I am a man of faith. There is a God. But is faith an appropriate basis for judgment in, let’s say, a court of law or a lab? Don’t facts or evidence count? Two instances bring to light the muddled thinking – the weird confusion of using the thought processes of the pew in a trial or medical experiment – in Trump’s surreal conviction of God-knows-what and Salem Media’s now-discredited “2,000 Mules”. The misapplication of faith abounds in both, and both are disgraceful.
Now, with Biden out of the picture, the Dems are pivoting to the tag line “Harris prosecutor and Trump convicted felon”. It’ll work among people who have a deep faith in the Democrats’ neo-Marxist vision, who are already disposed to believe anything that dribbles out of PBS, MSNBC, or The View. However, of what was Trump convicted in a Manhattan court, before a Manhattan jury, by a Manhattan DA who would make a Stalin prosecutor proud? The indictment’s 34 felony counts were actually one count just multiplied every time it appeared in the paperwork. The felonies were invented by injecting an ethereal and fuzzy federal election fraud charge into accusations that can’t survive the statute of limitations. All of it was hocus pocus for people who are inclined to believe in the unbelievable.
Well, the belief in the unbelievable is evident in people who regard Trump to be God’s vicar on earth, in the same fashion as that Manhattan jury’s belief in socialist prosperity, an oxymoron if there ever was one. So, if Trump castigates his 2020 election loss as fraud so will the massive supportive political complex behind him. Facts, evidence aren’t allowed to stand in the way. Salem Media’s “2,000 Mules” is a classic in the annals of political fiction.
In case you haven’t heard, Salem Media dropped Dinesh D’Souza’s “2,000 Mules” from its media platforms and issued an apology to Mark Andrews, one of the so-called “mules” (see #1 and #2 below). As it turned out, Andrews was placing in the Atlanta drop box ballots for himself, his wife, and three adult children. This is one “mule” that couldn’t be made to fit the invented profile. The narrator’s “What you are seeing is a crime” was pure poppycock. What of the other 1,999 “mules”? We get a clue when Salem Media dropped all mention of D’Souza’s monstrosity. Even diehards shrink from the prospect of having to shell out millions of dollars in compensatory awards.
Might there have been vote fraud in 2020? Possibly. Might there have been more fraud than normal? Possibly. But “possibly” shouldn’t be good enough for an electorate with their heads screwed on straight. Good sense demands a large dose of skepticism of an allegation of a secret conspiracy of 2,000 anybodies. A man with much good sense, Benjamin Franklin, once wrote, “Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.” Actually, conspiracy is the last refuge of the scoundrel, not patriotism, in today’s toxic political playground.
Why is it so toxic? It’s the junction of two factors. On the one hand, in true Marxist fashion, the Democrats have firmly adopted the maxim, the ends justify the means. Anything is considered proper so long as it accomplishes the desired end. On the other hand, the Democrats’ institutional heft behind the neo-Marxist revolution is confronted by their opponents’ cult of the middle finger in the person of Donald Trump. As a result, our politics are grotesque and filled with fantasies.
Welcome to a public that has been made into chumps.
December 2020:
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Publisher of ‘2000 Mules’ Apologizes to Georgia Man Falsely Accused of Ballot Fraud in the Film”, US News and World Report from AP, 5/31/2024, at https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/georgia/articles/2024-05-31/publisher-of-2000-mules-apologizes-to-georgia-man-falsely-accused-of-ballot-fraud-in-the-film
2. “A Belated Apology for ‘2000 Mules’”, Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal, 6/5/2024, at https://www.wsj.com/articles/2000-mules-salem-media-lawsuit-mark-andrews-dinesh-dsouza-2020-election-true-the-vote-1565ace0
* For my dear family and friends who are Trump supporters, I wish not to be provocative and strive only to be honest in my assessment of Donald Trump. Donald Trump is not the personification of “conservative”. If you read further, you’ll see why. Please keep in mind that hagiography (worshipfulness) is not an endearing quality. I won’t engage in it. That kind of adulation should be reserved for Him who raises up and brings down nations (see 2 Samuel 22:48), and belongs not to the hot political personage of the moment.
The choice of J.D. Vance is more proof that the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan has been laid to rest . . . for the time being. Like a vampire rising from his crypt, though, the GOP corpse is resurrecting as the Trump Party, while standing for nothing more than Trump’s brusque utterings on all matters foreign and domestic. Replace the “R” with a “T” after the name of the party’s officeholders.
What does the “T” actually represent? A strong hint can be found in the party’s platform. Warning, don’t be so dismissive of the party’s platform as an empty gesture and meaningless after the convention. Platforms are aspirational, reflective of the collective heart and mind of a party and provide the direction for where its representatives would like to nudge the country once in office.
Where does Trump want to lead the party and country in his platform? He no doubt wants to sidestep the prickly issue of abortion. The party’s longstanding and firm stance in support of unborn life has been replaced by a “Vote of the People” (see #1 below). A “Vote of the People” sanctifies the taking of unborn life according to the Trump Party. The only abortion act to be condemned is “Late Term Abortion”, the poll-tested safe position. The Trump Party’s positions are as poll-tested as the verbiage to tar opponents coming out of the Democrat political complex.
By its nature, the issue of the taking of unborn life can’t be reduced to states’ rights. A “Vote of the People” can’t sanctify a practice that is unsanctifiable. Instead, to advance Trump’s political interests, the 2020 commitment – “. . . we assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed” – must be expunged and replaced by the 2024 “Vote of the People” and a curt seven lines.
The Trump Party has adopted the 1854 rationale of Sen. Stephen Douglas (D, Ill.) in his Kansas-Nebraska Act regarding slavery in the territories, just adapted for abortion. Douglas called it “popular sovereignty”, like Trump’s “Vote of the People”: let the people in the territories choose to enslave others, or, in our moment, take the life of children who haven’t exited the womb. That makes it alright, eh?
Sen. Stephen Douglas (D, Ill.), author of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854
Trump has a history of being a bit dodgy on abortion. He was for it before he was against it, following in the illustrious rhetorical tradition of John Kerry. Now he’s shuffled slightly in reverse to “Vote of the People”. Anything that’ll get him back in the White House, even if it is over the bodies of the unborn.
There’s much in the platform to be lauded: rebuilding our military and its domestic industrial base, immigration controls, the defense of common sense in the culture wars, preserving the 2018 tax cuts, choice in education, ending the eco-madness, etc. These fall in the Venn diagram overlap between the old Republican Party and the new Trump Party. It’s in the expanding outstretched areas beyond the common zone that the Republican Party turns into the Trump Party, so much so that the word “Republican” is unrecognizable in the party name and as the descriptor of its members’ affiliation. “Republican” needs to be trash-canned for Trumpican. Those who gathered in Milwaukee are Trumpicans, not Republicans. All Trump Party officeholders, formerly Republican, should be designated like Sen. J.D. Vance – T, Ohio. Ditch the “R”.
No better example of the metamorphosis can be found than in the Trump Party’s newfound pledge to commit fiscal lechery (see #4 below), and this from a man who has filed six Chapter 11 bankruptcies starting in the early 1990s. It’s no secret that the dole, the welfare state, entitlements are driving us to the status of 1980s Argentina with an inflation rate of 3,000% (see #3 below), or Weimar Germany between 1922 and 1923 when inflation made one US dollar worth 4,210,500,000,000 marks. The three elephants in the federal budget of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid currently account for almost half of all federal spending (see #5 below), and are on a glide path to eat up more. Then, you must pile the mounting and mandatory debt interest payments onto that fiscal Mt. Everest. Interest payments don’t add one new frigate to the navy or new bridge to the interstate highway system.
What’s the Trump Party’s answer? Mimicking Trump before his adoring crowds, the platform reads, “President Trump has made absolutely clear that he will not cut one penny from Medicare or Social Security.” The bombast is followed by a promise of more benefits and a pie-in-the-sky hope that we can grow ourselves out of the incontinence (see #4 below).
Be honest, speak to the young and future generations about the huge burden that they will be expected to carry. Currently, we’re creating $1 trillion of new debt every 100 days (see #5 below). To say that the three elephants aren’t a big part of that picture is to play the part of the flim-flam artist in the old shell game. When we try to fund anything else, like defense, it only increases the pressure on the total federal budget, regardless of the gimmicky mirage of FICA taxes going in and bennies going out. Demography can’t sustain it. The Trump Party promises to stop the alleged raiding of the account, but ironically they need to raid it in order to shower rewards on favored industries, fund additional benefits, and resuscitate a languishing military after years of neglect.
One shouldn’t expect fiscal probity from a man who’s played fast and loose with the bankruptcy laws. Trump will be freed from the normal debt worries that are faced by normal people since he’ll have the federal power to issue new debt and gin up the printing presses. Debt is something for somebody else to worry about. Right? By that time, Trump and his aged cohort will have passed to their reward. Not so for your kids. We ought to be ashamed.
On the domestic front, the Trump Party promises tariffs and all manner of trade tomfoolery including the showering of largesse on favored companies and penalties for consumers (tariff-induced price increases), people who might be reluctant to subsidize the featherbedding of our labor unions, the same gang who ran Detroit and its automakers into the ground. Read Chapters three and five of the platform to know what the Trumpicans have in store (see #6 below). The effect of treating natural allies as trade enemies at a time of a resurgent Red China is anybody’s guess. It probably won’t end well.
But forward thinking hasn’t been the hallmark of Trumpicans, including Trump’s anointed 39-year-old #2, J.D. Vance. Look at the Trump Party’s definition of “National Interest” (see #7 below):
“Republicans will promote a Foreign Policy centered on the most essential American Interests, starting with protecting the American Homeland, our People, our Borders, our Great American Flag, and our Rights under God.”
Sounds great, right? This isn’t a product of independent deep thinkers coming together. It’s a cut-and-paste job from Trump’s stump speeches. The threat of Red China, the interests of our friends in the Indo-Pacific and Israel are mentioned, but Ukraine and the threat of Putin’s Russia didn’t survive the Trump censors.
Trump’s outlook presents a bugaboo that is compounded in Vance. It is a lack of appreciation for the international liberal political order after World War II. Don’t fly off the handle about the word “liberal”. The liberal order means the classically liberal cooperative arrangement of rule-of-law democracies, alliances, also called collective defense, and free trade. The “America First” jargon of the Trump clan often means America alone. The attacks on free trade translates into a love affair with tariffs, which is not a lubricant for international collaboration. Are the criticisms of NATO limited to making member nations increase their contributions or do they represent a pivot away from the alliance, another manifestation of America alone?
We’ll learn the hard way by putting him and his people in the White House for a second term. His people in a second term may not be the Reaganite types that populated the first. This second edition may be populated with protectionists and isolationists/noninterventionists, appointees falling under the dubious conjury of “national conservative”.
Listening to Vance, one worries about a whole lot of things. The former Never Trumper of 2016 has shape-shifted into a Trump firebrand with the same propensity for bombast before an open mic or on X as his Trump “shifu” (Chinese martial arts master). In 2019, Vance made clear the battle lines in the party between Reagan Republicanism and Trumpism. Speaking of Trump and the party split, he said,
“Even though he [Trump] was the president of the United States, there were already people who were aggressively pushing back against his influence, who were already planning a return to basically reimplementing the Wall Street Journal editorial page’s preferred positions in 2019. I think that’s over now. And the fact that it’s over is a huge, huge win for you guys [i.e. national conservatives], but mostly, it’s a huge, huge win for the American people.” (see #8 below)
By 2024, the Reaganite Republican Party of 2019, which Vance characterizes as the “Wall Street Journal editorial page’s preferred positions” – the free trade/small government/robust-military-and-diplomatic-engagement stance of Reagan – is eclipsed by people vaguely referred to as “populists”. The word demands parsing.
The “populism” for Vance is a cry for big government which is evident in his hostility to changes in Social Security and Medicare and in his support for trade protectionism. In 2020, running for the Senate, Vance said, “I don’t support cuts to Social Security or Medicare and think privatizing Social Security is a bad idea.” “Privatizing” is political code for opposition to the reforms that make them sustainable. It’s one of Chuck Schumer’s favorite rhetorical contraptions.
And in many ways, Vance is right there with Schumer and the rest of the collectivist establishment in the donkey party. They don’t like free enterprise, because it might be too free of their control, and apparently neither does Vance. He adores Lina Khan, Biden’s radical chairwoman of Federal Trade Commission (FTC). He gushingly approves of her when he said, “I look at Lina Khan as one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job.”
Lina Khan
If you’re a socialist of the kind commonly found in today’s Democrat Party, then the FTC is the place to be to assault your arch enemy, the free enterprise system. Khan traffics in the “Bigness is Badness” jargon of the Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party rather than the more practical and sensible “consumer welfare” principle of anti-trust law and regulation. The former is indefinable and leaves much running room for anti-business skullduggery, perfect for the budding socialists manning the parapets of today’s Democratic Party. Vance is anxious to join her there, while she has driven the two remaining Republicans out of the commission (see #11 below). Does Vance match Lenin’s definition of the “useful idiot”?
Vance’s “national conservative” compadres yearn for the 1950s, a time when our trade competitors were digging out from under the rubble of World War II. Then came the 1970s oil shocks, new regulations and new muscular federal regulatory agencies, and the revival of our trade rivals. Much American industry couldn’t survive their unions that were made powerful during the lax times of the 1950s and 60s. Much traditional American manufacturing fled the Rust Belt for the right-to-work Sun Belt and the South Belt. Michigan’s loss was Tennessee’s and South Carolina’s gain.
Foreign manufacturers jumped into the American right-to-work free trade zone of states making the words “foreign made” irrelevant. The car list is quite impressive. Much of Toyota’s entire lineup, Honda, Nissan, Hyundai, Kia, Volkswagen, Mercedes, and BMW have made their way into states not blue, not controlled by the AFL-CIO, where freer labor meets freer trade, and that means a smaller government. That’s the prescription for economic growth, not Vance’s big government manipulation of economic actors, whether they be consumers or producers, with bombast like, “We won’t sacrifice our supply chains to unlimited global trade, we’ll stamp every product made in the U.S.A.”
Sen. Josh Hawley (T, Missouri)
Do you actually think these protectionists will stop with “supply chains”? Another Vance-style “populist”, Sen. Josh Hawley (T, Missouri), now favors private sector labor cartels, commonly called “unions”, and opposes right-to-work laws. What is right-to-work? Right-to-work is the counter to the longstanding practice of using state powers to goad workers into labor unions under the legal colloquialism “collective bargaining”. The “collective” part of the phrase is the greasing of the skids, through force of law, to direct workers into the arms of union bosses, people who today have a propensity to be more socialist than a socialist. Yes, right into the arms of people like Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO.
We should examine Liz Shuler, the kind of person who Vance and Hawley would like to link arms (see Wikipedia for her brief bio). She is an example of the new, postmodern kind of boss, unlike the fabled bosses of decades past who toiled in blue collar jobs. Not her. Active in Oregon’s Democratic Party, and after her degree in journalism, and after union organizing activism in Oregon and California, she does what aspiring union bosses of today do: fight worker freedom in the workplace. She led the AFL-CIO effort to defeat Proposition 226 in California. It would have restricted the unions’ habit of easy access to a worker’s paycheck under state law to garner dues payments, and additionally it would have required a worker’s permission before his or her dues moneys can be used for political purposes. These are the type of people who Vance and Hawley want to join in political comradery.
Liz Shuler, AFL-CIO president
In so many ways, the Trump/Vance/Hawley “populism” is a white flag to the Left. They pander by surrendering to the militant unionism that made a hash of industries who fell under its powerful political sway. Is it just pure greed for a company to escape to a right-to-work state or overseas to avoid future bankruptcy? A survival instinct most emphatically exists in the economic realm, as it does among unionists whose very existence is dependent on government-granted privileges, without which, they’d shrink to voluntary associations. Trump/Vance/Hawley are okay with government-sponsored union power over the lives of workers and their employers.
For the Trump/Vance/Hawley gang, it’s a cold and hard calculation for the union vote while laying waste to American competitiveness. Union-love hasn’t worked going back to the 1930s. Consumers behave like business. They both thrive under conditions of free choice. Businesses discovered the welcome mat in southern states and European and Asian competitors recovered from the rubble of WWII, and buyers prospered with more options than those offered by the protectionists and hardcore unionists. Workers might need to relearn the lesson that without buyers for their production, their jobs evaporate. That’s why Trump/Vance/Hawley want to goad consumers, like they do workers, into buying what they wouldn’t in a level playing field. But now with the rise of the Trumpican Party, all of us will be forced to live our lives under a flimsy “industrial policy” of tariffs, subsidies, and coerced unionization. It’s an invitation to go back to the 1970s.
The bait for the unionized worker is a combination of tariffs and the bennies of the dole. The dole is bribing people with other people’s money, ditto with tariffs. Trump/Vance/Hawley is incomprehensible on tariffs. American consumers pay the tariff like any other business tax. Prices jump either directly from the tariff or from an oligopoly of “Made in America” favorites. Ironically, Trump is skeptical of EV mandates – as am I – but he wants to empower unions with a powerful government, the same government that imposed the EV mandate to begin with. Since they’re too busy sending Reagan to the ash heap of history, don’t expect the Trumpicans to recognize this 1986 Reagan masterpiece: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”
This Trumpican Party is busy sending up the white flag on the welfare state, but they won’t stop there. It’s quadrafecta of white flags that includes Ukraine, coerced unionization, and free trade. Would Reagan be a member of this party, a party of bankrupting welfare programs, America alone, neo-socialist assaults on free enterprise, labor monopolies, and a deaf ear to the cries of aborted babies? I kinda doubt it. After all, as he said of his departure from the Democratic Party in the 1960s, “I didn’t leave my party [the Democratic Party]; my party left me.” Well, has my party left me?
RogerG
Sources:
1. The GOP 2024 party platform can be read at https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2024-republican-party-platform. For abortion, turn to Chapter 9, section 4 of the 2024 platform.
2. Compare the brevity of the 2024 abortion plank with 2020 which can be found in “Republican Party Platform: ‘The Unborn Child Has a Fundamental Right to Life’” at https://www.lifenews.com/2020/09/03/republican-party-platform-the-unborn-child-has-a-fundamental-right-to-life/
3. “Inflation rates in Argentina”, WorldData.info, at https://www.worlddata.info/america/argentina/inflation-rates.php#:~:text=The%20hyperinflation%20of%20the%201980s%20peaked%20in%201989,economic%20turbulence%20began%20again%20in%20the%20new%20millennium.
4. Read the Social Security/Medicare planks in the 2024 GOP platform in Section 6, “Protect Seniors” at https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2024-republican-party-platform.
5. “U.S. National Debt Soars Adding a Staggering $1 Trillion Every 100 Days” at https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/us-national-debt-soars-adding-a-staggering-1-trillion-every-100-days/ss-BB1pOq5u#:~:text=The%20U.S.%20National%20Debt%20is%20skyrocketing%2C%20ballooning%20from,track%20to%20increase%20by%20%242.8%20trillion%20this%20year.
6. Chapters three and five of the GOP platform at https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2024-republican-party-platform.
7. Chapter 10 of the GOP platform at https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2024-republican-party-platform
8. Thanks to Philip Klein for his research into J.D. Vance in “J. D. Vance Pick Represents Another Nail in Coffin of Reagan Republicanism”, National Review, 7/15/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/07/j-d-vance-pick-represents-another-nail-in-coffin-of-reagan-republicanism/
9. “J.D. Vance Ditches Past Support For Social Security Cuts”, Travis Waldron, HuffPost, 7/13/2022, at https://www.yahoo.com/news/j-d-vance-ditches-past-161011851.html?guccounter=1
10. “Why the rise of JD Vance in Trump World divides US business”, Lauren Fedor, Financial Times, 7/12/2024, at https://www.ft.com/content/ff258541-dfe3-4dd9-99bf-2a1d26b6a21c
11. “Lina Khan’s Stalled Revolution”, Dominic Pino, National Review, 3/20/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/04/17/lina-khans-stalled-revolution/
12. “The Grand Strategy Behind J.D. Vance’s Latest Push To Kill Ukraine Aid”, Ian Ward, Politico, 4/18/2024, at https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/04/18/jd-vance-ukraine-aid-00153201#:~:text=In%20place%20of%20the%20rules-based%20international%20order%2C%20Vance,more%20insulated%20from%20global%20economic%20and%20military%20entanglements.
California Governor Gavin NewsomA big crowd was on hand when the Murrieta Valley Unified School District board voted last August to mandate that parents be told if their child shows any indication at school of being transgender. (photo: Mallika Seshadri / EdSource)
*Please tune into the recent Radio Free California podcast, “Least Mode” (available on Spotify), particularly the second half which is a discussion between Lance Christensen of the California Policy Center (CPC), and past candidate for Superintendent of Public Instruction, and Julie Hamill, CPC attorney and parent. It should scare your socks off. It should be required listening for anyone with children or grandchildren in the state’s schools.
*************
The popularly elected governor, Gavin Newsome, and the popularly elected Democrat super majority in the state legislature passed and the governor signed AB 1955, maliciously misnamed the “The Safety Act” (see #1 below). It would require student “privacy” protections against their parents. The law requires school officials and teachers to hide gender identity issues from parents at the behest of minors. Call it a right to lie to parents. Combined with the curricular California Healthy Youth Act (CHYA), which inducts your kids into gender ideology (see #2 below), you will be in for a hell of a ride. And after indoctrination, you will know nothing about it if it produces the likely effect of gender confusion in tweens and teens already going through the tumult of puberty.
These kids are the most vulnerable, and the state of California is the chief abettor, or maybe chief molester is more appropriate. The ruling party will cast the issue in a number of humanitarian ways, but the result is the same. You are frozen out when you drop your kid off at the bus stop or school. A U-Haul may be your only way out of the grip of the public employee unions, LGBTQ+ brigades, and the popular infatuation with lefty ideology which actually runs the state. A spine to stand up to these miscreants is in short supply in the state.
Get out, get out now! Voting is inconsequential. Your only hope is to escape your popularly elected officials by appealing to someone with greater sense, someone beyond the state’s electorate – say, the federal courts. Good luck with that, with the Biden claque running interference for the state-sponsored mutilators. So much for the beauties of democracy.
What beauty is there in scarred chests and genitalia?
If you care about your kids, if you don’t relish a lifetime of surgeries, pharmaceuticals, and medical interventions for your kids, get out, get out now! I don’t know what else to say.
Please watch the report below.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Newsom signs bill banning schools from notifying parents about student gender identity”, Mackenzie Mays, LA Times, 7/15/2024, at https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-07-15/newsom-bans-schools-from-requiring-that-parents-are-notified-about-student-gender-identity
2. “Comprehensive Sexual Health & HIV/AIDS Instruction: California Healthy Youth Act”, California Department of Education, at https://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/he/se/
This piece has little to say about the Trump shooter, simply because we know so little. It’s about the common threads of political violence and murder in the history of the last century and a half.
Violence as a means of political expression has come and gone only to return. The mobs of ancient Athens and other Greek poli were legendary. The 11th century’s Islamic Order of Assassins is renowned.
Starting in the late 19th century, political murder, assassinations, the targeting of prominent leaders, appeared with greater frequency. By the first few decades of the of the 20th, the collective action of gangs and mobs reemerged alongside the more targeted approach to killing. Something entered our political bloodstream to make political discourse incendiary from the late 19th century on. The attempted assassination of Donald Trump could be another episode in this sorry state of affairs.
The chronicle of political murder beginning in the late 19th century is startling. The incidences increased with the rise of revolutionary reformist movements of the anarcho-socialist-communist bent. Russian Czar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881 by killers of the Narodnaya Volya (“People’s Will”), a collection of revolutionary socialists. Then, entering the 20th came a string of killings. The Russia of this period was a breeding ground for them. Aleksandr Ulyanov, the brother of Lenin (real name: Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov), was executed in 1887 for his involvement in a plot to kill Czar Alexander III. In 1911, the reformist prime minister Pyotr Stolypin was murdered by another of those revolutionary socialists of the time.
Unrest, plots, and assassinations continued apace till the stresses of World War I provided opportunities for the most radical and violent of the revolutionary socialists, the Bolsheviks, to seize power in Petrograd in 1917 and eventually exterminated Czar Nicholas and his entire immediate family, including retainers, in July 1918: Nicholas, wife Alexandra, their 4 daughters of Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and the young heir Alexei. Others of the extended family soon followed. Under the rule of a string of communist general secretaries, the now USSR was plagued with purges, a gulag archipelago, mass executions, and thousands of the singular quiet variety in the basement of secret police headquarters in the Lubyanka, Moscow. It’s state-sponsored political violence on a mass scale.
The king of Greece, George I, was murdered in the streets of Thessaloniki in 1913. 13 years before, the king of Italy Umberto I was assassinated by an anarcho-socialist in Monza, Italy. One year after the king of Greece succumbed, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and wife Sophie were murdered in Sarajevo by a greater-Serbia nationalist. All suffered at the hands of fanatics of some abstract reformist better world, most frequently of one brand of revolutionary socialism or another.
Presidents Garfield (1882) and McKinley (1901) experienced a similar fate at the instigation of a similar cast of characters. From the 1880s on, anarcho-socialists targeted business leaders and successfully bombed Wall Street in 1920 killing 40 and injuring 143. Reaching down to the middle of the 20th century, JFK was killed by a loner of the same psychological profile as Gavrilo Princip (killer of the archduke and wife) or Leon Czolgosz (the McKinley assassin). The disenchanted, alienated, radicalized, and unbalanced went after Reagan and Gerald Ford. In the 21st, a Bernie Sanders supporter attempted the extermination of the Republican House leadership in 2017.
January 6, 2021 accorded some Trump rally attendees the opportunity to flex their collective riot muscles. This pales when compared to the 2020 summer of riots, killings, lootings, and arson, all excused as a reaction to some indefinable, mysterious, hidden racism – the same so-called structural oppression that can be traced back to the doctrines of Narodnaya Volya and the assassination of Czar Alexander II.
Most political murders of the past century and a half coincided with a fervor for reformist schemes of a revolutionary socialist cast. Progressivism simultaneously arose from an associated reformist zeal: the passion to construct the “progressive” state under a class of appointed “experts” to rationalize society. For both progressives and revolutionary socialists, possession of the power of the state is the sine qua non (essential condition) for building the better world. There’s so much at stake that, for some, murder might appear excusable. Political violence is frequently the underbelly of reformist zeal.
Their zeal to seize the commanding heights, as Lenin put it, has led to an equally zealous attempt to stop them. Donald Trump isn’t an idea politician. He’s the middle finger to the establishment of those pushing the aggrandizement of state power. Trump is a gesture politician who draws strong gestures from the opposition, who happen to be the same people already in possession of excessive reformist passion.
Up to now, the hair trigger hasn’t come from MAGA. A century and a half of political violence shows that revolutionary socialism with its reformist zeal provides a much more consistent impetus for political killings and wide-ranging violence. Hitler and Mussolini were as ruthless insofar as they had their own programs of upheaval to impose on their people. Race socialism shares the same ideological DNA as the socialists’ systemic extermination of a spectral bourgeoisie, the nebulous “enemies of the working class”. They both trade in the common currency of radical social engineering and don’t shy from radical means to achieve radical ends.
Skepticism about ending political violence is warranted so long as extremist reform movements, mostly of the anarcho-socialist persuasion (think Antifa, BLM and offshoots, CRT, etc.), occupy pride of place in one of our two major political parties. For them, a state of expansive powers is essential to remake the world. This extremism seldom applies the breaks to extremist actions.
This piece has little to say about the Trump shooter, simply because we know so little. It’s about the common threads of political violence and murder in the history of the last century and a half.
Violence as a means of political expression has come and gone only to return. The mobs of ancient Athens and other Greek poli were legendary. The 11th century’s Islamic Order of Assassins is renowned.
Starting in the late 19th century, political murder, assassinations, the targeting of prominent leaders, appeared with greater frequency. By the first few decades of the of the 20th, the collective action of gangs and mobs reemerged alongside the more targeted approach to killing. Something entered our political bloodstream to make political discourse incendiary from the late 19th century on. The attempted assassination of Donald Trump could be another episode in this sorry state of affairs.
The chronicle of political murder beginning in the late 19th century is startling. The incidences increased with the rise of revolutionary reformist movements of the anarcho-socialist-communist bent. Russian Czar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881 by killers of the Narodnaya Volya (“People’s Will”), a collection of revolutionary socialists. Then, entering the 20th came a string of killings. The Russia of this period was a breeding ground for them. Aleksandr Ulyanov, the brother of Lenin (real name: Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov), was executed in 1887 for his involvement in a plot to kill Czar Alexander III. In 1911, the reformist prime minister Pyotr Stolypin was murdered by another of those revolutionary socialists of the time.
Unrest, plots, and assassinations continued apace till the stresses of World War I provided opportunities for the most radical and violent of the revolutionary socialists, the Bolsheviks, to seize power in Petrograd in 1917 and eventually exterminated Czar Nicholas and his entire immediate family, including retainers, in July 1918: Nicholas, wife Alexandra, their 4 daughters of Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and the young heir Alexei. Others of the extended family soon followed. Under the rule of a string of communist general secretaries, the now USSR was plagued with purges, a gulag archipelago, mass executions, and thousands of the singular quiet variety in the basement of secret police headquarters in the Lubyanka, Moscow. It’s state-sponsored political violence on a mass scale.
The king of Greece, George I, was murdered in the streets of Thessaloniki in 1913. 13 years before, the king of Italy Umberto I was assassinated by an anarcho-socialist in Monza, Italy. One year after the king of Greece succumbed, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and wife Sophie were murdered in Sarajevo by a greater-Serbia nationalist. All suffered at the hands of fanatics of some abstract reformist better world, most frequently of one brand of revolutionary socialism or another.
Presidents Garfield (1882) and McKinley (1901) experienced a similar fate at the instigation of a similar cast of characters. From the 1880s on, anarcho-socialists targeted business leaders and successfully bombed Wall Street in 1920 killing 40 and injuring 143. Reaching down to the middle of the 20th century, JFK was killed by a loner of the same psychological profile as Gavrilo Princip (killer of the archduke and wife) or Leon Czolgosz (the McKinley assassin). The disenchanted, alienated, radicalized, and unbalanced went after Reagan and Gerald Ford. In the 21st, a Bernie Sanders supporter attempted the extermination of the Republican House leadership in 2017.
January 6, 2021 accorded some Trump rally attendees the opportunity to flex their collective riot muscles. This pales when compared to the 2020 summer of riots, killings, lootings, and arson, all excused as a reaction to some indefinable, mysterious, hidden racism – the same so-called structural oppression that can be traced back to the doctrines of Narodnaya Volya and the assassination of Czar Alexander II.
Most political murders of the past century and a half coincided with a fervor for reformist schemes of a revolutionary socialist cast. Progressivism simultaneously arose from an associated reformist zeal: the passion to construct the “progressive” state under a class of appointed “experts” to rationalize society. For both progressives and revolutionary socialists, possession of the power of the state is the sine qua non (essential condition) for building the better world. There’s so much at stake that, for some, murder might appear excusable. Political violence is frequently the underbelly of reformist zeal.
Their zeal to seize the commanding heights, as Lenin put it, has led to an equally zealous attempt to stop them. Donald Trump isn’t an idea politician. He’s the middle finger to the establishment of those pushing the aggrandizement of state power. Trump is a gesture politician who draws strong gestures from the opposition, who happen to be the same people already in possession of excessive reformist passion.
Up to now, the hair trigger hasn’t come from MAGA. A century and a half of political violence shows that revolutionary socialism with its reformist zeal provides a much more consistent impetus for political killings and wide-ranging violence. Hitler and Mussolini were as ruthless insofar as they had their own programs of upheaval to impose on their people. Race socialism shares the same ideological DNA as the socialists’ systemic extermination of a spectral bourgeoisie, the nebulous “enemies of the working class”. They both trade in the common currency of radical social engineering and don’t shy from radical means to achieve radical ends.
Skepticism about ending political violence is warranted so long as extremist reform movements, mostly of the anarcho-socialist persuasion (think Antifa, BLM and offshoots, CRT, etc.), occupy pride of place in one of our two major political parties. For them, a state of expansive powers is essential to remake the world. This extremism seldom applies the breaks to extremist actions.
Homeschoolers be warned that a politicized science in politicized journals like Scientific American is gunning for you.
If you believe that science hasn’t been corrupted by a political ideology, that it is value-neutral, you are naïve and grossly ill-informed. I invite anyone to go over to the Scientific American website (www.scientificamerican.com) and peruse their links to “Pressroom” for editor bios and “The Editors” for their stories (see #1 and #2 below). The bios read like missionaries of the progressive blob. The editors’ stories aren’t pure science but a monotonous drumbeat for greater central government power, the poker tell of progressivism. These are people who are impertinent enough to claim to represent science in America. Whew, what a mess.
Managing editor Jeanne Bryner encapsulates progressivism’s pretensions in her bio which includes the line “. . . just about everything can be viewed through the lens of science.” “Just about everything” might be the escape hatch from her half-witted flight of fancy. It should be clear to anyone with an ounce of adult-level awareness that moral judgments frequently evade the calculus of the lab. Science could devise an effective means to terminate unborn life, and has (for instance, the abortion pill of mifepristone and misoprostol), but it can’t say squat about whether we ought to. These people hitch “science” to their ideological commitments, such as the charge that we have too many people, and even add numbers, but that’s just quantifying an unquantifiable belief and calling it science.
Politicized science in Scientific American, June 2022 issue
The editors of Scientific American exude progressive conceit. Read their backgrounds; it’s something that they’ve been imbibing since their formative years, whose lifestyle reinforces. Degrees in fields that are hotbeds of left-wing activism are common. Environmentalism appears to be a substitute religion. Many have degreed specialties in journalism. Typical of ideological zealots, no serious consideration of trade-offs plays a prominent role in their thinking. How much of their production is real science, and how much of their “science” is curated through experiences in certain ideologically infected college disciplines, lifestyle preferences, and the prevalent proclivities of their demography (female, college, many single, urban white collar)? Mull over that for awhile.
Editor in Chief Laura Helmuth is straight from liberal-left central casting. Rummaging through her background discloses a propensity for hijacking “the science” for progressive, left-wing causes. The magazine endorsed Joe Biden in 2020 in a decision that was “both unanimous and quick”, citing the sins of the Trump administration to her brand of “science”.
Laura Helmuth, Editor in Chief
Her “science” is the science of the progressive zealot. Her mind is as closed as a steel trap. I doubt that the writings of researchers in design theory (evidence of a Designer in the cosmos and nature), like the work of the Discovery Institute, would ever be allowed to grace the pages of the magazine. If you’re cool to climate-change jeremiads, don’t expect a call to be a contributor. Under her leadership, Scientific American is in competition with Mother Jones for the same audience. See Helmuth’s Wikipedia page.
Progressivism lies at the foundation of editorial decisions. So, what is it? Progressivism is a ticket to power for people like Helmuth. Going back to the late 19th century, progressives fell in love with “experts”, people like them, people of the appropriate cultural accoutrements like years spent inside classrooms. They worship at the altar of credentials, degrees, and what not. And these college matriculants are said to be deserving of power to lead the population to the promised land. Little things like the Constitution, separation of powers, federalism, the subsidiary principle (localism), rule of law, and popular sovereignty shouldn’t be allowed to spoil the march to the rule of the administrative state.
That’s where we find the editors of Scientific American in their progressive jihad against homeschooling (see #3 below). They complain about the absence of uniform standards for such independent practitioners (parents) and their charges (their children), who are the rebels to their leadership. Of course, the “expert’s” uniform standards will be those that emanate out of the left-infected schools of education and the vile teachers’ unions and into the commissariat of the federal Department of Education and its policies and regulations. Once announced, they become the excuse for a power grab away from parents.
Nothing is worse for the progressive than a bunch of parents making their own choices independent of the “expert’s” set of coercible rules. They treat the population as cattle to be herded.
For example, these “experts” in the editors’ piece lamented the “pushback” of parents in Michigan against the experts’ much-loved registry of homeschooling parents and their children. Sounds like the registry of Jews of a bygone era. Their contempt for the “pushback” is actually a disdain for citizen involvement, something de Tocqueville praised but upsetting to the gurus of Scientific American. They stooped so low as to resort to child abuse to rationalize a diminishment of parental rights. It’s disgusting. If abuse occurred in one home, it is assumed to be characteristic of all parents who teach their own children, or why else bring it up?
Jews in Nazi concentration camps were tattooed with serial numbers for registration.
Here we have “experts” wallowing in the logical fallacy of composition – “if something is true for the part then that is true for the whole or the group too” (see #7 below). An abusing parent who isolates their kid is transformed into being a defining characteristic of homeschooling. This isn’t “science”. It’s something out of the Joseph Goebbels playbook.
The same stance of this we-know-what’s-best-for-your-kids crowd is the pretext for sidelining parents regarding “Transgender and Gender-Nonconforming” children as soon as the kids are dropped into the clutches of school employees. California is the Valhalla of this political sect masquerading behind a mask of “science”.
A huge leap in deplatforming California parents in the upbringing of their own children was promulgated in 2017 in the California Department of Education’s notorious Administrative Regulation 5145.3 (see #5 below). Under the guise of “Nondiscrimination/Harassment”, the young “gender-nonconforming” are accorded unique privacy rights not granted to any other student. The policy puts the child in the parental seat. If the child wishes it so, school employees are obligated to lie or withhold information from parents on their child’s condition. The kid may be transitioning with the assistance of school employees and the parents are kept in the dark. Needless to say, some locally elected school boards are resisting (Chino and Rocklin for instance) while the jackbooted California AG, Rob Bonta, responds with lawsuits to compel compliance.
Up to now, Bonta has succeeded. He even managed to sideline a parent initiative to codify the right of parents to be informed by using his power to title and summarize the proposition as “anti-gay” (all described in a prior post). A California judge bowed to Bonta when the parents sued. That put a stop to signature gathering. Parents of California, this, combined with the strangulation of other educational avenues in the state (charters, private and religious schools, homeschooling) may leave you with no other option but to leave the state to save your kids from permanent mental and physical scarring.
Detransitioner. Charlie Evans has set-up a charity to help people in the transgender community who want to stop or reverse their decision (photo: Stuart Nicol)Helena Kerschner before detransitioning and after
The only child abuse may be choosing to remain in the state.
It is heartening to know that the Supreme Court is putting a break on this stampede to the rule of the unelected “expert” – the kind of person utterly adored by the editors of Scientific American. At the federal level, the decision of the Court majority in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo put to rest the power grab of administrative agencies in areas not supported by law. See, such agencies can only operate within the clear parameters of an underwriting law, if one still considers the Constitution operative. If the law is silent or vague, they can’t freewheel it. Congress must clarify or not. If not, regulators aren’t free to legislate. They’re stuck, not us.
Since the 1920s, the Court has upheld parental rights under the 14th Amendment (with a muddled modification in Troxel v. Granville of 2000, see #6 below). Loper Bright drew a bold line for federal authorities, but has little impact on states whose electorates are infatuated with regulators, even if it means making the kids the sovereigns of their own upbringing under the guidance of empowered “experts”, even if it results in a compelled recognition of your daughter as now your son.
The people running Scientific American are typical of the educated “idle hands” class (in the words of philosopher Roger Scruton). In other words, people imprisoned in the Disneyland of their own mind. Don’t trouble them with reality. They have idled away their time in fantasizing about the many ways to be ludicrous.
As with children, so it is true with many of the college educated: idle hands are the devil’s playthings (Benjamin Franklin). The devil is playing around in the “science” of Scientific American.
RogerG
Sources:
1. The Editors of Scientific American in “Pressroom” at https://www.scientificamerican.com/pressroom/
2. Scientific American editors’ stories in “Stories of the Editors” at https://www.scientificamerican.com/author/the-editors/
3. “Children Deserve Uniform Standards in Homeschooling”, The Editors, Scientific American, 5/14/2024, at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/children-deserve-uniform-standards-in-homeschooling/
4. Thanks to James Mason of the Home School Legal Defense Association in “Why Is Scientific American Going After Homeschooling?”, National Review, 7/5/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/07/why-is-scientific-american-going-after-homeschooling/
5. California AR 5145.3, imposed on all school districts in the state, can be read at https://simivalley.granicus.com/MetaViewer.php?view_id=7&clip_id=1953&meta_id=123825. This is Simi Valley USD’s version of it. Scroll down to page 8 and the section “Transgender and Gender-Nonconforming”.
6. “The Supreme Court’s Parental Rights Doctrine”, parentalrigts.org, at https://parentalrights.org/understand_the_issue/supreme-court/
7. “Fallacy of Composition – Definition and Examples” in Logical Fallacy at https://www.logical-fallacy.com/articles/fallacy-of-composition/
Illustration from Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes”
Biden’s decline is part of a massive swindle, at once intentional and in other ways stupefyingly unintentional, and involves much more than a single person’s descent into senility. We are constantly confronted with demands to believe in the unbelievable. Many of us do. It’s as if we want to be swindled. It’s become routine, and we are shocked when the list of unbelievabilities turns out to be, just that, falsehoods and fiascos.
Of course, the story begins with the revelation of the not-so-revelatory story of Biden’s mental deterioration. It should have been clear to anyone observing Biden’s 2020 “basement” campaign. It succeeded. We elected a basement president. In that protracted war room of the left, which is composed of the natural alliance of the legacy media and the Democratic Party, all of a sudden it’s now safe to say that the president is a cognitive mess.
President Biden from the 6/27 debateMore of our president
They even admit that they buried the story and knew for quite some time. The leader of Biden’s praetorian guard, Ron Klain, only feeds the news in the President’s Daily Briefing that won’t trigger explosions of anger in the president. According to Politico, dealing with Biden is like coping with an unstable mental patient (see #1 and #2 below):
“It’s like, ‘You can’t include that, that will set him off,’ or ‘Put that in, he likes that,’” said one senior administration official. “It’s a Rorschach test, not a briefing. Because he is not a pleasant person to be around when he’s being briefed. It’s very difficult, and people are scared s***less of him.”
The dean of the left’s war room, the Washington Post’s Carl Bernstein, spilled the beans. On CNN he divulged (see #3 below),
“[Thursday’s debate] is not a one off, that there have been 15, 20 occasions in the last year and a half when the president has appeared somewhat as he did in that horror show that we witnessed [the debate].”
Those around Biden knew and the media’s co-conspirators knew. They gaslighted us, till 50 million people tuned in last Thursday night (6/27) and saw the glaring reality. Shame on them, and shame on many of us for our willingness to keep Biden in the game. Actually, get real, they’re torturing the poor guy.
It doesn’t end there. There’s a popular belief in the government’s ability to rescue us from all of life’s travails. Speaking of the belief in the unbelievable. Why is it that no one will mention the looming catastrophes of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid? Not Trump, not anybody. If you do, the left’s war room will descend on you like a flock of buzzards. The programs were built with a design flaw: demographics. Increasing numbers of old folks will clash with proportionally fewer working young folks. Taxes going in don’t cover benefits going out, and the national debt continues to balloon. This won’t end well. It never does. The root of it is our preference for the unbelievable.
Let’s move on to the pandemic and our misplaced faith in government employees in the administrative state. Doctors all, and, as it turned out, not to be trusted.
Look at what they gave us. You’ll still see people masking themselves in public when before the triumvirate of Fauci/Collins/Birx rose to prominence, they wouldn’t dream of it. The new paralyzing fear of the simplest public engagement is combined with children still trying to cognitively and developmentally recover from the isolation of Zoomed screens and closed playgrounds. The rush to forcibly vaccinate all of humanity came with a suffocation of the production of therapeutics even as the virus mutated and continued to spread. They even tried to blot out the ingrained human tendency to produce for oneself and family. It was an assault on our very nature. The waterboarding of society lasted longer in blue states, those places with a particularly gripping faith in government “experts”. We’re still living with the consequences in endemic inflation and a stubbornly low labor participation rate.
Who would have thought that they could destroy what makes us human? They tried really hard.
Our stunted nature is evident in a whole line of other unbelievabilities. How did we ever get to the point of assassinating our standard of living in the eco-fantasies of “sustainability” in the span of a decade? Somehow, energy density no longer mattered. Physics no longer matters. Extensive forests of windmills and floodplains of solar panels wrecking the landscape are billed as the salvation from the left’s wet dream of an apocalypse. Suddenly, our finely honed sedan is to be junked in favor of an obese array of batteries, or something else that doesn’t even exist. The already strained grid is to be burdened further. All the while, we’re chained to a chronological escalator to a new world order that resembles something conjured from the imagination of Salvador Dali or Hieronymus Bosch.
XY-people get to pretend that they are XX-people, and vice versa, and the rest of us are ordered to play along. The insecurities of tween and teen girls and boys are used as proof to herd them into the same pretend world.
It’s astounding, our willingness to believe in the unbelievable. Hans Christian Andersen meant more than he intended in his story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” (see #4 below). In the tale, two shyster weavers convince the emperor that they will produce raiment that only a fool cannot see. Fearful of being thought stupid, the emperor and his ministers see nothing but go along and pays them for their services. Then, with his new “clothes”, the emperor parades out in public to greet his subjects. No one in the crowd wants to be thought a fool till a child blurts out the obvious. See the parallel?
Fear of being thought a fool makes dunces of us all. People of the left believed in Biden’s sharpness so as not to be called MAGA. A challenge to Fauci/Collins/Birx was said to be proof of the existence of neanderthals among us. Ibram X. Kendi and the rest of the CRT cabal were made into geniuses to avoid the epithet of being called a closet racist. Fear of being labeled an implicit bigot in the c-suite has led to a rush call for the “marginalized” and quasi-obese in advertising campaigns. Anything less is a demand for more shaming sessions in the corporate world. Having an EV in the garage is proof that you’re not a denier, that you’re “smart”, despite the fact that you are afraid to venture 40 miles from your home charger. You’ll have to hide the essential internal combustion engine vehicle parked next to your four-wheeled symbol of virtue. We’re made to pretend that we’re not fools, as we prove that we are.
From Biden to California’s eco-nuttery, we are encouraged to pretend that we’re not making fools of ourselves. Ironically, our enemies are the child in the crowd who isn’t afraid to laugh.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Thanks to Jim Geraghty of National Review for the analysis and sources in “So Now It’s Okay to Talk about Biden’s ‘Cognitive Decline’”, 7/2/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/so-now-its-okay-to-talk-about-bidens-cognitive-decline/
2. “‘We’ve all enabled the situation’: Dems turn on Biden’s inner sanctum post debate”, Eli Stokols, et al, Politico, 7/2/2024, at https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/02/biden-campaign-debate-inner-circle-00166160
3. “‘Not a one-off’: Bernstein’s sources say concerns about Biden have been growing for a year”, Anderson Cooper interview of Carl Bernstein, CNN, video on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhFmaAMC1_Q
4. “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, complete story by Hans Christian Andersen, at https://americanliterature.com/author/hans-christian-andersen/short-story/the-emperors-new-clothes/
Gibberish has penetrated the doctor’s office and operating room. In a field exclusively reliant on science – in other words, on accurate depictions of what is – medical administrators turned their backs on it and instead became practitioners of voodoo, sorcery. If you’re a doctor and find yourself now in the equivalent of a coven, you might get fired for publicly expressing your amazement. It happened to Dr. Kendall Conger of Duke University Health.
Dr. Kendall Conger
Here’s the upshot. Duke University Health president Dr. Barbara Griffith sits atop an organization that magically discovered a “public health crisis” of racism in 2021, a racism so prevalent that we must drop common sense, reason, logic, and verifiable evidence to jump onboard the frenzy. Dr. Conger in the hospital’s emergency room noticed it, said so, and was fired.
Dr. Barbara Griffith, Duke University Health president
Duke’s “antiracism pledge” was purported to be “guided by science”. Dr. Conger asked, what science? In fact, they couldn’t produce any, just more gibberish. The zealots’ sensory response when caught off-guard is to wondrously make the racism “implicit racism”. Make it shadowy, vague, and thus unscientific, that’s how. When responding to Dr. Conger’s query, one Duke official admitted, “I concede that I cannot find a [clinical] trial that proves implicit bias is the cause of worse health outcomes for African Americans. Believe me. I have looked.”
It’s more than that. The “implicit bias” is unprovable by nature; it’s “implicit”. You must resort to racial bean counting of providers and patients and then leap to worse health outcomes, skipping over a vast ocean of other variables. Gibberish, absolute gibberish, and by people who might have to remove your infected spleen. What’s next, scapulimancy (divination from an examination of an animal’s shoulder blades)? Jump off the gurney and run for the exits if you view the slitting of a cow’s throat in an adjacent room. What’s the difference?
Dr. Conger was fired for publicly drawing into question a partisan pledge of dubious validity. A taxpayer subsidized organization takes a partisan position in a contentious public debate and suddenly all its employees must clamp their mouths shut? All this proves that bureaucracies are more sensitive to public embarrassment than in their commitment to science. Dr. Barbara Griffith and her coterie stepped on a rake, but you could get fired for warning them.
Oh, the times that we live.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Thanks to Mike Markham at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal in “Duke Health Fires Conservative Doctor”, 7/1/2024, at https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2024/07/duke-health-fires-conservative-doctor/
2. Thanks to George Leef of National Review for drawing my attention to Markham’s piece in “Doctors Must Not Dissent”, 7/1/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/doctors-must-not-dissent/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=second
The Biden-Trump rematch is in the books. Who won and who lost? Nobody won, and Biden lost. Will they move on to a second match? Hardly.
In a nutshell, by the end of the talkathon, my fears about Biden’s infirmity were confirmed, but my concerns about Trump were elevated. Biden came off as a doddering old Marxist head honcho like one of those Eastern European party strongmen in the waning days of the Iron Curtain, or the party elders standing next to Brezhnev overlooking the May Day grand parade in Moscow in the 1970s. Yes, Biden is infirm but what came out of his mouth in his infirmity was the socialism that is firmly established Democratic Party doctrine. If the party movers and shakers succeeded in pushing him aside, his replacement won’t be an improvement, just more presentable.
The left-wing party establishment got what it wanted under Biden (and Obama), and the country is a wreck for it. Biden resorted to the party’s doctrinal tics throughout the debate: tax the “rich” to save Social Security (it won’t), all the “pay their fair share” talk, the greenie nonsense, the “glories” of ending unborn life as if it was God’s eleventh commandment, and more bribery of friendly political constituencies with other people’s money. It’s disgusting, and ruinous.
For his part, Trump was . . . Trump. He brought his “A” game, as in donkey. He donned his adolescent schoolyard bully uniform for all to see. Vague generalities, superlatives in regard to himself, avoidance of questions in favor of rudimentary insults, and the repetitive use of a monotonous standard line were the essence of his performance.
Trump boasts were routine. For instance, “I’ll end the Ukraine War before inauguration day.” How’s he going to do that? He has no practical leverage on Putin. He’ll hang Zelensky out to dry and give Putin a third of the country, that’s how. All will be done in an isolated meeting after which there will be a smiling Trump photo op. Zelensky won’t be smiling, Ukraine will be in tears, and naked aggression will have been rewarded. Speculation? It’s more realistic than any of Trump’s self-assessments.
Trump made the correct observation that other world leaders see Biden as an embarrassment. After last night’s performance, they see our country as crazy. Are these two people the best that we can come up with?
Now more than ever, we need a real leader to prosecute the case against the creeping socialism that is smothering us, and for the unborn. We don’t have one, certainly not in Trump. Trump has always been merely a walking gesture, the middle finger to our decrepit politico-cultural elites. He’s incapable of presenting an argument, a line of reasoning. It shows every time that he steps onto a stage. In the meantime, the country is careening to insolvency. At this juncture, neither party will even recognize the tidal wave of debt that threatens to swamp us and our ability to defend ourselves. Eco-central planning is no more coherent than the kind in the old Soviet Union. Who do we have to make the case? Who has the wherewithal to convince the American people to turn away from their belief in the impossible, from decadence?
Don’t look for it in Trump. Don’t look for it in either political party. We need leadership, not a middle finger.
Bryan and Rebecca Gantt have adopted three children through Vermont’s system. (photo: Alliance Defending Freedom)
This is a revolution, a “gender” mutiny, make no mistake about it. It’s a revolution into our brain, in how we think and on our elemental outlook on the world. “Men” and “women”, “male” and “female” no longer make sense in this fantasy world. Any distinction has been turned into a floating oil slick at the mercy of the unstable currents of a person’s emotional state. This is a completely new and radical notion. Biology is relegated to a secondary circumstance. People who can’t accept the rootlessness of this rebellion are now deemed “unfit”. A recent series of lawsuits puts a spotlight on this latest phase in our ongoing cultural revolution.
At issue is whether a traditional Christian can help rescue children from situations of despair and abandonment. You see, the revolution is at war with the faith of generations and millennia for its refusal to bend a knee to the idol of gender fluidity. However, if you’re of an approved version of the faith, one that follows the fickle winds of fashion, you will be accorded full membership in the civil order. And you too might be granted the opportunity to adopt or be a foster parent.
Blue states are the Paris Commune of this revolution. From Vermont to the west coast, an additional criterion was put into the list of qualities to be eligible for adoption or provide foster care. In a recent email from Vermont’s Department of Children and Families (DCF) to foster-care applicants:
“[a foster-care license] is dependent on foster parents and applicants being able to support youth who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, or another diverse identity (LGBTQI+) even if the foster parents hold divergent personal opinions or beliefs.” (see #1 below)
Cutting to the chase, traditional Bible-believing Christians must promise to check their beliefs at the door, in their own home, before the state will allow them to touch a kid. A faithful Christian joins the ranks of pedophile and spouse-abuser in the eyes of the state.
It happened to Bryan and Rebecca Gantt of Vermont (see #1 and #2 below). He’s a pastor of a nondenominational church and the Gantts have been prior foster-parents and adoptive parents multiple times, and called “amazing” by child-welfare agents in previous foster and adoption situations. The only difference now is the mandatory acceptance of the ideology of gender fluidity to qualify. For them, where’s that in the Bible?
It isn’t. It’s contra-biblical. But one doesn’t have to be a fundamentalist to reach a similar conclusion. Pop-psyche can’t explain away biology, or chromosomes. Fashionable ideologies try to carve out a niche in the foggy bottom of psychology, but the whole scheme is reliant on the certitude of an adolescent’s emotional state. Talk about building a house – er, ideology – on sand.
The more that we’ve been forced to live with this thought-fashion, the more problematic it has become. Like master ideologies of the past, when people were judged for their race-fitness or propensity for class exploitation, it too is found to be extremely wanting. On grounds of pure reason, it’s bunk. The zealots attribute suicide and emotional trauma to the ideology’s chief culprit of gender dysphoria, like the rich or the Jews in past frenzies. It never appears to have occurred to the proponents that the dysphoria itself is a symptom of something deeper than disenchantment with genitalia. After removing the offending genitalia and ingesting pharmaceuticals, the thoughts of suicide will probably remain. Then, what have we achieved, nothing but another batch of scarred children who paid a little too much attention to social media?
Dr. Hillary Cass of the Cass Report to the NHS England
Other nations are putting the brakes on the institutional malformation of children. On the heels of the UK’s Cass Report (see #3 and #4 below), Europe is pulling back from the brink. Not so in America. We’ve become the loudest advocates of this generation’s version of eugenics and forced sterilizations. From the Biden administration to states like Washington, Massachusetts, Oregon, California, and Vermont, it’s full speed ahead (see #5 – #8 below). These people are making our nation grotesque.
Folks are suing in these bastions of revolution. They are the counter-revolution.
Erin Friday, leader of Our Duty, a group of parents supporting policies protecting the right of parent to be notified of gender issues affecting their children, speaks in Sacramento, 8/28/2023.
For the Bible-believing in these states, you have a choice to make: stay and resist (like Alexei Navalny, now deceased in Putin’s gulag) or leave. Bear in mind that your ability to resist will be effectively curtailed by the ruling politburos. Look at California AG Rob Bonta’s successful effort to kill the Protect Kids Initiative (see #9 below). The State of California can’t bring itself to protect children and the right of parents to parent their children. It’s surprising that they haven’t impeded your right to gather for worship.
California’s radical AG, Rob Bonta
Even more troubling, if you have children or grandchildren, what of them? Remember, the revolutionaries control the schools.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Thanks to Ryan Mills in “Blue States Are Barring Americans with Traditional Views on Gender from Adopting. This Christian Couple Is Fighting Back”, in National Review, 6/19/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/vermont-bars-christian-couple-from-adopting-due-to-traditional-beliefs-about-gender/
2. The lawsuit in US District Court in Vermont: Brian Wuoti; Kaitlyn Wuoti; Michael Gantt; and Rebecca Gantt v. Vermont, et al, Case No.: 2:24-cv-614, at https://www.nationalreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/WuotiComplaint.pdf
3. “NHS Report Finds ‘Remarkably Weak Evidence’ to Support Medical Gender Transition for Minors”, Abigail Anthony, National Review, 4/10/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/nhs-report-finds-remarkably-weak-evidence-to-support-medical-gender-transition-for-minors/
4. The Final Report of Dr. Hillary Cass on transgender services for children for the NHS England at https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/
5. “Oregon Woman Sues State for Rejecting Adoption Application over Opposition to Child Gender Transition”, Ryan M ills, 4/3/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/oregon-woman-sues-state-for-rejecting-adoption-application-over-opposition-to-child-gender-transition/
6. “‘Their Faith Is Not Supportive’: Massachusetts Bars Catholic Couple from Fostering Children”, Ari Blaff, National Review, 8/9/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/their-faith-is-not-supportive-massachusetts-bars-catholic-couple-from-fostering-children/
7. “How ‘Inclusion’ Excludes Christians: WA couple denied foster care license because of religious beliefs”, Family Policy Institute of Washington, 4/15/2024, at https://fpiw.org/how-inclusion-excludes-christians-wa-couple-denied-foster-care-license-because-of-religious-beliefs/
8. “Religious Discrimination Hurts Kids Waiting to Be Adopted”, Johannes Widmalm-Delphonse, Alliance Defending Freedom, 9/13/2023, at https://adflegal.org/article/religious-discrimination-hurts-kids-waiting-be-adopted
9. “Judge tentatively sides with California AG in fight over ballot measure on students’ gender ID”, Sophie Austin, AP, 4/19/2024, at https://apnews.com/article/california-transgender-parental-notification-schools-372ad55c99a17e19ce8f3f66c4963faf
