, in the good ‘ol USA, people are rushing to states and places where 3-strikes laws mean something, where taxes and bureaucracies aren’t bleeding producers white, where parking your car on the street in front of your house isn’t an invitation to vandalism. In other words, where neo-Marxism/progressivism is held in disrepute.
Where boys’ and girls’ bathrooms are separated by a wall. Where nature’s chromosomal distinction hasn’t been buried by the linguistic manipulations of pronouns and “birthing person” for “woman”. It’s just the opposite in our urban neo-Marxist silos. Entirely mired in the mindset, many of our cities and urbanized states are busy advancing the revolution by eliminating other distinctions such as the one between criminal and law-abiding. Judges and local potentates treat criminals as victims and their real victims as . . . well . . . .
As if we need any more evidence, Whole Foods announced yesterday (4/10/2023) that it was “temporarily closing” its 65,000 square foot San Francisco outlet at Eighth and Market, the Trinity section, that it just opened last year. According to a company spokesman, “If we feel we can ensure the safety of our team members in the store, we will evaluate a reopening of our Trinity location.” The area has been plagued by brutal beatings, stabbings, killings, and accidents in recent weeks. Too few cops and law-unenforcement is making San Francisco look like 5th-century Rome (see below).
These arbiters of revolutionary justice in places like San Francisco have their own vocabulary to push this cultural revolution. “Decarceration” is the go-to for releasing offenders to reoffend, just call it “low-level crime”, which is another word for “inconsequential” to Soros-backed DA’s – inconsequential to everyone but the person left battered, bruised, and bleeding in the subway. Barbarian invasions aren’t doing it to us, unless barbarian refers to the urban powerful who have drunk the neo-Marxist Kool-Aid. Your progressive DA, judges, city council, mayor, governor, and state legislature are performing the role of the Visigoths and their King Alaric in laying waste to Rome in 410 AD.
Visigoths sack Rome in 410 AD.Minneapolis in the 2020 summer of riots.
The only recourse for those not too fond of the mayhem is to vote with their feet. Get out! But these are democracies – surprise! The corruption is democratic. People are voting for mayhem. How’s that possible? It might have something to do with a little cost/benefit analysis on the run: the rewards of group largesse from the public treasury are greater than the costs of possibly losing your little girl in a drive-by. I know, it’s hard to believe. But, on the other hand, it could just be stupid people being stupid, something not unheard of in the annals of democracy.
Or it could be due to the overall social decomposition extending to our schools. People aren’t taught any better; they don’t know any better; and are easily led into believing nonsense. Yet, policy-nonsense still behaves, as it always has, whether popularly chosen or not, like a drunk behind the wheel. It’s a disaster careening down our thoroughfares. And like most drunks, all-too-often they don’t get sober till they hit bottom. Apparently, our urban electorates haven’t hit bottom. Or it could be that the voter pool has been reduced to the drunks, the sober having fled to safer climes (red states).
A sizeable majority – by ten points – of Wisconsin voters recently failed the field sobriety test but still grabbed the car keys. Some attribute the recent election of the Visigothic Janet Protasiewicz to the State Supreme Court to the abortion issue. Probably true, but Wisconsinites have now let the Visigoths through the gates with a new Visigothic majority on the Court and, as a result, will get much more than carte blanche abortion. Protasiewicz promised during the campaign to rewrite the state’s redistricting maps to the advantage of the neo-Marxists who promise more sacking into the foreseeable future. In addition, expect more teacher-union power to dictate your child’s education, backdoor racism in diversity-equity-inclusion, and higher taxes to finance the revolution. The whole litany of policies to promote the revolution against hypothetical systemic “oppressors” are about to be unleashed. And so will a run on exiting U-Hauls, proving once again that the only thing efficiently produced by Marxism is refugees.
Money is the mother’s milk of politics . . . and revolution. The donkey party neo-Marxists, in spite of their dismal record, are well-funded from a network of similarly intoxicated donors. The precedent was established by Lenin in 1917. The Bolsheviks were bankrolled by Imperial Germany. A revolution rides on more than fulminations.
Money and an election system reshaped to the advantage of their base put Protasiewicz in office, and gave Chicago another Alaric-style mayor, Brandon Johnson, to replace the Visigothic Lori Lightfoot. The guy is marinated in neo-Marxism, like his predecessor. San Francisco, Wisconsin, and Chicago are pointing the way to the future, the same future viewed by 5th-century Romans and early 20th-century Petrograd residents.
If not arrested, our condition will continue to deteriorate . . . until riveting calamities shock us back to our senses. Hopefully, by then, it won’t be too late. Hopefully, we won’t wake up to news of two aircraft carriers sunk in the western Pacific, and our response is crippled by an economy unable to meet the demands of the moment, or a population unwilling to fight after years of anti-western indoctrination in our media and schools. A pool of recruits rattled by gender dysphoria and accusations of white privilege can’t instill much confidence.
The signs of decay aren’t limited to the popularity of chic neo-Marxism among urban sophisticates. Another passed-out canary is plummeting birth rates and closing maternity wards. It’s hard to have a robust generational talent pool to face the threat with a population befuddled by pronouns and fungible sex-identity, all as the population shrinks. We’ve got a lot to worry about. And all the while, neo-Marxism, acting like the Visigoths, is busy hollowing out the nation and its civilization. At this late hour, the odor of national decomposition is beginning to overwhelm the olfactory glands.
RogerG
Read more here:
* BLM’s mission statement included the following:
“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.” It’s straight out of the writings of Karl Marx, nothing unusual for the self-professed Marxism of BLM’s founders of Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi.
From the Wayback Machine Archive, Black Lives Matter: “What We Believe”, at https://web.archive.org/web/20200408020723/https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/
* “Whole Foods closes San Francisco flagship store after one year, citing crime”, Jordan Valinsky, CNN, 4/11/2023, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/whole-foods-closes-san-francisco-flagship-store-after-one-year-citing-crime/ar-AA19IDPH
* If you’re interested, here’s a local San Francisco newscast about people getting out during the Covid shutdown: “On The Move: San Francisco residents on the move during the COVID-19 economic downturn” at
The admissions building at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (HADLEY GREEN / The New York Times, file)
Benjamin Disraeli (19th century British politician, Prime Minister, and writer/philosopher) in his book “Sybil, Or the Two Nations” wrote of the deep split of a people into two camps, almost nations, each completely estranged from the other:
“Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws . . . . THE RICH AND THE POOR.”
Benjamin Disraeli
For him, the divide was between the rich and the poor, an artifact of a time of much greater hardship. For us, it is between the blue silos of a radical Left cultural ethos and the red hinterlands of the traditions of standards, faith, the rule of law, equality before the law, and popular sovereignty under constitutional checks. The former wishes to overthrow the latter.
In these isolated little blue enclaves, overwhelmingly inner cities and college campuses, the hyper-wealthy and academics can entertain ideological fancies far afield from the lives of the vast majority of people living outside, people who are actually struggling with the daily realities of living and not secure from them by walls, money, and tenured academic freedom.
How could the corporate boardroom – in the past immune – become so enthralled by this revolutionary ethos? The answer lies in the social realities of living in a narrowly confined space of limited interactions. A homogeneous mind incubates in a scene of intermarriage, secluded social engagements in a protective cocoon, and an upbringing that transmits the same campus cultural revolution in these secluded social petri dishes.
Security gate at a Beverly Hills estate
Adapting Mao’s Long March mythology, Rudy Dutschke, a leader of the German radical Left of the 1960s, advocated a long march through institutions in that 1967 time of troubles of strikes, riots, and massive protests in the West. Rather than tear the institution down, take them over, he said. Well, it happened. Yesteryear’s student radical is today’s tenured college faculty with matriculated mental offspring littered throughout the Fortune 500.
What brings this to mind? Eighty-two American companies expressed their official support for race-based college admissions, loosely referred to as affirmative action, in two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court involving the University of North Carolina and Harvard (see their briefs below). Big corporate players such as Google, Apple, JetBlue, and General Electric produced briefs utilizing the same old neo-Marxist rhetoric of group-conscious oppression. Rhetorically, the table is set for the talisman of “diversity”. Merit is redefined as being a member of the proper race or possessing the proper genitalia and calling it “diversity”. No, this isn’t diversity of opinion. It’s the diversity of immutable characteristics. Competence and a special gnosis, it is assumed, emanates from melanin count and genitalia, not from observable qualifications. It’s preposterous.
The pretzel logic required to make this scheme marketable boggles the mind. In Monday’s hearing before the Supreme Court, defense counsel emphasized the gambit of race as one among many factors but couldn’t escape withering cross examination from Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito and Barrett. The inescapable fact is that at least some admissions will be based on race, and thusly a violation of statute and the Constitutional guarantees of equal protection. Trying to hide race among the weeds doesn’t eliminate the fact that race will be determinative to award advantages to some to the detriment of others not so privileged with the right skin color and genital comportment.
How could they get away with this after a Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment, Brown v. Board of Education, and the various Civil Rights Acts in the long campaign to end the award of benefits and/or disabilities based on race or other immutable factors? The whole enterprise relies on rhetorical legerdemain and a mountain of verbiage in bastardized “studies” to the point that “studies have shown” has gained the reputation as a tipoff for ideological skullduggery. It’s a new Jim Crow favoring the radical Left’s “oppressed”.
And an afront to most people’s practical sense of fairness. There’s a reason why lady justice wears a blindfold.
Not surprisingly given their backgrounds, corporate titans have bought into it. Read the briefs and you’ll find the ritual abuse of “diversity” and “qualified”, as in “Classroom diversity is crucial to producing employable, productive, value-adding citizens in business.” Or, how about the claim that the favoritism produces “a pipeline of highly qualified future workers and business leaders”? “Highly qualified” just became an oxymoron. “Qualification” now means the right melanin count and genitalia.
The whole thing is a legal, moral, and rational trainwreck. To borrow a movie line, “Yes, Virginia, there is institutional racism”, but it’s coming from the folks who brought you The 1619 Project, CRT, the 2020 summer of BLM riots, home appliances, and annual college admission letters. Amazing, the campaign against institution racism was always about furthering institutional racism.
RogerG
Read more here:
* The corporate briefs in Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, and Harvard, can be found at https://www.naacpldf.org/wp-content/uploads/Brief-for-Major-American-Business-Enterprises-Supporting-Respondents-FINAL.pdf .
* An excellent synopsis of the case by Brittany Bernstein can be found at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/dozens-of-major-u-s-companies-urge-supreme-court-to-uphold-race-based-college-admissions/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=next-article&utm_term=first
Could be, I don’t know. We fellow Boomers weren’t so smart. We rebelled against self-restraint and got a world without self-restraint. Now, a pleasant afternoon stroll in Denver or New York City will be through a smokey haze of people lighting up blunts amid the staccato bursts of drive-bys.
You can’t say that the times are the best for kids. If we aren’t pummeling their future prospects with eco-nuttery and $31 trillion of debt, we are destroying their mental capacities under a barrage of toxic neo-Marxism and a campaign to turn teenage emotional instability into gender dysphoric mutilations. Not only that, with all the cultural poison at their I-phone fingertips, we suffocate their leaning behind masks, plexiglass, social distancing and an end to in-person instruction under the threat of teacher union die-hards. The results? This is the most anti-child era in living memory, if not all time, and I haven’t got to the zealous push to abort them from conception to just before the slap on the back side after exiting the birth canal. Maybe after that too. A few data points are illustrative.
Item #1: ACT Scores dropped to their lowest level in 30 years. The ACT is a snapshot of the mental astuteness of this year’s incoming college freshman class. The shamings, lockdowns, school closures, and kids living their lives in the glow of flat video screens have produced one of the most ill-prepared incoming classes of matriculants. We did it to them under the pseudo-claims of “follow the science” and “experts”. Progressivism’s blind faith in a professional-but-politicized class of bureaucrats led us straight into a dark hole, and an even darker and deeper one for our kids.
And once they get to the ivy-covered walls of state U, more stupidity awaits them. Look at what our isolated hyper-wealthy in the isolation of their hyper-wealthy foundations consider “genius”, a “genius” that will flush through the lecture halls. Item #2: the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation released this year’s 25 winners of their no-strings-attached “genius” cash awards ($800,000). They’re left-wing activists. They’re “geniuses” because of it. Really. I don’t know of any veterans of the Young Americans for Freedom or Federalist Society getting the phone call.
The winners check all the preferred boxes of today’s race/gender neurotics. Two-thirds are women and 19 of the 25 were recruited from the so-called “marginalized”, all of the approved biases. No Candice Owens or Winsome Sears (Virginia lt. gov.) types were obviously considered. Somewhere, among the sanctified, you might find someone of the wrong genitalia and melanin count but still certainly, along with the rest, of the right ideological orientation.
Patrisse Colours, Black Lives Matter co-founder and the picture of “intersectionality”, Black/female/Gay.
Patronizing mediocre artists (Amanda Williams) and a chattering class of whiners (Kiese Laymon, etc.) with the title of “genius” will degrade it like “real estate agent” after the collapse and serial fraud in the Florida Land boom in 1926. “Genius” was applied to Reuben Jonathan Miller, U. of Chicago prof and peddler of the “mass incarceration” nonsense. The crusade against “mass incarceration” means “mass decarceration” and is turning many of our neighborhoods into war zones. Thanks “genius”. How many more vapid treatments of anything “indigenous” do we need? Robin Kimmerer serves up another one in “Braiding Sweetgrass”. The more-in-tune-with-nature schtick is an attack on air conditioning, the family mini-van, and the single-family home. This stuff is as old as the hippie commune and is as equally bankrupt. And this makes her a “genius”? The WaPo reporter tried to buck up Kimmerer’s status by writing that her book “has gone from surprise hit to juggernaut bestseller”. No, only if “juggernaut” is 4,474 in Amazon’s rankings (paperback, 1,504 in Kindle, 3,313 in hardcover).
Robin Kimmerer
Are these our educational influencers? These are only geniuses among people who are gullible enough to believe it. As a teacher of 30 years and annually exposed to the blatherings of credentialed activists telling us how to teach, I’ve watched them wilt under even mild cross examination. The phrase “empty suit” was tailored for this type. Yes, they’re empty suits but now they’re also rich “geniuses”. As for the kids, they’re languishing.
Watch Kmele Foster’s excellent observations on the decline in ACT scores, but don’t expect an $800,000 “genius” award for him coming from the MacArthurs. Use the link below.
* “ACT Test Scores Drop to Lowest in 30 Years Following School Closures”, Cheyanne Mumphrey, RealClear Politics, 10/13/2022, at https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/10/13/act_test_scores_drop_to_lowest_in_30_years_following_school_closures_148318.html .
* “Meet the new MacArthur ‘genius grant’ winners”, Karen Heller, Washington Post, 10/12/2022, at https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/12/macarthur-genius-grant-fellows/ .
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
Randy Weingarten, AFT president, and empty classroomRally for John Fetterman with Bernie Sanders at Philadelphia City Hall in 2018 (photo:Jared Guenwald)
What seems to be happening in the dog days of summer 2022? On the one hand, 1.5 million students went kapoof in national public-school enrollment from 2020 to 2021. And more recently, opinion polls show an improvement in Democrat fortunes. After all that has happened in the past two years, what gives? The former is not surprising. The latter is downright insane given the riots, the overall urban breakdown of civil order, the schools being turned into revolutionary propaganda mills, the mandatory masking and school closures, the inflation and shortages, the “transition” of energy from affordable and available to extortionate and unreliable, and the full-throated attack on the family sedan to, by hook or by crook, force people into the lifestyle preferences of the DNC donor class. The economy is in a shambles.
The Greeks and Romans of antiquity saw the Mediterranean heat of mid-to-late summer changing people into mad dogs, thus the “dog days of summer”. Are parents mad for leaving the public schools in droves? Hardly. A clue can be found in the places with the greatest defection numbers. Big city districts are quickly losing the warm bodies to fill the desks. NYC Mayor Eric Adams put it succinctly when he called it a “massive hemorrhaging of students.” The city’s public schools, the largest school district in the nation, lost 4 percent at the start of the 2020-2021 school year, and nearly another 2 percent in 2021-2022, a total of 64,000 youngsters. Over the last five years, the total runs to 120,000. Democrat bastions are experiencing the greatest disaffection.
Flipping over to the west coast, Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest, has fallen from 737,00 to 430,000 over the last 21 years, and the picture gets even bleaker with the district projecting a further 30 precent erosion to 309,000 into the next ten years. It’s a dismal picture for other big cities such as Detroit and Chicago.
The losses in places like Los Angeles can only be partially explained by the very real Great California Exodus. New York State, in one year alone, 2020-1, in the midst of its own exodus, lost over 319,000 residents, the largest decline of any state. Yes, Democrat-governed states dominate the flight statistics. The classroom overcrowding problem of a few decades ago has shifted to states like Texas and Florida.
Another facet of the trend has little to do with loading a U-Haul. Increasingly, parents are developing a love affair with options that free their kids from the grip of Randy Weingarten’s (AFT) and Becky Pringle’s (NEA) teachers’ unions.
Fifth-grade teacher Madeline Schmitt directs her students at St. Patrick School in Huntington, N.Y., on Sept. 9, 2020. Most Catholic schools returned to in-person learning earlier than public schools during the Covid-19 pandemic. (CNS photo/Gregory A. Shemitz)
Private, sectarian, charter, micro (private with 15 students or less), and home schools are some choices rising in popularity. Maybe the pandemic exposed to parents who’s running their kids’ classrooms. The racism-against-racism CRT claptrap and sex-change ideology, with the attendant display and glorification of sex-addiction behavior to adolescents, and the thought of their daughter sharing bathrooms and locker rooms with penis-girls, have shocked parents out of their lethargy. Many are coming to the conclusion that the trillions of “investment” in government schools is a monumental loser, more of a jobs program for special-interest clients of the DNC. It isn’t about the kids. That’s just empty rhetoric for the plebes.
Simultaneously, as school boards are reintroduced to the socio-political phenomena of people voting with their feet due to a growing revulsion of Democrat-led schooling, the political prospects of Democrats have brightened a bit, amazingly. Opinion polls show a tightening in the generic ballot. In key Senate races, Dem neo-socialists hold leads. In North Carolina and Ohio, it’s a dead heat. Oz is down double digits in Pennsylvania to a stroke-addled Bernie Sanders acolyte. How is it possible given the complete Dem-inspired unraveling of civilization from the summer of 2020 to summer 2022?
My best guess is a trifecta: it’s still the “dog days”; the Dem’s Trump campaign strategy; and inherent Republican political disabilities. Oh, the polls are junk, so it’s actually a quadra-fecta. Taken together, this is a bad time to gauge the state of play.
The “dog days” don’t have to mean madness. Sometimes, the dog of public opinion sleeps or is distracted during these hazy, lazy days of summer. Assessing what the public thinks at a time when people are vacationing and cramming bar-b-ques, ball games, concerts, yard work, and activities, activities, and activities, and expecting it to be authoritative, is absurd. Unless you are Antifa and BLM and have the convenience of a viral video to exploit and bountiful free time to indulge in recreational rioting, most people have other things on their minds.
The public is generally distracted and the Democrats want to keep diverting their eyes away from the disorder and decay all around them. Look, over there, it’s Trump, they say. In the 2018 midterms, they made it all about Trump and swept the near octogenarian, now octogenarian, Nancy Pelosi into the speakership. In 2020, they did same thing to such an extent that they got away with another near octogenarian, Joe Biden, campaigning from a basement computer. Governor Gavin Newsom in the recall election hung Trump around the neck of Larry Elder and the effort to remove him from office. They’re at it again.
Though, it’s hard for the shopper who just experienced sticker shock after a look at the supermarket cash register receipt. At the pump, at the utility meter, at the hardware store, you name it, the sense of dystopia surrounds us. The Dem’s best strategy, a proven winner, at a time when they have soiled themselves and us so badly, is to somehow make the election about Trump. Could that be behind the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago?
All of a sudden, it’s all about Trump again. Trump squeezes other GOP hopefuls out of prime-time news coverage. Trump sops up media attention and fundraising cash that might have gone to down-ballot races. At least for a short while, the raid jumbled the complexion of the federal midterm races.
Former President Donald Trump speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Fla., February 26, 2022. (Octavio Jones/Reuters)
It – the raid – may have worked in a perverse way. Trump’s personal approvals tick up and the GOP’s tick down. Trump gets to play the part of victim, which he could very well be, and the rest of the GOP gets momentarily lost in the news cycle. For the Democrats, the strategy is to avert the public’s attention from the representative and senator who defended rioters, defund the police, the DA’s who unilaterally ignore most of the criminal code to the detriment of us and our property, voted for more inflation through trillions of new spending, and have assisted in dismantling what it means to be woman. For those potentially in the gravitational pull of the Democratic Party, the prospect of an imminent Trump reappearance trumps everything. The strategy worked in 2018 and to a great extent in 2020. Why not this time around?
We’ll see how long the Democrat hall-of-mirrors campaign obscures the horrifying facts of life for most Americans under Democrat rule. We’ll also see how GOP command central responds. They’re lack of aggression and the Trump anchor may militate against a powerful counter. Working against them is . . . Trump. Just think, if that $100 million in Trump’s war chest had gone to Oz or to the National Republican Senate Committee (NRSC), the current donkey party bump would have been compressed to a micro-second blip. Trump in his semi-retirement has all the time in the world, two years away from the next presidential election, and is frenetic in his fundraising far earlier than any other braggart in history. The rest of the GOP is left to be the dog licking the crumbs falling from the table.
Trump is a mega-magnet due to his ego-run-amok. His overbearing brashness is a cheap imitation of what Alice Roosevelt Longworth said of her father, Theodore Roosevelt: “My father always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding and the baby at every christening.” I reckon that Trump prefers to see a lot of TR in himself. He sucks media attention out of a room, and fundraising cash out of the pool of GOP donors.
Maybe he’ll shovel some of his cash to his preferred candidates, making them even more beholden to him. Some of those selections in Senate primaries were . . . bizarre. In some cases, the weakest general election candidate was endorsed. But Oz, only recently a convert to the GOP and with no previous political footprint, and a man with carpetbagger and national loyalty liabilities? The same consternation in Ohio (J.D. Vance). The same in Arizona (Blake Edwards). But Eric Greitens in Missouri, wife beater and abuser of his children?
Dr. Oz in recent campaign ad
What explains the choices? The most controversial endorsements reflect what Trump sees in himself: “anti-establishment” and “outsider”, meaningless words that frequently grace the lips of Fox News’s Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham. The “establishment”? Well, after a process of elimination, it must mean anyone in the party opposed to Trump. It’s that simple. Anyone finding Trump abhorrent is automatically assumed to be a country clubber. It’s an outdated cliché since the millionaire and billionaire class is just as likely, if not more likely, to be a Democrat booster than a Republican one. As for “outsider”, history is littered with them from Paul Marat (Parisian mob rabble rouser of the French Revolution) to Lenin’s Bolsheviks to Jane’s Revenge. “Outsider” isn’t limited to being a moniker for someone with a fresh perspective. It could, and mostly does, mean a person so revolting to broad sensibilities to cause people to cringe and keep them at arm’s length.
Still, these are the Trump chosen in Senate races that he has fobbed off on us, and a large tranche of Republican voters have foisted on us in their primaries. In the general election, important races will pit a campus-socialist Democrat against a Republican with both feet immersed in the narrow habitat of the Trump cult. I fail to see why this shouldn’t be a red-tsunami year, given all the carnage that the Democrats have gifted to Republicans. Instead, much of the Republican base, enchanted by Trump’s self-serving verbiage, have turned sure-winners and easier gets into toss-ups and double-digit holes. Indeed, at this juncture, Biden may have a radical-Left Senate majority in January 2023 to rubber stamp us into an inflationary spiral and the centrally planned existence of the Green New Deal by executive edict.
Democracy is not synonymous with wisdom. The crooked timber of humanity is evident at the micro and macro levels. In 1964, Goldwater was pasted by LBJ in what many observers described as a sympathy vote in the wake of the Kennedy assassination. A popular mania gave us a bloody, miasmic morass in Vietnam and a morally bankrupting War on Poverty. Guns and butter profligacy would wreck our country for the next decade and a half. Then came the 1980’s and the beginning of a turnaround. 2022 could be the beginning of our turnaround, but will we seize the opportunity?
It would be lot easier if Trump stopped being so self-absorbed and divisive in the ranks of those trying to right the ship. Meanwhile, parents are taking matters into their hands by taking their kids away from the influence of Democrat client groups. I daily thank God that Trump hasn’t made any endorsements in school board races.
RogerG
Sources:
* “New Federal Data Confirms Pandemic’s Blow to K-12 Enrollment, With Drop of 1.5 Million Students; Pre-K Experiences 22 Percent Decline” at https://www.the74million.org/article/public-school-enrollment-down-3-percent-worst-century/#:~:text=A%25203%2520percent%2520decline%252C%2520measured,of%2520roughly%25201.5%2520million%2520pupils.
* “With Plunging Enrollments, A Seismic Hit to Public Schools”, New York Times, at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/us/public-schools-falling-enrollment.html
* “Census Bureau: N.Y. population loss greatest in nation”, The Daily Gazette, Dec. 23, 2021, at https://dailygazette.com/2021/12/23/census-bureau-n-y-population-loss-greatest-in-nation/.
* “Latest Polls”, FiveThrtyEight, Aug. 19, 20222, at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/.
* “Poll Finds Increase in Number of Republicans Who Support Trump over GOP”, Brittany Bernstein, National Review, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/poll-finds-increase-in-number-of-republicans-who-support-trump-over-gop/.
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