From the January 2021 Georgia special election, clockwise from upper left: Jon Ossof (D), Davis Perdue (R), Raphael Warnock (D), Kelly Loeffler (R)
Of late, two things are proving to be true: the January 6 Committee is a farce and Donald Trump is a scoundrel.
Pelosi scandalized her own creation – the Committee – when she packed it with hanging judges, with two of the most egregious carefully selected from the other side of the aisle. As for Trump, his warped character wasn’t necessarily exposed by anything uncovered by the January 6 rump. We’ve known since 2015 that the guy is prone to excitable outbursts, almost all self-serving. One series of outbursts, though, and their immediate aftermath, plague us to this day: his caterwauling about being cheated in November 2020 with disastrous results for the country. He depressed the Georgia conservative vote in the January 2021 special election which then gave us two hard left Georgia senators and a hard left Senate for the country.
Nancy Pelosi’s handpicked committee to hang Trump and Republicans.Pres. Trump at Georgia rally in support of Perdue and Loeffler,12/5/20.
Where’s the proof that he made it easy for Stacy Abrams and neo-socialists Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossof in that January Georgia faceoff? Atlanta’s David Burrell, CEO of Wick, a well-respected producer of opinion surveys, cited their poll of conservative voters who voted in November 2020 but stayed home in January 2021, the date of the Senate special election. The results showed “lack of confidence in the 2020 election outcome” by respondents. The “lack of confidence” didn’t materialize out of thin air. Trump gave ample reason for Georgia conservatives to not waste their time going to the polls in January 2021. He lambasted the November vote as corrupt, and still does today. A hard left Senate thanks to Donald Trump.
Thank goodness, Republican Kelly Loeffler, a victim of Trump’s bombast in that special election in January 2021, wasn’t so dispirited to exile herself from Georgia politics. She rolled up her sleeves and founded Greater Georgia to reenergize Georgia conservatives and go toe-to-toe with the demagogic Stacy Abrams. Loeffler succeeded wonderfully. This May’s Georgia primary had 1.2 million votes in Republican contests while the Stacy Abrams crowd only generated 724,244 for the Democrats.
Kelly Loeffler at the launch of Greater Georgia.
In addition, Governor Brian Kemp (R), a special target of Trump vitriol, showed he was adept at recognizing the need for and appeal of election reform. It was a Republican two-fer: conservatives came out in droves and Biden’s “Jim Crow 2.0” demagoguery only splashed more mud on the senescent occupant of the White House and his donkey party.
It proves that Republicans can overcome the plague of Trump’s self-dealing. It begins with the recognition by Republicans that Trump is the Democrats’ long hoped-for gift that keeps on giving. Well, at least in Georgia, 2022 was the year that conservatives with help from Loeffler could get out from the Trump shadow.
In an interesting aside, Trump’s shadow isn’t as large as some of the pundits in the Fox News primetime lineup would have you believe. In spite of Biden’s wrecking of American life, his approvals dipping into the 30’s, an Emerson College survey showed Trump besting Biden by only 2 points, 44-42. A Harvard/Harris poll put the margin at 45-42 Trump. Let’s be clear, Trump is no Reagan of 1984 when the Gipper swept 49 pf 50 states. Trump has an enthusiastic following, but he can only produce cliff hangers in which he wins the Electoral College and loses the popular vote (2016) or draws more people to his camp but energizes the opposition even more to lose in another squeaker (2020).
I don’t know about you but I’m ready for a landslide, a complete thrashing of the donkey party. However, don’t expect to win the Kentucky Derby riding a bucking bronc.
RogerG
Bibliography:
*Read Jack Fowler’s piece on the 2022 Georgia primary here: https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/06/sweet-georgia-red/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=third
A rioter clad in the black of Antifa raises his fist during the August 2020 riots in Portland. (photo: Nathan Howard, Getty Images)
“God made the angels to show Him splendor, as He made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But man He made to serve Him wittily, in the tangle of his mind.” – Sir Thomas More in “A Man for All Seasons”.
Paul Scofield as Sir Thomas More in “A Man for All Seasons”
Sir Thomas More in the movie was correct. The witty tangle in our heads exists, but the congeries of thoughts, memories, emotions, and facts can generate ideas that can redound to mankind’s credit or condemnation.
Gosh, our present age is amply illustrative of the tangle gone wildly astray. Ideas, oh, those ideas, of the destruction of moral standards that led an 18-year-old to storm into a classroom to kill 19 10-year-olds and 2 teachers. Personal grievance cancels human life. A community’s historical memory is erased by mobs who are angered by the fact that the past doesn’t match the climate of opinion in a college ASB. Defacement of cherished memorials ensued. Waves of crime, violence, riots, and general disorder have turned many urban areas into wastelands that would stretch the imagination of sci-fi writers. The facts of biology are said to play second fiddle to the fancies in our mind. Chromosomes are made irrelevant by chemical and surgical interventions. Thus, a mockery is made of girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports. Blatant, revolutionary indoctrination is openly disseminated to the very young in their classrooms and is heartily embraced in corporate boardrooms. The laws of economics take a back seat to highly contestable utopian visions as expressed in climate-change ideology and coerced group equality. Fuel costs skyrocket; broad inflation is unleashed; supply chains break; shortages appear; livelihoods are threatened; the work ethic is weakened; and depopulation continues apace as fertility rates plummet and pews become vacant. Get the picture?
World fertility rate
Something is at work. It’s ideas that emanate from the tangle in one person’s mind and enters the tangle of another. Frequently, if history is any guide, the results aren’t pretty.
These thoughts came to me from a reading of “Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography” by Julian Young (2010 ed.) and a subsequent viewing of Stanley Kramer’s “Judgment at Nuremberg” (1961).
The one is an account of high-minded philosophy and the other is about the vile ends that philosophical ideas can be put. Nothing like the Holocaust, the underlying subject of “Judgment at Nuremberg”, was the intention of Nietzsche in his late 19th century writings. Nonetheless, the Holocaust happened, and Nazi belief was scented with Nietzsche’s ideas: the will to power, the Supermen, his aristocratic radicalism, the need to be hard, the grotesque eugenics, the rejection of Christianity’s “slave” morality, a monolithic ideology supposedly promoting “community health”, and the condemnation of democracy and pluralistic societies, referring to them as “motley cows”. It’s all there in Nietzsche’s published musings.
Elizabeth Froster-Nietzsche, sister of Friedrich Nietzsche, who preserved his legacy as her life’s mission, joyfully receiving Adolf Hitler who honored Nietzsche for his contributions to Nazi belief.
The lesson: a person can control what they write; they can’t control how others use what they wrote.
The whole of the twentieth century into this new one is a museum of the evil that men and women can do . . . from the tangle of their minds. The demeaning of standards and the institutions that buttress them is the primary culprit. Revolutionary dogmas – communism, fascism, CRT, transgenderism – were, and are, the excuse to replace the old social fabric with these new (relatively speaking) shiny objects of the mind.
“A Judgment at Nuremberg” put on display only one consequence – Nazism and its Holocaust – while ignoring its competitor, communism. It was easy to do. Invading armies into Germany produced ample eye witnesses as they came upon the scenes when the ovens were still warm and the gas chambers had yet to be demolished, something not true for the victims of Marxism-Leninism in the Soviet Union – and to think that they were our allies (!?). We only had the writings of Solzhenitsyn and a few others to chronicle the horrors of Marxism: Katyn, Kurapaty Forest, 30,000 gulags, the unrestrained secret police, show trials, mass executions, state-manufactured famines. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then experiencing it with your own eyes, nose, ears, and hands is worth a thousand pictures.
Soviet NKVD officer executing a Polish soldier and prisoner
Don’t think for a moment that the horrors arising from the tangle of our minds are only matters for the history books. The dialectics of Nazism and Marxism are present in our time’s woke brigades. Yes, dialectics: the alleged truth that everything boils down to open and hidden coercion – the “system” so to speak – of people into the categories of the oppressed and oppressors. Merit and free will have no role. Group guilt dominates all. It’s the pith and marrow of critical legal theory in law and critical race theory for everything else in public policy. It shows in your child’s school in the forms of teacher training, curriculum, textbooks, and school management. It shows in banal euphemisms such as “equity” which then bleeds into nearly everything that government does.
Much of our lives are to be turned upside down to fit someone’s incoherent abstraction. In the end, we are guided down the well-traveled road to societal decay, to places occupied by the likes of the USSR, North Korea, the Khmer Rouge’s Cambodia, Xi’s surveillance-and-gulag state, Castro’s Cuba, and Maduro’s Venezuela.
It’s great for the high priesthood of the woke for they’ll get rich as they feed on the rotting social corpse.
Ibram X. Kendi, high priest of CRT
For the rest of us, welcome to the Middle Ages. See, the tangle of the mind can be made to pay, even as it destroys.
RogerG
*Also in my Substack feed, “The Golden Mean”, at rogerlgraf.substack.com/.
Recalled San Francisco DA Chesa BoudinSan Francisco poop map
Early morning Wednesday (6/8/22), a California man was arrested with weaponry and break-in tools to assault Justice Brett Kavanaugh in his home. Surprised?
Tuesday (6/7/22), San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin was recalled (i.e., removed from office) by a vote of the people in the city. Much of the city’s disorder, filth, and crime wave was attributed to him and his platform of “restorative justice” and “ending the carceral state”, which meant that he claimed the power to pick the laws that he was going to enforce and not enforce, and how.
What do these two incidents have in common? Both of them are indications of the lawlessness of the Left and its institutional avatar, the Democratic Party.
Lawlessness doesn’t stop at Boudin or a failed assassin. We’ve known for quite some time that public tirades by public figures purposefully instigate the unhinged. They’re invitations to lawlessness. Maxine Waters, Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Schumer, and others of the donkey party’s hierarchy have incited campaigns of intimidation of those who disagree with them. No wonder that in 2017 a Bernie Sanders supporter, James T. Hodgkinson, marched onto an Alexandria, Va., baseball field and shot five Republican congressmen. No wonder that Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Mitch McConnell, and Ted Cruz couldn’t enjoy a family meal at a DC area restaurant without facing a mob’s verbal fulminations. No wonder that 2020 would be known as The Year of Living Dangerously when America’s urban centers were turned into stage sets for Escape from New York or Escape from Los Angeles (to continue the movie metaphor). And Brett Kavanaugh was targeted by an assassin for daring to think that abortion is a matter for the states and not DC potentates.
Nicholas John Roske (l) arrested for preparing to assault Justice Brett Kavanaugh in his home.
Ironically, and quite a hoot as well, it’s the Democrats who are blindly wedded to the idea of law as cure-all. Think about it: have poverty, pass a law to spend money. Have school problems, pass a law to spray more money their way. Have “gun violence”, pass a law. And problem solved, or so they think. Though, it must be admitted, they’re great about spending money but not so great about enforcement. So, we end up with inflation, bloated budgets, and a breakdown of civilization.
Take their response to the Uvalde shooting. They trot out their prepackaged, 30-year-old talking points. It’s chock full of the same gun bans, regulations, and onslaughts on business. For them, it’s a simple matter of passing a law and then meeting after work for libations. Their great for “universal background checks”, for instance, but violations of the existing checks are rarely prosecuted. I suspect that it’s because either prosecutions would create more serious injustices – which says a lot about the inherent wisdom of the law – or a good chunk of the perps don’t fit the preferred profile: too many “people of color”, too few people without color.
A 2017 GAO report on the status of the federal government’s background check system found massive non-enforcement. Of the 112,000 documented cases of prohibited buyers stopped by the system, only 12,700 were even investigated, and of that number, 12 were prosecuted. Pass a law, spend money to set up the system, hire the personnel, and then don’t bring the miscreants to court. Surely, there must be more than 12 of the 112,000 deserving of a date before a judge.
Law without enforcement is no law at all. There exists a law that bans intimidation in the administration of justice, like what is happening on the sidewalks and streets outside the homes of six Supreme Court justices. The use of anything but the law in the provision of justice is expressly banned in 18 U.S. Code, Section 1507. Unlike most of the 1,000-plus-page gibberish that frequently emanates out of the Democratic caucus, this law is unmistakably clear:
“Whoever, with the intent of interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or with the intent of influencing any judge, juror, witness, or court officer, in the discharge of his duty, pickets or parades in or near a building housing a court of the United States, or in or near a building or residence occupied or used by such judge, juror, witness, or court officer, or with such intent uses any sound-truck or similar device or resorts to any other demonstration in or near any such building or residence, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.”
For the constitutionally dense, 1507 is the statutory means to implement the Constitution’s equal protection and due process clauses. Look them up. Nowhere do public demonstrations have a role in their application.
Why does AG Garland refuse to enforce 1507? Simple, it’s politics. The Dems demand a particular result in an abortion case before the Court and are willing to turn a blind eye to the law. In effect, 18 U.S. Code, Section 1507 just disappeared from the federal code. It’s been relegated to the same purgatory where you’ll find many federal, state, and local provisions on rioting, public indecency, theft, burglary, assault and battery, sentencing guidelines and laws, etc., etc. Garland and local DA’s like George Gascon and Chesa Boudin see themselves as mini-legislatures to make and unmake statute as they please. It’s grotesque, and so are our streets and public spaces.
Lawlessness appears to be a key Democratic Party doctrine.
RogerG
*Read Kevin D. Williamson’s excellent piece on the federal background check system.
A prayer circle at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Tx., on the day of the shooting.
The Uvalde elementary school shooting has sparked another public discussion riddled with confusion, hyperbole, and banal talking points. Frothing out of talk shows, the mouths of publicity hounds, and the speeches on the floors of Congress come the same stale rhetoric and empty gestures that will do absolutely nothing to stop sociopaths from shooting into crowds of adults or kids. The problem is what it has always been: unhinged people looking for soft targets.
First, the confusing rhetoric. A favorite among demagogues seeking to exploit horrible incidences for partisan advantage is “weapons of war”. They go right from the analogy of machine guns, real weapons of war, to the semi-auto rifles available for sale in a civilian gun store. The guns in the store look like the kind used on the battlefield of Iraq and Afghanistan but aren’t. They are as semi-auto, and not full auto, as my scoped semi-auto Remington 742 rifle. The 742 looks like deer rifle in one’s imagination.
Remington 742 Woodsmaster, semi-autoThe so-called “weapon of war”: AR-15 in a gun store, semi-auto.
They both operate the same and the bullet exits the barrel at the same frequency. So, the argument pivots on cosmetics. That’s right, ban a gun for its appearance but watch the same gun appear later absent the looks (pistol grip, banana clip, and with a different stock). It’s ridiculous. This is what happens when public policy is left to the firearm illiterate.
Next, the idea of red flag or stop orders that is being tossed around. These orders allow DA’s and judges to confiscate guns for cause. The problem with the idea is the great variability in implementation and enforcement. A Texas DA is likely to be a far cry in implementation from Joe Biden’s Justice Department, San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin, or LA’s George Gascon. In the former, a measured enforcement; in the other, the enticing opportunity to eradicate the Second Amendment. We’ve all seen what the latter has done to the enforcement of immigration law and a host of crimes below rape and murder. They execute the law as they wish.
A sensible middle ground might be an enhanced insta-check system, with updated, improved, and expanded criteria for denials. But, as above, it is only as good as the people administering it.
The “weapons of war” nonsense does nothing to enhance understanding. Red flag systems are ripe for abuse by the soapbox orator in the DA’s office. Even the middle ground only applies to new gun purchases. That leaves a big, huge gaping hole in the security of our kids: many of our schools are glaring soft targets, which means non-existent or too few good people with guns on the school grounds to stop bad people with guns. If you want to protect the kids, immediately harden your soft targets with many good people with guns. It’s the one thing that’ll make a difference.
No more soft targets, and leave the rest of the gun debate for another day.
In a previous post, I complained of the embarrassingly poor quality of our current elites, calling them dunces. The latest gathering at the World Economic Forum in Davos is proving the point. Their prattle was full of advocacy for a distasteful future. Snooping from outside and within our bodies, lifestyle controls in minute detail, living on less, and an overall abysmal existence, while calling it progress, were an important part of the gaseous blather. Of course, don’t expect these people to relinquish their private jets, mansions, and second-home paradises.
La Rochefoucauld once said that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. I rework the aphorism for the present moment: hypocrisy’s tribute is actually the price the rest of us must pay for living their conscience.
Absurdities rolled off their tongues in an endless parade at Davos. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, in glorious rapture, spoke of swallowing pills with chips to alert God-knows-who about what passes through our digestive tract. The complete lack of self-awareness was astounding.
Indeed, an absence of self-awareness is at epidemic levels among these plutocrats. China’s multinational Alibaba Group president J. Michael Evans talked of an “individual carbon footprint tracker” to monitor everything from our kitchen cupboards to our travels to the multiplex. Stalin would be proud. Xi is beaming.
That grand eminence, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, was gushing in his praise of artificial intelligence as a “co-pilot of every cognitive task”. Is he so certain that it will make us better or just more controllable? The possibilities are endless in the campaign to eradicate the next class of kulaks, or the Joes and Jennies who love RV’s.
The luminaries at Davos preened each other with prognostications of growing veganism and the eradication of borders. The sanctification of German industrialist Klaus Schwab as the patron saint of the Great Reset – which is a Soviet Gosplan for our future – proceeded apace. Make no mistake about it, this is a totalitarianism of smiley faces in expensive suits.
They are billing themselves as Plato’s philosopher kings, but are proving to be the latest gaggle of fat cats with an unbounded yearning to be taken seriously on matters beyond their ken. Every time that they gather and open their mouths, they are proving that they don’t deserve it. Please, go back to your c-suites and do what you do best: make oodles of cash for spreading prosperity. Prosperity isn’t a dirty word. Drop the hectoring nanny routine.
Macomb County Republican Party Convention from August of 2020.
Reporter Salena Zito, co-author of “The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics” of 2018, has long been sensitive to the views of those in Red America and accurately diagnosed the problem of an America dominated by an out-of-touch bi-coastal elite that set the stage for Trump’s amazing win in 2016. We have moved on, but Trump hasn’t. The Trump of 2016 is now the Trump of “I was cheated”, constantly regaling his followers at rallies with his complaints about 2020. In this column, she reports that the Macomb County, Michigan, Republican Party has had enough. At their county party convention, important for choosing county party leaders and candidates, county delegates threw out the party leadership that was obsessed with re-litigating 2020. We’ll have to wait and see if the party across the nation is willing to dodge the bullets that Trump is firing at it.
I have long maintained that Trump is principally responsible for the loss of the two Georgia Senate seats to neo-Bolsheviks, of all people, in Georgia of all places! A dispirited post-election Republican electorate was further dispirited by Trump’s post-election grandiose and unsupportable charges. If there ever was a time for “Move On”, this is it.
Trump at April 2 rally in Michigan.
Macomb County Republican delegate Jamie Roe described the scene: “Last night [April 14], everyone who was focused on winning the election in 2022 had been pushed over the edge.” He added, “Fed-up activists and elected officials joined together to remove the Executive Committee and officers from office and replace them with a new group focused solely on winning in 2022 and not on the past.”
The Trumpers have long called disloyal Republicans – disloyal to Trump, that is – RHINOs. Yet, expressing fealty to a person is much more reminiscent of “in name only” than loyalty to a party. The pot calling the kettle black? Projection?
Macomb County may be a healthy bellwether for this year’s elections. It was your typical blue-collar Democrat bastion but was shifting red as the Democratic Party became a reflection of our brain-dead college faculty lounges. A blue-collar Republican Party doesn’t have to be equally as brain dead. At last, the party may be in the process of shaking off the personality cult just in time for the Democrats’ march into cultural Marxism.
Yes, we have defenders of the proven economic creed of free markets. It’s just that it’s not evident among the high-profile windbags who inhabit today’s soapboxes, left and right. Go down the list from Trump to Bernie, Tucker Carlson to Rachel Maddow, France’s Marie Le Pen to French socialists, etc. All of them built fame and fortune on bashing free markets. For them, it stinks!
We should recall that old style conservatism in Europe meant a defense of feudalism, aristocratic prerogatives, and throne and altar. The old Right came by their distrust of the then-voguish ideas of free markets of David Hume and Adam Smith honestly. Choices in life were made to fit the prevailing order for these defenders of the status quo. It worked for a time. In Britain, the Parliament had its rotten boroughs (districts dominated by powerful gentry), an omni-powerful House of Lords (till the 17th century), the preeminence of the established Church and hostility to religious upstarts, its guilds to regulate labor, and taxes and legal privileges to favor local and national producers (Corn Laws, etc.). This web of government and custom restricted personal career choices and the basic staples of life. Competition and free mobility of labor and product were anathema. As such, putrid feudalism earned its reputation.
A critical illustration of the British corn laws from the 19th century.
The conservatism of Reagan was originally the platform of the 18th century British Whigs, the other party vying for public support. Liberal meant Adam Smith and free markets, not the pablum of today’s faculty lounges.
In contrast, the old Tory attitude was reflected in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, whether in the books or Peter Jackson’s film adaptation. Saruman’s and Sauron’s industrialized machine of war and subsequent despoilation of nature are the principal means to seize the ring and envelop Middle Earth in the Dark Shadow.
Saruman’s Isengard as depicted in Jackson’s Lord of Rings, The Two Towers
Catholic social teachings (Tolkien was a Catholic) abides criticisms of free marketeers. Protestantism wasn’t far behind. Concerns for the plight of the poor and condemnations of crass materialism, a la Dickens, while understandable, provided cover for government intervention. Religion wasn’t even necessary. In fact, for many critics of a free economy, the religion was left behind but the hostility remained. The modern Left was born. Marx showed how, and some Christians noticing the symmetry between their readings of the Gospel and the scribblings of this atheist revolutionary gave to us the Social Gospel movement. Marxist instigators in the raiment of the clergy became a fixture around the world.
Take Bernie Sanders, socialist and paragon of the modern Left. His faith commitment slinks into a word salad. One has to wonder if his belief is of a kind that requires nothing of him, the lazy man’s faith. He explains,
“I am not actively involved with organized religion. I think everyone believes in God in their own ways. To me, it means that all of us are connected, all of life is connected, and that we are all tied together.”
Previously, in response to Jimmy Kimmel, he was even vaguer: “I am what I am. And what I believe in, and what my spirituality is about, is that we’re all in this together.” Whew, hiding your beliefs so as not to be repellant to the still-sizable Christian chunk of the electorate leads to a ramble through mind-numbing Bernie circumlocutions. But it works for him to advance “Workers of the world unite!” – “we’re all tied together.”
Bernie Sanders on Jimmy Kimmel’s show in 2016.
If you think that the Bernie of the Left can’t come around to meet someone on the Right, well, I give you Tucker Carlson. Carlson’s rants against billionaires could have easily emanated from AOC’s Twitter feed, or Bernie’s stump speeches . . . and maybe did. Not to say that the corporate suits’ propagation of the vile identity politics and race essentialism isn’t deserving of condemnation, but that’s not the only cause of Tucker’s bloviating. His is AOC’s gripe: the rich exploit the worker. Watch him from 2018 castigate the rich, play lefty class warfare, and embrace Bernie, while tossing into the spiel a few throw away lines for his right-leaning (me included) Fox News audience (below).
And then we have Trump. MAGA has become a cliché, a banality meant to push the view of a floundering America in need of Making America Great Again, meaning Trump. The “Again” part is a nostalgia for the 1950’s; however, it isn’t as simple as that. The 1950’s weren’t a time without troubles: massive pockets of poverty, Jim Crow, dead lakes, filthy air, filthy streets, filthy water, and society-wide health problems.
That’s not all for MAGA. For Trumpkins, the sight of too many Toyotas on the road is proof of the death of American manufacturing. The MAGA mantra is manufacturing good, fewer manufacturing workers bad. But chants only have a superficial truth to them. The decline in factory workers is real but not overall manufacturing. Technological innovation made each worker more productive and freed up others to seek fortunes in other lines of employment, as it did at the dawn of the industrial revolution when people left the farm for jobs in the cities and subsequently created a dearth of rural workers which spurred innovation on the farm. An economic need is filled by invention in much the same manner as nature’s disposition to fill a vacuum.
Contra Trump, 2016, the year of Trump’s ascendancy, set an all-time high for American manufacturing. And manufacturing’s prospects look bright if our government gets out of the way. Off-shoring may have lost its luster as more American firms see that life in kleptocracies and totalitarian nightmares isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. In addition, off-shoring is a two-way street for foreign companies. Taiwan Semiconductor, the world’s largest chip producer, sees the Taiwan Strait as not much of a shield from an increasingly bellicose Xi and his People’s Liberation Army and Navy. They’re opening up shop in Arizona. Those Toyotas are increasingly coming off American assembly lines – the Tundra from a Texas one. Do I need to list all the other foreign nameplates?
A view across the Taiwan Strait from Taiwan toward the PRC.
But our government won’t stay out of the way, even for my friends on the Right. Trump has tariff-love and an unstated affection for a form of central planning called industrial policy. Enthusiasts of the so-called populist right have allied with Sanders to stiff our biggest companies with the cost of any employee on the dole. Unbeknownst to the goofs is the fact that the labor market is righting itself as companies compete for workers and come to realize that the costs of a constant churn in the payroll is deleterious to business health. The chest-pounding of Trump, Carlson, and congressional lackeys is a sideshow to more fundamental economic trends. True to form, though, that won’t stop them from taking credit for any good news.
The Right under the rubric “populists” has rediscovered its vintage inner-feudalist with their frozen-in-amber economics, but nothing at this moment can compare to the state-aggrandizement of the Left’s greenie zealotry. Here’s where the two sides part company.
Our nation could be crippled in a haze of the Left’s greenie visions. A Green New Deal (GND) in a totality or in pieces would turn off-shoring into one-way street out for anyone with a bottom line. The critical mass for the suicide pill has been building for decades. Relentless pounding in the schools and media has prepared the generational ground for greenie flights of fancy from boomers to millennials to gen z‘ers. Gavin Newsom’s “California Way” – the combination of high taxes, regulatory minefields, and gauntlet of greenie infatuations touching nearly all activity – once brought to the Beltway, will only imitate the state’s outbound migration crisis of business and the middle class on a national scale.
Students protest in San Franisco for a Green New Deal in 2019.
So, Tucker, Trump, and their sycophants will accomplish little with their tariffs, subsidies, and tax bribes if firms are forced to face a firing squad of the EPA, SEC, IRS, DOJ, and state counterparts back home. If you want more on-shoring and less off-shoring, then put Leviathan on a leash. Fact is, we’ve got a free-range Leviathan. A hellhole of Jacobins awaits them. Instead of Make America Great Again (MAGA), try Make America Competitive Again (MACA).
Congressional Republicans began the process with the tax reform of 2017 and their vetoes of Obama-era regulations by means of the Congressional Review Act. The whole country will take a leap backwards if the clumsy populist Right, intent on castigating “neocons”, joins hands with the clumsy populist Left.
Hoping for prosperity by bashing job-creators is an endorsement of masochism as an organizational principle. Slavery, besides being immoral, is the height of economic masochism: the belief that owning and beating people is sufficient to make them produce. Don’t expect the turning of the men and women of commerce into bondsmen of the state by regulation, prosecution, and taxation to be any more fruitful. Sen. Liz Warren and the Bernie bros will need a new Fugitive Slave Act to go with their wealth tax and coercive ecotopia to stop capital flight.
It comes down to the clown-theory of pain as pleasure in the junk-thought precincts of economic policy. It didn’t work for the American South and won’t work for the Right’s pining for the 1950’s or the Left’s eco-nuttery. The foolishness of economic masochism is a lesson that needs to be relearned by the Right and abandoned by the Left.
Santa Rosa resident who used his 2013 Nissan Leaf to power his house during a four-day blackout in Santa Rosa, Calif., as a result of the Kincade Fire. (photo: Vanessa Romo/NPR)
Surely, this wasn’t the intent of the article (here), but any sentient being could imagine the horrors of an EV world with California’s electricity grid. Remember, the clowns running the state are ecstatic about EV’s but absolutely moronic about the generation of electricity. They seem to be saying, “Hey, go buy one [$40,000 -$60,000] but your charging station will be dependent on the vagaries of the sun and wind, or the combustible, matchstick forests that could flare up at any time. No nuclear power for you.” Go figure.
The reporterette (Vanessa Romo) blithely treated the problem of finding charging stations during blackouts and raging forest fires, a recurring theme in California’s present and probable future, as another wholesome family adventure. One guy was confronting the raging Getty Fire and luckily found an answer to charging his Chevy Bolt from a Facebook group. Since the fire is busy destroying the grid, his hookup to Facebook must be through his phone. That means an operative cell tower nearby, not destroyed by fire, with power, and in range and with an unobstructive path to his phone. What happens if the charge on his cell phone is as low as his Bolt? What happens if cell reception is spotty or nonexistent? This is a theater of the absurd.
Venessa Romo of NPRCalifornia’s Getty Fire, 2019.The Holy Fire (2018) in Orange and Riverside Counties comes close to communication towers.California blackout
Another Sonoma County resident was praised for the “ingenious” use of his Nissan Leaf in an area ravaged by the Kincaid Fire. The subsequent blackout forced him to resort to his Leaf as a generator. Board certification for brain surgery isn’t required to figure out the massive problems with this “advantage”. Using the car as a source of electricity for the house depletes the car battery. This option only works if a charging station with a functioning grid hookup or global-warming fossil fuel generator is nearby. A charging station could be, but the other prerequisites might not be.
By the way, the inverter used in turning DC into the AC for his house could be employed just as well, maybe better, with a Ford-450 Diesel truck, a vehicle more useful than a glorified golf cart. A Leaf, or some such, isn’t necessary for that purpose. So, what’s the benefit for being forced to live in an EV world? You are being shoved into such an existence for no good reason.
Ford F-450 diesel
Nissan Leaf charging up.
The truth of the matter is that the whole charade is pure political theater. Concoct a catastrophe, stampede the public into mistakenly believing that the family sedan is the problem, declare unremittent war on fossil fuels, bribe and punish worker bees with artificially inflated fuel prices, close down the two remaining nuclear power plants, make your public lands combustible nature preserves writ large, and make the whole contraption reliant on the most expensive and unreliable grid in memory, and you too can enjoy the “new normal” of an asylum that calls itself a state.
We’ve seen it before. Aspiring opinion leaders in America read into prominent foreign leaders qualities that are actually a product of their own domestically produced biases and probably aren’t reflective of the foreign ruler’s true character. These political carnival barkers end up flacking for some pretty disreputable troublemakers. Or when disgraced by facts, they retreat to a stance of neutrality. It’s de ja vu all over again with much of Fox News’s primetime lineup, a myopic segment of the Right, and Vladimir Putin playing starring roles in a revived rendition of the tired play.
And I say this as a longstanding member of the Right and nationalist, albeit of the Reagan variety.
At work is naiveté and a warmed-over and coarse nationalism that previously arose in the 1940’s America First Committee (AFC). Celebrities, some in the well-published commentariat, and business eminences of the time signed up. Charles Lindbergh, R. Douglas Stuart (son of the co-founder of Quaker Oats), business titan William H. Regnery, General Robert E. Wood (chairman of Sears and Roebuck), eminent newspaper publishers in New York (Daily News) and Chicago (Tribune), future Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, and future political players Gerald R. Ford and Sargent Shriver found a home in the group.
Event announcing the formation of the America First Committee on Sept. 20, 1940.
Lindbergh understandably was the focus of much attention as an unofficial spokesman of the AFC. Comments such as these in opposition to sending aid to threatened countries in the wake of Hitler’s invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland could have easily dribbled from the mouth of Tucker Carlson or Laura Ingraham:
“I do not believe that repealing the arms embargo would assist democracy in Europe….” Or, “If we repeal the arms embargo with the idea of assisting one of the warring sides to overcome the other, then why mislead ourselves by talk of neutrality?”
Charles Lindbergh speaks at a rally of the America First Committee at Madison Square Garden in New York, on May 23, 1941. (AP)
Like Tucker, he levelled the now-overwrought charge of war profiteering if we send aid to countries under and next in line for conquest. Is it really shocking in a country with a still-vibrant private sector, a Second Amendment, and a military (as per Article 1 §8.13 of the Constitution) that private companies catering to this market would profit from selling their wares to our friends and allies? Would Lindbergh and his modern descendants prefer aid only if it bankrupts the companies? Or maybe they’d be satisfied with a Lenin-style commissariat to dictate profitability? The argument is preposterous.
Today’s cable channel superstars get the most exposure in this latest version of the new isolationism and vulgar nationalism. Though, others revel in the same limelight. Steve Bannon, Trumpkin par excellence, bellowed on Feb. 24, “Ukraine’s not even a country. It’s kind of a concept.” Candice Owens proclaimed in March,
“There is no difference, ethnically, between Ukrainians and Russians, obviously. Ukraine wasn’t a thing until 1989. Ukraine was created by the Russians.”
Fascists of the 1930s played the same trick, the gambit of denying the legitimacy of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Abyssinia before they attempted to subjugate these lands. Frankly, the charge is irrelevant, then and today. Ukraine’s existence was recognized by Russia, post breakup of the evil empire, Europe, the UN, and the USSR: Khrushchev drew its current boundaries, and Stalin knew it well enough to isolate it for starvation (the Holodomor). We don’t need to parse cultural and historical differences; this is a done deal.
A starving mother holds her child at the height of Holodomor. USSR. Circa 1933.
And by the way, when are powerful caudillos the lone arbiters of another country’s legitimacy? Who gave them the power to play God?
Something more insidious might be lurking in our celebrities’ heads. Our modern pundits see a little of themselves in Putin. He’s a professed Christian, nationalist, and defender of the culture. So are they . . . at least as they see themselves. So, how does that wash over into standing on the sidelines as invasion and war crimes are committed? Do we really want to relive prior horrors on a continent that has experienced the long dark shadow of aggressors who were rewarded by the compliance and appeasement of their adversaries? A nuclear-armed Putin who successfully mutilated Ukraine is an emboldened Putin . . . and Red China. Pacifistic inaction by those on the side of the angels at this juncture is an invitation for costlier abominations later.
The only practical advice in situations such as these comes to us from the Roman general Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus. In Latin, he wrote, “Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum.” Rough translation: If you want peace, prepare for war. If we, for good reasons, don’t want to do the fighting, we could certainly arm others to do it. Tucker, Bannon, Owens, and the rest of the gang of apologists need a new script other than the one written by Lindbergh and company and practiced by Neville Chamberlain at Munich.
The tenor of the times in today’s California in this protest march in the state from 2018.
The Great Skedaddle once referred to the flight of the Union Army from the battlefield in First Bull Run in 1861. No longer. Many cities and states have opted into the woke revolution . . . and people are fleeing, a Great Skedaddle II. What’s more, if we shifted the census from a mid-2020 counting to mid-2021, California would come close to losing 3 seats in the House of Representatives instead of the one. It’s the same in nearly all jurisdictions where Antifa and BLM appeasers reign supreme.
The official census is a centennial affair, but the bureau does annual estimates based on a continuing stream of data. And as a result, it gets worse for blue America. From mid-2020 to mid-2021, 10 states grew by 1% or more; eight are essentially red states. The other two (Delaware and Nevada) have maintained mostly friendly tax regimes in spite of, not because of, Dem dominance, when compared with their high-profile political cousins who routinely vote Democrat by double digits from their bi-coastal, metropolitan enclaves.
Some of the biggest losers are what you’d expect: California (-.76%), New York (-1.81%), Illinois (-1.1%), and Washington, D.C. (-2.83%). Some lost because of the continuing trend of the hollowing-out of the Rust Belt, which is slowing. Where it is accelerating can be pinpointed by county numbers. Manhattan (New York County) lost 6.9% over the one-year period; San Francisco down 6.7%; San Mateo dropped 3.5%. King County, Washington State, the home of Seattle, et al, and the mother lode of lefty votes, took the biggest step backwards in the state. With few exceptions, the county metro areas that grew the most are found in Idaho, Florida, Texas, Utah, and South/North Carolina.
An aerial view of today’s Manhattan.
One more interesting aspect to the story: states bordering California are magnets, with the exception of Oregon, thanks to the radical-Left dominance of the Portland/Willamette Valley urban corridor. Nevada did well, but the flight pattern’s sphere of influence extends to Arizona, Utah, Idaho, and my own western Montana. Most of these states would come close to gaining an additional House seat if the count was held just one year later.
Indeed, the pandemic is a contributing factor, but not the sole cause of this trend. COVID ripped off the scab of a festering wound. The population hemorrhagers were more commonly the most zealous in their regulatory suffocation of lives and livelihoods. Then, they go off into climate-change hysteria, transgenderism, slashing police budgets, and a racist Anti-racism crusade. Their schools and urban spaces became open sewers riddled with crime. What’s there to like?
Let this be a warning to woke corporate boardrooms: you’ve been betting on the wrong horse. Boycotting states over election laws and protections for girls’ sports, and ads showing your fidelity to the cultural Left, is not a winning strategy. People who vote with their feet are also more inclined to vote with their dollars. Disney, rethink your opposition to parental rights. Your stand may sound glorious in your corporate boardroom, gated community, or lunchroom, but the commoners have a profoundly different take.
Please read the source article for this post here.
