Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda at news conference after their infamous visit to North Vietnam in 1972Jane Fonda in the seat of a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun, the ones that were killing American pilots.Tucker Carlson recently in Moscow to perform the same service for Putin
Tom Hayden, premiere anti-Vietnam War activist, who declared “We refuse to be anti-Communist”, made multiple trips to North Vietnam from 1965 to 1974, including a 1972 one with his future wife, Jane Fonda, whitewashing the communist Hanoi regime. Who elected him to conduct our country’s foreign relations? The nerve of the guy. The American people already elected other people to do it. He’s of the Left, and today on the Right we have Tucker Carlson. In the Hayden tradition of pasting happy face on brutal and totalitarian thuggeries, Carlson goes to Russia and Vladimir Putin to normalize his tyranny, whether intended or not.
Watch below Tucker’s piece about his tour of the Kiyevskaya metro station in Moscow, Russia. Watch him gush about its orderliness and cleanliness. In case you may have missed it, spotless public spaces are a common feature of totalitarianism from Der Fuhrer to the communist Kim dynasty of North Korea. Tucker, it’s hardly a selling point, unless you’re quick to sacrifice liberty for sanitized public spaces.
Throughout his interview with Putin, the despot betrayed his basic Marxist outlook, a product of indoctrination in the USSR from child to career KGB officer. The Soviet Union hasn’t gone away; it’s only gone through a name change. And you can see the shadow of the sinister past in the station.
The Kiyevskaya metro station is named after Kiyev, or the anglicized “Kiev”. Yes, that Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. As this station went up in the 1930s, Stalin was murdering and starving 10 million people or so, mostly in the Ukraine, in something called the Holodomor. The murals festooning the station’s wall are propaganda images of happy peasants at work on their government-imposed communes, or collective farms (kolkhozes). The reality was anything but joyous.
Stalin ordered industrialization, even the industrialization of agriculture, for the country. Of course, the farmers liked their land, farms, animals, and equipment, and resistance fomented as their property was seized and they were herded onto collective farms or work camps (gulags), losing everything. Even the seed for next year’s crop which, like all the grain, was sold to purchase factory equipment. No more crop next year. The communes were as great a disaster as the factories. Famine spread and was exploited by the big man and his politburo to suppress Ukrainian nationalism. The gulags proliferated and became an archipelago of gulags in Solzhenitsyn’s famous words. The murals in the metro were designed to hide the horrors. They were totalitarianism in art.
Spotlessness in public appearances, absolute hygienic orderliness, could be a similar sign of complete tyranny. To keep the spaces clear of rubbish and ugliness, the Putin claque utilizes an import from the CCP: AI facial recognition tech tied to thousands of cameras. But that’s not the only purpose of it. Putin’s henchmen use it to pick up dissenters, dissidents, and political opponents. Many a free thinker has been spirited away into Putin’s archipelago, many never to be heard from again.
Friday, another one of the greats of Russian free thought, Alexei Navalny, died in custody. He joins many others in the grave. Life imitates art, Orwell’s Big Brother. Yep, Tucker, the last vestiges of freedom are thrown into the trash bin along with the other refuse. But Russia has clean subways.
And cheaper food prices, cheaper for a fat and sassy westerner like Tucker as he was guided into a Moscow grocery store (see #4 below). Everything is cheaper in the country, including the labor, which explains the lower prices. Lower incomes depress prices. In 1930s America, during The Great Depression, the time was a buyer’s paradise . . . if you had a steady job. The average monthly income in Russia is $787, as opposed to the U.S. monthly median of $4,568 (see #2 and #3 below). That says volumes.
That’s not all. 60% of Russians spend half their income on just food. 22% of Russian households don’t have indoor plumbing, compared to the American .3% (see #3 below). With a consumer base like that, Tucker could buy out the store with just pocket change, if he could slip it by customs at JFK airport.
North Korea is similarly spotless. Over the years, we’ve seen many pictures of the pristine, purified places in Pyongyang, and thin, even emaciated people standing around. Compare Tucker’s Moscow metro station with this video of Pyongyang street scenes in the next post. Tucker, could we also learn a few things from the Kim dynasty?
I nominate Tucker Carlson for the 2024 Tom Hayden Memorial Emissary Award for his attempt at dignifying the indecent.
Please watch the Carlson tour below.
RogerG
Sources:
1. The full Tucker Carlson interview with Putin can be viewed at https://youtu.be/hYfByTcY49k?si=kxFsUvWJsbtKDUzl
2. “How Average Salary in Russia Compares to US”, Tom Norton, Newsweek, 2/16/24, at https://www.newsweek.com/how-average-salary-russia-compares-us-1870740#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20latest%20figures,was%20about%20%24787%20in%20November.
3. Thanks to Jim Geraghty of National Review for his comparison of Russia and the U.S. in “No, America Is Not ‘Ugly and Decayed’”, 2/19/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/no-america-is-not-ugly-and-decayed/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=second
4. Tucker’s grocery store tour can be viewed at https://twitter.com/TPostMillennial/status/1758158808835125642
5. “We Need to Talk about Tucker”, Jeffrey Blehar, National Review, 2/20/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/we-need-to-talk-about-tucker/
6. “Tucker Carlson Claims Groceries Are Cheaper in Russia Despite a Russian Food Inflation Crisis”, Troy Matthews, MTN, 2/16/24, at https://www.meidastouch.com/news/tucker-carlson-claims-groceries-are-cheaper-in-russia-despite-a-russian-food-inflation-crisis#:~:text=In%20a%20survey%20of%205%2C000,more%20than%2020%25%20on%20food.
Are we off our rocker? Republicans sound like the 60s New Left and Democrats come across as Ronald Reagan (regarding Ukraine). Both Democrats and Republicans go off the cliff respectively into a crazy neo-Marxism and blind fealty in a cult of personality. I give you a few examples.
Right off the bat, Sen. J.D. Vance (R, Ohio) is clearly off his rocker. He took to the conservative American Spectator to burnish proof of his bonkers state of mind (see #1 below). In his mind, nearly everything goes down a conspiracy rat hole, particularly aid to Ukraine. The fact that the funding goes into next year is, in the twists and turns of his brain, proof of a Democrat plot to trap Donald Trump in impeachment if he should be elected this year. Here’s a shocker: it’s normal for funding to go beyond the fiscal year since it takes time to pass through the intestines of the federal Leviathan and make the stuff – in this case, munitions. It’s true for the aid to Israel in the bill which Vance incongruously, without a hint of embarrassing hypocrisy, supports (as do I).
The alleged trap assumes Trump will be elected and while in office turn the screws on Ukraine and by acts of omission assist Putin’s conquest of Russia’s “near abroad” – which, by the way, is strangely reminiscent of Lebensraum from another quarter of eight decades passed. Furthermore, it unwittingly presumes that Democrats will control the House and Senate to give us another impeachment parade, which might happen if Republicans continue to serve up candidate looniness and stage ugliness (Trump being Trump). For a good portion of the American public, who would want to check the Democrats’ neo-Marxism with the bestial and batty? Vance, without thinking and saying it, assumes that voters will prefer the neo-Marxists and thus they’ll be in position to oust Trump. Vance’s reasoning inadvertently slaps himself as he attempts to slap Ukraine.
What a strange way to quietly show affection for Putin and isolationism, albeit of the incoherent variety. What a strange way to make yourself unelectable as a party.
And in the Republican stable, more craziness awaits. Rep. Matt Rosendale (R, Montana), a stalwart of the House Republican suicide attempt in the toppling of Kevin McCarthy (R, Ca.) from the speakership, that didn’t make a lick of sense, announced that he’d like to bring the same looniness to the Senate chamber (see #3 below). Brandishing all the Trumpy jargon of the “establishment” drivel, he’s challenging Republican Tim Sheehy, who’s been running since summer last. So, the state Republican Party will be asked to place on the November ballot a man who lost to Montana Democrat Sen. John Tester in 2018 in a state Trump carried by 16 points in 2020. We’ll see if the state’s Republican voters are hungry to replicate 2022 when getable seats were lost by choosing the bestial and batty to carry the party flag. A sizeable chunk of Republican voters has proven to be the Democrats’ best allies.
Rep. Matt Rosendale (R, Montana)
In the end, ironically, after election 2024 passes from the scene, the Democrats might still be in a position to ruin the country, or make it look like the hellscapes of California and New York. Businesses and people are fleeing these bastions of insanity. When will we ever learn that lefty policy is a ticket to societal carnage? These states are governed by people who hate the Second Amendment and economic activity that isn’t directed by them. Lawbreaking, adolescent genital mutilation (“gender-affirming care” in the jargon of our time), eco-central planning, our schools as Marxist preparatory academies, the filth and crime, and the secessionist flouting of federal immigration law emanate from these metropolitan and bi-coastal enclaves. These places are a mess.
Their favorite whipping boys are people who bring us our energy and those who produce the means for us to protect ourselves from the miscreants coddled by them. Defund the police? The targets, especially the arms industry, are escaping a bevy of regulations, punishing taxation, and massive state-law sponsored lawsuits. Smith and Wesson fled Massachusetts for Tennessee. Now, Remington is abandoning New York for Georgia (see #4 below). Ilion, upstate NY, will shrink further.
Our newfound passion to make everyone whole (in legal eagle lingo) in the extreme is driving whole industries into bankruptcy, literally. The fact that a wacko used a Bushmaster to kill 20 kids and 6 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School is the excuse to squeeze $73 million from Remington and, by extension, its employees. What of the car manufacturer of the vehicle that the killer drove? What of the gas station that the killer accessed to get him to the school? What of the fuel manufacturer? What of the maker of the shoes, clothes, and food that kept him alive and well to perform the heinous deed? What of all the hammers and steak knives that have been utilized to commit mayhem throughout history? In states like New York, we have a web of law and a jury pool, indeed a population, curated on hostility to certain industries. Remington became the target, less so the killer. Well, they are getting out. Masochism shouldn’t be expected to be a requirement for economic activity.
From the article:
“My mom worked there [Remington, Ilion]. My dad worked there. My wife works there with me now. My daughter works there with me now. My second daughter works there with me now. And my son-in-law works there,” said Brown, president of the United Mine Workers of America Local 717. “So it’s a double-hit for me and my wife: two of us out of a job.”
Do ya think?!
In statements to the press and employees, Remington cited New York’s threatening “legislative environment” and the fact that Georgia “supports and welcomes the firearms industry” (see #4 below). As a result, the State of New York is giving its residents much more than they ask for.
It’s much more than a shrinking tax base. It’s a clear field of play for criminals after non-prosecution, hostility to self-protection, and suppressed bail requirements under the puffery of “equity”. Where’s the “equity”? Right now, some people have greater rights to steal and destroy your property than you do in desiring to keep it. If the numbers don’t break down “equitably” by race, then hell is turned loose on the law-abiding, and good number of those are in so-called “protected classes” supposedly in need of “equity”. It’s laughable, if it wasn’t also so tragic.
There you have it. Current events are a chronicling of absolute lunacy. Are we off our rocker?
RogerG
Sources:
1. “The Republican Plot Against Donald Trump”, Sen. J.D. Vance, The American Spectator, 2/12/24, at https://www.theamericanconservative.com/how-congress-is-pursuing-endless-war-in-ukraine-and-trying-to-stop-a-trump-election/
2. Thanks to Noah Rothman for the reportage and commentary on Vance’s claim in “J. D. Vance Thinks You’ll Believe Anything”, 2/12/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/02/j-d-vance-thinks-youll-believe-anything/
3. “Rosendale’s entry into Montana Senate primary sparks GOP furor”, Julia Mueller, The Hill, 2/11/24, at https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4459261-matt-rosendales-montana-senate-primary-donald-trump-tim-sheehy/
4. “Remington leaves the upstate New York village where it made guns for 200 years after a PE takeover and 2 bankruptcies”, Michael Hill and AP, Fortune, 2/11/24, at https://fortune.com/2024/02/11/is-remington-in-business-who-owns-leaving-new-york/
The term (radioactive personality) comes from the National Review editors’ op-ed on the eve of the Iowa caucuses (see below). Indeed, Trump is a radioactive personality. It bodes ill for the GOP in November.
No doubt about it, it’s true, and it’s true not because Trump drives the Left – which means the root-and-branch of the Democratic Party – nuts, but because everyone, even his friends and loyal supporters, recognize his self-absorbed boorishness and then run to a banal recitation of his accomplishments. The reprehensive demeanor is hard to avoid. This simple fact has profound repercussions. Going into this election’s primaries, Trump is the weakest rival to Biden in a general election, also, no doubt about it. If the Democrats should change their standard bearer, all bets are off for even the rosiest Trump scenario of a narrow victory in November.
How radioactive is he? His avid fans are giddy about his head-to-head slight lead (within the margin of error) in some major polls. Remember, he’s running against a guy who every day reminds the public that he belongs in a nursing home and not the oval office. In addition, look at the hash Biden’s party has made of the country and our national security. Everything from Abbey Gate (the deadly Kabul fiasco), inflation, the uncontrolled border, the assault on our standard of living in eco-totalitarianism, the neo-Marxism in DEI, the boosterism for transgenderism’s teenage genital mutilation in “gender affirming care”, the orchestrated annihilation of American education, et al, doesn’t leave much for the donkey party to run on, except the looming Trump ascendancy if he is the GOP’s avatar.
The tone for the general election is set. Biden’s speech last week in Blue Bell, Penn., made Trump the focus of evil in the world. It’s a replay of the strategy in the 2022 midterms. Did it work then? I don’t know, but the expected GOP banner year turned out to be The Great Disappointment. Apparently, it’s safe to assume that enough people fell for it. If anything, the person of Trump animates the Democrats and sends shivers down the spine of at least a sliver of Republicans. Not good for someone who’s already a close-run thing.
Biden’s “Jim Crow 2.0” speech from Sept. 2022 in the runup to the 2022 midterms
The polls tell the tale, and have been telling the same tale for quite some time. The second-place candidate in the Republican primary contest does significantly better than Trump in a face-off with Biden in the general. The crazy Trump indictments and other Democrat shenanigans have certainly contributed to a heavy sympathy vote among Republicans for Trump. While they have contributed to Trump’s political ballast among GOPers, once Trump gets out of the safe confines of the Republican primary, expect Democrats to cater to the electorate’s already deep disdain for the man from Mar-a-Largo, if only they can successfully distract the voters away from Biden’s catastrophes – a big “if”.
Follow the FiveThirtyEight aggregate of polls and follow them from 2023 on (see below for the latest). The trend is clear. At best, Trump eeks out a lead in the margin of error. The polling details vary (for instance, registered vs. likely voters) but the direction is obvious. Biden screws up, Trump improves, slightly! Yesterday (Jan. 10), the YouGov/The Economist poll registered a Biden and Trump tie at 43%. Both are stinkers with negatives in the mid to high 50s. The last time, December 2023, a general pairing of Haley or Trump versus Biden by the Wall Street Journal shows Haley smashing Biden by 17% with Trump squeaking out only a 4-point lead (see below). For the life of me, why are Republicans determined to make their election prospects so difficult? It makes me wonder if this is populist sadomasochism at work.
Nikki Haley (l)
I’ll leave the prognosis of sadomasochism to the field of psychology, but, at the very least, one must conclude that we live in crazy times. Trump is still radioactive, and Biden is a bumbler after having surrendered to his party’s neo-Marxism. Oh, America, why are we so gun-ho for mediocrities, and repulsive ones at that?
RogerG
Sources:
* “Republican Voters Can — and Should — Rethink Nominating Trump”, The Editors, National Review online, 1/10/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/01/republican-voters-can-and-should-rethink-nominating-trump/
* Latest FiveThirtyEight polling at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/
* “Why Nikki Haley polls better against Joe Biden than Donald Trump does”, Steven Shepard, Politico, 12/9/2023, at https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/09/haley-electability-trump-biden-polls-00130926
While listening to a podcast of the musical career of Simon and Garfunkel, up popped a segment of their song “Mrs. Robinson”. The verse struck me as oddly reminiscent of today. Think of the looming contest between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. The verse:
“Sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon
Going to the candidates’ debate
Laugh about it, shout about it
When you’ve got to choose
Every way you look at it, you lose”
I don’t expect much practical wisdom from rock stars, but this verse hits a chord. A verse from 1968 comes full circle to meet 2024.
A week ago, I happened to be watching an episode of Fox News’s “The Five”. A new Fox News poll had just been released showing Donald Trump ahead of Joe Biden. Four of the five hosts were almost dancing a jig on the table about the results, as if votes had already been counted and Trump was preparing his coronation speech. Is Trump becoming popular, or, more likely, is this a choice between the most abhorrent candidates of all time?
Look at the candidates’ negatives. They are far and away more detested than loved. A smattering of polls from the Nov. 8-14 shows these guys to be stinkers (see below). Biden’s detestability hovers between 53% and 59%. Trump’s swings from 54% to 56%. Biden has achieved a level of loathsomeness slightly greater than Trump’s. And the hosts of The Five are dancing a jig over this?
The contest is a consequence of the parties foisting on the general voting public execrable nominees. The Democrats can’t come around to jettisoning their enfeebled sellout to the party’s neo-Marxist Left. The Republicans can’t shake their enchantment with a narcissistic lunatic. Now, the public has experienced both behind the Resolute desk and the bully pulpit. If the contest is reduced to this binary, then the choice is about the least reviled.
So, why does Trump appear to be allegedly riding high? Biden is in the seat of power, more immediate, before cameras, at the head of the nightly newscast, the subject of much conversation, and people get a daily dose of the failures of the party’s neo-Marxism: an overrun border, inflation, climate-change central planning, the unraveling of civilization, the group-guilt shaming, the international scene coming unglued, etc. The present soon overwhelms the past. Trump slides into background noise amid court appearances. As a consequence, if the election were held today, the possibility of a president taking the oath while wearing an ankle bracelet looms large.
What’s there to like?
It is said by many that people prefer Trump’s policies but personally dislike Trump. There’s a lot to that, but those cherished policies are a reflection of longstanding GOP platforms. Prior to 2015 and Trump’s grandstanding on Obama’s birth certificate, Trump had few if any policy ideas other than the border and trade protectionism. His ignorance was profound. In a 2016 debate, he couldn’t name the legs of the strategic triad. He was befuddled by the term “triad”. When he amazingly got elected as a Republican, he not surprisingly turned to Republicans to fill out his administration. From a guy who was a policy empty suit, many of his “wins” were crafted by the input of others who would later be insulted into oblivion. Bill Barr, John Bolton, Mike Pence, Kelly, McMaster, et al, and the congressional leadership who were the fount of these ideas such as Paul Ryan, won’t be around for a Trump second bite at the apple.
In a Trump term #2, who will he turn to, the clown caucus of Matt Gaetz and company? A person still possessing their wits would be a fool to get too close to Trump. Expect any future Trump presidency to be filled with “fighters”, fighters who are a bit too punch drunk: the clown car caucus moves from Congress to the executive branch; the extended universe of isolationists and sycophants; and the rule of the Democrats’ craziness would be replaced by those who romanticize 1932’s Smoot-Hawley Tariff and the American Firsters of 1940. Mmmm. What would that world look like?
I have to amend my prediction that Trump is a loser. Er, he is; you just might have to look down ballot for the misery. The guy has no coattails because he’s kryptonite at the state and local level. As long as Trump is far from you, he might be tolerable, even if you’ll only see him on parole or probation. Yet don’t count out that Democrat vote-harvesting machine so quickly, or the possibility that they’ll do a switcheroo replacing the enfeebled with a fresh-faced, milquetoast neo-Marxist from the party’s ranks.
RogerG
Read more here:
* For the latest polls turn to https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/
** Also in my Substack feed, The Golden Mean, at https://rogerlgraf.substack.com/publish/home
. Frederick Keller’s “The Curse of California”, which appeared in The Wasp on August 19, 1882, is the likely origin of the depiction of the Southern Pacific Railroad monopoly as an octopus.Archibald Cox, first Watergate Special Prosecutorames Comey, FBI Director, and Hillary Clinton. Her campaign originated the Trump-Russia Collusion hoax.John Durham, special counsel into the Trump/Russia charade
*Grab a cup of coffee, sit awhile for I have much to get off my chest. My readings during my recent 10-day eastern Mediterranean cruise have given me much to ponder.
***************
Frank Norris in 1901 had his “The Octopus: A Story of California” published, a novel of crafty control of state government by a railroad monopoly. Today, a different octopus has a grip on the federal government in Washington DC and the blue states. This one has personality traits that are a mixture of the ideology of progressivism with its obsession for perpetually fungible oppressed classes (neo-Marxism) and an overweening administrative state, mindless immersion in the FDR and Kennedy auras, deeply entrenched, and a proven capacity to drain the vitality of a once-great civilization. Ours!
One can get a whiff of the putrefaction (decay) just having to go through TSA/customs at San Francisco airport (SFO), without having to actually step out onto the filthy, crime-plagued streets of the city-by-the-Bay. The labyrinth is mind-boggling, and in stark contrast to the relative ease in old world airports in cities such as Frankfurt, Munich, and Athens. I kept thinking to myself as we were navigating the SFO maze, “This is what civilizational decline looks like”: the meaningless scurrying through an array of channels and corridors, checks and rechecks, picking up luggage and hauling them to additional check-ins, and the near strip-search to add to the one already performed by the German federal police in Munich. And this is for people who never left the confines of airport security walls from Munich to the gulag-type walls of SFO – not much opportunity to acquire a cache of weapons and bombs to further the jihad. It’s reminiscent of the late-stage Ottoman sultanate, and look at what happened to them in 1919. It disappeared, and so is the population of San Francisco and California.
The nation is quickly resembling the condition of California: a society living off the fumes of the past. Its essential infrastructure is crumbling as the state, and now the country, pursues the suicide pact of substituting high-density energy (fossil fuels, nuclear) with low (solar, wind). There’s plenty of money for subsidized abortions up to infanticide, transgender mutilations of tweens absent parental cognizance, the effective repeal of the nation’s immigration laws leading to immense social costs, and million-dollar payments to descendants of ancient relatives of a distant history’s wrongs, but nary a cent to expand water deliveries or clean up the streets of the crime and the mental- and drug-addled. Prices go sky high, nothing seems to work, and that scent of social decay overhangs nearly everything like a suffocating blanket of smog. Welcome to our modern, putrefied sultanate.
The reason why nothing seems to work is that we are governed, essentially managed, by a class apart: the minions of the administrative state and assorted interconnected functionaries in allied institutions – a socially incestuous tribe of Ivy League graduates and academics, the media, and a cadre of self-appointed arbiters of culture. They operate like a hive but resemble an octopus like the railroad monopoly in Frank Norris’s “The Octopus”. It’s an octopus of and for the octopus. Benefitting society’s citizens runs second to power, protections, and rewards for it. They do well, we don’t.
It is vengeful when challenged. We see how it operates by examining the Trump saga and, going back further, to Watergate of the 1970’s. The recently released Durham report draws back the curtain on partisan chicanery targeting Trump by the FBI and Obama holdovers in the Justice Department and lesser minions in the national security agencies. Nearly an entire presidential term was handcuffed in meaningless impeachments and massive investigations. No evidentiary predicate existed to support them. They were efforts of the octopus to remove an interloper – really, the American people through their electoral choices.
It’s the same template used against Nixon. Geoff Shepard in his book, “The Real Watergate Scandal”, from 2015 performed the role of John Durham in exposing this older skullduggery from the early 1970’s. What has come to light since those heady days is a tale of judicial and prosecutorial collusion, serious beaches of due process, and the octopus of mostly networked Democrat operatives from Ivy League campuses filling power positions in DC. They’re amazing in their nearly homogeneous partisan makeup, with only a sprinkling of publicity-hound Republicans joining the phalanx. They form a Praetorium Guard protecting the interests of the Democratic Party and its ruling progressive orthodoxy in the upper reaches of power that is DC.
On Shepard, he was a second-tier assistant to the president, not in any way connected to what came to be called Watergate. He’s got two letters from Watergate prosecutors clearing him of any involvement. As a member of the administration, he knew many of the principal players in the story and oversaw efforts to comply with court orders on such matters as the famous White House audio tapes. On what later came to be popularly referred to as the break-in and cover-up, he had intimate knowledge of the indicted and the so-called evidence. The popular story didn’t compute to him back then and has only been drawn into more question as more information has since come to light.
Foremost, the octopus – or hive if you will – that swarmed Nixon and his people. A cursory examination of the key players in what can only be described as an anti-Nixon jihad would illustrate the workings of octopus. The principal presiding judge, the publicity hound John Sirica, a nominal Republican, barely passed the bar exam. He floundered as a U.S. attorney, went into private practice and faced an even more dismal experience (his “starving time” in his own words) before he was rescued by the eminent Democrat lawyer, fixer, and influencer Edward Bennett Williams. Riding in the wake Williams’s prestige, Sirica got himself appointed to the DC District Court by Eisenhower. The Williams connection and friendship would benefit him for the rest of his life. The DC social Borg at work.
What of the first Special Prosecutor, Archibald Cox? Here’s a who’s who from the Ivy League/Kennedy nexus. From Harvard College to Harvard Law to the law school faculty, a lifelong Democrat and Kennedy clan confidant, he advised JFK and wrote many of his speeches in the 1960 campaign. He filled the slot of chief federal litigator as Solicitor General under Attorney General Robert Kennedy, JFK’s brother.
If Cox’s prosecutorial team – often called Cox’s army – faced the inevitable appeals from Sirica’s gung-ho, get-Nixon style, waiting in the wings to handle the appeals was the chief judge of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, David Bazelon with a judicial majority on the Circuit to back him up. A veteran of the Truman administration as assistant attorney general, he was known to harbor a dislike of Nixon since Nixon’s days on the House Committee on Un-American Activities investigating Alger Hiss, another Democrat/FDR protégé but since proven to be a Soviet spy. Compounding the octopus’s Nixon antipathy is Nixon’s 1950 elevation to the Senate through his upset win over the much-loved, former star of stage and screen, firebrand progressive, and favorite, Helen Gahagan Douglas. Nixon was the bête noire of the Democrat DC octopus in an obvious Democrat town.
That’s just a sampling. There’s more, much more. The lineup of hired guns in the Special Prosecutor’s office under Cox and Jaworski exhibited the same partisan and social affinities.
The city’s demographic profile displayed, and continues to display, the same hard-edged partisanship. For instance, the city’s overwhelming electoral base for the Democratic Party is a prosecutorial force multiplier for any judicial proceedings with Republicans in the dock. DC is a Democrat city run by and for Democrats. The city’s growth owes much to FDR’s centralization of power, the patron saint for all subsequent Democrat administrations. Back in the 1970’s, grand and trial juries were drawn from the city’s three-quarters Democrat voter base. Today, it’s worse; 90% is more like it.
The galling Nixon 49-state sweep in 1972 didn’t faze the 78% DC election count for the humiliated Democrat candidate George McGovern. This presents a tricky problem for Republicans elected from the hinterlands and who now must reside in a sea of hostility. Partisan crusades – think Sen. Ted Stevens, Russia collusion, civil proceedings against Trump, anything drummed up against Republicans – will have a good shot at convictions and seeing Republicans in pin stripes. The maw of DC awaited Nixon and still lies in wait for any Republican officeholder today.
The Constitutional protections for a fair trial, fair jury, fair, balanced and conscientious prosecutors, and due process are trampled under foot in this one-party city. If you think that legal mechanisms such as preemptory challenges to remove biased prospective jurors are adequate protection, think again. There aren’t enough challenges to compensate for a 78%-90%+ Democrat jury pool in an atmosphere ginned up by a longstanding local Democrat-friendly media.
A change of venue to a more balanced jurisdiction is laughable when the DC appellate and trial courts collude with prosecutors to ensure prosecution-friendly presiding judges and appellate judges who are noted for their progressive proclivities. Appeals are stymied and so is due process. Once in a DC court, you’re never going to be allowed any other place. Republicans beware if you find yourself before a DC jury.
Washington DC is an obese city gorging itself on the extracted wealth from the provinces – er, states, as in fourth-century Rome. Its output is government, and more government, and has no relation to the generation of goods and services that compose real economic life for the nation’s citizens. It grew and benefitted from the party of government, the party’s progressivism, the party of the administrative state, the Democratic Party. The city’s denizens vote as if they know their benefactors. From this lair, the octopus extends its tentacles to encompass nearly all facets of national life.
The situation has deteriorated to the point that for the nation to thrive, Washington DC must not. The chances of national prosperity improve if DC fell into a deep commercial and residential real estate depression. We have too much government rooted in abstract, ideological crusades, and possessing too much power to interfere in daily life. Shrink the government and acquaint some of the federal workforce to the pink slip. Strip the city of all operatives except for the minimum necessary for physical proximity to the heads of the three branches of government. The functioning headquarters of the Department of Agriculture in Wichita, the base of the FBI and Justice Department in Columbus, Missouri, the operational centers for the four military service branches scattered from Mobile, Alabama, to Minot, South Dakota, might be just a thought, but certainly an appealing one. Oh, how about the headquarters of the EPA ensconced somewhere in Ohio or West Virginia, surrounded by the victims of its regulatory excess?
Strangle the octopus and reinstitute popular sovereignty. The type of people of Archibald Cox’s background have too much sway, and have only proven to possess the capacity to muck things up. How’s that for a path to “make America great again”?
RogerG
Read more here:
* Of all the books that I have read on Watergate, this is the one that resonates: “The Real Watergate Scandal: Collusion, Conspiracy, and the Plot That Brought Nixon Down”, Geoff Shepard, 2015. By now, in light of the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, the tale ought to sound like a familiar one. Of particular note, refer to pages 184-5, “The D.C. Jury Pool”, to understand the ingrained partisan prejudice against Republicans in D.C. Please go to “The False Heroes of Watergate”, page 12-17, for a deep dive into the backgrounds of people pursuing Nixon and his people.
* Geoff Shepard’s Watergate account reads like John Durham’s 316-page report of May 12, 2023: “Report on Matters Relating to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns”, John Durham, at https://www.nationalreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Durham-Report.pdf
I’ve been a Republican as long as I can remember, from Nixon to Trump. The Democrats have been thoroughly repugnant since George McGovern became the standard bearer and ushered in the New Left with its assault on western civilization culminating in the neo-Marxism of today – the woke-stroke – that is currently laying waste to the once and mighty USA. Then, a slice of the GOP started to smell, as if on cue. The locus of foul odor wafted over from the direction of the Matt Gaetz/Majorie Taylor Greene/Loren Boebert/Donald Trump wing of the party. Now, the stench is so bad that I’m beginning to entertain the unthinkable: joining the ranks of independents.
The only thing that causes pause is the desire to stay and fight for a free market and national security/deterrence GOP. That was my party and I did more than vote for it. I contributed money, managed campaigns, fundraised, walked precincts, manned phone banks, the whole litany of activities that define a firm member of the base. Now, a kind of populism has infected the ranks in the form of appeasement on the continent of Europe (Hmmm, is that familiar, circa 1938-41?), a cult of personality that resembles a political death cult (Trump worship), a grossly immature and self-destructive unwillingness to face our entitlement crisis, an embrace of Smoot-Hawley economics, and a history of embarrassing and wild accusations that more reflect the copy rooms of the DC/Marvel universe than a drawing room of serious adults. Who in their right mind would want to be part of that? I know, I know, there are legions who are, but they don’t include me.
Not surprisingly, the latest cringe-worthy episode from the ranks of the unhinged emanated from the Twitter feed of Marjorie Taylor Greene (MTG). Somehow, to her, the buffoonish 21-year-old Massachusetts National Guardsman who plastered top secret documents across the world wide web is a hero. In only her latest outrage, she tweeted:
“Jake Teixeira is white, male, christian, and antiwar.
That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime.
And he told the truth about troops being on the ground in Ukraine and a lot more.
Ask yourself who is the real enemy?
A young low level national guardsmen?
Or the administration that is waging war in Ukraine, a non-NATO nation, against nuclear Russia without war powers?”
ake Teixeira, the Massachusetts Air National Guardsman who flashed top secret documents across the world wide web.
Besides the incoherence of “against nuclear Russia without war powers”, the rest of it is as nonsensical as that tidbit. How does she know anything about this kid . . . er, young adult? She doesn’t. Fact: she’s just a hothead. As with all hotheads, their immediate concern is to strike a blow against their political rivals regardless of its harm to the country’s national security. For them, though, merely mentioning the phrase “national security” triggers rantings against the Bushes, “forever wars”, conspiracy paranoias, their serial misuse of “RINO”, and fulminations against a host of “globalists” and “elites”. They are consumed in bumper-sticker logic.
She and they show no sign of recognizing the threat posed by the fire-hosing of “top secret” through the ether. Instead, we get MTG bombast. If she will recall – which is unlikely given the delusionary nature of her thinking – her demigod, Donald Trump, suffered at the hands of a leaker of “top secret” or “privileged”. Remember the Zelensky phone call? Or how about the Comey chicanery in giving the content of a privileged conversation with Trump to a buddy? Or the release of the Steele Dossier into the public domain? Fact is, the MTG types were against leaking before they now praise it. They stole a line from John Kerry. Plagiarism?
The rest of the GOP seems cowed by this noxious wing of the party. And maybe they are right to be. A majority of registered Republicans in recent polls appear ready to place Trump in another faceoff with Biden in 2024. Is the base once again willing to stampede off the cliff like a herd of buffalo? Seems to be. So, Republican heavies do a tap dance to avoid annoying the berserkers in their midst. Kudos to Lindsay Graham for calling out this party embarrassment.
If it wasn’t for a few brave souls like Graham, I’d have already decamped the GOP.
RogerG
Read more here:
* Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Twitter remarks at https://twitter.com/RepMTG/status/1646615867285708802?s=20
What was Anheuser-Busch, Inc., thinking? For that matter, what was Disney, Inc., thinking? Dylan Mulvaney as the face of Bud Light? Add the bigs at MLB, the NFL, NBA, and NHL to the socially detached. The list of corporate heavies insulting their customer bases is quite long. They aren’t even aware that they have positioned themselves at the edge of a culture war. A beer brand strongly identified with the lunch-pail crowd decides to make a boy-turned-girl the face of its product. Did it occur to anyone in the c-suite that this could be a problem? I guess not. Why? The mediocrities at the helm of our big corporations are people completely out to lunch, out of touch, or what have you.
I suspect the disconnect has much to do with something identified by Charles Murray in his book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010”. An intensifying social nepotism among people of increasingly uniform background has created an insular managerial class ignorant of the world beyond their bubble, much like the nobility at Versailles. Thus, they are caught flat-footed when an advertising strategy that is broached at a wine soiree goes awry. It only sounds compelling to those similarly closeted. Outside, for the rest of us, it’s absolute looney tunes.
This is a girl, Alissa Heinerscheid, the vice president of marketing for Anheuser-Busch, with the monotonous social resumé of her class: the same elite schooling and social entanglements and experiences. They don’t drink the stuff but are identical to the other inhabitants of corporate headquarters. They have the sensibilities of the Harvard life but lack an acquaintance with regular life. I suspect that the same happenstance applies to every institution under the management of the socially privileged and cocooned.
Alissa Heinerscheid, Anheuser-Busch ad exec.Alissa Heinerscheid as a Harvard undergrad at one of her Isis Club’s bashes.
Credentials are no protection from the bumbling mediocrities who have such great power over livelihoods. We are living through a time when “elite” and “expert” makes one cringe, like watching the face of transgenderism become the face of Bud Light.
Be my guest and watch the Sky News report on the story.
Teacher union organizer and Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson speaks after being projected winner as mayor on April 4, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois. (Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)Janet Protasiewicz speaks at her election night party in Milwaukee after she defeated former Justice Dan Kelly for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat. (Mike De Sisti / Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel)
Our national decomposition shows little sign of abating. Elections in Wisconsin and Chicago indicate that there remains an appetite for decay.
Another word for decline or decomposition of a culture, civilization, or nation is degringolade. Whichever word is used, however, we are experiencing it. Nature isn’t doing it to us. We are doing it to ourselves. The precipitating factor is what is bouncing between our ears. A sizeable chunk of the electorate, without even knowing it in many cases, is sold on toxic neo-Marxism in the guise of modern progressivism. Today, progressivism and this updated Marxism are synonymous. I’m beginning to sound like a broken record since I’ve certainly mentioned it often enough but can’t get away from it. It’s constantly resurfacing in many places around the country.
This isn’t the progressivism of Woodrow Wilson. As a refresher, this current edition is a relatively modern refashioning of Karl Marx’s paradigm: the systemic oppression of the oppressed who are defined by an ever-fungible list of outgroups covering everything from XY girls to the poor to anyone with high melanin counts. To the rescue in this blinkered ideological schematic is a complete, top to bottom, inside and out, overhaul of all societal arrangements from the family to property, a thoroughgoing Marxist revolution. Sound familiar? Read BLM’s mission statement before it was scrubbed clean of too much revelatory information (see below). We’ve proven to be quite creative in defining the “oppressed”, or victim groups. For greenies, you might add the mother goddess Gaia (earth) to the list. Anyway, this latest edition fairs no better than the kind that lurked behind the Iron Curtain or Mao’s China or is lurking in North Korea and Cuba. It is a sacking of our heritage and thrusting the country into despair.
The canary passing out in the coal mine in this moment of our evisceration is urban America. Our cities are crumbling, and so are the states dominated by them. The story has been acted out before. We are historically rhyming with 4th and 5th-century AD Rome. The Roman Empire didn’t go out in a boom but a whimper. The cities became unlivable, mired in high taxes, crumbling infrastructure, a deterioration of services, lack of security, and overburdening controls. Who’d want to live there? Apparently, many didn’t by the 5th century. The population of the city nearly emptied from over a million in the 1st century AD to 30,000 by the 5th. Other similarly weakened urban places suffered. People flocked to fortified estates, monasteries, and towns with natural defenses. It’s the beginning of feudalism.
Feudalism is returning. Today, in the good ‘ol USA, people are rushing to states and places where 3-strikes laws mean something, where taxes and bureaucracies aren’t bleeding producers white, where parking your car on the street in front of your house isn’t an invitation to vandalism. In other words, where neo-Marxism/progressivism is held in disrepute.
Where boys’ and girls’ bathrooms are separated by a wall. Where nature’s chromosomal distinction hasn’t been buried by the linguistic manipulations of pronouns and “birthing person” for “woman”. It’s just the opposite in our urban neo-Marxist silos. Entirely mired in the mindset, many of our cities and urbanized states are busy advancing the revolution by eliminating other distinctions such as the one between criminal and law-abiding. Judges and local potentates treat criminals as victims and their real victims as . . . well . . . .
As if we need any more evidence, Whole Foods announced yesterday (4/10/2023) that it was “temporarily closing” its 65,000 square foot San Francisco outlet at Eighth and Market, the Trinity section, that it just opened last year. According to a company spokesman, “If we feel we can ensure the safety of our team members in the store, we will evaluate a reopening of our Trinity location.” The area has been plagued by brutal beatings, stabbings, killings, and accidents in recent weeks. Too few cops and law-unenforcement is making San Francisco look like 5th-century Rome (see below).
These arbiters of revolutionary justice in places like San Francisco have their own vocabulary to push this cultural revolution. “Decarceration” is the go-to for releasing offenders to reoffend, just call it “low-level crime”, which is another word for “inconsequential” to Soros-backed DA’s – inconsequential to everyone but the person left battered, bruised, and bleeding in the subway. Barbarian invasions aren’t doing it to us, unless barbarian refers to the urban powerful who have drunk the neo-Marxist Kool-Aid. Your progressive DA, judges, city council, mayor, governor, and state legislature are performing the role of the Visigoths and their King Alaric in laying waste to Rome in 410 AD.
Visigoths sack Rome in 410 AD.Minneapolis in the 2020 summer of riots.
The only recourse for those not too fond of the mayhem is to vote with their feet. Get out! But these are democracies – surprise! The corruption is democratic. People are voting for mayhem. How’s that possible? It might have something to do with a little cost/benefit analysis on the run: the rewards of group largesse from the public treasury are greater than the costs of possibly losing your little girl in a drive-by. I know, it’s hard to believe. But, on the other hand, it could just be stupid people being stupid, something not unheard of in the annals of democracy.
Or it could be due to the overall social decomposition extending to our schools. People aren’t taught any better; they don’t know any better; and are easily led into believing nonsense. Yet, policy-nonsense still behaves, as it always has, whether popularly chosen or not, like a drunk behind the wheel. It’s a disaster careening down our thoroughfares. And like most drunks, all-too-often they don’t get sober till they hit bottom. Apparently, our urban electorates haven’t hit bottom. Or it could be that the voter pool has been reduced to the drunks, the sober having fled to safer climes (red states).
A sizeable majority – by ten points – of Wisconsin voters recently failed the field sobriety test but still grabbed the car keys. Some attribute the recent election of the Visigothic Janet Protasiewicz to the State Supreme Court to the abortion issue. Probably true, but Wisconsinites have now let the Visigoths through the gates with a new Visigothic majority on the Court and, as a result, will get much more than carte blanche abortion. Protasiewicz promised during the campaign to rewrite the state’s redistricting maps to the advantage of the neo-Marxists who promise more sacking into the foreseeable future. In addition, expect more teacher-union power to dictate your child’s education, backdoor racism in diversity-equity-inclusion, and higher taxes to finance the revolution. The whole litany of policies to promote the revolution against hypothetical systemic “oppressors” are about to be unleashed. And so will a run on exiting U-Hauls, proving once again that the only thing efficiently produced by Marxism is refugees.
Money is the mother’s milk of politics . . . and revolution. The donkey party neo-Marxists, in spite of their dismal record, are well-funded from a network of similarly intoxicated donors. The precedent was established by Lenin in 1917. The Bolsheviks were bankrolled by Imperial Germany. A revolution rides on more than fulminations.
Money and an election system reshaped to the advantage of their base put Protasiewicz in office, and gave Chicago another Alaric-style mayor, Brandon Johnson, to replace the Visigothic Lori Lightfoot. The guy is marinated in neo-Marxism, like his predecessor. San Francisco, Wisconsin, and Chicago are pointing the way to the future, the same future viewed by 5th-century Romans and early 20th-century Petrograd residents.
If not arrested, our condition will continue to deteriorate . . . until riveting calamities shock us back to our senses. Hopefully, by then, it won’t be too late. Hopefully, we won’t wake up to news of two aircraft carriers sunk in the western Pacific, and our response is crippled by an economy unable to meet the demands of the moment, or a population unwilling to fight after years of anti-western indoctrination in our media and schools. A pool of recruits rattled by gender dysphoria and accusations of white privilege can’t instill much confidence.
The signs of decay aren’t limited to the popularity of chic neo-Marxism among urban sophisticates. Another passed-out canary is plummeting birth rates and closing maternity wards. It’s hard to have a robust generational talent pool to face the threat with a population befuddled by pronouns and fungible sex-identity, all as the population shrinks. We’ve got a lot to worry about. And all the while, neo-Marxism, acting like the Visigoths, is busy hollowing out the nation and its civilization. At this late hour, the odor of national decomposition is beginning to overwhelm the olfactory glands.
RogerG
Read more here:
* BLM’s mission statement included the following:
“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.” It’s straight out of the writings of Karl Marx, nothing unusual for the self-professed Marxism of BLM’s founders of Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi.
From the Wayback Machine Archive, Black Lives Matter: “What We Believe”, at https://web.archive.org/web/20200408020723/https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/
* “Whole Foods closes San Francisco flagship store after one year, citing crime”, Jordan Valinsky, CNN, 4/11/2023, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/whole-foods-closes-san-francisco-flagship-store-after-one-year-citing-crime/ar-AA19IDPH
* If you’re interested, here’s a local San Francisco newscast about people getting out during the Covid shutdown: “On The Move: San Francisco residents on the move during the COVID-19 economic downturn” at
Trump supporter and Antifa member confront each other, 2017.
“We are divorced, North from South, because we have hated each other so.” — Mary Boykin Chestnut from her diary at the onset of the American Civil War.
Today, one could substitute “urban from rural” for “North from South”. Please be cautioned, though, that some blowhards will manage to warp the nature of the divide. Marjorie Taylor Greene, that grand dame of unhinged hyperbole on the right, recently tweeted and repeated on Sean Hannity, “We need a national divorce.” She added, “We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government.” Her national divorce is incomprehensible since her blue/red dividing lines don’t neatly conform to state boundaries. It is more intrastate than anything, between a plethora of blue freckles against a sea of red across the entire national domain. That reality captures the essence of the current impasse. The root of our disjunction is cultural. A fundamental difference of ethos separates the blue dots from the red swaths.
The split consists of mutually incompatible mindsets with one being revolutionary and the other defensive of America’s founding. Both sides didn’t mutually move way from each other. One leaped from the other as if it had the plague. The key precipitating factor is the adoption of a radical cultural revolution by social, commercial and political elites in concentrated urban and academic nodes. Ronald Reagan once said, “I didn’t leave the Democratic party, the Democratic Party left me.” Well, America didn’t leave rural areas, but it certainly was kicked out of these nodes of concentrated power and influence. The separation is the logical outgrowth of the radicalization of our cultural elites.
The radicalization of the blue dots – what today makes them blue (actually red in its historical meaning) – consists in the adoption of a particular Marxist’s ideas on how to advance the revolution in spite of popular resistance to it. Antonio Gramsci in the 1930’s penciled out his grand strategy to advance the worldwide revolution. Karl Marx’s original idea was the organic development of a worker class consciousness which would culminate in the seizure of the means of production and set the world on the path to utopia. Others, including Lenin and Gramsci, noticed that it wasn’t happening as predicted. Lenin’s solution was a vanguard elite to precipitate the overthrow of the existing order. For his part, Gramsci advocated a “long march” through cultural institutions and civil society, the social elements that lie mostly between the people and government (civil society: churches, charities, social organizations, schools, businesses).
Antonio Gramsci
Lenin’s coup d’état expired with the implosion of the USSR in 1991 – speaking of internal contradictions that culminate in revolution (typical Marxist rhetoric). Gramsci, who died before he was set to be released from Mussolini’s jail in 1937, would posthumously succeed beyond his wildest dreams. He became the darling of the 1960’s New Left that would quickly morph into today’s progressivism. A hive of intertwined Gramsci acolytes dominates many of our important institutions such as the schools, the Fortune 500 c-suite, media, entertainment, foundations, charities, mainline churches, the administrative state, the Democratic Party, and of course higher ed.
The danger of this new Gramscian upper class to the rest of the country, so isolated as they are, was best expressed by Charles Murray in his book, Coming Apart:
“Many of the members of the new upper class are balkanized. Furthermore, their ignorance about other Americans is more problematic than the ignorance of other Americans about them. It is not a problem if truck drivers cannot empathize with the priorities of Yale professors. It is a problem if Yale professors, or producers of network news programs, or CEOs of great corporations, or presidential advisers cannot empathize with the priorities of truck drivers. It is inevitable that people have large areas of ignorance about how others live, but that makes it all the more important that the members of the new upper class be aware of the breadth and depth of their ignorance.”
Truckers descend on DC in 2022.
So ubiquitous are Gramsci’s ideas that you at least know them intuitively. They are everywhere. The notorious CRT is just the application of Gramsci’s Critical Theory to racial matters. It’s the same formula when considering gender, ethnicity, or mixtures of the host of identities (intersectionality) encompassed within the “other”, the so-called oppressed. Favoritism and oppression in the Gramscian hivemind are embedded in the culture, even if it has been superficially expunged from government. It’s systemic in the culture, they say. Real revolution won’t happen if the broader culture isn’t enlisted in the effort. Today, they succeeded for the most part.
The influence of the hivemind may be what John O’Sullivan had in mind in his law of organizational behavior: all organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing. The prevalent hivemind is too powerful to ignore. The evidence is all around. TV commercials are replete with representations of the “other” far beyond any reasonable relationship to their portion of the population. Those same ads are boosters for the ideology’s favorite products such as ev’s, as well as campaigns against the hated plastics and fossil fuels, alongside a push for the stakeholder corporate-management nonsense that threatens the health of my pension. MLB moved the Allstar Game; the NFL diluted the national anthem with the addition of an identity anthem; the kneelings; the black power fist thrusts. Popular entertainment and their awards extravaganzas are not without their ritual display of the putative threat of systemic racism and illusory attacks on the “other”. DEI and CRT are everywhere in curriculums, hiring, and admissions, with a baleful effect on standards and morale.
An entire industry has appeared overnight to cater and push the agenda on adults and their children. All of it is meant to bend the mind to accept the advantaging of one group at the expense of another, all of it based on race, gender, and ethnicity identity. We’re back to a new Jim Crow.
The assault on the minds of children is the most outrageous. Outright pornography is introduced to adolescents under the guise of furthering tolerance for the sexual “other” (transgendered, etc.). The distinction between mere tolerance and ideological recruitment won’t be fully appreciated on the part of the teacher-as-propagandist or obviously an impressionable high school sophomore, thereby artificially swelling the ranks of this new “other” in a social contagion. Behavior and language – if presented on radio or television, they would be eligible for a fine or loss of license – is now part of school and training curriculums, and the inventories of school libraries, for 8-year-olds in some places. Child abuse laws in states like California have been warped to shield children from parental interference in a minor’s choice to engage in essentially experimental sex-change interventions.
California has gone so far as declared itself to be the newest kind of sanctuary: a haven for a minor’s decision to break free of their parents’ influence, from any place, state, or country of origin. An underground railroad to the golden state for legally protected child sexual mutilation will soon follow.
A child’s newfound identity as a gender “other” will be reinforced by an absence of countervailing views, opposing opinions having been quashed by entrenched activists dominating society’s institutions. The struggle in the newsroom at the NY Times is instructive. Prior to 2021, the paper treated the issue of trans ideology as if there was only one side, the trans activists’ side. You know, it’s the same one given to your kids in their school: sex isn’t binary; denial of gender identity is bigotry; refusals to affirm a child’s self-diagnosis are akin to murder by suicide; a medical consensus exists in support of all things trans; the recent increase in teen trans self-identity isn’t evidence of a social contagion. Truth be told, a defensible counterpoint can be made to each one of these contentions, but it didn’t appear on the pages of the Times. Then, dissenters found other outlets like Bari Weiss’s Substack page.
After activists in the newsroom got opinion editor James Bennet to resign for approving a Tom Cotton op-ed, his replacements began to show some spine in not kowtowing to the radicals in their midst. Some opinion pieces questioning the newsroom orthodoxy began to appear. The hive was riled about having to face an opposing point of view. LGBTQ+ activist groups penned a letter to the paper condemning the openness. A group of contributors sent one railing against the simple recognition of another side in the debate. For them, there is no debate.
Their mind is closed and want to see everyone’s mind similarly clamped shut. In one of the letters, they declared, “. . . stop questioning science that is SETTLED.” Where have we heard that before? End a debate by simply issuing the fatwah of “SETTLED” without stooping so low as to prove their position.
The censorship makes the unproven and untrue seem plausible. At this point, the Gramscian “long march” sheds its cloak of tolerance to expose its true totalitarian nature. The philosopher Robert P. George has an eloquent description of the difference between an authoritarian and totalitarian:
“Ordinary authoritarians are content to forbid people from speaking truths. Totalitarians insist on forcing people to speak untruths.”
Cancel culture is forcing the gullible to speak untruths. We are running the danger of an entire generation being coaxed into believing contestable ideas are uncontestable. That’s dangerous. It’s one sure way for humaneness to disappear from humanity. People are frog-marched out of their jobs and free speech and conscience are suppressed. Public intellectuals, academics, and people of professional accomplishment who disagree are dismissed as “deniers”, “. . . phobics”, haters, and blocked from outlets.
The reigning neo-Marxists have, maybe forever, mutilated the meaning of words such as “consensus”. Their “consensus” – “the science is SETTLED” – is the wedge that is driving rural from urban. The blue nodes are the nexus of this Gramscian cultural revolution. Pardon people in the countryside for noticing this lurch into insanity. A good portion of the country doesn’t want to go where DEI consultants want to lead it.
Previously travelled routes to the socialist hyper-state have only led to misery. Now, will I be “cancelled” for saying it?
RogerG
Read more here:
* Charles Murray’s book “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010” is an excellent place to start research into our current predicament.
* “Biography of Antonio Gramsci”, Nicki Lia Cole, PHD, ThoughtCo.com, 8/14/2019, at https://www.thoughtco.com/antonio-gramsci-3026471
* An additional concise survey of the life and influence of Antonio Gramsci can be found here: “The Long March Back”, Nate Hochman, National Review Online, 2/16/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-long-march-back/
* A brief account of the philosophy of Princeton’s Robert P. George can be found here: “The Georgian Way”, Andrew T. Walker, fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, National Review Magazine, 3/6/2023
* The struggle in the NY Times newsroom is captured here: “All the News That’s Fit to Debate”, Madeine Kearns, National Review Magazine, 3/20/2023
A mural by street artist PBOY depicting yellow vest protesters inspired by Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People. (photo: Philippe Lopez/AFP)
“The green dreams of urbanites spark outrage in rural areas.” – Joel Klotkin, executive director of the Urban Reform Institute, and respectively Presidential and Washington Fellow at Chapman and Claremont Universities
Joel Klotkin’s newest piece on the urban/rural divide would be a revelation for those comfortable in their biases and lifestyle in their insulated, well-to-do urban enclaves (see below).
Joel Klotkin
They control urban-dominated states like California and are conducting a Sherman-esque scorched-earth march through the hinterlands to make them “howl” in forced conformity to a dubious enviro ideology. Their William Tecumseh Sherman flanking strategy involves the annihilation of vast stretches of flyover country in windmill forests and blankets of solar panels in conjunction with attacks on the farmers’ products and production inputs. Make no mistake about it, it’s at least a cold war, and occasionally a hot one, on those who feed the world’s hungry and provide the material backbone for the cultural commissariat’s own luxurious lifestyle.
Ironically, it’s an attack on themselves if they only thought deeper than a star-struck Davos groupie totally consumed in enviro agitprop. Anyway, they’re relaxed because it’ll bankrupt others further down the wealth pyramid first. They’re like Rome’s patricians laughing at Nero fiddling as the flames slowly approach their villas.
It’s an ideological crusade centering on climate change and should not be mistaken for real science. Leaps of faith are required to overcome huge holes in logic and fact. Here’s some “What’s” to ponder. What’s the degree of human impact on climate to ascertain urgency? What’s the level of positive effect on climate from a sudden shackling of the U.S. population to unreliable and expensive energy? What’s the influence on other countries, or will it be ignored? No amount of computer modeling can overcome these holes in the train of logic since software has always been susceptible to GIGO – garbage in, garbage out. The model is only as good as its designer. Artificial intelligence isn’t immune. On this topic, ideology trumps scientific objectivity all too often.
One fact constantly escapes the synapses of this secular faith’s upscale adherents: energy density. No amount of “we’ll innovate our way through the problem” can mask this ugly reality. Their favorite sources for energy “sustainability” are the feebly dense wind and solar – they need an awful lot of space to be practical. These contraptions require vast state-sized stretches of landscape on the order of magnitude of Tennessee to Texas, depending on how close you want to get to “net zero” in carbon emissions. What does that mean? It means the consumption of huge swaths of open space, wilderness, and land devoted to food and fiber. A dystopian future awaits in the nerve-rending and constant hum of wind turbines and a consigning of small town and rural residents to a hellish view of much of their surroundings under expansive pavements of solar panels or intimidating chorus lines of giant towers extending over the horizon. Watch real estate values and quality of life plummet for rural, small town, exurban residents.
A wind project in Michigan farm area in 2013.A sea of solar panels in Portugal.
And guess what? You still need fossil fuel backup which adds to the cost misery of the whole scheme. If batteries are to be your lifeline around the problem of blackouts and having to fire up backup gas-powered steam turbines, remember, the law of tradeoffs isn’t suspended. More resources pumped into this black hole translates into lost investment in medicine, manufacturing technology, food production and distribution, water, etc. The alternatives sacrificed are too numerous to mention.
That’s the glory of free markets, though; the voluntary choices of thousands, if not millions, sort this out. The rule of bureaucrats and pandering demagogues in elective office, when given billions and trillions of dollars to play with, are more famous for boondoggles. Remember Solyndra or California’s train to nowhere, parts languishing and graffitied like a LA Stonehenge in the Central Valley? I don’t expect Millennials, Gen Z’ers, and those following to have an inkling of life in the old USSR under a vast bureaucracy’s central planning, given the sorry state of our schools. California is chugging full speed into this fog of ignorance.
California’s upper crust may be the most visibly intoxicated by the eco-jihad but the mania is evident worldwide. Farmers and rural and small-town residents around the world are about to be engulfed in a plundering of their spaces by the half-witted infatuations of zealots with money and influence. But a counterrevolution is kicking in. In Europe, French truckdrivers and farmers rose up in the “gilets jaunes” (yellow vests) protests in November 2018 against the new greenie fuel taxes. Dutch farmers were brimming with hostility over crippling emissions and fertilizer regulations just last year. So devastating are the potential impacts of the new rules that a projected 3,000 Dutch farms may be lost in the next few decades.
Europe isn’t alone. African countries like Nigeria, Senegal, and South Africa have registered similar protests to Davos flights of fancy. The path to the ecotopia is lined with appropriated farmland, farmers, and everyone else who provide the hands, backs, and brains for the jet set to live in luxurious isolation.
Yep, ecomania among the insular well-to-do is poison to blue collars and everyone outside a country’s super zips. Joel Klotkin is right to use the world “colonize” in describing the imperial designs of cultural power brokers for the areas of the country who don’t vote and live like them. Occasionally, colonists rise up. Does Lexington and Concord remind you of anything?
The yellow vest protests in Paris, November 2018.Farmers gather with their vehicles next to a Germany/Netherlands border sign during a protest on the A1 highway near Rijssen, Netherlands, June 29. They are protesting the Dutch Government’s nitrogen plans, which would eliminate a sizable number of farms. (photo: Vincent Jannink / AFP via Getty Images)
Please read Joel Klotkin’s piece below.
RogerG
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* Much thanks to Joel Klotkin for his research in “Energy Colonialism Will Worsen the Urban-Rural Divide”, Joel Klotkin, National Review Online, 3/3/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/03/energy-colonialism-will-worsen-the-urban-rural-divide/
* “’Yellow Vests’: The elites talk about the end of the world, when we talk about the end of the month”, Le Monde, 11/24/2018, at https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2018/11/24/gilets-jaunes-les-elites-parlent-de-fin-du-monde-quand-nous-on-parle-de-fin-du-mois_5387968_823448.html
* “Farmers’ Protest in Netherlands Reflects Rise of Popular Revolts in Europe”, National Catholic Register, 7/29/2022, at https://www.ncregister.com/news/farmers-protest-in-netherlands-reflects-rise-of-popular-revolts-in-europe
