Arthur Brisbane, newspaper editor, wrote the following in 1911: “Use a picture. It’s worth a thousand words.” Yep, it is, since words require more brain juice than eye candy. Visual images strike our limbic system with greater force than words on a page. Goebbels and Lenin knew this from the get-go. Many times, illustrations or cartoons, more so than photos, get right to the point without the limitations of reality. The uber-left activist Craig Froehle in 2012 gave to his ideological compatriots an iconic absurdity. His tall-to-small threesome behind a fence on crates (see below) appeals to the zealots but does nothing for understanding.
A big part of the problem lies in the vacuousness of the political sloganeering that is “equity”, the point of the image, and one third of the verbal contraption “equity/diversity/inclusion” (Interesting to note, the more apt acronym DIE is possible by changing the order.). Oftentimes, “equity” is used without definition, as if it burst from the brain of God and to the mouths Lori Lightfoot and the radical activists running the show in the Biden administration. “Equity” is the criminal cousin to “equality”. We have at least a playground understanding of “equality”, but “equity” at the hands of our racialist carnival barkers isn’t what lights our eyes after our house’s assessment. It’s a weapon. It’s forced equality of outcome. And, for that, our lives are left open to state-run malevolence and malfeasance writ large.
A crowd whose brains have been softened to the agitprop will miss the folly and danger. Equity is a crutch for activists traumatized by life not being equal. Everywhere they look, they are horrified by inequality, inequality everywhere. They are forced to confront disparities in everything from size, talent, quick-wittedness to the incidence of low-birthweight babies by race, genitalia, income, bed partner, whatever. It’s enough to drive the traumatized to thumb-sucking.
The cure for the anxiety is found in the seizure of power to force equality. Freedom, as in equal opportunity, is repealed by the invention of “systemic racism”, or systemic . . . whatever. Just make the threat improvably “systemic” to empower the commissars to make things equal by imperial edict. The so-called malevolent “system” is a ghost presence but don’t bother with inductive or deductive reasoning for verification. We are coaxed to rely on the ghostbusters instilled with the secret gnosis, like the racialist grifters Ibram X. Kendi or Robin DeAngelo from their tenured academic redoubts.
Karl Marx played the same scam, only he didn’t leave this world with a fat bank account. But his pupils succeeded if you measure success by over a 100 million dead in the 20th century. How much ruination will Kendi, et al, visit upon us?
Back to Froehle’s cartoon scam. It doesn’t take much to dispense with the message. Life isn’t a matter of crate-sharing. Those crates in the illustration are actually other people’s income, jobs, property, and their children’s education. Froehle is actually practicing a zero-sum game: the state takes from one to give to another. And the assignment of forced contributor and assigned recipient is based purely on race, or any other grouping with the political clout to nose their way into the trough.
The cartoon is childish, but even children have an instinctual grasp of the unfairness of it all. They know that one kid getting two suckers based on melanin count isn’t fair. So is the award of benefits due to genitalia, bed partner, or personal declaration that supersedes their chromosomal makeup. A child has a better grasp of intrinsic fairness than some who’ve spent too much time in classrooms, a place where education has evolved into mal-education.
But that’s where we are at: the land of Orwell’s Oceania. The Ministry of Truth practiced “doublethink” and “Newspeak”, a language that undermines language. Language relies on common meanings so sharing and interaction can take place. In this world, everything is political, including words. Language is distorted to push the “defence [sic] of the indefensible”. So, racism and sexism became “equity” to the great detriment of ourselves, our children, and our nation.
James Madison, Federalist 51:
“In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates.”
One of the banal buzzwords in common usage about our Constitutional government is “coequal”, as in coequal branches. It’s drummed into the head of the kiddies and is trotted out ad nauseum by the over-exposed telegenic punditry. Part of the problem lies in other banalities like “checks and balances”, with emphasis on “balances”, that reinforces the mischaracterization of our government.
Think about it. In its simplest and correct form, our republic is composed of an executive to carry out the laws, a court system to adjudicate disputes according to the law, and a legislature to legislate, make the law. Look at it. The first two act on the law that is made elsewhere, in Congress. Constitutionally, they can do little unless there is a law made by . . . Congress. Sorry, that ain’t “coequal”. If the infantry is the queen of battle, the Congress is meant to be the queen of governance in a republic.
So, what has happened to Congress, it being the weak sister in the triumvirate? Nothing, except what Woodrow Wilson and FDR did to it. You might say that they ran at full speed with Hamilton’s “energy in the executive” (Federalist 70) toward progressivism’s dream of the big state, leaving the 535 squabbling inhabitants of the Capitol Building in the dust. What started with the Wilson/FDR imperial presidency, who then badgered Congress into effectively dispensing with a sensible reading of the Commerce Clause, made its way into an imperial judiciary who regularly legislates from the bench. Congress quickly became the footstool to a hyper-president and a non-entity to our uber-judges.
There’s more to the story. The “more” concerns the progressivism that’s in the head of all self-proclaimed liberals from the last couple of decades of the 19th century to the present. Deep in their cranium is IMPATIENCE to accomplish great and heroic deeds. They’re frustrated with the divided powers and checks and would like nothing better than to dispense with the whole racket by interpreting it out of existence, which they’ve done with the complicity of the Courts.
In that, they’ve got a lot in common with the communists. Communists are impatient socialists, and not at all receptive to the cautious instincts of their Fabian/Menshevik brethren. No need to wait for electoral success when a gun will do the trick right now.
As an aside, maybe this explains the socialist Bernie Sanders’s attraction to the Democratic Party, to caucus with them and seek their party’s presidential nomination. At an intuitive level, the Democratic Party’s progressivism and international socialism are kindred spirits. They are drawn like moths to the light bulb of the big state to accomplish great and good things. The quicker, the better.
One of the chief results of this turn of affairs is a Congress that can’t even pass a budget, their principal power of the purse. The presidency thrives in the Congressional chaos. The national government ends up running on continuing resolutions to avoid the stink of obvious Congressional impotence. These mega-bills carry forward the huge junkyard of federal spending, with a plus-up for inflation and some additional items heaped on the pile. Junk becomes a forever-thing. Also, buried in the all the junk are the many loopholes exploited by presidents.
The Courts are in their own progressive universe, not having to worry about legislative impediments to the agenda or impeachment, owing to Congress’s barrenness. Yet, reform of the Courts did happen despite Congress’s infirmity. It took some doing in the Senate and abnormal clear-sightedness by the normally bombastic Trump but the majority of black-robed potentates became a majority of Constitutionalists.
The same Trump who was instrumental in helping to herd the Courts back into their proper Constitutional sphere also exhibited many of the same power reflexes of his progressive forbearers. By fiat, for example, he shifted Pentagon money for bases to money for his wall. Not that we don’t need a wall. For heaven’s sake, we need something to manage the human tidal wave who’ve discovered the American minimum wage to be professional income in their homelands without air-conditioning.
Honduran migrants take part in a caravan heading to the US, on the road linking Ciudad Hidalgo and Tapachula, Chiapas state, Mexico, on October 21, 2018. (Photo by Pedro Pardo / AFP)
One’s view of potentates in the Oval Office spins on whether they’re your potentate or someone else’s. Caught up in the right’s frenzy for Trump, some conservative pundits became Trump pundits. To be clear, the terms “conservative” and “Trump” aren’t synonymous. Catching the “populist” wind in their sails, they turned on a dime on issues such as the Iraq War, free trade, and big-state entitlements for their audience-constituents. They became big-state activists like many Democrat caucus members. It’s just a big state for your side.
Thus, in lock-step defense of Trump, they expounded on how well “Trump ran the country” or how well “Trump ran the economy”. Right there, they fall into the progressive trap. A real conservative, not a Trumpkin, would cringe at such language. The president doesn’t run the country or economy. He’s elected to only run the executive branch. In our country, the people run the country and economy (a free market), not a histrionic huckster from Queens or a doddering fool beholden to the revolutionaries in his party.
We’d be well-served if that message made its way to the people. But, alas, that popular brain is taught to venerate Saint Woodrow and Archangel Franklin. We can’t get past the progressive hokum to appreciate the blessings of debate, dialogue, and compromise in a fractured society like ours, something a Congress is meant to channel. It can be slow and messy, but at least we’ll have our rights, religion, and property instead of losing them to “energy in the executive” or “energy in the judge’s chambers”.
To put it bluntly, progressivism is anti-democratic, anti-republic, and anti-Constitution. Progressives want to take the Elastic Clause and make every place that they control as elastic in power as possible. After all, it’s the ends that matter to them, not the means. Why worry about those bickering mouths at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue? It saves time and effort to simply saddle up the black robes and chief executive to build the new world. Get ‘er done is the operative principle.
None of this is explained to the kiddies or adults. Don’t expect it from the schools. We reason from unexamined progressive assumptions to . . . whatever dominates Twitter and our other screens. It’s easy to be tossed hither and yon if you’re not grounded in the basics of our Constitutional order.
Progressivism set the table for this distortion of our consensual mode of governance. Heck, for the progs, it doesn’t even have to be consensual. An all-powerful EPA, ATF, IRS, FEC, SEC, FTC, etc., works fine for them.
The U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section 3:
“. . . he [President] shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed . . . .”
The U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section 4:
“The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
Presidential Oath of Office:
“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Drone photo of crowds of illegal immigrants at the International Bridge on the southern border in Texas, Sept. 16, 2021.President Biden after signing a stack of executive orders shortly after taking office to reverse many of Trump’s actions.
Yes, but he won’t be.
How to rein in the President when occupants from both parties, but particularly the donkey party, have overstepped and shirked their legal responsibilities? Do we have to wait four years to correct the abuse?
Well, no. Impeachment stands at the ready. The Democrats tried it twice in Trump’s one term. They may have debased its utility by frivolous and failed overuse. Yet, it has become commonplace for federal officers throughout the three branches to egregiously overstep their powers while flagrantly ignoring their clear constitutional responsibilities. Most recently, President Biden refuses to enforce the immigration laws. He has, by execute order(s), simply repealed enforcement of the border. That’s a dereliction of a clear compulsory-in-law duty.
Could it qualify as a “high crime” when an elected officer grievously neglects his or her lawfully required responsibility? Biden’s executive orders are a clear violation of the oath of office to “faithfully execute” the constitutional position. You can’t “faithfully execute” if you refuse to do your job. You’re willfully derelict. Willful, persistent dereliction is a willful, persistent violation of the Constitution. “High crime” anyone?
The scenes at the southern border are gut-wrenching for all the people allured by illegal presidential promises to not enforce the law. The human tidal waves passing through without paying heed to legal strictures, while enabling passage throughout the country of said violators, is tantamount to presidential complicity in crimes. This isn’t an indictment based on a phone call or overheated rhetoric at a rally. It is a shredding of the oath and Constitution. What can be a more serious “high crime” than to blatantly violate the highest law?
The donkey party’s abettors of the behavior will try to hang their hat on “prosecutorial discretion”. Where’s the discretion? Is it “discretion” to take an entire class of law and pretend it doesn’t exist? Not only that, but to assist in the violation of the laws? Hardly. It’s the practice of euphemism to provide cover for criminal conduct. “Prosecutorial discretion” turns a bank robbery into an “unauthorized withdrawal”.
It’s time to rethink our obese federal Leviathan. The level of government headquartered in DC has been unhinged from Constitutional moorings for quite some time. Impeachment might be one useful tool to once again align the branches within the bounds of our charter – i.e., return them to legal status.
However, I’m under no illusion that anybody in either party has the stomach for such medicine. We’ll, as before, muddle along and be content with the results of an electorate equally as unhinged as the people they elect. And surveys will continue, as before, to show deep disenchantment with the people they choose.
Pogo in Walt Kelly’s comic strip famously said in 1970, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Kelly meant the statement for the plague of pollution. He’d probably be surprised to learn that Pogo’s quip has a much more robust application.
Gov. Gavin Newsom at his victory bash after surviving the recall.Gen Mark Milley at his June 2020 commencement address to the National Defense University.
Cosseted: adj.; cared for and protected in an overindulgent way; pampered.
David Mamet:
“We’ve often heard, ‘I’m a fiscal conservative but a social liberal’; but everyone is a ‘fiscal conservative.’ So the phrase can be most usefully translated: ‘I’m perfectly capable of controlling my own finances. Now I intend to control yours.’”
*From Mamet’s essay “The School Dream” in National Review, May 17, 2021, in a footnote.
Two events erupted recently: Governor Gavin Newsom survived a recall and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, was reported to have subverted the authority of the President in communications with subordinates in the chain of command, the military leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, and the President’s political opposition. Obviously, both are, or can be, deeply disturbing. Which is worse? You choose.
Yet, both instances are evidence of a troubling trend among the citizenry (and uncitizenry since certain places have effectively erased the distinction). In the one, California clung to its current class of baneful leaders. In the other, according to reports coming out of Bob Woodward/Robert Costa’s new book, a member of an elite class of administrators – these happen to be military – may have attempted to supplant the Constitutional authority of the duly-elected President with his own, even possibly going so far as to cooperate with an acknowledged and powerful foreign adversary. It’s what happens when an increasingly cosseted people surrender personal sovereignty to elected or unelected lords and oligarchs in an administrative state. It’s a horrible deal for rulers and ruled. It comes down to a people who longingly desire to be ruled and a group chomping at the bit to do it.
California has frequently asserted the mantle of being on the cutting edge. From Prop 13 to high tech to the counterculture, California expanded on its reputation by justifiably being the first to go from Ronald Reagan to the embrace of the Fabian socialist dream of a cradle-to-grave nanny state in the span of less than 20 years.
I suspect that demographics had a monumental role to play in the transition. It’s much more than immigration. The state changed social complexion by changing its economic complexion (and I don’t mean skin pigment) after the end of the Cold War. Defense industries and the kinds of people attracted them faded as their numbers were replaced by elements drawn to the burgeoning workplaces of entertainment, the college campus, unionized public-sector employment, and the pampered, climate-controlled world of computer screens on the elongated coastal plain west of the Coast Range – the denizens east electorally less consequential. The newly burgeoning cohort demand a different form of governance as opposed to those inspired by Chuck Yeager, and can be rightfully called subjects and not citizens. This new class of subjects is all-in for anything and anyone who’ll promise to build, extend, and maintain the public romper room. The state’s Democratic Party is the breeding ground for this claque of wet nurses and hall monitors.
That distinction between a subject and citizen is critical. A subject accepts a role of inferiority in the status ladder and looks to their “betters” for guidance and restraint. A society of citizens is a society of peers.
For the state’s segment still considering themselves citizens who find this state of affairs repugnant, you still have the right to travel . . . if Biden hasn’t repealed it for the unvaccinated. So, move, leave the place to the emotional midgets in desperate need of a helicopter-parent state.
The dependency demographic, or subjects, is always in search of a mommy or daddy who’ll protect them from the vagaries of life. When the real mommy and daddy go into chronic care or the rest home, the urgency for a cloying adult stand-in becomes paramount. Stepping into the breech is the vaunted, credentialed public-sector “expert” and administrative functionary. The subjects’ hopes and affections goes to the head of the those exalted with power. The laureled class morphs into a law unto themselves to rule over the subjects. Enter General Mark Milley, showing in a more martial manner the symmetry between the Pentagon and the nanny state.
In California, the elected leadership and the massive, unionized administrative state that they birthed are unsurprisingly on the same page. Nationally, the situation is quite different. Many states aren’t as affectionate of rule by credentialed autocrat. That’s where you find the greatest concentration of citizens. Since there is a whole other expanse to the country between the coasts, sometimes elected federal leadership doesn’t correspond to the wishes of the Google and Harvard campuses. Yet, the specific ethos of the minions of DC and its environs is more at home on those campuses than Texas-to-North Dakota.
The Pentagon is an administrative state par excellence. Think of it as a microcosm of Sacramento, and Sacramento is solely a microcosm of LA to San Francisco. Milley sounds like he stepped out of CRT/Faculty Lounge central casting, or the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, only in uniform. For instance, why was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff weighing in on an ongoing criminal matter – the Derek Chauvin case – imitating Rev. Al Sharpton? If your eyes were closed, you’d mistake his June 2020 National Defense University commencement address for a Jeremiah Wright sermon. Here’s a snippet:
“I am outraged by the senseless and brutal killing of George Floyd. His death amplified the pain, the frustration, and the fear that so many of our fellow Americans live with day in and day out. The protests that have ensued, not only speak to his killing, but also to the centuries of injustice towards African Americans. What we are seeing is the long shadow of original sin in Jamestown, 401 years ago.”
Mind you, Chauvin’s trial hadn’t begun but that didn’t stop Milley from declaring his guilt with as much caution and reserve as Maxine Waters at a BLM rally. Little did we know back then that we were experiencing our first woke, safe-space, four-star general who functions at the frontier between a racialist neo-Marxism and treason.
Who can forget his following year’s comments before Congress? He sounded less like a mature adult and more like the infantile statue topplers of the previous summer of manufactured “rage”. In response to a question on the teaching of CRT in the military academies, he said, “I want to understand white rage and I’m white, and I want to understand it.” The answer assumes the existence of “white rage” and is not a call for the academic study of its legitimacy.
Milley – and Austin – subsequently tried to backtrack on their “white rage” and “white supremacy” remarks. He later said, “I want America to know that the United States military is an apolitical institution.” It’s pure hokum. Of course Austin and Milley are politicizing the military in their ideologically-laced purges and neo-Marxist indoctrination.
Austin and Milley being questioned on CRT in the military in June 2021 testimony before Congress.
To better understand, let’s turn to an instructive hypothetical. Let’s say that the concern is about the teaching of Marxism in the academies. Suppose Milley had said, “I want to understand capitalist exploitation of the working class and I’m a capitalist, and I want to understand it.” Already he’s gone more than halfway to accepting the premises of communism. Marxism and CRT are claptrap. “Understanding” claptrap is a mealy-mouthed way of accepting many of its fundamentals. Who’s he trying to fool? The cadets are being indoctrinated in a form of ideological self-loathing.
And I haven’t gotten to the most disturbing charge against Milley. Most frightening is his alleged usurpation of civilian control of the military and his pre- and post-election cooperative assurances to the head of the CCP’s People’s Liberation Army. The latter behavior comes very close to the Article III, Section 3, clause 1’s definition of treason. A portion of which says, “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” Milley certainly may have given the Communist Chinese “aid and comfort”, even though technically and legally Red China isn’t a formally declared enemy. But Congress never declared war on the USSR and there is many rotting in prison for giving “aid and comfort” through espionage to the Kremlin.
That’s how Milley gets off: he didn’t commit espionage. He allegedly just picked up the phone to openly declare the “aid and comfort”. No sneaking around . . . apparently. But that puts him in the same category as O.J. Simpson. Everybody knows they’re guilty but the technicalities of jury nullification and legal jargon saved them from the chair and Leavenworth.
California is a sickening role model. Don’t expect citizens to emerge from the cosseting of perpetual adolescence in a nanny state. The best hope for citizen-Californians was made familiar by Cubans braving the waters of the Florida Strait on rickety rafts to flee Bernie’s workers’ paradise in the land of Castro. Just like them, Californios, rent yourself a box truck before the fee eats up your 401k and flee east across the border. To reformulate Horace Greeley, “Go east, young man.”
More tools are available to cage the federal Leviathan. At least the rest of the country can bring to heel the federal administrative state and prevent it from being a cheap imitation of the California nightmare.
The relationship between 9/11 and Afghanistan has an additional meaning since August 31, 2021. It’s called “SHAME”. We abandoned Afghanistan leaving Americans and our Afghan allies to the fate of people who decapitate, maim, and whip as part of their normal means of social control. These cretins stepped out their time tunnel from the Dark Ages and back into control of an entire nation-state. Think of the thousands left to the cruelty of these atavistic inquisitors. John Ondrasik of Five for Fighting captures the shame if it all.
Here’s the music with lyrics.
RogerG
*Update: Shortly after release of the song and video, Facebook banned any advertising for the song. No reason for the censorship was announced by Facebook to the public or John.
If you have 59 minutes to spare, please watch the attached video on Professor Victor Davis Hanson’s lecture before a gathering at Hillsdale College on September 8, 2021. In many ways, he captures the perils of our time. It’s a wakeup call.
One important takeaway was his dissection of the effort to remorselessly wreck America, its identity, history, institutions, founding principles, and spirit. Its a truly revolutionary endeavor, like all revolutions since at least the French Revolution.
These revolutions are top/down affairs. They are germinated by people from middle and upper backgrounds who have the wealth and time to be schooled, and therefore the luxury to conjure ruinous fantasies. They are the product of a radicalized and detached claque of demagogic public intellectuals who, once in power, recognize no restraint except the achievement of their extremist ends. They hide away in tenured faculty positions, in ngo’s, among the insulated hyper-rich and cultural elites. Before we knew it, it descended on us like a plague of locusts.
All of sudden, the prior terms of justice were replaced by revolutionary slogans like “equity”, a word made devoid of all meaning and recast to advance an assault on the foundation of the nation. Now, we’re really in for it.
Or does it? Let’s just say punditry is corrupted by bias and our minds come nowhere near the Divine. There’s a lot we don’t know and can’t comprehend.
The talk before the first snap among many Pac-12 punditry sites doesn’t match the reality after week 2 of the season. The proof is all over the place.
CJ Verdell of Oregon breaks free in Oregon’s 35-28 victory over The Ohio State.Stanford players celebrate a touchdown in their 42-28 win against USC. on Saturday, Sept. 11, 2021, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)
A common opinion before the first face-off was that the battle for the top was between Oregon and USC, with a favorable mention for Washington. Teams like UCLA and Stanford were relegated to middling status, or simply falling short.
Well, the Pac-12 acquitted itself well against non-conference foes, but also some of the conference’s powerhouses turned out to be busts. One huge caveat before we crown the early victors or condemn the losers is the obvious realization that games have to be played, and are not decided by fans at computer screens. In playing the game, some teams need a few games to gel. They mature the more they play. Sophisticated offenses and defenses take a while before 18- and 19-year-olds learn them at the intuitive level. Anyone heard of late-bloomers?
So, some teams blaze early and then fade, and some are a slow burn. Some are up and down and dangerously unpredictable.
Another word of caution stems from the fact that good teams who lose come back mad. Losing can be therapeutic. It works the other way too. Some teams after a big win come out flat the following week. If talent and coaching are present, managing the team psyche is the job of the head coach. That’s why they earn the big bucks. The best shrinks that I know are coaches.
Back to the record after week 2. Predictions are in a shambles. UCLA knocked off LSU. Oregon goes into the Shoe and punished The Ohio State. Washington gets derailed by Montana at home to start the season. They follow the humiliation with a thrashing by Michigan in Ann Arbor. Lowly Stanford, thought to have serious personnel issues like weakness at the quarterback position, put a licking on USC on USC’s home turf, the LA Coliseum.
The Stanford thumping of USC should not be surprising because Stanford, and Brian Shaw, always get up for the Trojans. Stanford’s unexpected performance presents caution about the other conference members. Many are blank slates. Who have they played? Oregon State, Washington State, and the Arizona schools come to mind. Colorado, Cal, and Utah are mediocre to start the season. They could easily fall into the dangerous category.
I suspect more upsets are in the offing as we wind through the season. Right now, the team to beat appears to be Oregon, not USC. USC has yet to prove its bonafides. When some people say “Follow the Science”, they really mean “Follow factual reasoning”. And in sport, talk is cheap. The game still has to be played, fact. Only then we will know. Sounds obvious, but it’s what we’re left with in this mortal world.
Eviscerate: verb; to deprive something of its essential content.
Well, here we are, 9/11 twenty years later. The event is a two-decade saga bookended by an aerial assault killing nearly 3,000 people and an ignominious August 2021 retreat from Afghanistan. 9/11 is more than just that horrible day at the start of the new millennium. The saga as it played out came to signify something far more disturbing. We are no longer a nation capable of great, heroic deeds. We are eviscerated of moral fortitude. There’s nothing left in the tank of courage in the face of pain and adversity. Yes, we might never forget the day, but we also don’t really care enough to deal with a messy world with thousands of killers running around in it. They, the killers, have the fortitude; we don’t seem to have much of it. How did we get to this point?
From thisTo this
Of course, not all of us are so enfeebled. It’s just that it’s easier today to cobble together an electoral majority to cut and run. The 2020 election gave us two bugout enthusiasts at the top of the ballot.
What has drained us of that moral fortitude? Simply put, our brains have been crafted to not handle it. On the one hand, for most of us, the world beyond a person is the one presented by Hollywood. Honestly, people don’t read, really read and contemplate; movies, audio-visual is the talk of the town. In an earlier era of cinema, war is capture the flag. In addition, today, the prevalent story line is one of oppression. Combine the two and you have a debilitating impatience. And why defend a cruel nation with a cruel people anyway? After a few decades of nearly non-stop self-flagellation, who would want to come to its defense?
Hollywood, a main culprit in the slide, hasn’t been kind to adult reasoning. American cinema reached its apogee in the runup to World War II and its aftermath. WWII on the big screen and tv was implanted in a generation’s mind to such an extent that all subsequent wars were unfavorably compared to it. But what do you do in a world where your enemies have no uniforms and no borders and capital city to invade and seize? Religious, militant, and ideological movements aren’t defined by the attributes of a nation-state. Capture the flag seems hardly appropriate when a walk through a South Chicago neighborhood on a Saturday night is the more accurate metaphor.
On the international stage, organized murderous rage is more than a crime. It’s a national security threat, as we should well know. It’s an international crime wave demanding attention. Think of it as law enforcement without a Fifth Amendment and the Miranda warnings. Intelligence gathering, training up cadres in the neighborhoods, raids, and support for allies over the long haul shadow hunting down the mafia in drawn-out domestic law enforcement crusades. It’s a dirty business. We don’t have the stomach for it because we lack the persistence. Fighting organized international terrorism lacks the visual glory of victorious columns entering Germany.
Our entertainment industry certainly created false expectations about war, but it also worked to define us as a people in the most horrible way possible. As Christianity has receded, a racialist Marxism filled the vacuum. America as the oppressor of the “other” became settled doctrine throughout the culture. What started as the ramblings of Herbert Marcuse, C. Wright Mills, and others of the 1950’s, and continued into the 1960’s in the Port Huron Statement of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), eventually funneled its way into the faculty lounge. Tweed and tenure replaced long hair and jeans. The line of descent extended into all branches of the cultural commanding heights: business, education, entertainment, publishing, the press, fashion. The beautiful people had a neat set of fashionable views to foist on their fans; Big Sports, Big Soft Drinks, Big Airlines had a rationale for boycotting Georgia.
And the Democratic Party became the institutional focal point for the revolution. It’s one thing to organize conclaves to plan protests; it’s quite another to have the full force of one of the two great political parties to push the radical dogmas. The Biden campaign became the avatar for the neo-Marxist program. Once in power, radicalism became policy.
It permeates everywhere in DC. The normal bastions of American exceptionalism like the military showed signs of the corruption. Can anyone forget the comments of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, before Congress in June? He sounded like the academic half-wit Ibram X. Kendi or AOC when he confessed a desire to “understand white rage”. There can be nothing as dispiriting to the ranks as being called a mass of racists by their principal commander.
No, he can’t squirm out of it by saying that he was referring to the academic study of CRT. His comment assumed the factual presence of “white rage”, not the study of its hypothetical existence. Besides, it’s part of the heated political rhetoric of the radical left that has a home in the media and donkey party. Milley proved that he is a sellout to the radical program, and he may be proof of the radicalization in the command structure and the deep penetration of the radicalism in the Pentagon’s training academies. The crushing of national morale goes alongside the crushing of morale in the ranks of the people responsible for keeping the nation safe.
All of this has taken place in the span of the twenty years since 9/11. The bugout from Afghanistan was disgraceful. It’s hard to tell what Trump would have done if he had been the 2020 victor, despite the unconvincing after-the-fact denials by him and his apologists. There are too many Trump statements from his 2016 campaign, presidency, and the pre-August period to deny that Trump was anything but a loud devotee of withdrawal.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (C-L) meets with Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar (C-R) in the Qatari capital Doha on November 21, 2020, (Photo by Patrick Semansky / POOL / AFP)
It’s hypothetical that he would have done it better. If anything, Trump and his people are proving the validity of Kennedy’s famous cliché after the Bay of Pigs disaster: “Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.” And nothing else.
The American people boxed themselves into a corner. Or more correctly, they allowed themselves to be boxed into the corner. A steady drumbeat to get out for over 5 years will have an effect on opinion polls.
But if you think about it, if it’s correct to assume that Trump would have done it better, it’s equally hypothetical to conclude that he would have left America in a better strategic position even if he won in 2020. A withdrawal is a withdrawal, and there’s nothing in the public record to indicate that he would have left a residual force. Everything coming out of his mouth and Twitter feed was a declaration to get everyone out. If anything, we hypothetically might have avoided the chaos at Kabul airport, but we still would have abandoned the country to the Taliban. Absent the steel of American logistics and air support, Afghan forces likely would have recapitulated their collapse under the guise of Trump. Afghanistan reverts back to 9/10, the Taliban and their movement’s deeply interconnected cousins – al-Qaeda and ISIS – rule the land, and America lost an important chess piece in the big game of national security.
So, here we are on the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. The Taliban and their nest of jihadist allies are in charge. In a recent broadcast on Afghanistan’s national RTA television station, the Taliban celebrated our defeat with a honorific of the 9/11 attacks as “the result of the United States’ policy of aggression against the Muslim world.” They celebrate the “martyrs”. For us, we go into mourning for our dead, as all those who fought, bled, and died in that God-forsaken place must come to grips with personal sacrifices that were diminished by power-hungry politicos who have sold the country on the non-sequitur of retreat-as-victory.
We ran and all we have to show for it is mourning at memorials, the memory of a disgraceful exit, and graves and scars for our wonderful veterans. And the world after the retreat is a far more dangerous place for America and Americans.
Biden in his White House speech, 9/9/2021.Napoleon’s overthrow of The Directorate, Nov. 9, 1799.
18 Brumaire, Year VIII? What’s this? It’s, first, a date in the French Revolution’s arid and rationally processed calendar – long since dead, thank God (literally, I mean that). To most sensible people, it corresponds to November 9, 1799, and the date of Napoleon’s coup d’état. He overthrew the French government, the Directorate, and had himself proclaimed First Consul, essentially a dictator. Yesterday, did President Joe Biden do the same?
A glum Joe Biden in his basement zooming his campaign, from 2020.A glum Napoleon after his defeat at Waterloo. Compare with Biden.
Once big change occurs, things can seldom return to where they were before. Biden’s announcement yesterday is filled with portents, warnings of serious changes in how we are to be governed. Most worrisome, progressivism may have finally pealed away its democracy mask. All along, unbeknownst to a poorly educated population, they were and are died-in-the-wool, self-righteous autocrats. Biden stood before cameras and announced the coup, if you didn’t catch it.
Mark that date – September 9, 2021 – for Biden issued new ukases without any basis in law or tradition. Reminiscent of Stalin’s war on the “kulaks” in the 1930’s, Biden targeted the “unvaccinated”. Whole measures were proclaimed to go after them. The command was clear: get vaccinated or put finis to your work, travel, and social intercourse. The only thing missing was the mass deportations to camps. Is that next?
Russian farmers, branded as “kulaks”, await deportation to camps in the 1930’s.
His Excellency – no longer is “Mr. President” appropriate – declared that only His views, His claque of “experts”, and His measures were allowed in all policy, coast to coast and up and down the federal ladder. He implored the private, now not-so-private, sector to heel to His commands. Employers of 100 and over are to order all employees to get vaccinated or be punished with weekly screenings, and, of course, termination if resistant. It’s an imperial decree that will quickly intimidate anyone with a payroll. Our expansive business sector will become the whip to Biden’s jackboot.
We may have just crossed a threshold in our history. Progressives have always been on the lookout for a “moral equivalent of war” to expand their control over the unwashed and unenlightened. “Crises” fit the bill, as in Rahm Emmanuel’s “A crisis is too good to waste”.
Now, they’ve got one tailored to their wishes. What better weapon than a pandemic to smash the little people with their little brains in their little churches in their little houses in their little towns in their little businesses in their little civic associations, and in their little and not-so-little families? Once this Rubicon is crossed, can we ever turn back? History is not encouraging.
Lenin and his Council of People’s Commissars, then ruling Russia after his 1917 coup. His revolution was a threshold that forever changed Russia, never to return even after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Neurotic (adj.), neurosis (noun): mental, emotional, or physical reactions that are drastic and irrational. At its root, a neurotic behavior is an automatic, unconscious effort to manage deep anxiety. (From WebMD)
We (wife, son, sister-in-law, myself) were in a Denny’s in Grand Junction, Colorado, and I couldn’t help but notice the greater prevalence of mask-wearing in the state. Sitting across from me while waiting for our table were two gentlemen in masks, one double-masked. At our table, looking out the window, I watched a solitary woman on her morning walk wearing a mask . . . outdoors! The scene struck me as odd since few, if any, wear masks in Idaho and Montana. Passing through my home state of Montana and Idaho on our way to Grand Junction, even at major venues like Walmart, I could count on one hand the number of people wearing masks. Not so in blue-state Colorado, at least as evident in Grand Junction. Could blue-state/red-state socio-political dynamics account for the behavior? After all, politics is downstream of culture.
Watch this scene from North Hollywood, California.
By all accounts, left-coast culture has come to dominate Denver and Aspen which has come to dominate Colorado. Blue culture equals blue state.
We were in Grand Junction for a wedding. To be honest, nobody at the night-before social, nor at the wedding and reception, could give a rip about Fauci’s pronouncements, and all were thankfully unmasked. Anyway, it wasn’t a crowd receptive to the dictates of the federal authoritarians. Beyond the perimeter of the festivities, however, life seemed to be more corseted.
Red states seem to want to get back to normal, and “normal” doesn’t mean getting used to soul-destroying mandates for us and our kids. Blue states push for the “new normal”. They follow in lock-step with blue-media, which happen to be headquartered in blue states. CNN, the flagship of blue-media, on Sunday and Monday went on a rant about maskless crowds at football stadiums after the first weekend of college football in 2021 (see below).
*PS: As an aside, take a look at this reaction to Pres. Biden by some in various stadium crowds.
Bigtime college football – the major D1A schools are in red states – is a “red” sport. The values of most folks in red states don’t coincide with government acting like our forever-helicopter parents. Perhaps those of us in the red states have had it with the micro-controls. Maybe we’ve noticed that all the masking, vaccines orders, social distancing, euthanizing the restaurant industry, and school closures didn’t make a lick of difference. The bug did what bugs do: they evolve! So, we’re back to authoritarianism – or totalitarianism if you will.
It’s not that the vaccines didn’t work. It’s that the bug became something different, and the jabs become less relevant since the bug changed the ground rules by changing. Our wannabe nannies now have the excuse to slide back into their preferred habit of authoritarianism. What was once “bend the curve” turned into COVID-forever. We’re going onto two years of ginned-up hysteria, almost to the point of generating a permanent social neurosis, particularly in blue states.
The obvious answer would be to get back to a real normal, not a “new” one. You know, life like it was before China foisted the bug on the world. Open the schools, open the restaurants, open the downtowns, open the stadiums, get back to work and church, and rely on therapeutics. Take the vaccine if you wish, but, regardless, have plenty of therapies on hand to treat the vast, vast majority of the infected who will have a bad case of the flu. Each year’s flu season doesn’t shut down society. Why should this?
We are twisting ourselves into knots to avoid what is clear as a bell. We’re going to have to gut our way through it. To me, it’s been clear for quite some time that the straitjacketing has only delayed the spread of the virus, thus leaving it to erupt again, again, and again.
We have plenty of therapeutics, something unavailable in 1918. It won’t be Fauci who’ll lead us out of this. It will be nature, and our own therapies that’ll allow us to weather the storm. It increasingly looks like natural immunity will have a bigger role to play than the jabs.
It’s better to recognize the obvious reality than to hang onto Fauci’s and Walensky’s feelings-of-the-moment. They’re only succeeding at making hordes of neurotics, and making blue the color of statewide neurosis. Is that what they mean by a “new normal”?
