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Empty Pews and the Rule of Race-Agitators

House Democratic Party leaders: Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, and Jerry Nadler.

Today, we might be sensing the whiff of the kind of social decay that earlier laid open the ancient classical world to Christianity. A fatigued civilization, for whatever reason, can’t generate the resistance to something else filling the void. In the Greco-Roman world, the emptiness was filled with the beauty of Christianity. In our own time, it’s the onrush of the vile postmodernism and its depraved cousin, critical race theory, that is attempting to displace Christianity. The elites of all stations get caught up in the mania for this latest new thing, even if it is a moral and logical mess. We are entering a really dark place. Yet, hope lies in the fact that we’ve had trials before, and Christianity has proven to be remarkably resilient.

Sparse attendance at an United Methodist Church.

The current decline of Christianity in modern America is stunning. A Pew survey of American religiosity from 2019 shows the dire situation in just 10 years. In a nutshell, adherents of Catholicism and Protestantism are down (51% to 43%), and agnosticism, “nothing in particular”, and atheists are up . . . in just 10 years! Plowing the field deeper, the drops are most significant among those in the East, the college-educated, Democrats, and the young, with Millennials taking first place among the youthful disaffiliated. Nothing about his should be surprising if you’ve followed the culture.

The decline can be traced to the failure of our institutions. Marriage has been redefined into a near oblivion with easy no-fault divorce, thereby leaving behind a tranche of emotionally-scarred children. The schools, in an effort to maintain religious neutrality by bleaching any hint of God from the curriculum, are training grounds for materialism (the material world is all that there is). The family provides no corrective since it has been incubated in the singular quest for material pleasure. The state reinforces the materialism by the transformation of its core mission into the nation’s nanny. All it can do is affect a person’s material condition, not their spirit or soul, if you will. In the end, the ever-expansive state crowds out the church and its essential social mission. It’s more and more a world without God.

The experience of the 20th century shows that the displacement of God tends to lead to the emplacement of man in His place. God goes down the memory hole and man gets deified. The deification occurs in the sanctification of the words of certain trendy persons. Their words are worshipped like Moses receiving the Commandments from the burning bush. They require no proof for their validity. They are simply announced and off to the barricades the zealots go.

The new gospel is postmodernism. It rejects a single, overarching truth, and makes all claims of truth to be dependencies of who and what is in power. Truth isn’t objective; it’s relative to those in a position to impose it. The problem: it justifies a skepticism of all claims and ends in a belief in nothing. A person under its sway will be forever in a state of second-guessing themselves. They end up where G.K. Chesterton found them:

“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

The “anything” could be modern “critical race theory”, “systemic racism”, or the neo-Marxism rampaging in the streets of Portland, anything put forward by anyone with a platform and power to push it. So, a philosophical movement meant to question power comes around to being a chief exponent of it: power in its most crass expression.

Herbert Marcuse

Enter Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse, an acolyte of the Frankfurt School (Institute of Social Research) in Germany, took the oppressor/oppressed dialectic of Marx and postmodernism’s chaining of truth to power to concoct the “critical theory” of today’s “critical race theory” (CRT). In Marcuse, the consciousness bit is hyped to present truth, and our awareness of the truth, to be a product of our power position in society. The powerful – the “privileged” in CRT – can be defined by race, gender, ethnicity, any one of a number of materially-based categories. Your consciousness – your values, intentions, beliefs, your head – is locked in place by your melanin count, et al. If you fall into the lighter side of the color spectrum, for example, you can say nothing to deny your “privilege” – code for power. You are as guilty as the darker pigments are founts of wisdom since they are deemed “oppressed”. Logic, reason, the scientific method, and any prior civilizational core tenet cannot be allowed to contravene the yapping of the race-hustlers on MSNBC, The View, the streets of Minneapolis, or the Democratic Party’s big cheeses. After all, their “truth” is covered by the claim that they give voice to the voiceless, a banality in common use in such circles.

If you haven’t noticed, their contradictory circular logic leads them back to a power grab to impose a “truth”. The whole thing is a hot mess, and a dangerous one at that.

LeBron James of the Los Angeles Lakers

What happens when the oppressors and oppressed switch roles: the oppressed become the oppressors? Of course, all of this is nonsense. Most single moms in a crime-ridden slum aren’t storming a Baltimore Target. The barking is coming from multi-millionaires and billionaires like Oprah or LeBron James, or a host of others of the oppressed-by-skin-color who have estates on Martha’s Vineyard and attended elite prep schools. The skin-color matrix breaks down as the new “privileged” take on the mantle of Lenin’s vanguard elite. In the end, we’ve got a new slate of “oppressors” as the consciousness bit is weaponized to crush opposition. The new “truth” that is not beholden to logic, law, the scientific method, math, or reason is set loose with no barrier to its realization. Are you sensing a whiff of totalitarianism?

Maxine Waters (D, Ca.)

Maxine Waters (D, Ca.) cavorts to Minneapolis to incite street extortion for her preferred verdict, and shouts “shut your mouth” to Rep. Jim Jordan (R, Oh.). Mazie Hirono (D, Ha.) goes before cameras to demand that men “Just shut up” if they attempt to prevent her from performing a career lynching of Brett Kavanaugh. Biden and Harris jump to cameras after the Chauvin verdict to announce a crusade against “systemic racism” without a shred of logic, reason, or evidence to justify the inquisition. Biden turns loose the powers of the federal authorities to indoctrinate the young in the contemptible “critical race theory” by reversing Trump’s order to stop the mental devastation in the federal government. Things are happening that should send chills down your spine, and all because some suburbanites had angst about Trump’s comportment.

Yep, elections have consequences, and many of them are hellish. The period between the present and the 2022 elections is a race, a race to see how much damage the New-Left-in-Democrat-clothes can inflict on the country before they are stopped in a vote of the people. The political charlatans currently running the show have a window of opportunity for them to unwittingly push the country into a major rupture. If they are successful in DC in ramming through their revolution, there’s too much of the rest of the country that won’t abide by it.

Ironically, states and cities under the sway of the New Left showed the way for red states who wish not to join their revolution. Leftists in power declared their jurisdictions to be sanctuary cities and states for illegal immigrants. As per blue states, red states are forming an expanding list of Second Amendment sanctuary states. Disunion, if it does happen, began with the Left’s flaunting of the clear Constitutional federal authority over immigration and may end with the two-thirds of the other states whose citizens don’t wish to be remain in a union with states who are striving to relegate them to second-class political status.

Gabrielle Clark, mother of the 12th-grader, who is suing her school and district for the imposition of critical race theory curriculum.

More pushback is germinating. Critical race theory’s totalitarian indoctrination is being challenged in court and before school boards. Examples are many. A father publicly pulled his daughter out of Brearley, an elite $54,000 per year New York private school for propaganda acts such as a school-sponsored student “Anti-racism pledge”. He says the school’s antiracism actions were “misguided, divisive, counterproductive and cancerous”. Gabrielle Clark, mother of a twelfth-grader in a Nevada charter school, filed suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada in December 2020. In her complaint, her son’s school “inserted consciousness raising and conditioning exercises under the banner of ‘Intersectionality’ and ‘Critical Race Theory.’” Further, “The lesson categorized certain racial and religious identities as inherently ‘oppressive,’ . . . and instructed pupils including [her son] who fell into these categories to accept the label ‘oppressor.’” This is Khmer Rouge stuff, and happening all over the country, and likely to intensify as the full resources of the federal government are brought to bear in service of the jihad.

How much more can the union endure? These are tumultuous times. May cooler heads prevail.

A possibility?

RogerG
*Thanks for the informational contributions and insights of Peter J. Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute, Bari Weiss, former New York Times editor, and Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay in their book, Cynical Theories.

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Our Abysmal Leaders, Demagoguery, and the Missing Film Footage

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Calif., speaks as Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, listens on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, April 20, 2021, after the jury returned guilty verdicts on all three charges in the murder trial of former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin in the death of George Floyd. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Good public leaders don’t attempt to ride a wave of falsehoods. Right now, our mediocre leadership does! Take today’s enthusiasm for race-hustling among many of our elected leaders at the top of our political establishment. The whole edifice of “critical race theory” and its companion charge of “systemic racism” rides on a blatant mangling of facts, inventing them in many instances. The George Floyd case has turned into another example in the sorry saga.

Universal connectivity now makes it possible for cat videos, daily cop interactions with the public, and acts of rank stupidity to spread like the 1906 San Francisco Fire in the immediate wake of the 7.9 earthquake. Back then, fire-storms rampaged almost unimpeded, like the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Today, fire-storms are limited to wildlands; however, another kind is let loose on the public. Under conditions of instant connectivity, everyone gets to see what somebody else has taken with their cellphone, and frequently, before it has a chance to go virile, someone will have cropped it to fit a crazed political fetish. Sadly, not unexpectedly, it happened again regarding the arrest of George Floyd.

Watch the video below of the prologue to the famous 9-minute Chauvin segment that was hyped by our race-hustling halfwits in elected positions. I’ve said it before: resisting arrest increases the risk of an encounter ending in a bad place. Add the facts of the suspect being high as a kite, universal cell-phone cinematography, and near-illiterate revolutionary fervor of a narrow clique running at a fever pitch, and we get to see our cities explode.

Does anyone do real risk assessment anymore? Many of our leaders go overboard into authoritarianism to pursue zero risk because of a virus, but find excuses for resisting arrest as if the risk of refusing to follow officer requests is negligible in the haste to brand cops as covert KKK members. Little risk is permissible in one while high-risk behavior is ignored in the other. How does that work?

Do we produce good leaders anymore who can sensibly navigate the nonsense? If we don’t find some soon, get prepared for a major rupture in our national cohesion. Red-state locales won’t countenance the craziness that appears to ride at the top of our society.

RogerG

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Our Abysmal Leadership

Biden and Harris after the Chauvin verdict was announced.

It seems that we go through periods of poor public leadership like the spate of presidents prior to the Civil War (Pres. James Buchanan?). Great leaders don’t get caught up in momentary public manias, nor are they demagogues grasping for approval and feeding the passions of extremists who they mistake for a fount of wisdom. Dead ends and discord are the results, which is horribly and amply displayed in our history.

The quality of our leadership of late came to mind after surveying the campaigns of the 2020 election season and its aftermath down to the present. Of particular note is the reaction of Congressional leadership and Biden and Harris to the inflammatory Chauvin case. Either through ignorance or demagoguery, after the verdict, they paraded before cameras and went from the abuse of a single police officer right to “systemic racism”. It’s a leap without a scintilla of evidence. It wasn’t even an argument made by prosecutors, nor was any evidence presented that implied that Chauvin was a racist. So how do these public luminaries get from “A” to “Z”? Easy, just say it!

The whole edifice of “systemic racism” is similarly constructed. The ideology’s enthusiasts go from statistical disparities right to racism. They can’t imagine any other explanation for the inequalities in the numbers across demographic groups. They childishly paste “systemic” to “racism” so they don’t have to prove it. In the Chauvin matter, the scandal doesn’t only lay in the abuse by a single cop but in the ritual abuse of good sense by an increasingly radicalized wing of our political establishment. Where’s the leadership to reign in the foolishness?

One of the chief propagandists for “critical race theory” and “systemic racism”, Ibram X. Kendi, at his lectern at Boston U.

A review of the trial record makes clear the reality of the Chauvin case.

First, George Floyd died from asphyxiation from Chauvin’s persistent and excessive pressure to Floyd’s neck and back. Chauvin was responsible for his death.

Second, the cops weren’t on a hunt for black people to harm. They had a legitimate reason for attending to George Floyd. Cops were responding to a call of a criminal act: the use of a counterfeit $20 bill. On prompting from the store clerk, cops – not Chauvin – approached Floyd, who was obviously under the influence, possessed a second phony bill in the car, along with drugs and pills with Floyd’s saliva on them.

Third, Floyd resisted the initial officers’ attempts to bring him into custody, with Chauvin and his partner arriving later, and for Chauvin to make matters worse. Throughout this early phase of the arrest, before Chauvin, it is interesting to note that Floyd made claims of “I can’t breathe” with no one having him in a stranglehold or knee on his back.

Fourth, no evidence was presented by the prosecution of Chauvin’s, or anyone else’s, alleged racism. Not a hint, inference, or otherwise. Possibly, one could argue, this was due to the need to keep the trial focused on Chauvin’s actions. Still, if Chauvin was a raging bigot, something would come light that would lead a person to believe it. Nada.

Fifth, so how do we go from bad cop to racist America? The answer lies in pure demagoguery. A virile video clip of the actions of a bad cop, combined with a mania to find authority figures, preferably white, to publicly humiliate, breeds the ill-starred crusade of our crazies in elective office. It brings out the worst in our current crop of abysmal leaders.

However, it must be admitted that these people were elected. If there is a broader guilt to be assessed, we must bear some of the blame. Enough of us chose them. Could it be that we get the leadership that we deserve, or could it be that some of us just made a poor guess? I think the latter.

RogerG

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Disguised Marxism

Have you noticed the pervasive use of “systemic racism” and “equity” in public utterances by eminences in our society? The two are key elements of “critical race theory”, an idea akin to Marx’s Scientific Socialism.

Honestly, the terms are a real head-scratcher to most sensible people. The former (systemic racism) is assumed to be real and bad, and the latter (equity) carries a vague aura of something good, being phonetically similar to “equality”. The reality is that both are warmed-over Marxisms, Marxisms for the obsessive identity-mongering of our time. It’s the oppressed/oppressor schtick of Marxism with the ranks of the “oppressed” filled with “people of color”, women (however defined), and that catch-all, the “other”. The “oppressors” are those of a pale shade and male. Notice that personal actions have nothing to do with the assignation.

You are judged by melanin count and genitalia. Sounds like good old fashioned racism and sexism to me, just practiced by different people.

Anyway, all of this is nonsense since racial intermingling has a made a hash of “people of color”. Soon, the only people reasonably without color are those at room temperature.

“Equity” began in English common law as the means to fill in the gaps, address loopholes, and to realize the goals of the common law: fairness and justice. The spirit-of-the-law stuff, as opposed to the letter.

That ain’t true today! It has the rancid odor of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge and Mao’s Cultural Revolution. It’s the century-plus bid to force equality in the strictest terms possible among the preferred categories (above).

Acts of public shaming during Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
Virtual reality training in a business conference room to identify and correct for “systemic racism”. (Photo: Forbes)

What does this mean to the common American as this noxious ideology embeds itself into everything from the Fortune 500 to the schools, especially the schools? Munchkins in elementary schools are asked to demean themselves in rankings of racial “power and privilege” (Cupertino, Ca.). During a middle school teacher in-service (i.e., training), a shaming session is conducted for Christian white males to confess their “privilege” – aka, “sin” – and admit their oppression of the “other” (Springfield, Mo.). Fifth-graders are compelled to celebrate “Black communism” and engage in a protest to free 1960’s radical Angela Davis who was, by the way, charged with murder (Philadelphia). In Seattle, the school district administration issued a memo that described white teachers as guilty of “spirit murder” of black children. Think, this totalitarian indoctrination is happening to your children and the people teaching them.

This isn’t education; it’s child abuse!

Ibram X. Kendi, formerly known as Ibram Henry Rogers, the warlock of critical race theory mysticism, demands a federal Antiracism Department, independent of the elective branches. No homage to popular sovereignty for this guy.

It’s just the tip of the iceberg. The abuse to logic and decency is evident everywhere from the military academies, the Pentagon, the labyrinth of state, local, and federal governments, corporate HR departments, et al. Just like the prior Marxisms, this one will end up in another pathetic existence for the people forced to live under it.

And you were worried about Trump’s comportment in 2020? Waiting in the wings is something far more horrifying, whether you realized it or not.

In 1917, many Russians didn’t like the czar. Then, they helped overthrow him and eventually got Lenin, Stalin, and communist totalitarianism for about 80 years. 10-12 million deaths later (due to civil war, famine, mass executions, and state-sanctioned murder) Russians got what few wanted at the onset.

Be careful for what you ask for. You are about to live the consequences. Here’s a photo gallery of one of the consequences, using the example of Minneapolis:

Onlookers watch as smoke smolders from a destroyed fast food restaurant near the Minneapolis Police Third Precinct, Thursday, May 28, 2020, after a night of rioting and looting as protests continue over the death of George Floyd. (Photo: AP Photo/Jim Mone)
People stand on a burned up car as fires burn near a Target Store after a night of unrest and protests in the death of George Floyd early Thursday, May 28, 2020 in downtown Minneapolis. (Photo: David Joles/Star Tribune via AP)
A man poses for a photo in the parking lot of an AutoZone store in flames, while protesters hold a rally for George Floyd in Minneapolis on Wednesday, May 27, 2020. (Photo: Carlos Gonzalez/Star Tribune via AP)
A man poses for photos in front of a fire at an AutoZone store, while protesters hold a rally for George Floyd in Minneapolis on Wednesday, May 27, 2020. (Photo: Carlos Gonzalez/Star Tribune via AP)
People break into a Target store, while protesters hold a rally for George Floyd in Minneapolis on Wednesday, May 27, 2020. (Photo: Aaron Lavinsky/Star Tribune via AP)
People get out of a Target store with merchandise, while protesters hold a rally for George Floyd in Minneapolis on Wednesday, May 27, 2020. (Photo: Aaron Lavinsky/Star Tribune via AP)
A man, center, sorts for items left in grocery carts strewn in the Target parking lot near the Minneapolis Police Third Precinct, Thursday, May 28, 2020, following a night of rioting and looting as protests continue over the arrest of George Floyd who died in police custody. (Photo: AP Photo/Jim Mone)

RogerG

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The Post-Chauvin Time of Troubles

Seen from Hiawatha Avenue, a large fire burns Thursday, May 28, 2020, in Minneapolis during a third night of unrest following the death of George Floyd while in Minneapolis police custody. (David Joles/Star Tribune via AP)

It happens to civilizations: the episodic spasms of chaos, conflict, and self-annihilation. The Greco-Roman world was beset by invasions, civil war, mob bedlam, warring political factions, among other things. In spite of it, it still lasted about a combined 10 centuries. Other refined ways of life weren’t so lucky; they collapsed, sometimes in quick order. Today, we are in the midst of another one of our perilous times. The big question is, is what we’re experiencing today a portent of our imminent demise? I don’t know, since we’ve survived earlier catastrophes, but the pessimism is understandable when you’re living through the furor. This one could be the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

This strife is different in that it is based on a broad self-loathing. We hate ourselves and each other because many of us think that stealthy conspiracies exist to ruin us. Infantile notions of conspiratorial cabals of all stripes are feeding the discord. On the right, we have QAnon and the cry that a host of plotters are seeking to destroy America, in secret of course. Many of them fomented the capitol riot and lurk in the background of some scattered protests. On the left, we have the ill-defined “systemic racism” and its kindred threat of “white privilege”. Add to the left’s paranoia, the devout belief in capitalism’s plot to destroy the planet in the fervently-held dogma of apocalyptic climate change.

San Francisco rally led by Sunrise Movement in 2019. (Photo: Peg Hunter)

Right now, the left’s lunacies are manning the cockpit of our society. They have the upper hand, with the unhinged on the right relegated to microscopic niches. The left’s manias are ascendant in corporate suites, our schools, government, Big Entertainment, Big Sports, throughout the cultural commanding heights. There’s nowhere for a person of a conservative bent to go to avoid the inanities. Who would have thought that simply buying a soft drink, or a Dodgers’ jersey, or going to Disneyland was a quiet endorsement of the Democratic Party’s revolutionary jihad? Now, small, formerly innocent pleasures feed the revolution. Everything is politicized.

The Chauvin verdict will be exploited by those in the cultural and political catbird seat to advance the left’s holy war. Biden’s AG is set to lead an inquisition to ferret out the witches who are fomenting persistent “systemic racism” in the Minneapolis PD, the first of many future inquisitions. The two-word banality slithered off the wagging tongues of Biden and his zealous lieutenant Harris shortly after the verdict was announced. The judge barely had time to take a breath after reading the verdict before the radicalized demigods at the head of the Article II branch ran to the cameras. They’re hardly a reassuring presence when they announced that half the electorate and the thin blue line have bulls’-eyes tattooed to their backs. For all of us, whether we realize it or not, their words are threats to public tranquility, public safety, and our Constitution.

Pres. Biden and VP Harris at the podium after the Chauvin verdict.

A false impetus will be ginned up for pushing DC and Puerto Rico into statehood, and four more senators to make it easier to advance the revolution. That’s not all. They have on their agenda the desire to castrate the Electoral College and make flyover country, and two-thirds of the states, politically irrelevant. I can’t think of any other single act that could do more to provoke Civil War II. They’re not done. They won’t be happy till they make a shambles of election integrity by the elimination of the secret ballot and voter ID through the unconstitutional vacuuming of power over elections to their grubby little DC hands. Don’t expect the courts to stand in the way. Let’s not forget their rank bullying of the Supreme Court with the cudgel of court-packing to frighten the robes into slinking into the background. When they’re done, America will be a hellish, unrecognizable place.

Expect the exodus from the political bastions of the lunacy to intensify. The geographical centers of the left, however, hope to counter the losses with an open border for the world’s poor. The more, the merrier . . . for them. But it will do nothing but escalate the divisions that’ll make Civil War II inevitable; though, I sincerely hope not.

And you thought that jailing Chauvin would be the end of it. No, it isn’t as simple as that because the ascendant left won’t let it be. We are in for an existential time of troubles.

RogerG

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Justice Under a Cloud of Mob Rule

Defense attorney Eric Nelson, left, and defendant former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin listen as Assistant Minnesota Attorney General Matthew Frank, questions witness Christopher Martin during the Chauvin trial.

If you think that the conviction of Derek Chauvin is the end of it, you’re a fool. Winston Churchill said it best in 1942: “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” There was a ring of hope in Churchill’s words for Brits after the Battle of Britain; not so for us. Now, America, we are really going to be in for it.

This is more than about Chauvin. The Chauvin trial should have been about a police officer’s abuse of his power. Instead, it was taken along in a flood of revolutionary fervor to change America beyond recognition. The verdict only fed the beast, the beast being the organized hustle of “systemic racism”; and the beast needs more feeding. Like everything else, the Chauvin/Floyd incident was thrown into this mythical-racism maelstrom. These radicals won’t be satisfied with a single conviction. Their goal is to make America unrecognizable and, hence, unlivable for the rest of us.

BLM protesters in Minneapolis.

After reading the press reports this morning, a common reaction to the verdict is a collective “sigh of relief” with calls to “reimagine” policing and continue the fight against the spectral “systemic racism”. In both cases, we’re going to be screwed with more violent streets, an epidemic of resisting arrest, riots, and a bloated federal monster rooting around in nearly all aspects of our lives. Yes, we’re going to be in for it.

The oft-quoted “sigh” concerns the relief that the mob got what it wanted and we’re safe from them torching our cities . . . for now. That’s the ticket: public tranquility guaranteed by indulging the mob. You don’t have to look very far to see what we’re in store for. Kids will tell you what it’s like in a playground with a few bullies and no adults. Make no mistake about it, we are entering a time of public policy and justice under the gun of mob intimidation. The collective “sigh” is worrisome in the extreme.

The trial was organized at the outset to be exposed to the mob. The judge amazingly refused to grant a change of venue or even sequester the jury. The jury during the trial could have been pummeled by media stories of the mayhem 10 miles up the interstate from the courtroom (and home to one of the jurors), the Maxine Waters flame-thrower inciting more violence, the intimidation of a defense witness, the general turmoil outside the courtroom, and the year-long mayhem across blue-America. We won’t know if they were affected by the intense rancor till many moons later, but nonetheless the judge’s decisions will forever taint the trial.

The tactic of intimidation to further the ends of the revolution isn’t limited to the miscreants of Black Lives Matter on the streets of Minneapolis. The tactic of court-packing by the Jacobins of the donkey party isn’t solely meant to land four new lefties on the Supreme Court. It serves the function of intimidating the court. Justice, the cement of a civilized society, could be compromised by justices, like the institutionalist John Roberts, constantly looking over their shoulders at the threats coming from the mob soldiers running the show in Congress and the senescent Biden administration. They will have won without seating more radicals if the Court caves. Remember, in the end, back in the thirties, FDR won without successfully packing it.

Evil winds are blowing. Given all that has happened, and likely to happen, this is not a time to go into law enforcement. It’s a perilous profession that will be “reimagined” into more peril for those in its ranks. If you’re already in it, and of a ripe age, fill out the retirement papers. If you’re younger than that, you have a big decision to make: stay or leave. If you’re a young whippersnapper looking to join, consider becoming an astronaut. I hear that a mission to Mars is in the offing.

For the regular Joe and Judy six-pack, don’t expect 911 to matter anymore. We’re on our own.

RogerG

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Risk as a Bad Word, a Non-Existent Word, or Simply Incoherent in Use

Rioters stomping on a police cruiser in Brooklyn Center, Minn., April 12, 2021.
A patient is wheeled out of Cobble Hill Health Center by emergency medical workers, Friday, April 17, 2020, in the Brooklyn borough of New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Can anyone make sense of the common use of the word “risk”? In one sense, it’s eliminated altogether in sentences that begin with “If it saves one life . . ..” Any expense and other dangers are ignored in the pursuit of some influential person’s, or group’s, particular action. It makes a mockery of the reality of tradeoffs in life. In another sense, it’s a non-factor in bee-lining straight to a revolutionary gang’s favorite end state, or utopia, as in the “critical race theory” crowd’s headlong rush to make equal by fiat all skin shades in all socio-economic measures. They call it “equity”, thereby soiling another word with the mud of extremist politics.

The pandemic accorded the perfect opportunity to do the former: public administrators and executives, mostly blue-state and blue-Biden and company, forcefully neglected any serious consideration other than stopping the virus. Admirable, yes, but adolescent thinking at its worst. There were options other than the destruction of other aspects of life – schooling the young, careers, worship, social gatherings from the movies to Thanksgiving, etc. – but it all depends on a mature assessment of risk and the accompanying tradeoffs. Other choices were available without the never-ending masks (double and triple) – quickly becoming our new burqa – and the formation of a writ-large leper colony in six-foot social distancing and the solitary confinement of the lockdowns.

The wet blanket on life may have been justified in the first few months till we got a handle on therapeutics and some understanding of vulnerable populations. As we knew more, the controls should have been gradually lifted with concentrated efforts on protecting groups especially susceptible to lethal repercussions. Instead, we got the shuttering of life – which Fauci and Biden and company show no signs of lessening – and the subsequent rash of suicides, failed students, substance and domestic abuses, undetected diseases, destroyed careers, and the unending loneliness in our solitary confinement. Are these tradeoffs worth it? Was it acceptable to incur these risks?

No serious assessment was ever laid out to the public. The tactic was to strangle society, and keep strangling it. We were sold on the gambit to “stop the spread”. In essence, all of us were labeled walking super-spreaders. All-of-a-sudden, we lost our humanity, optimism, and future. No wonder people turned to drink, reefer, crack, and, for some, a bullet to the head. Kids languished in a cognitive miasma; Zooming their educations turned into a disaster. These risks were dismissed or blatantly ignored in the tunnel vision of “If it saves one life”.

Risk is maligned in another context: resist arrest and crap happens. Nick Saban once said,

“One thing I always tell players is that there are three bad things: Nothing good happens after midnight, nothing good happens when you’re around guns unless you’re going hunting, and you don’t want to mess around with women that you don’t know because a lot of times, bad things happen.”

Good advice, and one which requires the addition of resisting arrest to his list.

George Zimmerman after his confrontation with Trayvon Martin, 2014.

Black Lives Matter as a neo-Marxist movement par excellence came to the fore on resisting arrest. The Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman imbroglio was a small spark, but the thuggish Michael Brown/Officer Darren Wilson confrontation in Ferguson, Mo., of 2014 jump-started it to a national cause. As it turned out, Brown was spoiling for a fight with a cop and got one, and got killed, and hence giving us the “Ferguson effect”: cops pull back and crime jumps, a replay of LA’s Rodney King riots of 1992 (funny thing: another act of resisting arrest). And the whole thing is due to resisting arrest.

Remember, a nasty risk is attached to resisting arrest.

There’s more to Black Lives Matter ascending the respectability ladder to the chic status of a favorite Fortune-500 charity. More incidences followed, in this age of the ubiquitous cell-phone and universal connectivity, to give a false aura of righteousness to this Marxist band, more instances of ignoring the risks of resisting arrest. With the exception of Eric Garner (NYC, 2014), high profile instances of resisting arrest were caught on tape to be viewed by any youngster with access to a cell phone. The elevation of George Floyd to sainthood is one shining example of the tendency of resisting arrest heightening the chances of someone’s death. To deny Floyd’s uncooperative actions is to indulge in a fantasy. Floyd, a big man with an extensive criminal background, was subdued by a cop’s possible overreaction in a stressful situation of resisting arrest. Once again, crap happened.

Or take this celebrated incident in Atlanta at a time of rioting to “honor” George Floyd: Rayshard Brooks resisted arrest, scuffled with cops, grabbed a cop’s taser, fled after tasering the cop, and was shot and killed. The poor Wendy’s was torched, more rioting, and another reason is given to leave America’s urban centers.

Rioting in Kenosha, Wisc., 2020.

Jump forward to August 2020, Kenosha, Wisc., and Jacob Blake. Police answering a domestic disturbance call confronted Jacob Blake, a man with a warrant for his arrest who resisted officer requests, strove to his car (whose car is open to question), and a melee erupted with Blake being shot. Like after midnight, nothing good happens from defying officer requests. It ends in the worst sort of place for all concerned. It’s a lesson that should have sunken in, instead of being used as another excuse for widespread mayhem.

Or take this most recent episode in greater Minneapolis. Cops pull over Daunte Wright, he attempts to flee, and in the heat of the moment an officer grabs the wrong weapon and inadvertently shoots Wright. You’d think that it was common knowledge that police have a tendency of not dealing with church choir members. The self-preservation instinct is very much alive in an occupation known for its interaction with some of our nastiest people. They wear body armor as part of the uniform, after all. You’d think that people would know and act accordingly, but, alas, some don’t, run the risk, and we get exposed to more Black Lives Matter jive.

Rioting and looting in Brooklyn Center, Minn., April 12, 2021.

As a side note, don’t choose a career in law enforcement in this day and age. It’s a risky business for your health and freedom as you stay out of the clutches of vengeful DA’s, the media and politician mobs, defunding campaigns, and judges and juries who could be poisoned by the same thoughts in the heads of the street mobs. Why take the risk?

Risk is not well understood, and in some cases not even considered. The foolishness has resulted in a shattered society, the destructive looniness of the “systemic racism” crusade, and a risky but necessary public service becoming a threat to life, limb, and future for all who aspire to join its ranks. Just think, these same BLM boosters want to strip the people of their guns at a time when they have made the streets an unruly mess. Soon, the only thing left for us to do in the face violent miscreants is to huddle in prayer. But the moment we seek refuge in a sanctuary to do likewise, these very same beleaguered officers will be called upon to arrest us for violating the ban on indoor social gatherings.

What a strange world that we have created for ourselves.

RogerG

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Stories, Damnable Stories

Josef Goebbels, Reich Propaganda Minister
MSNBC, a chief purveyor of our new Big Lie.
Photos of Robert Long, the accused shooter in the Atlanta murder spree.

Preamble: I’m going to suspend my normal rule against making reference to the Nazis when drawing a historical comparison to make a point. The parallels with our current mania are too obvious to avoid.

The Big Lie has long been identified with the Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, and has been used thereafter as a political weapon against opponents. Goebbels’s deceit is much more than the lie. Here’s the fuller Josef Goebbels’ statement on the tactic:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” [my emphasis]

Most of his rendition concerns maintaining the lie, not making it. In short, the success of the lie requires suppression of dissent and control of information and thought. You see, the politically useful lie demands censorship and more than that, a controlling narrative, an imposed foundational story for which no one can evade.

Sound familiar? If not, it should. Today’s Big Lie is “White Supremacy”. The supporting superstructure of the story is sheathed in overwrought jargon like “critical race theory”, “systemic racism”, “white privilege”, and “white fragility”, and unceasingly propagated everywhere in an unholy alliance among our increasingly uniform political, economic, media, and cultural leviathans. You can’t escape the Big Lie and its supporting story – and that’s Goebbels’s point – even more so than the lie itself.

Everything is crammed into our modish Big Lie of the burgeoning threat of “White Supremacy” whose existence no one can prove. The secret of the Big Lie is to simply repeat it, not prove it, because it can’t be proven. Our Big Lie’s oft-repeated “statistical disparities” aren’t proof of racism, and the “White Supremacy” that undergirds it, because causation for the dubious claim faces the reality of many potential fathers, absent a paternity test, i.e., proof. It’s quite easy to cite more cogent factors to explain the disparity without ever turning to the gibberish coming out of the mouths of VP Harris, Robin DiAngelo, or Ibram X. Kendi. How about the desolation of family life in poor neighborhoods, for instance?

DiAngelo (l), Kendi

No better example of the modern Big Lie can be found than in the treatment accorded the horror in Atlanta on March 16. The actions of a disturbed and confessed “sex addict” are shoe-horned into the Big Lie of “White Supremacy”. Once the culprit’s picture hit the net, off to the land of “White Supremacy” they (the legacy media, our demagogues in high office) went. Violence against Asians began to be spun by our official and unofficial propaganda ministries as an outgrowth of the racial angst of MAGA supporters and angry white males, and an assortment of other illusory villains (QAnon). Traditionalist Christians were slimed. Ironically, the facts about violence against Asians, though, don’t make a neat fit with the propaganda story.

***************

Watch the video below. The web of propaganda ministries want to make it difficult for you to see the contradicting reality. Jump through YouTube’s hoops to see it. You’ll see that it is no more violent than most of the other stuff on the site. It is relevant to the next paragraph.

******************

Before we began the frenzied hunt for “White Supremacy”, it was well-known that 85% of assaults against Asian-Americans were perpetrated by African-Americans. The fact was too embarrassing for our web of propaganda ministers so the ministries went into overdrive to repudiate it, and a grand erasure took place. Look up the original reportage today and you’ll find of a Reddit Warning like this:

“Sorry, this post was deleted by the person who originally posted it. It doesn’t appear in any feeds, and anyone with a direct link to it will see a message like this one.”

SFGate, an online news service affiliated with the San Francisco Chronicle, the original source for the factoid, came out with this bit of cancellation through distancing:

“Editor’s note: This 2010 column originally appeared in print in the San Francisco Chronicle. As of 2019, the Chronicle and SFGATE have been separate editorial operations.”

Maintaining the narrative and Big Lie of “White Supremacy” overrides all other concerns, like honesty. It’s a very familiar story to the one that took shape in the decades before and after the National Socialists’ rise to power. Eugenics by then had seeped into the minds of European elites, and it mingled with atavistic notions of racial hierarchies and the persistent undercurrent of anti-Semitism. Academics like Germany’s H.K. Gunther crystalized a previously existent story of racial superiority into a functioning “science” and belief system. From there, the story is a blood stain on history.

But everything was funneled through the narrow lens of race, just like today. And if the facts don’t fit the story, make the facts fit, or erase them. The shadowy “systemic racism” has much in common with the shadowy “Jewish conspiracy”. Proving the sketchy theory is made easy by simply citing the presence of a white male – or in the case of an enthusiast of Aryan race theory, a person of Jewish ancestry – in the incident. It’s a mental tick familiar to anyone in the SS Race and Settlement Main Office. All other inconvenient facts get weeded out.

We are in a dangerous time. Facts no longer matter, the story does. All competing explanations, even logic itself, are shunned or worse. As such, if history is any guide, a much more appalling injustice is waiting in the wings.

Armenian village leaders executed by Turkish troops during the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, 1915.

RogerG

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Warning! Don’t Box People into Corners.

Coach John Mosley of the East Los Angeles Community College basketball team, and a focus of Netflix’s “Last Chance U: Basketball” (highly recommended), stated, “Rules without relationships are rebellion.” When you think about it, he’s onto something. Rules in the absence of an interpersonal connection can easily be received as a cold and blind force, and frequently are. In a related fashion, I remember counseling young teachers against angling a troubled kid into a corner with no escape because he or she might violently lash out. When rules box people into corners without escape, expect rebellion.

Coach John Mosley of East Los Angeles Community College’s basketball team

The makings of a serious national rupture are happening as I write. The near complete monopoly by the Left in our society’s centers of power and influence is forcing an unpalatable choice upon the many dissenters. Right now, the safety valves of free speech and thought are being closed by the Big Tech oligarchy as the Democratic Party pursues a redesign of elections to keep themselves in power for generations, emasculation of our borders to chronically expand the critical mass of their supporters, redesign of our schools into their indoctrination centers, and removal of the last symbol of citizen self-reliance in the neutering of the Second Amendment. What will the loyal opposition do if this new Borg leaves the people with no recourse? My guess is that it’ll no longer be loyal. Don’t box people into corners.

In a relatively brief span of time, the hegemony of a narrow set of beliefs has descended upon us. For some, the deplatforming of Trump “for life” by the tech oligarchs was the omen of a new Dark Age of absolutist control of thought and conscience. The contradictions are glaring and instructive. Twitter bumps Trump but must be forced by a to Department of Homeland Security to take down a video of her son’s sexual assault. Amazing.

Hardly does Trump deserve much of a defense for some of his actions. I’m not in the Hannity world of Trump-worship. But neither am I in the habit of blinding myself to the first real exercise of raw power to erase a prominent figure from the world stage; though, it’s been happening for quite some time to the less notable. It’s raw power and used in a brazen manner.

Mark Zuckerberg famously stated before Congress that Silicon Valley is an “extremely left-leaning place”. He’s got that right. “Left-leaning” means a techno-utopian ideal of gauzy socialist-egalitarian, libertine, and greenie bliss brought into existence by universal techno-connectivity. It’s certainly a way for them to feel good about themselves by the self-elevation of the importance of their work. For the people who aren’t caught up in this romper room of the mind, they get cancelled.

Brandon Eich

It’s unapologetic censorship, like what happened to Brandon Eich, the brief (for 11 days in 2014) CEO of Mozilla. He was “forced” out by something loosely called the “Mozilla community” – a more accurate term would be “mob” – for daring to support traditional marriage (2008’s Prop 8 in California). Key to any mob’s “cancellation” is the recognition that there aren’t other legitimate points of view to be tolerated.

An excursion into the functioning of tech central’s totalitarian mind was provided by Forbes magazine in 2014 when it republished a Quora piece by Ian McCullough, “consumer tech”, of San Francisco, on the forced resignation of Eich. McCullough’s defense of the disposal of Eich pivoted on two claims: Eich’s opinion is beyond the pale and an extremely odd notion of freedom of speech.

Unbeknownst to McCullough, the unpopularity of opinions frequently depends on location. Eich’s opinions on marriage aren’t fashionable in Zuckerberg’s “left-leaning place”, and in McCullough’s San Francisco – thus, beyond the pale – but neither are McCullough’s and those of Zuckerberg’s left-leaning place as popular in the vast stretches of flyover country. There is a difference, though: McCullough’s support for gay marriage won’t by itself result in his forced resignation if he stated his views in Arkansas, at least as far as I can determine. If it does happen, there’d be a groundswell of opposition for making a person’s employment status contingent on rectitude with an area’s popular slant on a contentious issue. No, that kind of thing is routinely reserved for Zuckerberg’s “left-leaning place”.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, testifying before the Senate on April 10, 2018.

In that “left-leaning place”, fundamental rights such as freedom of speech is contorted out of all recognition. In McCullough’s twisted mind, the freedom of speech of a mass can be used to intimidate a single person’s exercise of free speech. In a way, ironically, he’s right. Every single person in the mob has freedom of speech individually, but the bigger question involves self-control. Ought we to practice it in that manner? Arkansas is much more into “ought” and Zuckerberg’s “left-leaning place” is all into gang-style suppression; that’s the difference.

And even more importantly, does the First Amendment have any practical relevance if an opinion is more popular in other locales but is unpopular in the little node where we find the oligarchic power of Big Tech to blot it out everywhere? By what legitimate right should one locale and their nest of opinions have the power to censor the opinions about traditional institutions in the communities that hold these traditions dear? McCullough, no one should have that power. No one, not you nor anyone like you, or me for that matter.

Today, Big Tech has the power and they use it. It does so by banning information that doesn’t comport with their socio-political prejudices. Look at what happened to The New York Post’s Biden family corruption story just before the election. In an informal, or formal (?), alliance of interest, Big Media and Big Tech shut out the story. No such forbearance was granted Trump regarding the grand smear that went by the name of “Russia collusion”. The fiction had a 3-year lease on life despite the fact that it was predicated on a demonstrably proven pack of Democrat-funded lies.

Another alliance member – the upper echelons of DC’s permanent Fed Administrative State – were giddy at the possibility of dragging Trump through the mud and only ended up with a two-year $40 million probe that was led by a doddering Robert Mueller and his band of partisan hacks who produced . . . nothing.

What did we get for $40 million? We got 3 years of hair-on-fire, a perpetuation of the smear, unsuccessful impeachments, and conservative websites hidden on page 5 of a Google search. Like the Biden corruption story, uncooperative sites go down the memory hole. Of course, initially, Google feigns that it’s due to their software “protocols” or “algorythms”. Then they dropped all pretense by calling it “misinformation”. It’s still a crock.

Big Tech’s “misinformation” campaign targeted the pesky Breitbart media operation. Breitbart News noticed clicks on Google dropped 99% from 2016 to 2020. Their entire website was given the NYPost treatment.

And if that’s not enough, complete platforms were deplatformed. Parler, the social media competitor to Twitter, was destroyed by Big Tech’s near-Gang of Eight. Like Trump and Breitbart, it was steamrolled by the big wheels of Big Tech. Read this quackery of a write-up on Wikipedia:

“Parler is an American alt-tech microblogging and social networking service. It has a significant user base of Donald Trump supporters, conservatives, conspiracy theorists, and right-wing extremists. Posts on the service often contain far-right content, antisemitism, and conspiracy theories such as QAnon.”

Not a word about the charlatanism of the Green New Deal and the buffoonery of its eco-apocalypse and the 30-something adolescent mind from New York’s 14th congressional district behind much of it. Not a word about the potential for descent into Venezuela-land from socialism’s new found popularity. Not a word about the buffoonery of “settled science” since real science means a real scientific method that is operative all the time. Not a word about the provable unsustainability of “sustainable energy”. Not a word about the scientific backlash to the “settled science” of Fauci and World Health Organization. The paradox is that the most frequent purveyors of “misinformation” are the people combatting “misinformation”. Franz Kafka looking at our time would see abundant evidence of life imitating art, his art.

What will people do if they come to conclude that there is no recourse to submission? If the Democrats have their way, elections will have the legitimacy of loan sharking and only keep the Socialist Revolutionary Party (Democratic Party) cemented in power for the foreseeable future, thereby proving the Marxist revolutionary’s maxim: one man, one vote, one time. Voices are to be silenced by a formal unity of purpose among entrenched elites at the commanding heights of our society. The kids are to receive no respite in the assault on their minds from every quarter in entertainment and the schools. Traditional institutions and the morality of self-defense are systematically upended. For those standing aghast at this turn of events, some may sadly seek redress in more violent means, no other option having been left open to them. Boxing people into corners has dangerous consequences.

Friedrich Hayek had many reasons for the failure of socialism, but one was the “knowledge problem”. Big government’s attempt to manage the many affairs of its people requires a level of knowledge that no one person or small group of individuals can possess. Crap happens and human existence enters a dark place.

Coach Mosley and his team experienced the consequences in the state whose governing elites are infatuated with government’s top-down management of its residents, but aren’t, and can’t be, as knowledgeable and wise as they think themselves to be. After completing a 29-1 season and surviving the first round of the state championship tournament, and after loading on the bus to travel to West Hills College in Lemoore for the Final Four championship round, Coach Mosley received a phone call to announce the cancellation of the tournament due to COVID. It was part of a state of California lockdown that proved to be no more efficacious than states who left their residents free to live a more normal life. A season of hard work, trials, and tribulations was ended just as the prize for going through all the trouble was near at hand. And it was all for naught.

The spirit of resistance in California, April 2020. Protesters to the lockdown blocked traffic around the state’s capitol in Sacramento.

Coach Mosley properly acceded to the state’s decision. What else could he do? But what’ll happen when the one-party state of California is transferred to DC and the one party blocks all avenues of civil opposition to the ruling ideology? The Democrats are playing with fire.

CULVER CITY, CALIFORNIA – MARCH 15: A man walks with a stroller as people stand in line outside the Martin B. Retting, Inc. guns store on March 15, 2020 in Culver City, California. The spread of Coronavirus (COVID-19) has prompted some Americans to line up for supplies in a variety of stores. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

RogerG

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The Era of No Need for Custom

This:

Young woman reading a book at a public library.

Versus this:

Defacing a Confederate monument in Portsmouth, Va.

Thomas Sowell, the noted economist and public intellectual at the Hoover Institution, said in the most recent documentary on his life that his gateway out of his poor neighborhood was books. Yes, books. A friend at an early age introduced him to the New York City public library. From there, his life’s journey coursed its way from the military, through college, a PhD, and from Marxism to a deep skepticism about the whole enterprise. It led to employment at the US Dept. of Labor, the questioning of government’s attempt to elevate mankind through fiat (such as a minimum wage law), and various university teaching gigs, the authorship of many fine books on economics and culture, and his current post at the Hoover Institution.

Thomas Sowell

Why mention Thomas Sowell? His life’s story is an example of the influence of books on a person’s life. Books, combined with the collegiality of the classroom, can strengthen the mind muscle. The setting can instill the desire and mental acuity to ruminate, test, and explore ideas. Books present to us a smorgasbord of what others have thought and did from the ancient past to the present.

Well, and this is most disturbing, we are about to lose it all. That is, we are about to squander the ability to produce seasoned, mature minds. A massive mental erasure is taking place as we and our children are taught to disparage the past by seeing it through the contrived lens of chic thought. It’s a grand undertaking to shove everything, including ideas, down the vortex of racism, systemic or otherwise. As such, there’s no need to pay attention to the books of dead people. The experience of mankind is reduced to the fetid imaginations of today’s pop stars like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. It dominates one of the two established political parties, is attached to the coattails of its politicos, and is smeared through policy and government actions. We’ll all be smeared by it.

It’s how college is reduced to the equivalent of totalitarian “struggle sessions”. It’s how the language is corrupted in order to stifle free inquiry. Last summer’s wave of statue defacement and destruction is a public manifestation of the phenomena. The zeitgeist’s tentacles are evident in Big Tech’s censorship, the reeducation of corporate employees in propaganda workshops, and the soiling of everything from Big Sports to school curriculums. Sowell’s view of the value books as the mental gym for cognitive maturity is replaced by the mass production of mental midgets.

A small snippet on the importance of books is an insight from Gordon S. Wood’s Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. It involves two things: common law and seditious libel. The legal principle of seditious libel is rooted in common law. For us, today, the concept of seditious libel sends shivers down our spine because of its recent dark history of government brutality to punish dissent.

However, the circumstances of earlier times presented a different story. The common law is found there, in the misty past. Common law closely corresponds to traditions that take on the force of law. Most commonly, they originate in the decisions of local magistrates who have to grapple with situations not foreseen, nor expected to be foreseen, in the statutory law. They develop over long stretches of time, and become the acknowledged precedents to handle similar situations in like manner.

Got it? Without the past, one definition of justice – treating like situations alike – would not exist, and we would be at the mercy of the impulses of the mob or the passions of spasmodic majorities who capture the powers of the state. Rampaging mobs through the streets of 5th and 4th-century BC Athens, nor the impulses of all-powerful assembly super-majorities, doth not make for public peace and tranquility.

A mob murdering Hypatia of Alexandria, a Neoplatonist philosopher and mathematician, in 415 AD.

Seditious libel ( the crime of publishing material that brings the government and its officials into contempt) fits into the common law due to conditions common in an era before institutionalized law enforcement. Police forces with their administrative structures and collective bargaining agreements didn’t exist. A single sheriff, and whomever he could coax to join him, couldn’t be the sole means to enforce compliance to a magistrate’s decisions. A great deal of voluntary assent and respect for the officer and office was considered essential for social harmony.

A depiction of the reeve, Oswald, in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. The reeve became the chief administrator in a lord’s shire. The word “sheriff” is a combination of “shire” and “reeve”.

The traditional aura that accrued to an official and his office was instilled by essential institutions such as the family and the Church, but also with the common law principle of seditious libel. Throwing aspersions on an official was tantamount to throwing aspersions on the office and therefore undermining the ability of a society’s officials to maintain public tranquility. Respect for both the officer and office was critical to maintaining order.

A man convicted of seditious libel in the stock in a 17th century English woodcut.

Books are the means to gain such insights. Without them, our libraries would be limited to one shelf in one rack, and filled with a few volumes of the excrescences of some fashionable halfwits who have discovered their moment.

It’s also very dangerous. Trashing the past frees your fashionable tyrants from restraint. Pol Pot’s “year zero” talk is fully anchored in a repudiation of the past and its customs. Today, we are abundant in such talk. For instance, “change” is a trite theme in the repertoire of modern Hollywood’s scriptwriters. It prizes a break away from the past to create someone’s gross conception of Shangri-La. It’s gross if you have some idea of where these ideas have led people in prior times. I suspect a profound ignorance of earlier human experience.

In this undated photo provided by Documentation Center of Cambodia, the late Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, center, greets Khmer Rouge cadre in Phnom Penh airport, Cambodia.
Khmer Rouge labor camp
Child soldiers of the Khmer Rouge who proved to be vicious killers in the camps.
Skulls, discovered in 1981, lie in the killing fields of Choeung Ek, Cambodia.

Even when they portray the past, it’s done through the tunnel vision of today’s obsessions. History becomes another tool in the furtherance of contemporary thought fashions. It’s a distortion, but who cares, as the lessons of real history are turned into just another form of confirmation bias?

That’s where many of us have chosen to be: at a place not to be disturbed by custom, or anything else that can rock us from the safety blanket of our own falsehoods. Sadly, many of us don’t know them to be falsehoods because there’s nothing else rolling around in their heads to unsettle the mind. When those in power are in the grip of the banality, watch out, for there will nothing left to provide refuge from the whirlwind, custom and the lessons of the past having disappeared down the memory hole. At this point, we get the pleasure of repeating the horrendous errors of humanity’s worst flaws: one of them being willful but mentally comfortable ignorance.

Indeed, this is the dawn of the era of no need for customs, fueled by bad learning. It won’t end well.

Flames rise from a liquor store and shops near the Third Police Precinct on May 28, 2020 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during a protest over the death of George Floyd. (AFP / Kerem Yucel)

RogerG