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On Disunion

Illustration courtesy of Roman Genn, National Review.

Will we have a disunion? Yes, maybe, or somewhere in-between, with plenty of caveats. Sounds indefinite, as most sober projections of this nature should be.

Well, I’ll have to admit that some sort of disunion is taking place. All the evidence is pointing that way. Will it be a hard or soft disunion? A “hard” one would be some kind of constitutional restructure, or a complete break like the old Czechoslovakia into the Czech and Slovak Republics. The “soft” variety entails some kind of unofficial consensual agreement to live and let live. I’m of a mind to reject the former, but the latter raises some interesting possibilities.

Even more, is the talk of disunion part of a passing phase? All of this could be meaningless chatter. That’s an even more interesting possibility.

Evidence of disunion is all about, though. Some saw it coming at the dawn of the new millennium. Terry Teachout and Gertrude Himmelfarb back then wrote of it as “Republican Nation, Democratic Nation” (Teachout) or “one nation, two cultures” (Himmelfarb). Then, Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing crowned the idea four years later in their book, The Big Sort. Bishop and Cushing noticed that in-migration data showed like-minded people seek to live around other like-minded people. Are you paying attention New York and California?

The hard left turn of the Democratic Party is driving the talk. No, it’s not because the right has suddenly resuscitated Mussolini’s Black Shirts. Policies, laws, and actions in deep blue urban areas and states are forcing many people to make a choice between the comfort of their place of birth and desire to escape the one-party cultural revolution of the chic cliques that dominate their state or municipality.

At root in these havens of the ruling revolutionary thought is a set of prejudices about others not so willing to adopt the hedonism and its concomitant authoritarian rule, people who are loosely defined as traditionally inclined. The libertinism shows as a rejection of standards: traditional morality, the physical determinants of nature (DNA, chromosomes, biological limits, etc.), the elements of merit, etc. Oxymoronically, lying next to this idea of the free-floating individual is the ready submission to the aristocracy of sheepskin-wielding “experts”. Not all “experts”, mind you, just those who feed the libertines’ prejudices. It’s a terribly selective cadre of gurus.

It’s not as if the cool exponents of the philosophy actually live what they preach. The urban professional types, and the uber-rich that rose from their ranks, that dominate the ruling pack, get married and instill self-discipline in their young as Charles Murray so clearly observed in his research. They carry on like Horatio Alger even as they denounce the guy, which proves that consistency is not a readily observable human quality.

When they’re spouting “It’s good for thee but not for me”, they may be onto something. That something is the intuition that at least they and their children can’t prosper under anything goes. The public schools must keep their monopoly at all costs, as their votes and campaign donations proclaim, as long as elite prep schools are open for their young scions. The result is a descent into chaos for many inner-city schools, which matches the chaos in the surrounding neighborhoods that was engineered by bountiful entitlements and a pervasive ridicule of law and order.

It’s starting to ooze out: neither they, nor can anyone live this way. Yet, their indulged offspring fill the ranks of BLM and Antifa to make everyone else’s life a living hell. Their political activism produces permissive DA’s who won’t enforce quality-of-life crimes so the quality-of-life rots. Simple things like roads and the electrical grid crumble as their leaders pursue crusades against the chimerical “systemic racism” and for a greenie utopia. Urban landscapes each day look more like something out of Mad Max or John Carpenter’s “Escape from New York”. Indeed, many New Yorkers have already joined Snake Plissken (Russell) in the flight from hell. Florida, here we come! Life imitates art.

Where are they heading? It’s to more than Florida. The refugees are going to places where gun ownership isn’t treated as a mental illness, where churches have tendency to be full on Sunday, and where taxes are low, housing is cheap, and jobs aplenty. Sure, some may regret not having a beach nearby, but those boardwalks are beginning to take on the look of the rest of the dystopia anyway. The escapees won’t be missing much.

Some commentators have devoted much ink on extremists at the fringe of both sides. In their reading of the political landscape, the left has its Antifa/BLM to go along with the dynamic duo of Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi with their critical-race-theory/systemic racism sermonizing. The right has the ill-defined QAnon and Arian Nation look-alikes. But the two fringes aren’t anywhere near equivalent; the right deserves a 10-handicap. The DiAngelo/Kendi crowd and their Antifa and BLM militias are much more deeply entrenched in our critical institutions than the QAnon devotees and Proud Boys ever were. The lefty militias are perfumed into respectability, DiAngleo and Kendi get rich, and nearly every other large and powerful organization has their own offshoot of the ministry of propaganda. It’s an egregious false equivalence and an affront to sound reason to pretend otherwise.

No other words describe our current divide than revolution (left) and counterrevolution (right), a classic civil war. The two stances are deeply divided into mutually exclusive sets of values. A commissariat-driven holy war to impose equality of result for fashionable identities versus a legal regime of equal opportunity is only part of the story. Another angle is the vague spirituality of my “personal truth” versus the certainties of altar and hearth. Still another one is the exaltation of two n’s – narcissism and nihilism – versus self-restraint and our heritage of compassion. Still another one is the impulse to tear it all down and build anew according to someone’s fanciful conception of heaven on earth versus the inclination to build upon the glories of the past. These approaches are mutually exclusive. Where is there room for compromise if one side, the Left, is hell-bent on forcibly foisting their worldview on the other?

Don’t take solace in the natural live-and-let-live of federalism. The Left from its perch on the cultural commanding heights is feverishly trying to centralize power in DC. Centralization will bury subsidiarity. The principle of subsidiarity embraces the value of local and regional control as the most efficacious form of governance. It holds that on most matters the more local, the better. Well, that’s on the chopping block in a host of ways.

The US capitol and surrounding buildings in DC.

Will sufficient numbers of people push back? That’ll be hard to achieve once the Left’s dream of legitimizing vote fraud is rigidly imposed on the entire country. At this point, elections as the corrective will be effectively neutered. Opposition will be forced into submission or the various lanes of disobedience, civil or violent. When elections seem to have no meaning, eruptions of less palatable methods of opposition will be more frequent. History is littered with examples.

Watch that space on HR1, the Left’s grab bag of “reforms” making its way through Congress to remove vote fraud from the category of a crime and reconfigure it as a legitimate get-out-the-vote strategy. If it passes, those storm clouds from Mordor will have reached your home.

RogerG

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A Cancelled Cat

Ted Geisel, “Dr. Seuss”

The “systemic racism” witch hunt knows no bounds. The airbrushing out of memory isn’t limited to long dead white guys on horseback. Ensnared are old lefties like Ted Geisel, “Dr. Seuss”. We are living in a very dangerous time. It’s beginning to look like the frenzy of the Reign of Terror that engulfed France in 1793. Nothing was spared: the Church, nuns and monks, anyone who dressed fancy, the calendar, and even the entombed remains of kings in the crypt underneath the Basilica of Saint-Denis. Our time’s vicious Jacobins are let loose.

RogerG

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Another Failure of Our “Experts”

*Today’s short comment is mostly based on the work of Nicholas Eberstadt, the Henry Wendt Chair of Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute.

Our “experts”, the ones that grab the attention of the mathematically and scientifically illiterate in Big Media, are essentially bureaucrats in Big Government’s agencies of public health, corporate Big Pharma, and the university schools of public health. And all of them were asleep at the switch, the switch to throw the alarm on the catastrophic jump in working class “deaths of despair”: drug overdoses, cirrhosis of the liver, and suicides. Putting a number on it would be over 300,000 premature deaths from 1999 to 2015. And these are our gurus on all matters public health. With friends like these, do we need any enemies?

The disaster occurred under the noses of Clinton, Dubya, and the first term-and-a-half of Obama. Obama didn’t notice it, and maybe didn’t care. The alarm was tripped by Princeton’s Anne Case and Angus Deacon during Obama’s second term. Don’t forget that at this time, Obama was too busy lambasting the blue collars of western Pennsylvania as “bitter clingers” to their sky god and guns.

These same bureaucrats were the ones who fed the prejudices of the Big Government Left in the Democratic Party and the Party’s allies in Big Media during COVID. Fauci and company were elevated to sainthood. Behind the scenes, as our social and economic lives were castrated on the advice of these very same desk-jockeys, the death toll in “deaths of despair” accelerated.

Ryan Halligan, age 13, committed suicide by hanging on Oct. 7, 2013.
Picture of Jo’Vianni. age 15, in the hand of her mother. She committed suicide in April of 2020.
Bethany Palmer, age 17, of Greater Manchester, UK, committed suicide in April of 2020.
Rally to raise awareness of deaths of despair in 2017.

These “experts” are said to be public servants. But which public are they serving? I can’t avoid the insights of James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock in their famous work in public choice theory. They start with the simple premise of self-interest: it applies to everyone. It’s true every bit as much among GS-level employees and their politicized head honchos as it does for any budding entrepreneur. The cloistered ecosystem of the bureau, combined with occupational self-absorption, make for a unique animal who misses a whole lot.

Just think, with the Green New Deal and the jihads against “systemic racism” and for genderism, these same fools will be put in charge of nearly every aspect of our lives. If that doesn’t startle you, I don’t know what will.

RogerG

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Strangled by the Administrative State

Example: Delano Jt. Union High School District (DJUHSD) Reopening Plan, California

Not everyone is a scientist, but everyone can have a scientific mentality. Fact is, most don’t, and many of those become sneering haranguers like the CNN reporter condemning the Tampa Bay Super Bowl crowd at a popular eatery for not wearing masks. She doesn’t possess a scientific mentality because, if she had, she would have to hedge her judgment about masks with many caveats, like a real scientist. There are many scientific reasons to question the efficaciousness of masks, and many of the other COVID measures that have stripped us of our livelihoods and humanity.

Many of the assertions on COVID that entered the brain of our CNN reporter came from scientists who are more bureaucrat than scientist. They are accorded the final word as if the whole of science can be shoe-horned into the behavioral norms in the rarified atmosphere of the government office building. Their science is a stunted one suffering under the interplay of government employees jostling for job security and career advancement. It’s a unique social ecosystem that mangles science, usually to the lowest, or most stringent, common denominator to avoid blame for failure and a black mark in their personnel file.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, currently Biden’s Chief Medical Adviser, previously Director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

The rest of us outside the world of government employment are expected to bend a knee.

The attitude is more prevalent in the states and localities who are immersed in a love affair with government as the most important agent for human betterment – i.e., where progressivism has an iron grip on thought (blue states and localities). Anything out of the mouth of Anthony Fauci is treated as gospel, and off they go to public shaming and kneeling before the latest round of edicts out of the mouths of bureaucrats, that essentially act as “cya” for job security.

By so doing, our kids are approaching a full year without meaningful instruction. It’s clear that children aren’t walking super-spreader events. Yet, another class of government employee, the unionized public-school teacher, refuses to go back to educating them. Believe me, zooming isn’t teaching. It’s a form of play-acting: teachers sit in front of the computer camera and screen and who know what is happening at the other end, and everyone from the school board to the teachers to the principal’s secretary act as if the real thing is happening. It isn’t, as evidenced by kids dropping out, and off the servers, and the record number of F’s across the nation.

“Distance Learning”

A scan of my old employer’s website (www.djuhsd.org) brought to light a system – bureaucrats are infatuated with “systems” – that a King Minos, the developer of the maze to hold the Minotaur, would appreciate. At the top of pyramid – or maze – is the California Department of Public Health and its map of color-coded tiers of county infections rates to guide all government actions. And on top of them is the entire apparatus of the one-party state. Like a kaleidoscope of constantly changing hues, a county would find itself flipping back and forth from draconian to looser controls in a chaos that would make radical disruption a normal part of life. Interpretation of the continually changing map is the responsibility of another set of bureaucrats, the county department of public health.

Any plan for reopening the schools must adhere to the noise coming from the state and the county’s interpretation of the noise. The district issues their own plan with “phases” while adhering to the fluid and unpredictable circumstances. One week is the announcement of schools’ reopening; the next week is a lockdown. The bottom line for your kids: zooming for God knows how long.

And the striking fact about all the heavy-handedness is that it isn’t making a difference. More mask wearing, school closures, social distancing, and lockdowns hasn’t made an appreciable difference lowering infection rates and deaths. For instance, Texas and California are quite similar, except for the unemployment rate (7.2% to 9.9% respectively), and one being more open and the other in near perpetual lockdown. At least in Texas, a person can still go to work, to a restaurant, and school and run the same risk as a Californian who is stuck in the house, or marked by such gripping fear to refrain from even going to the park.

Maybe it’s as Ross Douthat said in his recent New York Times column: many of us, particular those in our culturally progressive urban areas, are longing for a secular messiah – a god-politician or god-expert – to deliver us from our travails. Politics and bureaucracy are poor places to look for deliverance.

In the meantime, many kids are getting dumber. It looks like we’ll have to inflate the number of H1B visas for engineers from the CCP’s China. Zooming in America won’t produce them here.

RogerG

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College Requires a Warning Label

Michael Bloomberg as mayor of New York City was famous for his finger-waving nanny bans on Big Gulps, super-sized fast food, and decrees on salt levels in restaurant foods. He wasn’t content with warning labels. He should have been content with warning labels. In contrast to Hizzoner, I’m suggesting only a warning label be placed on every college application – not in 2-point font in a footnote at the bottom of the page – to caution every parent and student of the danger in going to college in America. It might read something this:

“Warning: Any student matriculating to this college or university may procure revolutionary beliefs and a record of convictions for assault, murder, destruction of public and private property, threats to the rights of others, and other acts of disorder in furtherance of a historically proven dystopia.”

The connection between college and malignant left-wing radicalism is at least as strong as the relationship between tobacco smoking and lung cancer.

There are many historical instances of crass and brutal left-wing radicalism coming from the ranks of the college-educated with disastrous results. Take Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov – aka Lenin – for instance. His dad (Illya) was a college professor at the Penza Institute for the Nobility, and his sons were college students: Lenin at Kazan University and his older brother, Alexander, at College of Simbirsk and the University of Saint Petersburg. Later, Alexander would be executed in the unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Czar Alexander III. The radical bona fides of the siblings were insinuated in the college culture of the time. Aleksander Solzhenitsyn amply described the setting in many of his writings. Sound familiar?

Lenin as a university student

If it sounds familiar, it should . . . because it is! Let’s take a look at what happened to Michael Brase, a second-year dental student at the University of Iowa. David Johnsen, the dean of the University of Iowa’s College of Dentistry, mass-distributed an email condemning Pres. Trump for withdrawing federal funding for the propaganda and Maoist struggle sessions known as “diversity training” – in the words of the executive order, “race/sex stereotyping” and “scapegoating”.

Brase responded in a logical reply to Prof. Johnsen’s opinionated missive: “By condemning Executive Order 13950, does the [College of Dentistry] support using federal funds to promote trainings that include race/sex stereotyping and/or race/sex scapegoating?”

For Mr. Brase, the sh#! hit the fan. Brase was quickly ordered to appear before a disciplinary hearing for “unprofessional behavior”. Rather than prostrate himself before his accusers, he went to the press and his elected representatives in the Iowa state legislature whose House Oversight Committee launched an investigation. Facts were made clear and the lefty cabal in the professoriate was exposed. Under the glaring spotlight of public scrutiny, the professorial lynch mob scattered like cockroaches who were startled by the light. The professorial ring leader, Prof. Johnsen, ended up delivering a mea culpa.

Or take the experience of Economics Professor Frank Gunter at Lehigh University. He had the temerity to deliver a talk on poverty in response to the Biden Administration’s request for faculty advice, but his views didn’t jibe with the lefty groupthink on campus (see below). He dared to counter three myths about poverty that are constantly trotted out by lefty faculty and racialized students in furtherance of the revolution. The three falsehoods according to Prof. Gunter are the following: (1) poverty is a matter of race – racial minorities are its chief victims; (2) poverty is a generational curse – once poor, always poor for generations; and (3) the poor have no agency because they are victims of large, impersonal forces (“systemic racism”, articulated in “critical race theory”).

For this, the lefty hive on the U. of Iowa campus erupted into a swarm. Black Lives Matter went to the barricades and the College of Business – Gunter’s teaching assignment – feverishly tried to blunt this exercise in academic free speech and academic freedom. The lesson is clear: stick out your neck for truth and be forever ostracized.

That’s the setting for our young adult freshmen who wish to broaden their minds and opportunities. Parents, they may enter college one way, and may exit completely different. And don’t assume it’ll be an improvement.

The pervasiveness of the above experiences is frightening. It’s also absolutely disgusting. State legislatures get to work and mandate the warning label.

RogerG

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The Buffoonery of “Fact-Checking”

Xavier Becerra as California Attorney General
Little Sisters of the Poor on the steps of the Supreme Court in 2016.

Let’s face it, “fact-checking” radiates from the same noxious fever swamp of ideological zealotry that dominates most newsrooms in Big Media. An example is the herd of “fact-checkers” rushing to defend Xavier Becerra’s verbal gymnastics in yesterday’s (2/25/2021) confirmation hearing to hide the fact that he assiduously worked to force religious charities into sinning. With a straight face he said,

“I have never sued the nuns, any nuns. I’ve never sued any affiliation of nuns, and my actions have always been directed at the federal agencies.”

Salvador Rizzo of the Washington Post

And with an equally straight face, the Washington Post’s fact-checker, Salvador Rizzo, came to the demagogue’s defense: “It’s misleading to say Becerra sued the nuns . . . . the California attorney general has not filed lawsuits or brought enforcement actions against the Little Sisters of the Poor, a charity run by Catholic nuns.”

The Sacramento Bee chimed in as if the two newsrooms were working off each other’s Twitter feed. This vaunted exemplar of truth in the fourth estate bellowed that Becerra “did target a federal government exemption”, not a specific group. Then, the clowns went on to smear Sen. Ben Sasse’s assessment of the obvious as “misleading”. If this was a football game, the WaPO and SacBee were the pulling guards for a wide sweep left.

Kate Irby, Sacramento Bee fact-checker

The vast majority of today’s journalists aren’t referees; they are huddling with one team. Their team was caught with a teammate who wanted to coerce not just one group of nuns but every church and denomination with traditional morality and a calling to help the needy. To be clear, Becerra did target the nuns (Little Sisters of the Poor), and nearly every tithe-paying Christian, Muslim, Jew, and pagan.

Becerra began the feud in 2017 when he couldn’t tolerate the fact that many established churches have beliefs that he decreed shouldn’t be allowed to stand in the way of Obama’s edict in Obamacare that everyone, including nuns, provide birth control and abortifacients in their health coverage, a sin for them and many other people of faith. For Becerra, if they don’t cooperate, they must be made to cooperate. Trump saw the injustice in this authoritarian act and granted religious exemptions. Becerra, as the not-so-Golden State’s AG, sued the Trump administration (one of 100 lawsuits in his personal jihad against Trump) in a case that appeared in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals as California v. Little Sisters of the Poor.

So, it’s worse than an assault on one faith group. The commissar wanted to force all of them into perdition, or get entirely out of Christ’s mission to help the needy.

Becerra’s verbal slight-of-hand reaches right up there into the highest ranks of public buffoonery. Earlier, his comrade, Sen. Alex Padilla, came to the defense of his fellow California revolutionary by invoking the race card in his gambit to one-up Becerra in tomfoolery. The race card is a pity card. He sat next Becerra to invoke pity for the times that he and Becerra were the only Latinos in the room. What? What’s that got to do with handing over control of the nation’s healthcare to a lefty zealot? A person’s high level of melanin doesn’t inoculate the person from foolishness. One can be Latino, Anglo, Asian, Black, a man or woman, gay or straight, and a man-one-day-but-a-woman-the-next, and still be stupid.

Sen. Alex Padilla (D, Ca,), foreground, and Xavier Becerra behind the mask in yesterday’s confirmation hearings.

“Fact-checking”, and much the rest of the fourth estate, can no more be trusted than the race-hustlers seeking a promotion at taxpayer expense, like Becerra. Our public discourse more resembles the babblings of an asylum than the interactions of mature adults. The problem: others around the world are watching the madness. What a sobering thought.

RogerG

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A Total War Against the Founding

“The Constitution was founded on the law of gravitation. The government was to exist and move by virtue of the efficacy of ‘checks and balances.’ The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing . No living thing can have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live.” President Woodrow Wilson, a progressive icon, 1913

The Democrats are in power, and that means the ideology of progressivism will be in the cockpit. Progressivism is a form of authoritarianism with the rulers being an elect among the clerisy (“a distinct class of learned or literary people”) under the honorific title of “expert”. “Experts” rule, elite colleges coronate the rulers with spurious certificates of competence (degrees), elite coastal social networks in exclusive nodes confer status, and the common people are shunted into the increasingly meaningless debating societies called legislatures in the states and Congress.

This mongrel is the malignant dream of “progressives”, since at least the late 19th century, to unseat the Constitutional mechanisms – separation of powers and checks and balances – that were established to protect the public well-being from inherently flawed human beings in the possession of great power. The “science” of the expert is forever on their tongues. But we aren’t getting dispassionate men of “science” to rule over us, as per the progressive dream. We’re getting the same mediocrity, or worse, but with the gloss of a college resume’.

UC Berkeley BA graduates, 2016

The Founders tried to warn us against placing too much power in the hands of any small group of apparatchiks. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams fleshed out the danger in their correspondence.

Jefferson, as the golden jubilee of the nation (50-year) approached, denied the request for his attendance at the festivities due to “ill health”. But he had some weighty words that our aggrandizing progressives would be wise to heed:

“. . . the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”

A sheepskin with “science” on it does not bestow boots and spurs for one person to ride another. The flaws of humanity remain in spite of a commencement exercise. Wisdom and moral character are not automatically conferred by a curriculum riddled with lefty bromides, or any other litany of coursework for that matter. Ambition, avarice, vanity, egotism, etc., remain in spite of acquiring a six-figure student loan debt.

Our new aristocracy

John Adams would make sure everyone at his time understood the menace that is posed by our defective nature. He maintained to the end of his life that “human Reason and human Conscience [are] not a Match, for human Passions, human Imaginations and human Enthusiasm.” He went further when he wrote that the passions “insinuate themselves into the Understanding and the Conscience and convert both to their Party”. Our politicians’ favorite bromides of “follow the science” or “scientific consensus” is jargon to cover their poorly reasoned ideological prejudices.

Some of Adams’s words would send many of our snowflakes into thumb-sucking safe spaces. The priesthood of critical race theory would rush to their political allies in the Democratic Party to have him air-brushed from history like the old Bolsheviks who were erased from the pictorial record in all Soviet publications after their execution by Stalin.

Adams had no patience for equality of result, and thus no need for an “equity” crusade. He would say that equality in law and soul is not the same as equality in material effects and natural endowments. The former is proper and fitting, the latter isn’t. People aren’t born with equal capacities.

Yes, he would agree that being born into an elite family is an advantage, obviously, but it isn’t determinative. Look at him. He was the son of a cobbler and farmer. As he wrote at the end of his life to drive the point home,

“To teach that all men are born with equal powers and faculties, to equal influence in society, to equal property and advantages through life is as great a fraud, as glaring an imposition on the credulity of the people, as ever was practiced by monks, by Druids, by Brahmins, by priests of the immortal Lama, or by the self-styled philosophers of the French Revolution.”

Inequality of status and wealth is the natural condition of humanity according to Adams. A jihad against inequality can’t eliminate it, only replace one group of barons for another. The equity commissars will be every bit an aristocracy as those inhabiting the grounds of 18th-century Versailles.

Orwell captured the rise of the new privileged ruling class in Animal Farm: “All animals are equal / but some animals are more equal than others.”

Guess who will be “more equal than others”? They’ll be the legions of venal consultants leading the charge against the wreckers of the “systemic racism” conspiracy, or the armies of activists who shifted employment from the likes of the Southern Poverty Law Center to the Justice Department. It’s the rule of powerful apparatchiks with their secret police and army of sycophantic informers in corporate boardrooms and in all other areas of life.

Robin Diangelo (l) and Ibran X. Kendi, the commissars of critical race theory.

The progressives’ dream seems to be an echo of CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping’s surveillance state and social credit system. Censorship is rampant. It’s lurking underneath the jargon of “misinformation” and “hate”. External control of thought, speech, conscience, and action is everywhere. We were sold on free trade with China in the hope that they would become more like us. Instead, we are beginning to look a lot like them.

CCP large monitor surveillance

In a nutshell, we are living at a time of the near completion of the progressives’ campaign against the Founding. And it sucks.

RogerG

Posted on

A Total War Against the Founding

Biden, wife, Harris, and transition team, January 2021

The Democrats are in power, and that means the ideology of progressivism will be in the cockpit. Progressivism is a form of authoritarianism with the rulers being an elite among the clerisy (“a distinct class of learned or literary people”) under the honorific title of “expert”. “Experts” rule, elite colleges coronate the rulers with spurious certificates of competence, elite coastal social networks in exclusive nodes confer status, and the common people are shunted into the increasingly meaningless debating societies called legislatures in the states and Congress.

Jeff Zients, White House coronavirus response coordinator, speaks with the rest of Biden’s COVID-19 Response Team, January 27, 2021.

This mongrel is the malignant dream of “progressives”, since at least the late 19th century, to unseat the Constitutional mechanisms – separation of powers and checks and balances – that were established to protect the public well-being from inherently flawed human beings in the possession of great power. The “science” of the expert is forever on their tongues. But we aren’t getting dispassionate men of “science” to rule over us, as per the progressive dream. We’re getting the same mediocrity, or worse, but with the gloss of a college resume’.

Portrait of Thomas Jefferson, 1805

The Founders tried to warn us against placing too much power in the hands any small group of apparatchiks. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams fleshed out the danger in their correspondence. Jefferson, as the golden jubilee of the nation (50-year) approached, denied the request for his attendance at the festivities due to “ill health”. But he had some weighty words that our aggrandizing progressives would be wise to heed:

“. . . the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”

A sheepskin with “science” on it does not bestow boots and spurs for one person to ride another. The flaws of humanity remain in spite of a commencement exercise. Wisdom and moral character are not automatically conferred by a curriculum riddled with lefty bromides, or any other litany of coursework for that matter. Ambition, avarice, vanity, egotism, etc., remain in spite of acquiring a six-figure student loan debt.

John Adams, c. 1800/1815, oil on canvas by Gilbert Stuart.

John Adams would make sure everyone at his time understood the menace that is posed by our defective nature. He maintained to the end of his life that “human Reason and human Conscience [are] not a Match, for human Passions, human Imaginations and human Enthusiasm.” He went further when he wrote that the passions “insinuate themselves into the Understanding and the Conscience and convert both to their Party”. Our politicians’ favorite bromides of “follow the science” or “scientific consensus” is jargon to cover their poorly reasoned ideological prejudices.

Some of Adams’s words would send many of our snowflakes into thumb-sucking safe spaces. The priesthood of critical race theory would rush to their political allies in the Democratic Party to have him air-brushed from history like the old Bolsheviks who were erased from the pictorial record in all Soviet publications after their execution by Stalin.

Nikolai Yezhov, pictured right of Stalin, was later removed from this photograph at the Moscow Canal. (Credit: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images & AFP/GettyImages)

Adams had no patience for equality of result, and thus no need for an “equity” crusade. He would say that equality in law and soul is not the same as equality in material effects and natural endowments. The former is proper and fitting, the latter isn’t. People aren’t born with equal capacities.

Yes, he would agree that being born into an elite family is an advantage, obviously, but it isn’t determinative. Look at him. He was the son of a cobbler and farmer. As he wrote at the end of his life to drive the point home,

“To teach that all men are born with equal powers and faculties, to equal influence in society, to equal property and advantages through life is as great a fraud, as glaring an imposition on the credulity of the people, as ever was practiced by monks, by Druids, by Brahmins, by priests of the immortal Lama, or by the self-styled philosophers of the French Revolution.”

Inequality of status and wealth is the natural condition of humanity according to Adams. A jihad against inequality can’t eliminate it, only replace one group of barons for another. The equity commissars will be every bit an aristocracy as those inhabiting the grounds of 18th-century Versailles.

Orwell captured the rise of the new privileged ruling class in Animal Farm: “All animals are equal / but some animals are more equal than others.” Guess who will be “more equal than others”? They’ll be the legions of venal consultants leading the charge against the wreckers of the “systemic racism” conspiracy, or the armies of activists who shifted employment from the likes of the Southern Poverty Law Center to the Justice Department. It’s the rule of powerful apparatchiks with their secret police and army of sycophantic informers in corporate boardrooms and in all other areas of life.

The progressives’ dream seems to be an echo of CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping’s surveillance state and social credit system. Censorship is rampant. It’s lurking underneath the jargon of “misinformation” and “hate”. External control of thought, speech, conscience, and action is everywhere. We were sold on free trade with China in the hope that they would become more like us. Instead, we are beginning to look a lot like them.

In a nutshell, we are living at a time of the near completion of the progressives’ campaign against the Founding. And it sucks.

RogerG

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Perversion of Science

US President-elect Joe Biden, arrives with Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris to announces his economic team at The Queen Theater in Wilmington, Delaware, on December 1, 2020. (Photo by Chandan KHANNA / AFP) (Photo by CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP via Getty Images)

Today, science is routinely weaponized for political ends. Not surprisingly, it’s the people who know the least about it who abuse it the most, like the power-seekers whose educational preparation is limited to the verbose college subjects – subjects reliant on the manipulation of the written and spoken word, the “soft sciences”. Graduates of international relations and communications studies, for instance, promiscuously trot out “science” to boost their ideological prejudices. So, for them, “science” becomes their go-to means to feed their socialist inclinations. It’s the bane of our times.

Take two cases to illustrate the point: climate change and the pandemic. Climate change – “global warming” in an earlier incarnation – is riddled with Donald Rumsfeld’s known unknowns. And many unknown unknowns by the way. We definitely can take temperatures readings throughout the layers of the atmosphere and at the exosphere (top). We know pollution in the form of carbonates, etc., and cloud cover, can create a warming effect. But beyond those facts, politically exploitable grand predictions are the rankest of speculation. The unknowns are trampled asunder to get right to the activists’ solution of giving them and their fellow-travelers power, to the ruin of us all.

As the Gospels reported Jesus as saying on the cross, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.”

Jim Geraghty, a reporter for National Review, in a recent article illustrates the persistence of the many unknowns about the pandemic. In the beginning of the COVID affair – or I should say when we first noticed its presence – we didn’t know much. Nonetheless, confident announcements obscured the ignorance.

At this time of innocence, prudence justified strong but short-term measures: lockdowns, school closures, masking, social distancing. The development of therapeutics and the knowledge of who is vulnerable should have led to a lessening of the grip. It didn’t. Once power is acquired, it’s awfully hard to give it up, proving once again that power is intoxicating.

Dr. Fauci testifying before Congress in June 2020.

At this juncture, many confidently talked about the date that the virus first entered the U.S. Now we’re getting the idea that we really don’t know, and neither do our masters. Honestly, our “experts” were aping each other in confusing the moment when they first noticed it with its actual appearance in the country or the world. With each new tranche of evidence, we’ve had to push back the start date in halting steps. This has significant implications about the virus and our response to it.

The official appearance of the bug in China has been moved back from December to October to “late summer and early fall” of 2019. Geraghty quotes the South China Post, NBC News, and US intelligence sources to raise suspicions of a far earlier pandemic birth date. Cell-phone activity in the Wuhan lab vicinity suddenly went dark for 17 days in October and satellites pictured unusually-packed Wuhan hospital parking lots “in the months before the pandemic became international news”. How much time before October was it mistaken for the common flu? “Late summer and early fall”?

Satellite photo of Wuhan parking lot unusually filled with cars, October 2019 (source: Taiwan Times)

If it had an earlier start date in China, did it have an earlier start date in other parts of the world? China didn’t shutdown flights to other parts of China till the last week of January 2020, and other countries didn’t stop travel till the next month. If the virus first appeared in “late summer and early fall” 2019, for how much time was it mistaken for the flu? Since international travel wasn’t suspended for the whole of the last third of 2019, and the virus was active, there was ample opportunity for the virus to spread to God knows where. It could be anywhere floating about on cruise ships, visits to American college campuses, malls, Disneyland/Disney World, Las Vegas, etc. How many Americans contracted it and nobody knew, least of all the patient, doctor, and our vaunted public health experts?

Visiting group of undergrads from the PRC to Stanford’s School of Engineering, 2017.
Recent photo of PRC tourists at a Las Vegas casino.

During this time of ignorance, many people who may have had it didn’t die, were treated, and a few may have succumbed, which matches our experience with any virus. For 90+% of the population, symptoms range from a cold to a nasty flu. As in all outbreaks, the vulnerable are the people with weakened immune systems, the aged with age-related conditions, and for that matter anyone with serious medical problems.

It’s entirely possible for the thing to fly under the radar for an extensive period of time before somebody with a microphone hits the panic button. Was the panic justified? Yes, maybe no. I’m reluctant to draw a hard and fast conclusion, but let’s just say that my BS-sonar is registering pings. Stringent measures in the beginning are excusable, but when we know more – not when we get a handle on its spread – they should be adjusted to fit that better understanding. So, instead of nearly everyone under stay-at-home orders, lockdowns with accommodations should have been limited to the vulnerable. Similar targeting should apply to masking, social distancing, and school in-person attendance. Instead, our scalpels were put away in favor of sledge hammers.

Social distancing in an American park.

We have mangled science and our lives. Back in March of 2020, I proclaimed that “We Can’t Do This”, the “this” being lockdowns. The costs in the trade-offs were too severe. Now we know that many of the powerful were making decisions to wreck our lives as if there were no gaps in their knowledge. Heck, as it turns out, they still don’t know when the bug started to circulate. It’s probably been with us much longer than anyone knew.

In the end, our power-hungry politicos and their supporting cast of lickspittle and self-aggrandizing “experts” have soiled the reputation of science. A good reputation once lost is hard to regain.

RogerG

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He Made Conservatism Cool

I was there at the beginning, the birth of a luminary. I was a grad student at California State University, Chico, about 90 miles north of Sacramento, Ca. Not a fan of talk radio, occasionally I’d pick up the AM radio signal of Sacramento’s KFBK for news and information. Serendipitously, I happened to be tuning in when the station was auditioning a guest host after their headliner had been forced to resign after making an ethnic joke. The replacement was funny, entertaining, and the style was light and beckoning. He stayed. He was Rush Limbaugh.

My wife remembers me coming home from the campus one day and laughing. I told her of the funniest radio program that I discovered from just cruising the dial. It was the beginning of Talent on Loan from God.

From where did the star of Rush arise? Limbaugh as the beneficiary of a generational rethink that was taking place in the late 1970’s. He came at the right time.

Men of the radical left raise their fists during the “Days of Rage” anti-Vietnam War demonstrations organized by the militant Weathermen in Chicago. Oct. 11, 1969.

Again, in an earlier incarnation as a grad student, this time at UC Santa Barbara in the late 1970’s – I seemed to be in perpetual grad-student mode at that time in my life – I attended a campus open-air talk in 1977 or ’78 on the state of national affairs. Hyper-inflation, the humiliation of the fall of South Vietnam and Southeast Asia, the attendant slaughters and holocausts, and the sinking mood in a seemingly impotent country were current events, not the third-to-last chapter in a high school History textbook. When questions were allowed at the end of the talk, I remember shouting a rhetorical query on the cause of our malaise, “What about our rampant consumerism?” That shows where my mind was, as it was for many of my age at that time. It was nonsense, absolute nonsense.

Open-air anti-War speeches, UC Santa Barbara, 1970
Anti-War protest, UC Santa Barbara, 1970.
The 1970 Isla Vista riots, adjacent to the UC Santa Barbara campus, with the Bank of America building burning in the background behind the line of Sheriff deputies. The campus had quieted considerably by 1977 when I arrived as a grad student.

The horrifying scenes of the fall of Saigon and the ghoulish totalitarian genocides coming out of the place that we abandoned, Southeast Asia, shocked me. My philosophical transition started. I began to discover a new counterculture, one long in existence and counterpoised to the left/liberal Ivy League hegemony, an older relative of the smothering orthodoxy that dominates our cultural commanding heights today. Milton and Rose Friedman, the Chicago School of Economics, Thomas Sowell, Arthur Laffer, George Gilder, Jean Kirkpatrick, Jean-François Revel, and National Review soon followed. The candidacy of Ronald Reagan politically encapsulated the trend. And for the average lunch-pale man and woman, there was Rush Limbaugh.

Limbaugh became a cultural event. He was the right’s SNL. His stunts offended the liberals in the newsroom at KFBK. In their stunted minds, conservatives were dour people of mundane prospects. But with this guy, they were parodied and they didn’t like it. Still don’t.

Rush standing before a Sacramento billboard that was paid by someone who obviously disliked Limbaugh. Limbaugh was at KFBK from 1983-88.

From his perch in the studio, for instance, he followed the progress of a coast-to-coast nuclear freeze march that was meant to stymie Reagan’s attempt to counter the Soviet’s buildup of nuclear missiles in Europe. Limbaugh would find their location, call someone in the town at random, and ask them about the marchers. He’d crack jokes with the resident about the lefty marchers traipsing through his or her town. It was great radio, and enough to cause you to stop what you were doing and listen.

Who can forget the Rush dictionary? There were “feminazis”, women that he characterized as not able to get a date with a man, nor wanting one. There was the story of watching a woman “farding” in her car. He took awhile to explain that “farding” meant the application of makeup. The Kennedys were a rich vein of humor, particularly Ted who had a hard time finishing a statement without blubbering. Limbaugh did to liberals what liberals have been doing to the rest of the country from their monopoly perch of their own Versailles that stretched from Manhattan to Hollywood to the Ivy League.

And then there was Dan’s Bake Sale in 1993. It started as a conversation with a caller, Dan, who said he couldn’t afford the Limbaugh Letter because his wife didn’t like Rush. Rush borrowed his idea of a bake sale to pay off the national debt and suggested the idea to Dan. The idea caught fire among “dittoheads” and before anyone knew it, 65,000 people gathered in Ft. Collins, Co. Think of it as Rushstock ’93. Rush was rockin’ fun.

Rush was fun and the Left was exposed as killjoys. The left dished it out but couldn’t take it. There’s been a role reversal: the liberal establishment and their media mandarins have become the “Church Lady” without the church. Snowflakes spitting and fuming and disrupting anyone who can’t countenance their inanities were bound to produce real time material for the lively mind of someone like Rush. In those early days, Rush could take these cranks without any self-awareness and turn them into entertainment, and the object of a little deserving ridicule as well.

The “drive-bys” still harbor resentment for receiving what they have been dishing out for half a century. Nicholas Kristof, New York Times columnist, on today’s Hugh Hewitt show couldn’t bring himself to say anything positive about Rush when given the opportunity. Crickets. Wikipedia devotes an entire section to his personal problems (divorces and addiction to pain killers) and another one trying to impose the opinions of “fact-checkers” over his. This isn’t fact-checking; it’s opinion cancellation. Julia Wick, Los Angeles Times staff writer, came out with this gem, “… he helped bring conspiracy theories and racist, misogynistic vitriol into mainstream political discourse ….” They hate him for laying bare their pretentiousness. The emperors and empresses have no clothes.

Rush, RIP. We’ll miss you.

If you’ve got time, grab a cup of coffee and take a glimpse of Talent on Loan from God: his 2009 speech to CPAC.

RogerG