Dr. Robert Redfield on CNNWuhan virology lab, China.
The origins COVID-19 are still a mystery. Many questions about the virus have been distorted into political ones. One source of the politicization is the desire to gain power and use it to fulfill a certain vision of society. When a person’s opinions and conclusions run counter to the contrived story, they are silenced, mocked, and ruined. This is politics at its most heinous. This is happening to anyone associated with Trump, defending tradition, and protective of what’s good about the country’s history and values. The truth is the first casualty.
As a result, many questions go unanswered, particularly if the answers don’t fit the erroneous but useful narrative. No better example can be found than the persistent unknowns about the coronavirus and the related pandemic. If “xenophobia” is the cry-of-the-moment, anything is grabbed to deflect attention away from China, especially if the barkers are working hard to make Asians believe that they are an oppressed minority, oppressed by the cultural elites’ favorite bogeyman: white supremacy. Thus the overheated attempt to blame nature or anyone and anything but China – a bat for instance.
MINNEAPOLIS, MN – AUGUST 14: A woman raises her fist at the front of a march down Washington Avenue to protest racism. (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
Stats are squashed that might threaten the hand-picked story line of the virus’s magnified lethality, a threat that proved advantageous in allowing them to flex the muscles of their all-powerful administrative state. One such number is the date of origin. If it leaked out of a Wuhan lab earlier than previously thought, let’s say, the number of infected grows and that number may work to reduce the morbidity rate of the virus. A key part of the plot will have been undermined, something to be resisted at all costs.
Therefore, serious and honest research into origins can present a dual hazard for them: truth wrecks the xenophobia plot thread and might show the administrative state’s suffocation of life to be a colossal waste. Thus, the Left has two good reasons to rally their troops in the media and academic circles to sully any semblance of free thought and real science.
Colin Kaepernick’s “systemic racism” career is monetized by corporate America in this case by Nike.
Dr. Robert Redfield, below, has a few strikes against him in the eyes of the reigning Left: he’s an accomplished virologist, worked under Trump as head of the CDC, and dares to think that the virus might have escaped the Wuhan lab as early as September. So, In the fall of 2019, it’s possible that the virus was seeded in China and, from there, to the rest of the world. Many people got it, survived it, mistook it for the flu, some succumbed, and the rest of the world waited till February and March 2020 to hit the panic button.
Once panic was lit, parents became paranoid to send their kids to school; businesses and livelihoods were decimated; romantic life was suppressed as we hid ourselves behind our modified burqa; scenes of public rage at dissenters became commonplace; the surreal scene of watching drivers alone in a car and masked was not unusual; and good and bad came to be defined by how comprehensively a public official clamped down on their society. Timothy Leary in one of his LSD-induced fits couldn’t have produced a weirder script.
Watch the courage of Dr. Robert Redfield, Trump’s CDC Director, who bravely refuses to be cowed in a CNN interview. And you know what? CNN, the most Democrat-friendly operation this side of MSNBC and the Democratic Socialists of America, didn’t go into full mob-rage, as is their practice. His contention that the virus emanated out of the Wuhan lab around September or October couldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Watch the clip.
Yesterday, my family and I went to Kalispell, Mt., (gateway city to Glacier National Park) to do our monthly shopping. While on the way, Jared (my son) was driving and all of us were listening to XM Radio’s “80’s-on-8” and, lo-and-behold, Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” blasted through the speakers (see link below). The song is a good rocker, but who listens to the lyrics? Right? I paid closer attention to the words and gleaned their meaning. It struck me as a Trumpian anthem: the struggles of a young couple in tough times regardless of identity.
Life sometimes is a “fight”, or perseverance in the face of challenges. America has been beset by decades of neglect, permissiveness, maladministration, and the reemergence of evil ideas that should have stayed dead. Today, the worst of all of it was exposed by the pandemic, and, I suspect, more is to come. Still, we fight on, as we should.
Who can’t identify with that? What young couple, starting fresh in life together, hasn’t struggled to get a foothold into a better life? Some times are more demanding than others, but as the song title says, all of us were “Livin’ on a Prayer”.
We’ve had a year of a smothered human existence in reaction to COVID, with some advocating its extension with no end in sight. I’m starting to worry about what we have done to ourselves. Our understandable desire for an immediate, near-term gain – stop the pandemic cold – probably has come at the expense of a long-term slide into a more desperate reality. What we did was novel, and worryingly portentous. In the end, we neither stopped the pandemic with the shutdowns, or the costs. Dark clouds loom.
Storm clouds over Austin, Tx. (Photo: Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman)
To this day, it’s surprising to me how blithely the population accepted the decrees from political figures who are inherently enthralled by a new class of janissary, the bureaucratic “expert”. It’s the bane of Progressives: they can’t help themselves. They long ago surrendered their judgment, and the independent judgment of free citizens in a free republic, to blinkered specialists with great power.
Now look at what it’s gotten us. These lockdown measures – universal mask-wearing, shutdowns of life, school closures, an amputated social existence – may have irreparably damaged our children’s psyche and their long-term prospects. What have we done to our kids after a year, or more, of sentencing them to solitary confinement during an important slice of their developmental years?
The worries don’t stop there. Others have tried to put numbers to the future devastation. Taking into account the avoided medical procedures, sacrificed productivity and earnings, disrupted educations, isolation-induced stress and abuse, the National Bureau of Economic Research calculates a 3% increase in the mortality rate and .5% drop in life expectancy in the next 15 years. Stretched out over 350 million people, that’s a carpet-bombing of a noticeable portion of the commonwealth.
And just think, none of these measures stopped the disease, if you compare jurisdictions across the country who varied quite dramatically in their response. No discernable positive impact can be detected for the worst that the likes of Cuomo, Newsom, and Whitmer – and now Biden – have inflicted on their people. It came down to herd immunity – something disparaged by those in a panic – which was facilitated by the discovery of a vaccine.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.
Shutdowns, social distancing, and mandatory mask-wearing look to be, at this juncture, irrelevant . . . and destructive. And remember, that’s not all: the hyperinflation of 1923 Weimar Germany may be waiting in the wings. All the chickens haven’t fully roosted yet.
The NFL’s building at 345 Park Avenue, New York.NCAA’s corporate headquarters, 700 W Washington St, Indianapolis, IN.
We are on the cusp of permitting them to impose a permanent disfigurement of organized athletics. The entrance of the highly contentious ideology of transgenderism is about to destroy girls’ sports. Big Sports, Inc., won’t allow dissent. If you’re a believer in transgenderism, the full monopoly power of the organization will indulge your beliefs. If not, and you and your daughter aren’t warm to the idea of “gender identity” being used to hand trophies to people who weren’t born female, tough luck.
Terry Miller of Bloomfield, Conn., wins the 200 meter dash with a time of 24.47 in the CIAC State Championship Track and Field Meet in New Britain, Conn., during the 2019 outdoor track and field season. (Mark Mirko / Hartford Courant)
MLB, NBA, NFL, MLS, NCAA – Big Sports, Inc – are clear partisans in the turbulent debates of our time. They ought not be. They tip the scales in support of one side in these contests. This isn’t about the ethical ending of Jim Crow or giving women an equal place at the table of organized athletics. No, Big Sports’ special status as sanctioned monopolies gives them power to impose their favored side. For the sake of our civil order, they should be stopped and their special status revoked till their charters are reformed to prevent the harmful meddling.
They take one side on issues that should be left to the people in their debates and elections. Contradictory standards may result but that just means that Congress must step in and do its duty, not to allow others to usurp that responsibility.
Gov. Kristi Noem, South Dakota.
Gov. Kristie Noem of South Dakota was caught in the vice. She was intimidated from signing a bill to protect girls in girls’ sports. She’s right to see this as a political fight. I agree, and until a broad revolt gains steam, Congress should revoke and revamp Big Sports, Inc.’s permissive charters.
These are matters for the people’s elected representatives to decide and not the province of corporate administrative offices functioning as partisan zealots. The people are quite capable of settling these matters without threats for holding the “wrong” views from those of corporate desk-jockeys.
The California Department of Education building in Sacramento.
In case you missed my post below, in the “comment” section, I posted this in light of the California State Board of Education’s recent approval of pure left wing indoctrination in the curriculum:
“Oh, and one more thing, and I thought that I’d never have to say this: Parents, get your kids out of the government-controlled schools, for the sanctity of their own mental state. Use part of Pelosi’s $2-trillion bailout – the kid and personal money in the monstrosity – and head to a good private school with classical curriculum and instruction. Go to acescholarships.org if you need further assistance.
The government schools are fully immersed in the Left’s revolution. As a public school teacher for 30 years, I’m loath to advise parents to get their kids out the public schools. There used to be individual schools and districts who avoided the worst of it. Not today. There’s nowhere to hide.
Get your kids out them. Now! Use the part of the Pelosi bailout money that comes to you and your kids and if necessary turn to Ace Scholarships, above, or other sources like them.
Josef Goebbels, Reich Propaganda MinisterMSNBC, a chief purveyor of our new Big Lie.Photos of Robert Long, the accused shooter in the Atlanta murder spree.
Preamble: I’m going to suspend my normal rule against making reference to the Nazis when drawing a historical comparison to make a point. The parallels with our current mania are too obvious to avoid.
The Big Lie has long been identified with the Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, and has been used thereafter as a political weapon against opponents. Goebbels’s deceit is much more than the lie. Here’s the fuller Josef Goebbels’ statement on the tactic:
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” [my emphasis]
Most of his rendition concerns maintaining the lie, not making it. In short, the success of the lie requires suppression of dissent and control of information and thought. You see, the politically useful lie demands censorship and more than that, a controlling narrative, an imposed foundational story for which no one can evade.
Sound familiar? If not, it should. Today’s Big Lie is “White Supremacy”. The supporting superstructure of the story is sheathed in overwrought jargon like “critical race theory”, “systemic racism”, “white privilege”, and “white fragility”, and unceasingly propagated everywhere in an unholy alliance among our increasingly uniform political, economic, media, and cultural leviathans. You can’t escape the Big Lie and its supporting story – and that’s Goebbels’s point – even more so than the lie itself.
Everything is crammed into our modish Big Lie of the burgeoning threat of “White Supremacy” whose existence no one can prove. The secret of the Big Lie is to simply repeat it, not prove it, because it can’t be proven. Our Big Lie’s oft-repeated “statistical disparities” aren’t proof of racism, and the “White Supremacy” that undergirds it, because causation for the dubious claim faces the reality of many potential fathers, absent a paternity test, i.e., proof. It’s quite easy to cite more cogent factors to explain the disparity without ever turning to the gibberish coming out of the mouths of VP Harris, Robin DiAngelo, or Ibram X. Kendi. How about the desolation of family life in poor neighborhoods, for instance?
DiAngelo (l), Kendi
No better example of the modern Big Lie can be found than in the treatment accorded the horror in Atlanta on March 16. The actions of a disturbed and confessed “sex addict” are shoe-horned into the Big Lie of “White Supremacy”. Once the culprit’s picture hit the net, off to the land of “White Supremacy” they (the legacy media, our demagogues in high office) went. Violence against Asians began to be spun by our official and unofficial propaganda ministries as an outgrowth of the racial angst of MAGA supporters and angry white males, and an assortment of other illusory villains (QAnon). Traditionalist Christians were slimed. Ironically, the facts about violence against Asians, though, don’t make a neat fit with the propaganda story.
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Watch the video below. The web of propaganda ministries want to make it difficult for you to see the contradicting reality. Jump through YouTube’s hoops to see it. You’ll see that it is no more violent than most of the other stuff on the site. It is relevant to the next paragraph.
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Before we began the frenzied hunt for “White Supremacy”, it was well-known that 85% of assaults against Asian-Americans were perpetrated by African-Americans. The fact was too embarrassing for our web of propaganda ministers so the ministries went into overdrive to repudiate it, and a grand erasure took place. Look up the original reportage today and you’ll find of a Reddit Warning like this:
“Sorry, this post was deleted by the person who originally posted it. It doesn’t appear in any feeds, and anyone with a direct link to it will see a message like this one.”
SFGate, an online news service affiliated with the San Francisco Chronicle, the original source for the factoid, came out with this bit of cancellation through distancing:
“Editor’s note: This 2010 column originally appeared in print in the San Francisco Chronicle. As of 2019, the Chronicle and SFGATE have been separate editorial operations.”
Maintaining the narrative and Big Lie of “White Supremacy” overrides all other concerns, like honesty. It’s a very familiar story to the one that took shape in the decades before and after the National Socialists’ rise to power. Eugenics by then had seeped into the minds of European elites, and it mingled with atavistic notions of racial hierarchies and the persistent undercurrent of anti-Semitism. Academics like Germany’s H.K. Gunther crystalized a previously existent story of racial superiority into a functioning “science” and belief system. From there, the story is a blood stain on history.
But everything was funneled through the narrow lens of race, just like today. And if the facts don’t fit the story, make the facts fit, or erase them. The shadowy “systemic racism” has much in common with the shadowy “Jewish conspiracy”. Proving the sketchy theory is made easy by simply citing the presence of a white male – or in the case of an enthusiast of Aryan race theory, a person of Jewish ancestry – in the incident. It’s a mental tick familiar to anyone in the SS Race and Settlement Main Office. All other inconvenient facts get weeded out.
We are in a dangerous time. Facts no longer matter, the story does. All competing explanations, even logic itself, are shunned or worse. As such, if history is any guide, a much more appalling injustice is waiting in the wings.
Armenian village leaders executed by Turkish troops during the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, 1915.
From 1937 to 1938, Stalin oversaw the politically-motivated liquidation of “13 of 15 army commanders, 50 of 57 corps commanders, 154 of 186 divisional commanders, 220 of 406 brigade commanders, all 11 vice-commanders of defense, 98 of 108 members of the Supreme Military Soviets, all army political commissars, 25 of 28 corps commissars, 58 of 64 divisional commissars. Even the lower ranks were not spared.” The Communist Party leadership never fully trusted the Red Army partly because it was associated with Trotsky. For purely political reasons, Stalin decimated the officer corps just before their talents would be sorely needed three short years later when Hitler’s Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941.
First five Marshals of USSR; Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Semyon Budyonny, Kliment Voroshilov, Vasily Blyukher, amd Aleksandr Yegorov. Three of the five were either imprisoned or executed.
Is Biden and company copying a page from Stalin’s political playbook in his SecDef’s stand down order to weed out “extremists” in the U.S. military in the face of a resurgent Red China? Are we being laid open to a forcible retreat and catastrophic losses – or worse – like Russia as the Wehrmacht swept across the vast Russian European plain to the gates of Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad? Are we prepared for the real-world consequences of political tinkering with the primary agency responsible for protecting us? The combination of Democratic Party neglect and the evisceration of morale in the ranks could spell our doom.
German tanks deep into Russia during Operation Barbarossa.
There’s much to keep a person awake at night. The rot predated the Left’s recent capture of the two political branches of government. The upper echelons in DC have long been encrusted with careerists whose distance from the rank-and-file and comfy billeting in one of the most financially rewarding playgrounds on earth has nurtured a receptivity to the worst of Lefty ideology. It’s jarring to watch bemedaled and uniformed big wigs talking like college snowflakes.
The sight begs another comparison with the Russian defense establishment, the one before and during World War I. It has been voluminously described as a kind of aristocracy resplendent in personal enjoyments, security of position, and completely divorced from reality. In World War I, dilettantes spelled disaster. In World War II, megalomaniacal politics did the country in.
Same here, or is gestating before our eyes. When riots engulfed our cities this past summer and threatened to overrun the nation’s capital, Trump was condemned by the likes of the retired Mattis, Allen, and Mullen and 280 other retired military officials and diplomats for advocating the use of troops to quell the mayhem. Last time that I looked, not a word was heard from these titans about the over 5,000 troops that Pelosi has ordered stationed around the walls and concertina wire of the nation’s capitol. I smell Lefty political agendas all over the Pentagon, among its comfortable pensioners, and in its academies and war colleges. Hmmmmmmm.
SEC. of Defense Austin with troops manning the wall and concertina wire around the capitol.
Maybe a person ought not to be surprised since our military is highly bureaucratized. Bureaucracies have a history of an ear tuned to chic thought since any threat is far removed from their air-conditioned office. One of the hot reads to appear on the navy’s reading list is Ibram X. Kendi’s trendy How to be an Antiracist – he being the director of Boston U’s identity politics indoctrination center, the Center for Antiracist Research. In complimentary fashion, Biden doubles down on the agenda by mandating a more “inclusive” military, which means more women on the front lines, pregnancy flight suits, and fully taxpayer-funded sexual reassignment surgery. It’s madness.
This is happening at a time when China’s navy is beginning to surpass us, its land and air forces are rapidly modernizing, and its nuclear arsenal is growing larger and more potent. Their advances in high tech and space are proceeding apace. They are manning up as we are manning down.
A fleet of Chinese ships sail out at sea after a joint naval drill with Russia, in September 2016. (Stringer/Reuters)
I’m afraid that we’ll wake up one morning like Russia did on June 22, 1941, facing Operation Barbarossa and find ourselves confronting a full-throated invasion of Taiwan with a couple of our carriers and task forces totally obliterated, the sea lanes left open to Hawaii. Don’t think that it can’t happen simply because we haven’t lost a major war. (Vietnam doesn’t qualify because it was a negotiated settlement, then violated, and we did nothing in response. It was abandonment, not defeat.)
The Pentagon’s reaction to Tucker Carlson says volumes. Here is Carlson’s report that drew their ire.
Coach John Mosley of the East Los Angeles Community College basketball team, and a focus of Netflix’s “Last Chance U: Basketball” (highly recommended), stated, “Rules without relationships are rebellion.” When you think about it, he’s onto something. Rules in the absence of an interpersonal connection can easily be received as a cold and blind force, and frequently are. In a related fashion, I remember counseling young teachers against angling a troubled kid into a corner with no escape because he or she might violently lash out. When rules box people into corners without escape, expect rebellion.
Coach John Mosley of East Los Angeles Community College’s basketball team
The makings of a serious national rupture are happening as I write. The near complete monopoly by the Left in our society’s centers of power and influence is forcing an unpalatable choice upon the many dissenters. Right now, the safety valves of free speech and thought are being closed by the Big Tech oligarchy as the Democratic Party pursues a redesign of elections to keep themselves in power for generations, emasculation of our borders to chronically expand the critical mass of their supporters, redesign of our schools into their indoctrination centers, and removal of the last symbol of citizen self-reliance in the neutering of the Second Amendment. What will the loyal opposition do if this new Borg leaves the people with no recourse? My guess is that it’ll no longer be loyal. Don’t box people into corners.
In a relatively brief span of time, the hegemony of a narrow set of beliefs has descended upon us. For some, the deplatforming of Trump “for life” by the tech oligarchs was the omen of a new Dark Age of absolutist control of thought and conscience. The contradictions are glaring and instructive. Twitter bumps Trump but must be forced by a to Department of Homeland Security to take down a video of her son’s sexual assault. Amazing.
Hardly does Trump deserve much of a defense for some of his actions. I’m not in the Hannity world of Trump-worship. But neither am I in the habit of blinding myself to the first real exercise of raw power to erase a prominent figure from the world stage; though, it’s been happening for quite some time to the less notable. It’s raw power and used in a brazen manner.
Mark Zuckerberg famously stated before Congress that Silicon Valley is an “extremely left-leaning place”. He’s got that right. “Left-leaning” means a techno-utopian ideal of gauzy socialist-egalitarian, libertine, and greenie bliss brought into existence by universal techno-connectivity. It’s certainly a way for them to feel good about themselves by the self-elevation of the importance of their work. For the people who aren’t caught up in this romper room of the mind, they get cancelled.
Brandon Eich
It’s unapologetic censorship, like what happened to Brandon Eich, the brief (for 11 days in 2014) CEO of Mozilla. He was “forced” out by something loosely called the “Mozilla community” – a more accurate term would be “mob” – for daring to support traditional marriage (2008’s Prop 8 in California). Key to any mob’s “cancellation” is the recognition that there aren’t other legitimate points of view to be tolerated.
An excursion into the functioning of tech central’s totalitarian mind was provided by Forbes magazine in 2014 when it republished a Quora piece by Ian McCullough, “consumer tech”, of San Francisco, on the forced resignation of Eich. McCullough’s defense of the disposal of Eich pivoted on two claims: Eich’s opinion is beyond the pale and an extremely odd notion of freedom of speech.
Unbeknownst to McCullough, the unpopularity of opinions frequently depends on location. Eich’s opinions on marriage aren’t fashionable in Zuckerberg’s “left-leaning place”, and in McCullough’s San Francisco – thus, beyond the pale – but neither are McCullough’s and those of Zuckerberg’s left-leaning place as popular in the vast stretches of flyover country. There is a difference, though: McCullough’s support for gay marriage won’t by itself result in his forced resignation if he stated his views in Arkansas, at least as far as I can determine. If it does happen, there’d be a groundswell of opposition for making a person’s employment status contingent on rectitude with an area’s popular slant on a contentious issue. No, that kind of thing is routinely reserved for Zuckerberg’s “left-leaning place”.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, testifying before the Senate on April 10, 2018.
In that “left-leaning place”, fundamental rights such as freedom of speech is contorted out of all recognition. In McCullough’s twisted mind, the freedom of speech of a mass can be used to intimidate a single person’s exercise of free speech. In a way, ironically, he’s right. Every single person in the mob has freedom of speech individually, but the bigger question involves self-control. Ought we to practice it in that manner? Arkansas is much more into “ought” and Zuckerberg’s “left-leaning place” is all into gang-style suppression; that’s the difference.
And even more importantly, does the First Amendment have any practical relevance if an opinion is more popular in other locales but is unpopular in the little node where we find the oligarchic power of Big Tech to blot it out everywhere? By what legitimate right should one locale and their nest of opinions have the power to censor the opinions about traditional institutions in the communities that hold these traditions dear? McCullough, no one should have that power. No one, not you nor anyone like you, or me for that matter.
Today, Big Tech has the power and they use it. It does so by banning information that doesn’t comport with their socio-political prejudices. Look at what happened to The New York Post’s Biden family corruption story just before the election. In an informal, or formal (?), alliance of interest, Big Media and Big Tech shut out the story. No such forbearance was granted Trump regarding the grand smear that went by the name of “Russia collusion”. The fiction had a 3-year lease on life despite the fact that it was predicated on a demonstrably proven pack of Democrat-funded lies.
Another alliance member – the upper echelons of DC’s permanent Fed Administrative State – were giddy at the possibility of dragging Trump through the mud and only ended up with a two-year $40 million probe that was led by a doddering Robert Mueller and his band of partisan hacks who produced . . . nothing.
What did we get for $40 million? We got 3 years of hair-on-fire, a perpetuation of the smear, unsuccessful impeachments, and conservative websites hidden on page 5 of a Google search. Like the Biden corruption story, uncooperative sites go down the memory hole. Of course, initially, Google feigns that it’s due to their software “protocols” or “algorythms”. Then they dropped all pretense by calling it “misinformation”. It’s still a crock.
Big Tech’s “misinformation” campaign targeted the pesky Breitbart media operation. Breitbart News noticed clicks on Google dropped 99% from 2016 to 2020. Their entire website was given the NYPost treatment.
And if that’s not enough, complete platforms were deplatformed. Parler, the social media competitor to Twitter, was destroyed by Big Tech’s near-Gang of Eight. Like Trump and Breitbart, it was steamrolled by the big wheels of Big Tech. Read this quackery of a write-up on Wikipedia:
“Parler is an American alt-tech microblogging and social networking service. It has a significant user base of Donald Trump supporters, conservatives, conspiracy theorists, and right-wing extremists. Posts on the service often contain far-right content, antisemitism, and conspiracy theories such as QAnon.”
Not a word about the charlatanism of the Green New Deal and the buffoonery of its eco-apocalypse and the 30-something adolescent mind from New York’s 14th congressional district behind much of it. Not a word about the potential for descent into Venezuela-land from socialism’s new found popularity. Not a word about the buffoonery of “settled science” since real science means a real scientific method that is operative all the time. Not a word about the provable unsustainability of “sustainable energy”. Not a word about the scientific backlash to the “settled science” of Fauci and World Health Organization. The paradox is that the most frequent purveyors of “misinformation” are the people combatting “misinformation”. Franz Kafka looking at our time would see abundant evidence of life imitating art, his art.
What will people do if they come to conclude that there is no recourse to submission? If the Democrats have their way, elections will have the legitimacy of loan sharking and only keep the Socialist Revolutionary Party (Democratic Party) cemented in power for the foreseeable future, thereby proving the Marxist revolutionary’s maxim: one man, one vote, one time. Voices are to be silenced by a formal unity of purpose among entrenched elites at the commanding heights of our society. The kids are to receive no respite in the assault on their minds from every quarter in entertainment and the schools. Traditional institutions and the morality of self-defense are systematically upended. For those standing aghast at this turn of events, some may sadly seek redress in more violent means, no other option having been left open to them. Boxing people into corners has dangerous consequences.
Friedrich Hayek had many reasons for the failure of socialism, but one was the “knowledge problem”. Big government’s attempt to manage the many affairs of its people requires a level of knowledge that no one person or small group of individuals can possess. Crap happens and human existence enters a dark place.
Coach Mosley and his team experienced the consequences in the state whose governing elites are infatuated with government’s top-down management of its residents, but aren’t, and can’t be, as knowledgeable and wise as they think themselves to be. After completing a 29-1 season and surviving the first round of the state championship tournament, and after loading on the bus to travel to West Hills College in Lemoore for the Final Four championship round, Coach Mosley received a phone call to announce the cancellation of the tournament due to COVID. It was part of a state of California lockdown that proved to be no more efficacious than states who left their residents free to live a more normal life. A season of hard work, trials, and tribulations was ended just as the prize for going through all the trouble was near at hand. And it was all for naught.
The spirit of resistance in California, April 2020. Protesters to the lockdown blocked traffic around the state’s capitol in Sacramento.
Coach Mosley properly acceded to the state’s decision. What else could he do? But what’ll happen when the one-party state of California is transferred to DC and the one party blocks all avenues of civil opposition to the ruling ideology? The Democrats are playing with fire.
CULVER CITY, CALIFORNIA – MARCH 15: A man walks with a stroller as people stand in line outside the Martin B. Retting, Inc. guns store on March 15, 2020 in Culver City, California. The spread of Coronavirus (COVID-19) has prompted some Americans to line up for supplies in a variety of stores. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
In a phone conversation with a friend from the Golden State, he mentioned a remark from an acquaintance justifying the COVID restrictions. According to him, his interlocutor quoted a line from Jesus (Matt. 22:21): “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” I responded by saying, “When you engage in the battle of the verses, you’d better make sure that the arrows in your quiver are more numerous than the number in the other person’s.” And there are other arrows to be found in her opponent’s quiver. In fact, many, many, many of them.
I suspect that the arrows dealing with idolatry alone would be sufficient to overwhelm her fusillade. One source identifies 30 including the famous Exodus 20:4: “You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth.” It’s the main reason that Christians endured three centuries of persecution. They wouldn’t bend a knee to the altar of Caesar. For the ambitious Progressives of our time, government is the resurrected Cult of Caesar for which all must bend a knee. This is no longer simply “rendering unto Caesar” but bowing before the altar of a new set of god-kings, a new Cult of Caesar.
Christian persecutions in the Coliseum, Rome, 2nd or 3rd centuries CE.
I look around and see the Cult of Caesar nearly everywhere. “Follow the science” is one of the mystic chants of the cult, even as they ignore the real thing. The priesthood of politicized “experts” is just one group of high initiates to guard the Cult’s Inner Sanctum. There are other sources for the Cult’s men of the cloth. Many cut their teeth on the Cult’s lefty politics in the bowels of the Democratic Party and rose to power in the Cult’s geographic strongholds: namely blue states and municipalities, and in DC with the ascension of a new High Priest in the Oval Office that now serves as the seat of the Vicar of the Cult.
Let’s not leave out the numerous seminaries, our colleges, who germinate the Cult’s zealots, the militant Jesuits (Antifa, BLM, etc.) whose duty is to proselytize the faith and do battle with the small pockets of unbelievers. These militia of the faithful were groomed in very comfortable surroundings and received elite training in elite institutions, which are now almost solely devoted to the key tenets of the Cult. They spread out as rampaging mobs (Minneapolis watch out), dominate the commanding heights of the culture, fill the ranks of the Cult’s chief evangelists in seats of power (Pelosi, Maxine Waters, The Squad, and true-believers in the Senate, and staffs), and into corporate boardrooms that have been remarkably receptive to the Cult’s ministrations.
Progressivism is the modern manifestation of the Cult of Caesar. One of its early prophets from the turn into the 20th century was Herbert Croly, not exactly a household name.
Herbert Croly
He went up to the proverbial Mt. Sinai of his mind and brought down his great epistle, The Promise of American Life (1909). It, and his voluminous other writings in the journal that he co-founded, The New Republic, were all into “give unto Caesar”. Why? Because Croly’s Caesar has two qualities of a true god: the powers of heaven and the concomitant power to make perfect. And I quote from him, “[T]he sincere democrat is obliged to assume the power of heaven.” And again, “Democracy must stand or fall on a platform of human perfectibility.” The quotes aren’t taken out of context. They form the core of his theology – or theology disguised as ideology.
It’s interesting that he intermingled the idea of the state “assum[ing] the power of heaven” with democracy. Croly like all Democrats profess a love for democracy, but only so long as it produces the right outcomes, their outcomes. If it doesn’t, democracy must be reengineered to fit the desired ends.
Thus, the Democrats’ demand for HR1, the omnibus bill that seeks to enshrine the electoral practices of Tammany Hall. Want unaccountable voting? Scatter ballots to the wind (i.e., mail), institute automatic registration when you have any interaction with the state (get a driver’s license, pay a fine, get a business license, make a lunch date with the clerk, etc.), eliminate election day by voting before and after “election day”, allow the zealots to sow and reap ballots, and forbid voter verification will do the trick.
Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall, NYC
The Cult’s high priesthood claim to expand democracy, but do it by destroying it. Why vote, knowing that your vote will be canceled by a mysterious downpour of ballots from the ether that nobody can or is willing to validate? Even the minimal qualification of consciousness can be ignored . . . since really nobody is checking. Breathing on a respirator while flatlining is no disqualifier.
I can’t think of a greater downer for voter turnout than this monstrosity. The whole contraption requires nothing of the disinterested voter. The ballot is delivered to you and will be picked up for return by somebody else. Nothing will be expected of the voter. The only thing missing is somebody to direct your hand as you vote – or maybe that is next. No hassles and no civic responsibility are the order of the day. Thus, for the voter with a brain, why vote? After all, the result may be preordained, and as honest as a mob-run casino.
The Cult’s newly installed High Priest recently gave a speech on one of the Cult’s chief challenges: the pandemic. The talk took the form of a papal bull and was replete with the assumed powers of heaven in the body of our latest Caesar. The Heavenly Leader’s proclamation was part plea to follow His injunctions – get vaccinated, wear masks, practice social distancing, etc. – and if we bow to His wishes, He offers a return of our normal lives by Independence Day. If we don’t, or nature throws us a curve ball, He will exercise the powers of heaven to smash our dreams and livelihoods. This isn’t a citizen republic. It’s a theocracy with a god-man/woman/it and a College of Cardinals in charge.
Watch out! They’re not done. The High Priesthood is looking to disarm the unbelievers. The Second Amendment is about to become as much of a dead letter as the Mosaic Dietary Laws in the Book of Leviticus. That’s next for the reigning Cult of Caesar.
I feel like Cicero – hopefully without the same end (execution) – who witnessed, and resisted, the rise of Julius Caesar and the end of the Roman Republic. The new imperium was established with the old institutions kept alive in empty form only. Rome achieved the revolution through civil war. We may have reached the same end by passive acquiescence to a new faith: the Progressive Cult of Caesar.
Pres. Biden in his CVOID speech from the White House on 3/11/2021.
Did you tune into Pres. Biden’s COVID speech last night (3/11/2021)? I did, and bunkum works as its chief characteristic.
The first part of the pitch was devoted to empathy for the lives cut short, the businesses ruined, the miseducation of the young, and the demolition of a country’s social life. He said this as if it occurred by magic. It didn’t. These were outcomes of deliberate government actions that were most enthusiastically implemented by Democrat overlords, and are still clutched by them with a death grip. It’s extremely odd to express empathy for fallout that people like him caused. It’s absolutely mindboggling to watch.
The middle part of the truncated harangue could be summed up as vaccine, vaccine, vaccine. Not mentioned was the fact that the vaccines were Trump vaccines with a Trump rollout that was cut aborted by a semi-election of mail-in ballots.
Also, to be sure, getting vaccinated is a good thing, but getting our lives back is equally, if not more, important. We have known since the middle of last year who is vulnerable and how to treat the bug with a host of therapeutics, with or without a vaccine. It’s clear that the most stringent measures should have been targeted on the vulnerable rather than a strangulation of the lives of everyone. To be honest, I could do without Biden’s cries of empathy as he promises to prolong the agony.
We now know that the straitjacket didn’t do much good. Federalism provided a live experiment, and it showed that cemeteries didn’t get any fuller in the more open states in comparison to the ones in perpetual lockdown.
The worst was saved for last: The Threat. If we don’t follow the mindless decrees of his power-hungry appointees and bureaucrats-as-“experts”, we may as well shred what remains of our Constitution. There will be no back to “normal”, and we’ll be forever stuck under the thumb of our new autocracy.
The spiel would have made more sense if Biden was Dorothy and he/she was tripping down the yellow brick road.
