Karine Jean-Pierre, Pres. Biden’s press secretary, tries to explain away Biden’s search for a knowingly deceased congresswoman.
Watch buffoons in the national media and the upper rungs of the government sound technocratic, which means that they claim to be the inheritors of the “science”, the “experts”, and the “best and brightest” from our academic bubbles in the grip of, truth be told, cultural extremism. And watch our life get measurably worse.
Politics corrupts judgment, and no more fevered environment exists than one just before an election. Today, the word “transition” is employed to hide many sins. Just a week ago, Karine Jean-Pierre, Biden’s press secretary, announced, “. . . what we are seeing . . . is a transition to a more steady and stable growth.” Transition frequently crosses her lips on nearly everything that could foretell troubled times ahead. Biden, the donkey party powerful, and blue-state potentates are also especially fond of the word. It’s their current favorite to sound wise.
The jargon is a reflex of progressivism. Progressivism built its reputation on replacing the compromises, clashing interests, “smoke-filled rooms”, and bargaining of messy democracy with the credentialed “expert”. They actually believed that society can be managed by fine-tuning, like a technician adjusting an old-style carburetor. A little turn of the fiscal and regulatory screw here and there and bliss will be upon us. So, if fighting climate change and pursuing social justice (ergo blatant racial favoritism) are your goals, an agency of degreed “experts” and appropriate decrees from on high will seamlessly float the people in the right direction without pain. It’s all a bunch of hooey.
Hundreds of millions of free souls will not be rigidly controlled by a claque of government employees who lack the humility of admitting that they don’t know half as much as they claim, and a good portion of what they do know is wrong. The economist Friedrich Hayek warned of the inherent “knowledge problem” in government. It’s playing out before our eyes.
“Transition” conceals a troubling winter. Fuel prices normally experience seasonal gyrations, but the Biden people raised the water level of those fluctuations by over half. Prices undulate at a rate of 50% to 100% over a year or two ago. Be prepared for a jump in electricity rates this winter on the east coast, Northeast, and other blue bubbles, which is not surprising given that they are most enthusiastic about rule by “expert” – all according to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, an agency that is limited to measuring reality, and not to be confused with the “experts” of the climate change and equity freakouts.
“Transition” is often coupled with “soft landing”. President Clinton caught with his hand in the proverbial cookie jar, once parsed on the meaning of “is” in his perjury before a federal grand jury. The same is true for the treatment of “transition” and “soft landing” by the gaggle of progressives dominating the regime. The words are rhetorical cosmetic surgery for probable layoffs and business retrenchment. You don’t have to look far for proof. The economy only recently reached its pre-pandemic total employment numbers, which doesn’t take into account population growth. The laggard pace of employment screws up the unemployment rate. Vigorous job growth coming out of a shutdown by government fiat isn’t surprising. But a 3.7% unemployment rate out of a pool of adults shrunk by huge numbers opting out of the workforce makes the unemployment number almost superfluous.
Retrenchment is in the winds. Big Tech and others are beginning to trim some fat. Meta, Twilio, and Snap are jettisoning workers. Gap, Boeing, and Walmart are lopping administrative overhead. Real estate is taking a big hit as Wells Fargo, RE/MAX, and Redfin cut employees and agents as the Fed raises interest rates to combat another Fed-induced problem: inflation. And Biden and company still want to fight inflation – too much money chasing too few goods – by amazingly throwing more money at it. Never has a fire been successfully fought by pouring jet fuel on it.
Local businesses are hard it. The 2020 summer of riots didn’t help. Downtowns resemble ghost towns. Cities can’t proclaim a welcome mat for business when the sidewalks are open sewers and wanton theft, even serial assault, are ho-hum to district attorneys. Now we get to the cultural dimensions of “transition” and “soft landing”.
“Transition” to an “equity” society entails racial discrimination (against Asians and white males), lawlessness, crime victims, property destruction, XY-chromosome girls in XX-chromosome girls sports, and extremist indoctrination (eco-cultism, CRT, transgenderism, socialism) in the schools. No place is safe from the transitioners, not the home, not parenthood. Listen to Nikole Hannah-Jones – a symbol of the intersectionality of Black, female, and extremist cultural revolutionary – expounding on the danger of parents having a say in their children’s education (see below). It encapsulates the foolishness of “transition” and “soft landing” by “experts”.
Dropping the pretense of deceptive verbiage would be a great start. The so-called reformers are revolutionaries and should be forced to lay out their vision of how to create the new person for their new world. It’s totalitarian in scope. They need to lay their cards on the table so we are aware that the “soft landing” will be hard and brutal, as all such movements have proven to be. It won’t end well.
RogerG
Read more here:
* The U.S. Energy Information Agency’s electricity rate forecast of Sept. 7, 2022 can be found at https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/electricity.php .
* Jim Geraghty of National Review wrote an excellent piece on the subject in “The Economy Is Starting to Buckle”, National Review Online, Sept, 26, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/the-economy-is-starting-to-buckle/ .
* The normally suspect Bloomberg News announced the achievement of the employment milestone In “Employment in US Has Finally Exceeded Its Pre-Pandemic Level” at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-02/employment-in-us-has-finally-exceeded-its-pre-pandemic-level?leadSource=uverify%20wall .
San Francisco 49ers safety Tashaun Gipson Sr. (31) celebrates after intercepting the football against the Seattle Seahawks during the second quarter at Levi’s Stadium on Sept. 18, 2022. (photo: Kyle Terada-USA TODAY Sports)Los Angeles Skid Row in recent photographSanta Cruz, Ca., homeless encampmentSan Francisco homeless encampmentA homeless encampment along 112th Street Southwest in Everett, Wa., near Seattle. (photo: Mike Siegel / The Seattle Times)
Probably due to past loyalty, I sat down to watch the San Francisco 49ers v. Seattle Seahawks game last Sunday (SF won 27-7); however, I must admit that my enthusiasm for professional sports has waned. I can’t remove from my mind Big Sports’ enrollment in the radical left. Neither can I erase the images of these two cities’ decline into urban chaos, as is true of most of the other NFL home cities. These cities willingly chose that path. A smothering cloud of ideologically driven misrule overhangs the stadium crowd, the broadcast, and the team organizations. With few exceptions, the NFL schedule has turned into a series of Dystopia Bowls: one team booster of the radical left agenda from a radical left dystopia playing another with an identical image.
I didn’t politicize the sport. Previously, I had no clue about the political leanings of those composing the team organizations and the league, and didn’t care. As for the cities, they upheld for the most part some sense of decency. Not anymore. The sport concerned itself, pure and simple, with athletic competition at the highest level. Not anymore.
How did the NFL and their urban homes allow themselves to descend into such depravity? The movie “All the President’s Men” made popular the modern cynic’s favorite principle: “Follow the money”. That’s not true by a long shot. If you want to accurately follow the course of human events, “Follow the ideas”. It’s how we got to a compromised NFL and today’s unlivable cities.
It begins with one word: Socialism. Yes, that word, a rhetorical vessel wherein the perennial hopes and dreams of human betterment can be realized, despite its track record of abysmal failure. Its oppressed/oppressor dialectic is so appealing that it escapes any final verdict on its failure. It’s the vampire that won’t stay dead.
In one sense, what began with Marx and Engels, passed through the 60’s New Left, and would end up in today’s BLM, Antifa, college campuses everywhere, and the Democratic Party platform. In the good ‘ol days of the 19th century Socialist International, the oppressed was the industrial revolution’s urban working class (proletariat). But the dreams of revolution by the proletariat fizzled and where they did succeed in a takeover, it was a litany of nightmares: 100 million deaths in the 20th century by one accounting of a group of French historians in The Black Book of Communism.
Yet, something happened on the way to the collectivist Emerald City of Oz to keep the flame burning. Two things: new groups auditioned for the roles of oppressor (the white patriarchy) and oppressed (minorities and a plethora of hypothetical outcasts), and the real threat was said to come from an abstract “system”. And voilà, new life was breathed into the disgraced Marx.
The home of The Frankfurt School in Frankfurt, Germany, in the 1930’s.
Pointing the way were disgruntled Marxists ensconced in what came to be called the Frankfurt School. They followed the line of thought of Antonio Gramsci who tried to explain away the reluctance of workers to be enthusiasts of revolution by pinning the blame on “cultural hegemony” – the values, mores, institutions, and ways of life that keep them supposedly docile. In modern lingo, synonyms would be “the man”, “the system”, or “the establishment”. Inspired by Gramsci’s gambit, European activist academics banded together and formed the Institute for Social Research at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, which would later be dubbed The Frankfurt School. Hitler, however, set them packing in the 1930’s. Many of them made their way to the United States – the Frankfurt School set up shop in New York City – to eventually take up academic posts to proselytize the American young in their babble.
Antonio Gramsci
Theordor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, et al, and the risible Herbert Marcuse lent their thoughts and encouragement to the burgeoning 60’s counterculture and the extremist New Left to continue the erosion of the foundations of western civilization. The physical consequences were plagues of drugs and STD’s. The political offshoots were the SDS, Weather Underground, Black Panthers, Symbionese Liberation Army, etc. Crime and urban riots erupted, and campuses were paralyzed in protest and violence. It would appear that the trail of these ideas is one of tears. Some liberals were shocked into neo-conservatism by the 1970’s and 1980’s.
Herbert Marcuse
Once again, disaster, and, once again, someone will appear to pick up the torch to fling it. It’s proof that gullibility like the poor will always be with us. In our social media world, glibness reigns supreme in the form of stitching together words into appealing quips that remain just as erroneous as they did before. The glibness of the BLM politburo, Nikole Hannah-Jones (the lead founder behind the intellectually bankrupt The 1619 Project), Bernie, the Biden crowd, the CRT demagogues, AOC and her Squad, and the big wheels of the Democratic Party can only put lipstick on a pig and cannot with a wave of the hand turn the porcine beast into Miss Universe. I don’t believe in shapeshifting. Do you?
Today is different, though. Whereas before, the nuttiness infected the fringes of society, only occasionally bursting forth to wreak havoc. Today, it’s everywhere and especially among the those who occupy the commanding heights of the culture. Why does big business from Major League Baseball to Coca-Cola to Delta Airlines to Disney risk alienating two-thirds of their customer base, unless they actually believe this bunk? There must be something more at work than fear of the race hustlers’ shakedown racket.
Rudi Dutschke, a German missionary of the 60’s New Left, pointed the way by espousing a “long march through the institutions”. He elaborated, “Revolution is a long complicated process in which people have to change.” He meant to shove aside and replace established civil society and government. But others realized that a root-and-branch approach wasn’t necessary, that today’s unkept radicals in blue jeans could be tomorrow’s tenured staff in tweed. Welcome to your kid’s nest of revolution, errr, college.
Rudi Dutschke
Simply put, the barbarians at the gates became the barbarians inside the gates. Lo and behold, the neo-socialism is dogma among the beautiful people residing in their super-zip code (Martha’s Vineyard, Chappaqua, NY, Atherton, Ca., Malibu, Ca., etc.), any place where hyper-wealth screens people from the consequences of their beliefs. Of course, part of the uniform for this new aristocracy is a degree from a legacy university, preferably Ivy League. They have all the outward signs of manners and outlook of a college pedigree, and the inward signs of proper breeding in fealty to the dogma. The Fortune 500 is no longer the Republican Party at work. It’s an alumni booster club for the neo-socialism of the campus.
The minions of this new privilege infiltrate beyond the boardroom and into all positions of power and influence. Since FDR made DC into the new Rome, and swelled its politico-cultural influence beyond the District and into the surrounding states of Maryland and Virginia, the neo-socialism has at its disposal the aggrandized power of the federal government. Any popular threat to its monopoly can be squashed under the banner of another German rhetorical import: streitbare Demokratie, or defensive democracy. It normally shows up as censorship. It’s the speech control in “hate” and “extremist” statutes and regulations in the European Union, UK, Austria, Germany, etc. You hear it out of the mouths of Pelosi, Schumer, Biden in “defending our democracy”, which is code for thought control by pasting contrary views with “misinformation”. Biden has attempted an institutionalization of the censorship by creating “misinformation” ministries in his administration, all stymied as of now.
Pres. Biden’s speech in Philadelphia on Sept. 1, 2022, branded “MAGA Republicans” dangerous “extremists”.
Streitbare demokratie seeks to freeze in amber the gains of the long march of neo-socialism through the institutions. The effects are physically observable in viral gender confusions among the young, uninhabitable downtowns, a plague of crime, radical indoctrination of the young, an ecotopia that forcibly reverts life back to medieval times, and a crumbling infrastructure that can’t deliver safe roads, sewers, water, or affordable and reliable electricity. Hillsides aflame, high taxes, inflation, and gargantuan government waste characterize life in this “democracy”. It’s like the decay of Rome in the 5th and 6th centuries after repeated barbarian conquests and misrule. Soon, much of the place is abandoned only to fall into rubble, to be later uncovered by the new field of 19th century archeology. Is that the fate of New York City, Baltimore, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New Orleans, et al?
A late 19th century photo of ancient ruins in Rome. Or could it be today’s Seattle or San Francisco?
The stench of watching it unfold in real time overpowers the senses. The knowledge of the occurrence overwhelms any enjoyment of watching a football game. Sorry.
RogerG
Sources:
* An account of the super-zip codes can be read here: “Super ZIPs: New map reveals who is part of the rich ‘isolated elite”, Deseret News, Nov. 18, 2013, at https://www.deseret.com/2013/11/18/20529811/super-zips-new-map-reveals-who-is-part-of-the-rich-isolated-elite#:~:text=In%20the%20Wall%20Street%20Journal%20and%20his%20book%2C,5%2010514%3A%20Chappaqua%2C%20N.Y.%20%28New%20York%20City%20area%29
* A rudimentary internet search of “streitbare Demokratie”, Rudi Dutschke, The Frankfurt School, the guiding lights of the School, Antonio Gramsci, will shed light on today’s neo-socialism.
You should know that I was a second-generation California native of 62 years who no longer lives in the state as of 2015. I am retired but had been disgruntled with the state for the previous couple of decades. The state is worn down, falling apart, and progressive utopias were, and still are, pursued at every turn. At least I got out before the blackouts.
Already, at the time, $400-$500 monthly electricity bills in the summertime heat of Bakersfield were financially strapping us. The high rates are a form of extortion to compel a resident into poorly-thought-out wind and solar schemes at a time when the powerful were beginning to kill off nuclear, natural gas, and other streams of reliable electricity. I fled a state with a current average of 25 cents per KWh to a place with 8 cents (national average: 15 cents). The state’s population is being fleeced for a blackout-riddled energy product, with rates running so high that depopulation of the Central Valley and desert regions is the unmentioned but logical consequence. What good is accomplished when you must swelter in the darkness?
Average electricity rates in 9/3/22. (Source: energysage.com)
The con is hidden behind the threat of “climate change”, which became the rhetorical substitute for the old “global warming”. CO2 is the go-to scapegoat, and it probably has a role. How much? Hard to say. Water vapor does to, but the sound of crickets resonates in media gabfests. People who claim to know don’t, and lack realistic scientific humility. They fail to admit that there remain huge gaps in our understanding of the dynamics of the atmosphere.
We do know that we live at a time when a plethora of global sensors – terrestrial, atmospheric, in space – produce a flood of data as never before. The problem isn’t the paucity of data. Gosh, we can see every weather system around the world. The problem lies in the processing of the visuals and numbers. What do they mean? Nearly everywhere across the airwaves and the net, ideology goes where scientific theory dare not tread. When they don’t know, they rely on their biases to hide the fact. Mediagenic mouthpieces declare that it must be man-caused, which leads the unthinking right into the wheelhouse of the progressive utopians: redesign the human being to fit into the utopians’ preferred lifestyle. We have left real scientific inquiry long ago. The results are played out in California with the mauling of the state in massive wildfires that are ignited by ideologically driven forestry practices and ideologically driven state agencies mandating and pressuring public utilities away from simple things like grid maintenance. And now, the regular blackouts.
Power lines in Siskiyou County, Ca., the same ones that would be blamed for the McKinney Fire. (9/4/22)
Have you heard about PG&E’s guilty plea in causing the deaths of 84 people in the 2018 Camp Fire? Poorly maintained power lines touched off the firestorm. But why so poorly maintained? PG&E may be guilty at some level, but so are the eco-driven mandarins in Sacramento and their henchmen in state agencies such as the PUC, one of the state’s utility regulatory agencies. The political inmates running the asylum in Sacramento in their infinite wisdom foisted on the utilities the “Renewables Portfolio Standard” in 2002, 13 years before my flight from the state. The state has been in a pell-mell rush to shoehorn its grid into “renewables”, essentially wind and solar, 60% of all sources by 2030, in a mere 8 years! More money spent on the utopia is less money to prevent sparks from igniting the poorly maintained hillsides. PG&E was in the dock, but where were the activists, agency heads, and politicians? They deserve a perp-walk too.
It’s amazing that this is done as mandates for roof-top solar has reduced incoming company revenue. The utilities are hit by the double whammy of less coming in and more going out. It’s surprising that more of the state hasn’t been charred, and much more CO2 convulsed into the atmosphere than from the state’s 800,000 internal combustion engines in the residents’ possession.
And to think that now they want everyone out of their dependable car and into a $60,000-$70,000 electric vehicle. Nothing like doubling down on stupid.
RogerG
Sources:
* “Cost of electricity in California”, updated 9/3/22, at https://www.energysage.com/local-data/electricity-cost/ca/
* “Wind Energy in California”, California Energy Commission, at https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/california-power-generation-and-power-sources/wind-energy-california#:~:text=Wind%20energy%2C%20an%20integral%20part%20of%20California%27s%20electricity,the%20south%20to%20Shasta%20County%20in%20the%20north.
* “RPS [Renewables Portfolio Standard] Program Overview”, Public Utilities Commission, at https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/RPS_Overview/#:~:text=California%27s%20Renewables%20Portfolio%20Standard%20%28RPS%29%20is%20one%20of,portfolio%20from%20eligible%20renewable%20energy%20resources%20by%202030
* “PG&E pleads guilty to 84 counts of manslaughter in devastating Camp Fire”, NBC News, June 16, 2022, at https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/pg-e-pleads-guilty-84-counts-manslaughter-devastating-camp-fire-n1231256
President Biden during his speech on Thursday, 8/1/22, in Philadelphia.
Biden’s speech of last Thursday in Philadelphia was red meat for a Red base. Breaking it apart, “red meat” is rhetoric “that is forceful and poignant, as will excite or inflame their supporters”, and “Red” to characterize a political faction isn’t to be confused with the red/blue designations on US political maps. “Red” is drawn from the traditional color assigned to adherents of the socialist movement. It’s historical and dates back to the 19th century Socialist International with its red flag and workers-of-the-world-unite anthem, of which Karl Marx was the titular figure. Just to be clear.
The Democratic Party of today is the American manifestation of the many socialist parties around the world. The heart of the party’s most fervent members lies in the broader socialist movement. Notwithstanding the leaders’ proforma denials, the party’s political program meshes quite nicely with the socialist aim of greater government control of the economy and life, the same advocacy found in the Labor Party of the UK or any of the other European socialist parties. There’s a reason why Bernie, the Senate’s self-described socialist, caucuses with the Democrats. Birds of a feather. Don’t be fooled by the brush-off.
It was certainly fitting that the camera view of Biden at the lectern had a background bathed in red. From it, Biden spewed inflammatory words that had little place in rational discourse. This isn’t the tone of your local crisis counselor. It was a red speech for a Red cause.
I delayed my commentary till I could hear the speech in total and unfiltered. Bluntly put, it was shocking. Its only conceivable purpose was to rev up the base to forestall a long-anticipated Republican wave in November. It was filled with raw appeals to emotion, stoking fears, incoherent, and riddled with hypocrisy. It was the kind of stemwinder used to get the Parisian mob to storm the Bastille. And if you know anything about the Bastille events on July 14, 1789, you’ll know that the place only imprisoned a few, and they were the most heinous miscreants (the Marque de Sade among them). After the surrender, the guards were butchered, their heads cut off and mounted on pikes and paraded around Paris. Biden lifted a page from the playbook of the hate-filled rabble-rouser Paul Marat; I hope without the detached heads.
Contemporaneous illustration of the Bastille guards with their heads on pikes after their surrender on July 14, 1789.
To kindle his partisans, he stood behind the trappings of the presidential office to deliver language more appropriate for a fire-breathing sermon. One ploy was the abundant use of the phrase “MAGA Republicans”. Mao wannabes need a neat word or phrase to encapsulate the “enemy”, a target, to roll up the opposition. Marx invented “capitalist” as a focal point of opprobrium, Stalin had his kulaks, and for Biden, his “MAGA Republicans”. Soon, afterwards, it was all over the airwaves as if the party’s media sycophants got the robo chain text.
Do you think that he limited his gaze to the MAGA subspecies of Republican? Not on your life. The speech’s language was fungible enough to tar any Republican, even the ones that Trump hates, if they continually stand athwart the political thrusts of his party’s radicalized base. Just lather them with “intimidated”, another gambit in the speech.
Rhetorical ground was laid to attack all of them since being pro-life and following the Apostle Paul on marriage were lumped together with January 6 “insurrectionists”. The constant reference to “going backwards” is the well-worn refrain of all revolutionaries. Progress is synonymous with revolution and neither has any room for the venerable and time-tested, no matter the allusion to the Constitution and rule of law. Both were cynically and repeatedly violated by this man bathed in red light.
I was waiting for the tag on Republicans as defenders of slavery (Biden golden oldie: “put you all back in chains”) and Jim Crow, completely oblivious to the fact that it was the Democratic Party that rammed through the secessionitis defense of slavery of the Civil War and constructed Jim Crow in the aftermath. These historical Democrat actions came about as reactions to the rise of the Republican Party. Biden and Democrats, get your facts straight!
In essence, Biden condemned the “MAGA Republicans” as subversives to our civil order under the banality of a “threat to our democracy”, leaving unsaid the simple fact that we don’t have a “democracy”. It’s a constitutional republic, something a bit more sophisticated than a simpleton’s 50%-plus-1 standard of mail-in ballots to decide public issues. The Constitution and the rule of law belts our public officials in all kinds of restraints in spite of Gallup.
Really, the threat that Biden had in mind wasn’t the clearly observable 574 riots, $2 billion in damage, 2,000 police casualties, and anywhere from 17 to 35 killed as a consequence of the 2020 Antifa/BLM summer of riots. No, for Biden, it was January 6 with the only death accruing to a Trump supporter. Sorry, Biden, no men in blue died in it.
The bombast left unsaid the many ways that he was soiling the Constitution and rule of law. No separation of powers for Biden with the lawmaking authority in a Congress and a president limited to executing the laws. In 2021, he tried to extend an eviction moratorium although simultaneously recognizing its illegality. He knew that he was violating the Constitution, which was later confirmed by a Supreme Court decision (Alabama Association of Realtors, et al v. Dept. of Health and Human Services, et al, Aug. 26, 2021). Most recently, he invented student loan forgiveness out of thin air in direct contradiction to the previously announced position in June of his fellow-traveler, Speaker Pelosi.
It’s not just his cutting loose from the Article II restraints which limits him to carrying out laws made in Article I (Congress). He even ignores his Constitutional duty to perform the carrying out. Item #1: immigration law. The US code is chock full of provisions that define law-abiding and non-law-abiding immigration. Word has spread like wildfire in the troubled regions of the world that the border is such an open sieve that localities east and south have been emptied of their residents to join caravans in the long trek to a border manned by a Border Patrol that has been morphed into a Welcome Wagon. After a greeting by the Border Patrol, the illegal crossers are awarded plane travel to a destination of their choice.
Caravan of immigrants approaching the US southern border in 2021.
Don’t forget, these aren’t refugees from Cuba or Middle Eastern jihadist goons. Biden, in effect, has redefined refugee in such a way as to declare 8 US Code Section 12 (Immigration and Nationality) null and void under the guise of “prosecutorial discretion”. That’s right, “discretion” is stretched to cover the nearly blanket non-enforcement of 8 US Code Section 12 by imperial presidential dictat. Hardly can Biden wrap himself in the Constitution and rule of law when his actions make him eligible for impeachment. The word is projection: hiding your intentions behind false accusations of your opponents doing what you have done.
A pattern of Democrat campaigning is evident: don’t tack to the middle, but gin-up your party’s normally uninterested, ill-informed, and lackadaisical voter base to counter the enthusiasm of the other side. It worked for Obama in 2012, Pelosi and Schumer in 2018, and Biden in 2020. The heart of the strategy is to embrace the Left, not run from it. Use absurdities, gross hyperbole, and illusory threats to get your people to the polls. For 2022, it is to make the campaign a referendum on Trump and not on the party in power with much to answer for. And all of this bombast was present in Biden’s speech.
The speech was an insult to the office of the presidency. Fear of the electorate punishing your party at the polls is no excuse for turning Independence Hall into a Nuremburg Rally. People quite rightly have an aversion to escalating food and fuel prices, shortages, crime surges, their cities becoming open sewers, their children suffocating behind filthy masks, their schools being turned into woke reeducation camps, blackouts, greenie fanaticism, the socialism – i.e., the general Democratic Party program and its consequences. Biden would profit from Clinton’s dose of sobriety after the Republican blowout in the 1994 midterms (the R’s gained 54 House seats): “The era of big government is over.” Instead, Biden gave us red meat for his Red base.
Doubling down on stupid may work if it gets Biden’s Red-oriented base to show up. Sad, but true.
RogerG
Sources:
* Numbers of casualties and damage attributed to the 2020 summer riots are curiously hard to come by. They can be found if a person expands the search beyond Wikipedia, the CNN/MSNBC nexus, and legacy media. Other than vague generalities, specifics are nowhere to be found in those venues. Here’s a list of some sources with specifics:
“More Than 2,000 Officers Injured in Summer’s Protests and Riots”, Police Magazine, Dec. 3, 2020, at https://www.policemag.com/585160/more-than-2-000-officers-injured-in-summers-protests-and-riots
“Riot deaths ignored by major networks; watchdog finds 99.3% of protest coverage focused elsewhere”, Washington Times, June 4, 2020, at https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jun/4/riot-deaths-ignored-by-major-networks-watchdog-fin/
“2020 BLM/Antifa Riot Deaths”, National Conservative, at https://national-conservative.com/extremist-files/2020-blm-antifa-deaths/
“Police chief association releases number of officers injured during violent riots”, Fox News, Dec. 1, 2020, at https://www.foxnews.com/us/police-chief-officers-injured-riots?fbclid=IwAR0wFsq7Ndyhr7HyBQQnZ10Gn4WI_eJz4gH67vbg5ehPJ8u6WBGCKgF80H8
“RIOTS BY THE NUMBERS: POLICE CASUALTIES, PEOPLE KILLED DURING ‘PEACEFUL PROTESTS’”, Louder with Crowder, July 31, 2020, at https://www.louderwithcrowder.com/riots-by-the-numbers-police-casualties-people-killed-during-peaceful-protests
Parents protest the teaching of Critical Race Theory during a Placentia Yorba Linda School Board meeting in Yorba Linda, Calif., November 16, 2021. (Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
Our public and many private schools are a mess, but the vast majority of the blame shouldn’t be directed at the teachers. The onus should be shouldered by an intellectually bankrupted overclass that sits atop a sprawling education industry from coast to coast, much like the Janissaries of the old Ottoman Empire or the self-indulgent and self-serving aristocracy in 18th-century Versailles. Unexamined and unaware, its members reside in a world apart from the rest of society. It’s an isolated existence with its own values and assumptions about the workings of the world. Born of 19th century progressivism and its administrative state, their zeal for “reform” has bred a missionary class of consultants, hyped in the latest fads of thought driven by a near uniform set of ideological sympathies. Duly papered in now-devalued credentials and degrees, they descend upon the schools and make a real hash of things.
Parents might be waking up. Zooming to their children during the pandemic by means of the family computer, right in front of them, was the chic radicalism from a world apart where lefty radicalism is assumed to be a virtue. The veil of secrecy was blown off. The fashionable neo-Marxist theory of systemic group oppression and guilt flashed before their eyes. Racism was mangled into a public good as a means to fight purely hypothetical but politically useful villains. They saw how adolescent feelings of gender confusion became the rigid theory of transgender ideology. Now, their daughters are no longer safe in the bathroom or locker room.
Other fancies were exposed such as the religion of environmentalism, a mystical faith masquerading as a not-to-be-challenged scientific fact. The crooked timber of humanity was somehow, magically straightened depending on your self-professed identity. Bankers bad, workers always and forever angelic. Whenever a woman or racial, sexual, or ethnic minority graces the page, it’s always in the context of exploitation. Tradition is lambasted and morality is fashioned to serve the interests of the latest chic reform. America is evil and in need of a revolution. That’s what they’re attempting to groom: little revolutionaries.
As a teacher in the public schools for almost 30 years, I’ve witnessed it firsthand. Teachers are forced through “professional growth” mandates to be constantly exposed to the latest in stylish radicalism emanating from the academic bubble. School districts regularly take their teachers away from their students for multiple days of the school year – sometimes called “inservice days” – to get steady doses of the latest in leftist dogma. Students lose a few days of learning so their teachers can be indoctrinated. The result is almost always a few steps backward for both the students and teachers.
Teacher training
To boot, many of the presenters don’t know the radical philosophical roots of what they’re presenting. It says volumes about the academic preparation and forethought of those pretending to be Zeus on Mt. Olympus. Two incidents stand out in my long career. In one, a richly paid consultant was brought in to instruct us on his favorite pedological pet, “cooperative learning”. Midway through the presentation I got the drift of where this was heading. I politely asked him if the basis for his approach was “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” If you’re wondering, it’s straight out of Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto”. He said, “Yes”, apparently unaware, or maybe quite aware, of his idea’s ideological parentage. Shortly after that, I quietly slipped away to my classroom to grade papers and prepare instruction for the week, a much better use of the time.
Another example came about as a result of administrative pressure to attend a paid training session on a Saturday, which I was reluctantly to do for certain reasons. Well, this session just so happened to be founded on the theory of multiple intelligences, a highly contestable notion for which the presenter was unfamiliar with the debate. Common sense tells us that kids can have excellences in different skill and knowledge areas. But these aren’t “intelligences”. They are talents. In contrast, intelligence is a unique measure of cognitive ability that is innate to a person for various biological and social reasons. The interplay of the two is open to much debate.
All of this is glossed over to get to the hidden purpose of this questionable idea: everyone gets a trophy, which is born of Marx’s obsession with equality of result. For people following in the footsteps of Karl Marx, a society of goodness and light can only be achieved if everyone is equal in everything from intelligence to possessions, just institutionally redefine intelligence in a multitude of ways for instance. Without saying it, but following the logic, unequal performances among students in the form of grades or scores is automatically and morally suspect. So, classrooms and instruction must be refashioned to make them more equal. How? Design and implement multifarious instructional approaches to access the hard to determine but assumed to be numerous “intelligences” in the classroom. If the task is too cumbersome or inequalities persist, the burden is on the teacher to make things equal. Marx blames the social system, the educrats blame classroom teaching, i.e., the teacher. Thus, the schools engage in the perpetual search to weed out systemic oppression in the form of inequalities through incessant “training”. No time here for placing responsibility on the student or home life.
The Marxian equality of result permeates everywhere in the school. Merit – a sense of deserving through hard work – is disparaged and replaced with racial, gender, and sexual orientational reparatory contrivances in discipline, instruction, management, and grading (or no grades). As a teacher scrambles to devise an ever-increasing number of pedagogies for an ever-increasing number of “intelligences” in the classroom, if hell busts loose, punishment is made to adhere to the god of equality of result like everything else. If someone tallies the expulsions and discovers a “protected-class” excess beyond its demographic proportion, the school is turned upside down by conforming to the newest euphemism to downgrade the effectiveness of a school: restorative justice. Watch the ratio of non-teachers to teachers explode. The biggest building in the school will no longer be the one for Language Arts but the sprawling one housing the army of functionaries of the social services for the multitude of interventions required to create the illusion of identity-group equality.
If you think it’s such a great idea, this thing called “restorative justice”, then move to LA, SF, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Chicago, New York City, or any place suffering under permissive Soros-backed DA’s. They’re all into “restorative justice” and all that goes with it. You’ve just endorsed the transplanting of the chaos of San Francisco streets to your kids’ classrooms.
Nothing escapes the Marxist obsession with equality of result. It’s embedded in your teacher’s training in college, and it’s constantly dragged before staffs every school year by an army of consultants. It’s a very lucrative flim-flam as CRT evangelists like Ibram X. Kendi can attest. He got $20,000 from Fairfax County taxpayers for a 45-minute virtual training video for the Virginia county’s public schools. His fellow grifter, Robin DeAngelo, author of “White Fragility”, rakes in $14,000 per event earning a lusty $700,000 a year. It’s a sweet gig if you can get it. (See the column below by the American Enterprise Institute’s Frederick M. Hess.)
What do they really have to offer? Nothing good, and everything deeply troublesome. If you think that statue-toppling or joining the ranks of the militant wings of the Democratic Party is not an appropriate career path for your children, it is incumbent on parents to help bring to heel this wayward mass of detached educrats by electing state and local public officials who’ll clean house at the governing boards and make our colleges accountable for the undermining of our way of life.
There, we have our task.
RogerG
Sources:
* “Defund the Teacher-Trainers”, Frederick M. Hess, Aug. 11, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/08/29/defund-the-teacher-trainers/?fbclid=IwAR10uTGkoMNTRebq74lRN6aC2638Z8-Mhw_rhuuJpzbnVSysv8ciOB6LHHg
Pres. Biden signs the Green New Deal LIte, also grotesquely misnamed as the Inflation Reduction Act.
“There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers but defeat is an orphan.” It was the response of President Kennedy to NBC reporter Sander Vanocor at a press conference on April 21, 1961 as his way of taking responsibility for the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation. Where did JFK get it? The line of descent can be traced to the movie “The Desert Fox” and before that to Count Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s Foreign Minister.
Why mention it? It could apply to popular manias and their failures. A fashionable idea is embedded in the imagination of a sizeable segment of the population, i.e., fathers, and once it falls out of fashion due to its real-world effects, its parentage is forgotten, i.e., an orphan. It disappears into deep space.
The paramount craze of today is “going green”. It is both science and anti-science: a blending of real science – but without cost/benefit modification – and many pop-culture phobias. They are sourced in ideological, theological, and secular-utopian notions. We are experiencing the frenzies in everything from forest management, food production, energy renewables, zero-carbon, and the eco-iconic electric vehicle. We are quickly learning unfortunately that, contra to a one-with-nature ecotopia, the reality is obsolete water projects, massive fire storms, an unreliable grid producing rolling blackouts, decaying energy infrastructure, skyrocketing energy prices, outrageously expensive grid-dependent and unreliable personal transportation, and a smaller and more costly food supply. If you haven’t noticed, some of this “future” is playing out in Sri Lanka.
Protesters in Sri Lanka in July 2022 force the resignation of the country’s president after the onset of an economic collapse due to the adoption of many green policies such as bans on the use of many ag chemicals.
In many conversations going back decades, I’ve heard people express the most fanciful beliefs. Do you remember the cliché of those fleets of oil tankers anchored of the coast during the oil embargos of the 1970’s supposedly as part of the oil companies’ conspiracy to jack up fuel prices? It’s baaaack! Or how about the Non-GMO, Whole Foods fever of today? Or the fanatical and popular in elite circles preservationist forestry policies that produced vast landscapes of dead trees in a drought-prone, dry-summer climate, just waiting for the poorly maintained electrical grid or dry lightning to spark a conflagration? Or the popular war on herbicides, pesticides, and synthetic fertilizers that promises famine and economic and social collapse (once again, Sri Lanka)? Or the pricey but government-preferred electric vehicle running low on juice that’ll ensure that you can’t get out of the path of a hurricane because of the blackout from category-five winds and a monstrous sea surge? Or the huge forests of windmill towers and seas of solar panels scarring the landscape that can’t keep the lights on? “Going green” is a rediscovery of life in the Middle Ages. It’s a future of going backwards.
The Dark Ages looms as we fancy a food supply without Safeway – or Kroger, Albertsons, Walmart, General Mills, the Great Plains ocean of grain, and meat packing plants, etc. Anything produced on an industrial scale whether it be lettuce, eggs, bacon, burgers, fryers, Minute Rice, or bread is made suspect. But anything “free range” means less of it and more expensive. Ditto for Non-GMO. The world cannot be fed with farmer’s markets and Jeff Bezos’s boutique Whole Foods. The eco-stuff rots which limit its range of availability. It may taste better and be marginally healthier, but what difference does that make if you can’t get it, or is priced out of the family budget? How are barren cupboards healthier?
Do you think that the equivalent of victory gardens will make a dent? Farmers markets would collapse and quickly run out of product if the throngs who filled the parking lots of Walmart flocked to the stalls and easy-ups on a few acres off I-95. Some actually think that we ought to live on what we personally grow. To do that, everyone must have the equivalent of “40 acres and a mule”, er, tractor (Civil War Order No. 15, Gen. Wm. T. Sherman). But what eco-nut would tolerate the invasion of 330 million people scattered over their wilderness hiking paths? They’re already up in arms about people choosing to live in the land of bears and chipmunks. They even have their own arcane vocabulary for it: Wild Urban Interface (WUI). In other words, places where you oughtn’t be if they get their way. Of course, the irony is that all places at one time or another were WUI’s.
Anyway, who could afford the real estate? Let’s face it, these are the fancies of a hyper-wealthy society with a large cohort of people who can afford to live expensively. Coincidentally, small family size tracks the lifestyle: the fewer disruptive mouths to feed in the family unit, the easier it is to indulge in eccentric, pricey, and ideologically laced lifestyle choices. Speaking of fewer mouths, guess the demographic with one of the lowest fertilities. Non-Hispanic whites dredge near the bottom of all groups at 1.64 children per woman (2018). Non-Hispanic whites in the District of Columbia are even less productive at 1.012, demographic suicide levels. This element – government workers, white collar and overwhelmingly college educated – has much in common with the residents of college communities, bi-coastal exclusive developments, Silicon Valley, and other areas of like complexion. Maybe this is the reason for their enthusiasm for massive immigration, legal or illegal, since they can’t rely on their own organically produced offspring to provide the medical supports and entitlement contributions to keep them comfortable in the autumn of their lives.
So, they grow old and are free to wallow in the hang-ups of their youth. Prominent among them is the “nuclear” bogeyman. A steady diet of movies (“Them”, Godzilla, The China Syndrome, et al) and classroom atomic bomb drills in their youth nurtured nightmares of looming apocalyptic dooms. The boomers and X’ers transmitted the aversion to their sparse offspring. A nearly permanent political base against nuclear power has arrived.
“Nuclear” was a monster like Godzilla, but their depiction of it is in open conflict with the worship of the newest deity in an increasingly secular age, Gaia. Combine the fear with the climate-change hype and we have only the latest in a long line of self-negating philosophies. Don’t like nuclear power because characters played by Jack Lemmon, Jane Fonda, and Michael Douglas said so in a movie (The China Syndrome)? Well, we still can’t have it even if it’s carbon-free and safe and will help address all manner of Chicken Little catastrophes that’ll befall mankind like category ten hurricanes and the oceans lapping onto the Obamas’ estate on Martha’s Vineyard, and further reinforced in another movie (An Inconvenient Truth) produced by the politician-Moses of our time, Al Gore, and followed by a steady stream of more (The Day After Tomorrow, etc.).
So, the message is no abundant and affordable energy, and we must accept less and live with more aggravation and disruption in our lives. We are told that we can’t have fossil fuels, which is plentiful in our own backyard. Thoughts of R & D in carbon capture are verboten, still born in the crib. And don’t dare build those efficient, safe, cost-effective Small Modular Reactors (SMR’s) for carbon-free and plentiful electricity. Instead, it’s small in everything from calorie intake to living space to appliances to travel distances.
Nowhere to charge the Tesla?
With the political assault on more land for housing, we’ll be crammed into more Hell’s Kitchens, infected with crime due to DA’s who are committed to ending incarceration, infested with pandemic-level contagions, and public transportation where the filth, threats, and smells of the outside envelop you on the inside. Is this where Pete Buttigieg plans to bike to work?
Going green isn’t a better world. If we’re not careful, the DNC plans to give it to us. We may wake up one morning with the urge to escape the workers’ paradise, but the all-electric Chevy Bolt is dead because of the regular blackout from a grid connected to overburdened windmills and solar panels. Anyway, where are you going to go? The roads are unpassable because of striking road workers and less of the infrastructure money going to asphalt and more to expanding the Diversity/Equity/Inclusion Department. You’ll have to invest in a Sharpie and carboard to beg your way to the expanding homeless camps on the outskirts adjacent to the lavish, walled, and secure estates of the DNC donor class.
Now, all of this assumes that you still have a job in a country governed by the fairy tale principles of Modern Monetary Theory. And if you did, would it make any difference in the chronic inflation from the fire-hosing of the country in paper money? What began as a scheme with many fathers will soon be orphaned. The parentage relegated to the misty past.
RogerG
Sources:
* “Fertility Rates In The United States By Ethnicity”, World Atlas, at https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/fertility-rates-in-the-united-states-by-ethnicity.html
Sound towers collapsing in scenes of aimless rage at Woodstock ‘99.
Look around you today and you’ll see all the signs of existential social malfunction. Urban areas are riven with crime, filth, and homelessness. Grids are dysfunctional operating more as fire starters and plagued by blackouts. Energy prices are through the roof. Housing is unaffordable. Massive government overspending abounds in pursuit of utopian unicorns. The language is bastardized by an ideology that seeks to repeal the divine, or evolutionary, plan for the two sexes, making a mockery of anything designated boy/girl. Essential racism in the form of “equity” and doctrines of essential oppression in the rhetorical incantations of “systemic” and “critical theory” are everywhere in the media and schools, infecting young minds as early as kindergarten. The sciences are not immune which raises serious questions about the future efficacy of our medical institutions (see Heather McDonald’s piece below). That’s just for starters.
Where does this lead? Watch Netflix’s “Trainwreck: Woodstock ‘99” for a glimpse into our future (see the trailer below). After showing the consequences of the loss of standards and self-restraint, the flick tries to detour what you are viewing into a condemnation of machismo – or the male patriarchy – and greed and endorsement of wokeness and Me Too. Still, the images are there, just strip away the juvenile punditry. Go ahead, watch it.
The trailer:
Woodstock ’99 was a classic attempt to recreate Woodstock ’69 after 30 years of glamorizing that first edition. Some of the organizers and workers at ’99 were patrons of ’69 and describe it as a harmonious and tranquil love-in. It wasn’t. Many of the screw-ups at ’99 was present at ’69. Shortages of food and sanitation, rampant drug use, lack of crowd control, event personnel exchanging privileges for drugs, and the rain and mud that exacerbated the sanitation problems. The only thing missing was the riot of ’99 (see below for an abreviated account of ’69).
Fast forward to ’99. Michael Lange, the organizer of ’69, tried to resuscitate Woodstock with an eye to making money – Surprise! – which ’69 did not. The mellow rock of the Yardbirds was replaced with headliners such as the edgy, high-energy heavy metal of Limp Bizskit, Korn, Kid Rock, and Red Hot Chili Peppers. Drugs and nudity in the crowd and on stage were commonplace. One cannot think of a clearer signal of the loss of self-restraint and norms of decency. The visual cues of forbearance were absent.
Red Hot Chili Peppers on stage at Woodstock ‘99.
More troubling is the fact that the crowd that you get is a product of the musical acts that perform. The fan of Limp Bizkit and the Red Hot Chili Peppers is not the fan of Joan Baez and Blood, Sweat, and Tears. An important element of rock by the end of the millennium had slid off into atavistic rage with a fanbase to match – emblematic in the name of the popular group at the time, Rage Against the Machine. Fans were overwhelmingly male, of high physicality, with a cage-fighting personality.
The festival by the third day reminded me of the worst of a Daytona Spring Break. Violence and rampant public fornication, including sexual assault, frequently go together and should not be a surprise in an intoxicated, drug-addled assemblage of 300,000 teens and early twenty-somethings. Add the music and the type of fan that it attracts and the tinder for chaos is present. The blame cannot be solely placed at the feet of greedy vendors. For this crowd, we must add “riot hard” to “party hard”.
When standards of decency and the normal guideposts and expectations of life are erased, life becomes a free-for-all. We are experiencing this happenstance across the board. A walk through downtown San Francisco is a health hazard, as it is in most of our urban centers. One can no longer be sure that the girls’ locker room and bathroom will be filled with only girls of the expected chromosomal makeup, essentially ending girls’ sports. A toxic racial favoritism has been magically turned into a public good. Flights of fancy replace sober deliberation in policy debates when inflation is said to be cured by more inflation. Military readiness is said to be amazingly advanced by racial witch hunts in the ranks, self-flagellation, and identity politics from the Pentagon to West Point to the barracks. We are a mess like those fans at Woodstock ’69 and ’99.
Has there ever been a superpower when at the height of power and influence, it commits suicide? The gun went to the temple with little advanced warning. It was sudden, nearly overnight, taking less than two years. Woodstock ’99 is a warning.
RogerG
Sources:
* “The Corruption of Medicine”, Heather McDonald, City Journal, Summer 2022, at https://www.city-journal.org/the-corruption-of-medicine?wallit_nosession=1
* “The Messed Up Things That Happened In Woodstock 1969”, Rock Pasta, at https://rockpasta.com/the-messed-up-things-that-happened-in-woodstock-1969/
We are in an age of personality cults. Maybe we always have been to one extent or another. Regardless, we are in one, big time.
The decline in religiosity could be a partial explanation for people who need something to look up to after they have relegated heaven to myth. It’s easier to replace God with a human being. It’s evident across the political spectrum. The Left has theirs in the many academic offshoots of Karl Marx. On the Right, icons have arisen in the person of people from Jordan Peterson to Donald Trump. They may be correct in much that they say, but being human, they occasionally step on a rake. Then, the followers parrot the mistake while jettisoning their brain, the same brain that God gave them, that they don’t recognize that it was God who gave it to them.
Today’s brain is ill-informed of history. The schools have failed. We study history for what it says about human nature. And, yes, there is such a thing as human nature. Many won’t recognize the errors of the present because they are unaware that we’ve committed the blunders many times before. For instance, some of what today’s Right seems to be saying about the Ukraine War is an imitation of the rhetoric of the 60’s radical Left. Jean Kirkpatrick, a longtime Democrat and a defector from the looming socialistic, neo-Marxist takeover of her party, spoke to the 1984 Republican Convention nominating Ronald Reagan for a second term (see below). Her speech was a bold rejection of the “San Francisco Democrats” (Sound familiar?) and the Left’s “blame America First”.
Today, you’ll hear echoes of the same condemnable language of the 60’s radical Left coming from the likes of Donald Trump, Jordan Peterson, and their media apologists.
Trump introduced the Left’s oratory to the Right when he morphed the Left’s “blame America First” into “American First”. His 2015-2016 bombast against the Bushes led to a harangue about “endless wars”, i.e., the War on Terror, almost identical to the Left’s complaint about the Vietnam War. Trump made the chant of “America First” and its cousin “MAGA” into a reflex for isolationism, something ever-present in the GOP going back to 1940 and Lindbergh’s America First. Don’t’ forget, implicit in “Make America Great Again” is the claim that we aren’t great, which for the Right is due to our decadence. For the Left, we are censured as “exploiters”. As decadent or “exploiters”, the Right has made common cause with Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda.
Seemingly taking their cue from Trump in his odd admiration for Putin, some on the Right chide our support for Ukraine. The culture war is used as the excuse to criticize support for Ukraine. Tucker Carlson is scornful of the Zelenskyy government for its alleged autocratic tendencies; Laura Ingraham complains of our aid lost in purported Ukrainian corruption; and Jordan Peterson provides an alibi for Putin’s invasion as Putin fending of western decadence, a decadence resplendent in transgenderism. He comes close to aligning with Putin and when confronted backs off. The quote that got him into trouble was as follows:
“The culture war is now truly part of why we have a war [in Ukraine]. It is certainly the case that we do not therefore have all the moral high ground…. In fact, how much of it we have at all is something rightly subject to the most serious debate.”
In my view, transgenderism is a civilizational catastrophe, but to mingle it with Ukraine is sophistry. That puts Putin as a defender of goodness and light. If so, where does that put the CCP’s Xi? After all, Xi is leading a campaign to stop the feminization of men. Have you seen those PLA recruitment ads? They’re nothing like those gushing rainbow LGBTQ+ ads by our Marine Corps. Carlson, Ingraham, and Peterson would find themselves boxed into the corner of opposing US support for Taiwan against a Red Chinese invasion just to remain consistent. What kind of world would we have if our decadence or any other domestic policy failing is a straitjacket on our ability to stop this generation’s fascist and communist aggressors? Look to history for the answer.
Jean Kirkpatrick in 1984 outlines the stakes of a Trump/Carlson/Ingraham/Peterson foreign policy. It’s the same one advanced by the “San Francisco Democrats”. If you have 21 minutes, please listen to her riveting speech. It’s the antidote to the bile in this new era of personality cults.
Republicans are bedeviled by the spawn of Trump and Democrats are enthralled by neo-Marxism in their combination of rank socialism and malignant identity pandering. While Democrats engage in a headlong rush into college-campus extremism, many Republicans seem intent on adopting the philosophy of Smoot-Hawley, ignoring Adam Smith’s lessons on the inherent foolishness of politicians managing trade or the general economy, shunting Hayek’s knowledge problem to the corner, and an emulation of Soviet Gosplan (central planning) only with them in the catbird seat. As a Republican in the Buckley-Reagan tradition, it’s galling. Trump is responsible for unloading this hash of blustery claptrap on the sole remaining party that should know better.
The steamy love affair with government by some of today’s Republicans shouldn’t catch anyone by surprise. Every politician loves to bring home the bacon, so politics can make hypocrites of us all. Yet, this is different. An orthodoxy developed around Trump’s buffoonery. Suddenly, Republicans and others on the Right started walking around proclaiming the evils of the free market.
It’s not surprising that Trump should be their spiritual leader. Here’s a man who made fame and fortune in real estate, the economic sector most debased by politics and government at every level. Government can help you make millions, indeed billions. Government is a partner for a big developer who needs local potentates to eliminate competitors, get approvals, and steamroll recalcitrant homeowners. Trump happened to have a career in an industry that found government not necessarily an obstacle but just another factor of production. The transition from Big Government Developer to Big Government Republican is easy in that matrix. Add a little 60’s Queens street tuff to the public persona and you too can have people walk over broken glass to attend your rallies.
The Republican slide into incoherence came to the fore at the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s American Economic Forum on July 29. Billed as the antidote to Davos’s left-leaning World Economic Forum, it interestingly emulated Davos. Both confabs provided ample grist for government control of the economy. The only difference is the targeted beneficiaries.
A defensible role for government as referee against brute force and monopoly in the market is one thing. It’s quite another to play Karl Marx in distorting economic activity to the advantage of one class. For Rick Santorum, it’s blue-collar workers – not much different from Marx’s Cinderella class of the proletariat. Subsidies, the tax code, and regulatory powers should be geared to cementing the working class to the GOP in Santorum’s grand design – admirable as a political goal, but lousy economic advice. Did it ever grace his mind that blue-collar workers need blue-collar industries? And blue-collar industries need investment, i.e., capital, i.e., Wall Street. The economy is a synergistic whole. The only answer from Santorum and company is to grease the skids for manufacturing, mindless of the effect on the rest of the economic web.
Rick Santorum
It doesn’t work. Thomas Sowell’s famous dictum cannot be repealed: “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” The reality is that some manufacturers get favored treatment over others. Some get the resources that are sucked away from others.
And what of those labor unions who turned themselves into the false champions of those blue collars? Remember, the same unions that drove two of the big three automakers into the arms of a government bailout in 2008-9 are manifestations of the one currently aggravating the supply-chain crisis at west coast ports, the featherbedding International Longshoreman and Warehouse Union. Anchored cargo ships are visible over the horizon. A blue-collar organization meant to benefit blue-collars does so at the expense of every other facet of economic life, and other workers. Government has a congenital habit of only turning its gaze to the squeaky wheel and to heck with the other three. Try driving a car with three flat tires. Trade-offs anyone, aggravated by government winner-picking?
How do tariffs fit into Santorum’s quest for the blue-collar vote? Good question, but another participant at the talkfest, Trump’s trade czar Robert Lighthizer, is a fanboy of them. He is a practitioner of economic snake oil, just like his patron, Donald J. Trump. With “balanced trade” as code for tariffs, he proclaimed that they wrought “astonishing results”. Really? I hear “post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy” (two events happening chronologically with the earliest one mistakenly assumed to be the cause) in the bombast. So many reforms were swirling around in 2017-2018, thanks to a Republican Congress, to overwhelm the impact of the tariff silliness.
Robert Lighthizer
Thus, attributing the so-called “Trump economy”, pre-COVID, to the orange man’s tariffs is demagogic self-puffery. Take the “Trump” tax cuts. They were really the Paul Ryan/Republican-caucus tax cuts, a distillation of ideas running around Republican policy circles since at least the 1990’s. Trump just happened to be in office to put his signature to something that was mostly the work of others. The business tax reductions were testosterone for economic muscle growth. And it showed according to AEI’s James Pethokoukis. Let’s just call the “Trump” tax cuts what they really were: the “Paul Ryan/Republican” tax cuts.
Oftentimes, cutting regulations can act like tax cuts. Remember the Congressional Review Act (CRA) of 1996? It codified a Congressional veto power over the administrative state’s rule-making juggernaut. Keep in mind that the Democrats love the administrative state going back to Woodrow Wilson so don’t expect them to exploit the power. Thus, Congress’s successful use of the CRA is dependent on the vagaries of presidential elections. A repeal requires a president’s signature like any bill. From 1996 to 2001, a repeal succeeded only once when a Republican, George W. Bush, was in the Oval Office. We’d have to wait another 16 years for a Republican-controlled Congress to remind itself of its power. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell in 2017 jumped at the chance and sent to Trump’s desk 14 veto resolutions bringing to heel the federal eco-agencies, FCC, Department of Labor, SEC, the Ed Department, etc., of our community-organizer-in-chief, Barack Obama. Trump simply put his signature to a political impetus that began elsewhere by other people.
For Lighthizer to bully his way to the podium at the American Economic Forum to take credit brings braggadocio to new heights, like his mentor, the prince of Mar-a-Lago.
The tax cuts, reining-in the pit bulls of the Left’s administrative state, and unleashing American energy production have long been Republican talking points and planks in the party platform, and not the lab creatures of Trump, Robert Lighthizer, or Peter Navarro (by the way, a former SoCal Dem no-growther). The GOP has long been a booster of opening up ANWAR, fracking, horizontal drilling, pipelines, refineries, offshore platforms, things that would incite conniptions in Silicon Valley lunchrooms. Trump just happened to be the sympathetic warm body to not stand in the way of affordable energy.
As for Trump’s beloved tariffs, they are sand tossed into the economy’s gears. They are a drag since tariffs are taxes. Surprise! Impose them and you just increased the burden on consumers and businesses. The Trump 25% tariff on imported steel slabs is a case in point. American steel producers remanufacture these slabs into sheet metal for fenders and appliance housings among other American-made desirables. Well, guess what? Since March 2020, the price of steel ballooned by 215%. While Biden’s eco-craziness and socialism has a role, Trump’s contribution to our current travails is his mindless worship at the altar of “balanced trade”, i.e., tariffs. If business tax cuts are testosterone, then tariffs are a flesh-eating virus. Give ‘em a little time before we end up in intensive care. The Republican Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 showed the way.
Smoot-Hawley Tariff in the newspaper, June 17, 1930
Not only that, tariffs needlessly make enemies, especially at a time when you need allies, unless, of course, you want America First to be America Alone. Red China has discovered its inner hegemon. Many Pacific countries are fearful of entering the maw of the CCP and are turning to the US as the only counterforce. The relationship between trade ties and military ones is well known. Just as we were about to draw much of the Pacific rim into a closer cooperation with us, 2016, a presidential election year, came upon us. The Dems practiced their usual fealty to the AFL-CIO and Hillary trashed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), something negotiated across multiple administrations. Not to be outdone, Trump in his usual bombast blasted the deal as “a continuing rape of our country”.
Well, what is this “rape”? The pact would slash tariffs all around the Pacific rim from the US to Brunei to Chile. For an America First/Alone enthusiast like Trump, the TPP is the perfect whipping boy. He torpedoed the deal and then boasted about it, repeatedly. But he made it harder to begin a “pivot to Asia” by initiating a trade war with our natural allies. His economic advisors must have been aghast and suggested their own pivot from “rape” to “bilateral”. The rhetorical gimmick was to disparage the adjective “multilateral” (TPP) and substitute “bilateral” in agreements. So, Trump’s people scrambled around the region to cement a smorgasbord of individual pacts to substitute for the omnibus one, all to save face from admitting to the slander.
One way to prevent the much-hated “forever wars” and bankruptcy of the US treasury is to have many allies. Their contributions may be small but together think of them as forcing upon Red China a weakening by a thousand cuts. We provide the biggest military piece but it’s better than having to pay for the whole piece which would be the consequence of the America Aloners.
The Aloner evangelists such as Tucker Carlson or Tulsi Gabbard, or even the conservative Tom McClintock (R, Ca.), stray into the logical dead end of more-allies-means-more-wars. Actually, that is only one possibility, and the least likely one. More allies mean more deterrence. A worse buzzsaw cannot be imagined for Putin’s Russia and Xi’s CCP for them to venture into an attempted reconstitution of the USSR and a Red Chinese-led Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The addition of Sweden and Finland to NATO intensify deterrence on Russia and trade pacts with miliary cooperation in the Pacific rim makes Xi’s Middle Kingdom dream seem more like a nightmare.
Coups are frequently associated with costly adventurism by despots. Everyone does cost-benefit analysis, unless they’re crazy. Even then, deterrence raises the costs to prohibitive levels for any compadres-of-convenience in the regime to continue to follow the lunatics. Still, anyway, if the crazy should practice a Nigh of the Long Knives (Hitler’s 1934 elimination of his rivals), you’ll definitely need those allies more than ever.
Foreign relations and a nation’s economy are intricately connected. Our national prosperity cannot survive a world with the renminbi as the world’s reserve currency, the World Bank headquartered in Beijing, the world’s shipping lanes policed by the PLA Navy, a NATO decaying in its nearly vacant Brussels headquarters, and a new USSR bullying its way westward and southward. Then we will be really alone. And it begins when we start to mangle economics and our recent history to fit the ambitions of narcissists and the hucksters of economic nostrums. I am worried that we are seeing too many of both among the people who should know better.
PLA Navy on maneuvers 2022
Specifically, the golden years, pre-COVID, from 2017 to early 2020 should not be referred to as the Trump economy. It was the Republican economy, all of it emanating from the Republican “establishment”. Anyone but Tucker Carlson fanboys should realize it.
RogerG
Sources:
*“Did the Trump Tax Cuts Work? The Answer May Not Be What You Think”, James Pethokoukis, American Enterprise Institute, at https://www.aei.org/economics/did-the-trump-tax-cuts-work-the-answer-may-not-be-what-you-think/
*” Trump’s Steel Tariffs Still Harming Producers and Consumers”, Bob Luddy, Brownstone Institute, at https://brownstone.org/articles/trumps-steel-tariffs-still-harming-producers-and-consumers/
*”Congressional Review Act”, Ballotpedia, at https://ballotpedia.org/Congressional_Review_Act
*”Where Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump stand on Obama’s legacy trade deal”, Business Insider, at https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-tpp-2016-9
*” Central Planning with Conservative Characteristics”, Dominic Pino, National Review Online, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/08/central-planning-with-conservative-characteristics/
*Tom McClintock’s vote against support for adding Finland and Sweden to NATO in “One California congressman voted against Finland and Sweden joining NATO. Here’s why”, in the Sacramento Bee, at https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article263626043.html
Ideology: noun; a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic, social, or political theory and policy.
Women’s studies, gender studies, and feminist anything are ideologies and not fields of learning, of scholarship. If they were the subject of real academic inquiry, their premises would be critically examined and not accepted as preordained truths. Dissemination of an ideology is propaganda and, if successful, indoctrination. Welcome to the modern university . . . and the yuck factor.
Years ago, the writer Robert Caro produced a multi-part book series on the life of the 36th president, Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ). I remember one literary critic after reviewing the book summing up the character of LBJ in one word, “Yuck!”
This is my reaction to modern higher education as described in Princeton undergraduate Abigail Anthony’s account in National Review Online of the smothering prevalence of sexual ideologies on our college campuses, particularly the Ivy League. As a high school teacher and Social Science Department chair, counselors and staff were beaming with pride when one of our seniors was accepted to one of the Ivy League schools. After reading Anthony’s exposé, no one should be beaming. Not only is “yuck” an appropriate descriptor for some important parts of the campus curriculum and intellectual climate but the acceptance letter should come with a warning label, “Parents Beware!”
And don’t think for a moment that warning should be limited to the Ivy league. Notre Dame, the most famous Catholic college in America, has a Gender Studies Program to propagate the many ways to subvert Catholic doctrine. The creed of the program is summarized on the school’s website: “Integrating learning and research with social change, Gender Studies identifies, examines, and challenges injustice, while imagining and creating better futures that serve the common good.” See those words “social change” and “challenges injustice”? They’re code for political activism, which means that the program’s central purpose is to create political followers of a particular political ideology, one whose premises are unexamined and accepted as truth, much like a new religion expunging an old one. Go figure, an anti-Catholic Catholic University.
The Baptists have their own problem. Baylor University, the largest Baptist institution in the world, not surprisingly has a Women’s and Gender Studies Program (WGS). The camel’s nose of physical and self-professed identity being central to the search for truth and wisdom is clearly visible through the college’s tent flap. The usual rhetorical markers of the ideology are littered throughout the program’s web page. On the program’s “About Us” page is this juicy tidbit: “The WGS program emphasizes the intellectual, artistic, political, social, economic, and spiritual contributions of women, which traditional scholarship long overlooked or denigrated.” In addition, “WGS uses the lens of gender to extend this analysis to a broader range of issues, including the social and cultural meanings of masculinity, femininity, and identity construction.” “The difference between gender and sex” and “The social construction of gender” are representative samples of “What you will learn”. One prof is described as an expert in “feminist theology”. Another colleague is presented as an expert in “feminist philosophy”. Still another proudly proclaims her membership in Christians for Biblical Equality (CBE), a group with the Squad-simpatico mission statement that reads, “CBE’s mission is to eliminate the power imbalance between men and women resulting from theological patriarchy.” This is the old Marxist oppressed/oppressor schtick under the guise of a “Christian” resumé.
Dr. Lisa Shaver opens the program by introducing the audience to Baylor University’s new minor in Women’s and Gender Studies. (Photo: Baylee VerSteeg | Multimedia Journalist)
If it is possible in places thought to be resistant to the fad thought, sectarian schools, what do you think is happening at your run-of-the-mill State U? These college operatives don’t have to face the skeptical gazes of a hidebound board of regents, people who are more likely to believe that the Word of God is actually the Word of God. The people running the show at your public colleges and universities are usually of the sort fully marinated in the junk thought. Go to any public university website and look up “Women’s Studies” and “Gender Studies”. Google it. It’s more in your face and a cause célèbre (arousing widespread controversy, outside campaigning, and heated public debate).
At the Ivies, Anthony recounts the septic tank of the mind. In alphabetical order, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, and Yale are littered with the usual litany of visiting lectures by drag queen (and Tufts University prof) LaWhore Vagistan; the ubiquitous Centers for Women and Gender “to engage the campus community through a feminist praxis of activism and academics”; a variety of pornography courses with the usual hands-on (pun intended) applications; some version of Columbia’s student-led BDSM group, Conversio Virium; courses like Cornell’s Nightlife to understand “queer communities of color” and “interrogate the ways in which nightlife demonstrates the queer world-making potential that exists beyond the normative 9-5 capitalist model of production”; and Dartmouth’s religion department sponsoring “Dragmouth”, a drag show. Get the picture?
University of Oregon students in Pride parade on campus, 2018.
Parents, do you understand what your daughters and sons are about to get into? A co-ed dorm filled with students immersed in pornography and BDSM? How about a catalogue of offerings that confuse ideological indoctrination for scholarship? They certainly will not be wiser after accruing $60,000 in student debt. It might be better for them to forego the superficial prestige of a degree, avoid the debt anchor, pick up practical skills in the real world, and maybe later attend a real college with a real classical curriculum. As one observer put it, Hillsdale can’t take everyone.
Young people, parents, steer clear of the yuck factor.
RogerG
Sources:
*Abigail Anthony’s piece in National Review Online, https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/the-sexual-experiment-at-the-ivy-leagues/
*Notre Dame’s Gender Studies Program, https://genderstudies.nd.edu/
*Baylor University’s Women’s and Gender Studies Program, https://genderstudies.artsandsciences.baylor.edu/
