Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced on June 24 that she will create a committee to investigate the January 6 attack on the Capitol. (photo: Kevin Dietsche)
The key features of a show trial, according to Wikipedia, are that guilt has been predetermined; it functions as preemption against political opposition; and it serves as propaganda in support of the ruling party’s oligarchy. These days, we’ve got a whole lot of show-trialing going on.
An example of the unwitting advancement of a bogus story for show trials can be found in Hugh Hewitt’s ongoing characterization (June 29) of some of the Jan. 6 capitol rioters as “insurrectionists”. Some may be, but neither he nor has anyone presented proof of “insurrection” and a justification for endless pretrial detention (no bail). Today, to prove his point, Hewitt went to the Justice Department’s website (see here: https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/capitol-breach-cases).
Identities and charges are listed for the defendants as well as their custody status on the website. Yet, the listed charges are just as likely to indicate a fevered desire to throw the book at Trump through his supporters and to lend a false credence to a campaign against “white supremacy”. If true, that’s a political motive and is contrary to the pursuit of justice. It could be the onset of a new Inquisition as much as legitimate prosecutions. The USDJ’s list isn’t dispositive of anything, much of the evidence is still under wraps or possibly nonexistent. Who can tell?
49-year-old grandma Anna Morgan-Lloyd — in the middle — was let off more lightly after recanting and being re-educated. Look like “white supremacists”?
The political aim, though, is up front and center. AG Garland, Biden, and the rest of his supporting cast have continually proclaimed a jihad against “white supremacy”. Jan. 6 is the crown jewel in their case against their political opponents who they’ve lumped together as “white supremacists”. It’s the event that they will milk it for all its worth. At the very least, this mental state of the donkey party casts a cloud on DOJ’s list and all that they do. Simply put, Hewitt doesn’t get it.
Another show trial is incubating in the House. Pelosi has announced a select committee to “investigate” Jan. 6. Have you taken a look at what she plans to create? The Dem/Rep breakdown will be 8-5 in a 220-212 House. She rules the House on the edge of five votes, but McCarthy will be relegated to five picks to her eight. The five that’ll be allocated to Republican leader McCarthy will only be “considered” by Her Excellency. Who appoints the staff, the folks who do most of the work? What are the respective rights of the minority? Sorry, I smell a rat! This will have all the makings of Soviet jurisprudence. Watch that space.
Welcome to the United States of America, the newest banana republic. Or more accurately, the latest edition of the Great Purge with an active and pliant politburo and a Chief Prosecutor Vyshinsky stand-in.
Stalin’s chief prosecutor in the 1930’s, Andrei VyshinskyBiden’s AG, Merrick GarlandThe USA, the latest member of the Banana Republic bloc
It’s similar to your brain on DiAngelo (l) and Kendi.
Remember those 1980’s “Just Say No” ad campaigns: This is your brain on drugs? Well, watch the guru of “Anti-racism” and critical race theory (CRT), Ibram X. Kendi, stumble through a simple definition of racism. Think, this is your brain on Kendi’s “Anti-racism”. Watch it here – it begins at the 34:06 spot on the tape:
When asked to define racism by a member of the audience, Kendi says, “So racism, I would define it as a collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity that are substantiated by racist ideas.” Any simpleton can pick up the fact that this is hooey. Let me get this straight: He uses a word in a few of its forms that he hasn’t defined in order to define it. Got that?
It’s worse than farcical logic. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of a circular firing squad.
I’ve always considered mental agility – for instance, speaking extemporaneously, off the cuff, with competence – to be a component of intelligence. Kendi is hardly coherent when forced to ad-lib. This guy is a lefty show pony.
Just think, this is the person whose book is on the Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday’s recommended reading list for the ranks under his command. This is the guy who is an inspiration for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley. If these Pentagon potentates are sincere, I question their mental fitness to drive a car, let alone run military operations around the world.
I’m reminded of the congressional testimony of the pre-Pearl Harbor commanders after Dec. 7, 1941. Are we about to experience more Dec. 7’s and subsequent congressional mea culpas?
Circa 1946: Adm. Husband E. Kimmel at Pearl Harbor Hearing. (Photo: George Skadding, Time & Life Pictures)Battleship row, Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941.
It’s too frightening to contemplate. Watch the video.
Useful idiot: noun; a derogatory term for a person perceived as propagandizing for a cause without fully comprehending the cause’s goals.
The “useful idiot” is a term that is often wrongly attributed to Lenin, but can be traced back to post-WWII Italian politics when centrist democrats used the phrase in reference to the social democrats who were considering an alliance with the Italian Communist Party. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley’s comments before Congress on June 23 (see below) are a shocking admission that post-WWII Italian politics are analogous to the emerging alliance between the radical left and the people managing our arsenal of democracy. We might be viewing the beginnings of a new Red Army, and I’m not exaggerating.
His remarks were, to put it succinctly, appalling. Most egregiously, he used lefty jargon to justify lefty indoctrination of the ranks. That’s right, lefty indoctrination. The mashup of illogic began with a partisan rendering of the Jan 6 capitol riot. Let Milley speak for himself: “So what is it that cause[d] thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the constitution of the United States of America?” The former US District Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Andrew C. McCarthy, put the kibosh to that story line (read his piece here).
McCarthy’s point is that what happened on Jan. 6 wasn’t an insurrection. The protesters weren’t trying to “overturn the constitution of the United States of America”; they were mistakenly trying to rescue it at the behest of the commander-in-chief, the then-president Trump. None of those arrested are likely to be charged with anything close to treason. The legal equivalent of trespassing and its derivatives are mostly in the offing. The reason: there’s no evidence of patriotically-inspired, flag-waving rioters wanting “to overturn the constitution of the United States of America”. 49-year-old grandmas and a shaman-pretending clown don’t make for an overthrow. Yet, Milley chooses to sound like AOC.
The protest crowd around the Capitol Building, Jan. 6
He then goes on to use his mischaracterization of Jan. 6 to justify radical left brainwashing at the military academies. That’s because he misconstrues the purpose of a military academy with that of a university. West Point exists to create an officer corps. UCLA exists to broadly educate a population, albeit, today, oriented extreme left. The SDS and Weather Underground of the 60’s, and their offspring, have filled today’s faculty lounges. The alleged call for free thought created a huge safe space for the nurturing of a whole host of lefty-inspired and self-defeating balderdash. Out of this hothouse came the buffoonery of critical race theory (CRT), its jargon, illogic, and Milley consequently making a fool of himself. That’s just what we want: a military closer in its thinking to Code Pink or the Black Panthers than George Washington.
Antifa on a US college campus.
The foolish premise to Milley’s bombast was a complete confusion of propaganda and teaching. He began by surrendering the validity of lefty boilerplate when he said, “. . . I want to understand white rage and I’m white, and I want to understand it.” What’s this “white rage”? It’s lefty lingo for anyone who opposes with them. Of course, it was used to brand the protesters as “white supremacists”, and Milley repeats the lie. They were Trump supporters and this group is more diverse than ever before. I guess in Milley-babble Trump’s people of color are now trying to reinstate the KKK. Milley’s brain is just a hot mess.
After surrendering the rhetorical battlefield to lefty banalities, he used the excuse of an “open mind” to condone indoctrination. Ideas studied for analysis (real teaching) is far removed from accepting their validity and engaging in political confessionals. This isn’t a scholarly study of Lenin or Mao but a form of brainwashing. Milley has little clue as to what he is saying.
Milley’s comments were an insult to the American people and all those laboring in the ranks trying to defend what Milley apparently believes to be an irredeemably racist country. That’s the “systemic” aspect of systemic racism, the essence of the radical doctrines emanating from the radical high priesthood of CRT. Now we have proof that the farce is the governing doctrine of the people commanding the most sophisticated fighting force in history.
Who’s dumber, a person without a college degree or a person with one? Additionally, who’s dumber, a person with a BA, MA, or PhD? Is it possible for a person to educationally advance and get dumber? A response might be to dismiss the questions as misleading for many reasons, but the common assumption is that a degree is a visa to smartland. Is it true? Recent voting patterns force us to confront the questions, and the answer may shock some of us.
I’m speaking of Tuesday’s NYC mayoral primary election. Boroughs heavily populated with blue collars, ethnics, and minorities – cohorts with few college degrees – are voting as if they have a dislike for socialism and affection for law and order. The lower the percentage of whites in the district, the lower socialist and woke vote. What? Yep!
Eric Adams greets supporters at a New York City primary mayoral election night party in New York City, June 22, 2021. (Andrew Kelly/Reuters)
The pundit Kyle Smith put it succinctly: “The socialists just can’t seem to process enough white people through Oberlin to get themselves to a majority, even in their intellectual capital, New York City.” Middle and upper-income whites have moved left, along with their sheepskins. Everyone else likes cops and abhors the coddling of thugs and the government largesse for the pampering (like Andrew Yang’s mass mailing of checks). Now that’s some real cognitive dissonance for the ladies on The View.
Ex-cop and law-and-order candidate Eric Adams won 46% to 17% for MSNBC lawyer Maya Wiley in early voting in the Bronx. Blue collar whites and Hispanics dominate Staten Island and turned out 31% for Adams and 13% for the AOC darling, Wiley. Over all, Adams holds a 9% lead as of now.
Where do we find the enthusiasts of wokeness? It’s clustered in tony, hipster micro-districts in Manhattan and Brooklyn, any place with the highest concentration of whites.
Affection for socialism is my metric for gauging dumbness, which is popularly synonymous with stupidity. Simply put, the mental contraption doesn’t work. Its boosters – AOC, The Squad, Bernie, the activist core of the Democratic Party – cite countries, especially Scandinavian ones, who are in reality more free market than these zealots’ dream for America. Sweden, et al, dumped the nonsense long ago, and the demise of the USSR showed that Green New Deal central planning, as with all central planning, is a prescription for chronic depression. Non-whites have a gut instinct for the reality that escaped the geniuses from Oberlin, et al.
A degree hasn’t inoculated many upper and middle-class whites, and everyone else who grace these ivy-covered halls, from stupidity. Does a modern college degree befuddle the mind with inanities? I’m sure that it depends. But as of now, it would have been better for many of our degree-holders to skip the expensive indoctrination, and the 5-figure debt, and follow dad and mom into the work world.
Moving left is moving socialist and into forever oppressed/oppressor victimhood, and voting like it. It’s stupid and morally corrupting. Is that what is meant by the ‘burbs turning blue, ergo dumb? One has to wonder.
RogerG
*Source: https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/eric-adams-probably-defeats-socialism-in-new-york-city/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=featured-writers&utm_term=third
*Also on my website: libertatevitute.com
The “For the People Act” would make wide-open absentee voting the new norm.
H1/S1, the “For the People Act”, is actually the “For the Democrats Act”. It would codify the Democrats’ enthusiasm for mass producing votes, real or imagined. But regardless, the thing is unconstitutional. It would make a shambles of the US Constitution’s Article 1, Sec. 4, Cl. 1. The Clause reads:
“The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but Congress may at any time make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Place of chusing [sic] Senators.”
According to the Democrats’ wild reading of the Constitution, the clause behind the semi-colon eliminates the one in front. But why would Madison and company bother writing “shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature” if Pelosi and Schumer could erase it with the “make or alter” in the secondary part of the sentence? That’s certainly what H1/S1 does. It’s a federal takeover of all elections in the country. Here’s how:
It effectually repeals a state’s voter ID laws.
It lacerates a state’s registration requirements. It commands same-day registration for all states which would make it impossible to validate a voter before they vote as the thing is then allowed to untraceably flow into the river of votes to the counting center. It decrees automatic registration from government databases (DMV) which ropes in the eligible with the ineligible. States would be required to allow the registration of 16 and 17-year-olds. What would stop them from voting since the ID laws were emasculated? If that isn’t enough, a state’s laws to clean up the registration lists would be repealed through a variety of petty and self-serving legalisms.
The act of voting according to a state’s laws would be altered beyond recognition. Mail-in voting with ballots shot-gunned to the wind would be the new norm coast to coast, all of it with no validation of a signature or anything else for that matter. Ballots can be dropped off anywhere, any precinct, and by anyone. Combined with the rest of the loosey-goosey provisions, who know who’s voting and from where? To boot, party activists are empowered to sweep the area to collect the things (ballot harvesting). No potential for fraud there?
Election Day becomes a minimum of Election Two Weeks+1 by federal edict. People get a chance to vote before they know all the issues, like a presidential candidate’s son engaging in influence-peddling that also implicates the presidential candidate. The idea is to get votes in the bank before the digging can expose the candidate as a scoundrel.
The First Amendment would be under permanent siege with provisions criminalizing political speech. George Soros’s and Biden’s lefty DA’s would have a field day going after anyone who dared to stand athwart their vision of the “right side of history” – reminiscent of Lenin’s “ground down by the wheels of history”.
Congressional redistricting, a clear power of the states (Art. 1, Sec.2), would be rendered moot by the bill’s order for every state to have unelected redistricting commissions. Once again, another slice of the Constitution is made silent by narrowly partisan congressional gamesmanship.
Now this is real chutzpah: the bill would restrict the power of the Court to hear suits against the bill. They aren’t happy with silencing opposition. They desire to muzzle the Court.
Simply put, this rotten fish wouldn’t pass legal muster. In today’s Court, judicial review can’t be repealed when fundamental federalism and personal rights are being flattened. Here’s a list of Court precedents that are steamrolled by the monstrosity:
NAACP v. Alabama: The concomitant intimidation against opposition political groups in the bill’s disclosure requirements violates NAACP’s key finding that a group’s associational rights are protected by the 14th Amendment.
Citizens United v. FEC: Political groups have First Amendment protections to shield them harassment.
Allen v. Cooper, Board of Trustees of the University of Alabama v. Garrett, City of Boerne v. Flores, Cutter v. Wilkinson: All concern the “congruence and proportionality” standard. The rule sates that a federal statute can’t be overly broad when it crosses into the states’ constitutional powers and must be tailored to specific ends that are validated by heavy evidentiary findings. By any stretch of the imagination, H1/S1 doesn’t cut it. Pelosi rushed this thing through without much of a hearing back in 2019, only to bring the thing back again in 2021 now that Schumer, at least nominally, is calling the shots in the Senate. The atrocity is ripe for the Court’s guillotine in spite of their best efforts at garroting the Court.
Senate Republicans stepped into the breach. They aborted the thing before the Court would have to do a later-term version of the act, to borrow the lingo from the long-simmering abortion debate.
RogerG *Source: https://www.heritage.org/election-integrity/report/the-facts-about-hr-1-the-the-people-act-2021 *Source: https://thefederalist.com/2021/06/07/even-if-congress-pretends-h-r-1-is-constitutional-the-supreme-court-cant/ *Also on my Facebook page.
Protesters walk past a destroyed hulk of a building in downtown Minneapolis on May 29, 2020.
Versus Hamburg, Germany, 1945.
Outsiders did this to Hamburg. Americans are making mini-Hamburgs of their own downtowns in the previous photo.A bicyclist rides past piles of trash from the Santa Ana River homeless camp after it was cleared and more than 700 people relocated in Anaheim in February. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Big-city crime is up, both violent and property, and nary a peep out of the legacy media. If you’re glued to the conventional lefty media hive, you might be clueless, unless you’ve actually ventured outdoors. What they’re failing to chronicle is an unraveling of civilized order in the hope that it’ll go down the memory hole. The fact is, lefty beliefs produce chaos if translated into policy, as the gang’s leaders devolve into an all-powerful commissariat.
What happened to our cities?
Minneapolis is a case in point. Up until the 1970’s, Minneapolis Republicans were competitive and the city had a Republican mayor (Charles Stenvig), the last one, whose term ended in 1974. Then, the hard-left Senator Paul Wellstone died and the radical left got organized over his corpse and formed “Wellstone Action” and later “Re:Power”. The hard left pushed the Hubert Humphrey types out of the Liberal-Democrat alliance (the Democrat-Farmer-Labor Party). Now it’s just the Left with the moniker of Democrat as cover.
Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender calls for a “police-free future” in 2020 interview on CNN.Image of activists and community organizers from Re:Power’s website (repower.com). It comes with the caption: “Ready to run? Already running? We got you.”
They then crystalized around the septuagenarian Bernie Sanders, a leftover from the old days of the unilateral disarmament crowd trying to topple Ronald Reagan. It seems that the Bernie Bros and Sisters are more militant than your conventional Humphrey partisans or members of the AFL-CIO. Heck, the guy is a proud socialist. Most other Democrats are as well, but they attempt to hide it behind bald-faced denials. Who else other than zealots-with-an-edge would rally to a geezer still singing “The Internationale”, the anthem of the doddering Socialist International? Now it’s time to “defund the police” and energize a pogrom for Marcuse’s critical theory and its many ideological offshoots riding under the banners of critical race theory, social equity, just “equity”, Irbam X. Kendi’s anti-racism circus, and the ubiquitous DEI of Diversity/Equity/Inclusion (change the order and it’s DIE) .
Re:Power is Minneapolis’s Jacobins and filled with street corner activists – the “community organizers” of Obama fame – who are trained in the arts of gaining power. They are inspired by another leftover aging in the lefty fridge, Saul Alinsky “Rules for Radicals”. Power is their soul.
Just like the community organizers had to be trained for conquest, so the national movement needs a vast apparatus of trained militants on a much bigger scale than a municipality. There’s no better vehicle to mass produce militants than the schools, K through grad school, by taking over the staffing and curricula. The schools become the left’s boot camp. The radical left has discovered a political Mother Lode: legions to fill the ranks . . . at somebody else’s expense, the taxpayer.
Presenters and trainers from Greenlight Business Solutions, LLC, cheerfully indoctrinating Critical Race Theory and its ideological offspring “social equity” to businesses, schools, and government. Just think, people pay ample sums for leftist propaganda.
So, parents, get off your duff and take control of your schools from this tightly organized clique of radical political operators. Unless, of course, you like the idea of your offspring torching a police precinct. They’ll be burning more than a police station; they’ll be putting the torch to our republic. Other than that, what’s there to worry about?
RogerG *Thanks to Kevin D. Willamson in his piece “Minnesota Nasty” in the March 8 issue of National Review.
Parents of children in the Poway, Ca., school district protest critical race theory in their schools, June 3, 2021.
A recent column written by Bonnie Jean Feldkamp of the Cincinnati Enquirer illustrates the shallow, activist-oriented mind that inhabits so many of our newsrooms and has broadly penetrated the education Borg and faculty lounges down to the elementary school a few blocks away. Critical Race Theory IS clearly, unmistakably Marxism in drag. People like Feldkamp seem to be blind to it.
Bonnie Jean Feldkamp
At issue in her piece is the parent opposition to a proposed adoption of a “social equity” course for Highlands High School in Ft. Thomas, Ky. Let’s be clear: “social equity” is a euphemism for critical race theory (CRT). The elements of CRT are at its roots, as is the moniker “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI). Both apples don’t fall too far from the same tree.
Her argument in support of the class was embarrassingly incoherent. She presents the CRT-driven “social equity” course as an attempt to address “outcomes”. She writes,
“When you put the emphasis on outcomes and look at the data, it’s difficult to deny things like systemic racism and white privilege, which hits the core of the pushback on CRT, mostly from conservatives.”
That is, pure and simple, the post hoc fallacy (look below) run amok. Because slavery and Jim Crow preceded today’s lagging socio-economic numbers for African-Americans, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the former caused the latter. That’s jumping to conclusions; that’s ideology; that’s bias; that’s political activism; that’s Marxism in drag!
For the benefit of Feldkamp and CRT enthusiasts, there’s a lot that can come between 160-year-old historical circumstances and today’s crime-ridden slums. Try the War on Poverty. Try the rampant fatherlessness. Try the serial assault on traditional faith.
Try the failing inner-city public schools. Try the serial indoctrination of victimhood that strips a person of their agency. Actually, the conclusion is a baby with many fathers, least of all the one stretching back a full three hundred years.
This isn’t logic. This isn’t even serious history. This is an over-complex scheme to justify a political crusade, a campaign for a militant reverse discrimination. Thus, it is classic indoctrination when imposed on unsuspecting young minds and pushed by half-aware newspaper columnists and a few recruits from the education blob.
The missionaries for CRT, DEI, “social justice”, “social equity” are marinated in the mind of Marx. First, the cognitive monstrosity begins with a huge and unsupportable assumption: groups defined by some physical or socio-economic attribute determine the course of all of our arrangements throughout history. For Marx, it was class. For CRT’s minions, it’s race. From this hunch, it’s open-field running to the end zone of political power. The first stop along the way is to germinate an army of young activists like the child soldiers of the Khmer Rouge who marched off hundreds of thousands to the killing fields and death pits.
Khmer Rouge child soldiers at a base camp in the Cardamom Mountains of western Cambodia, north of Pailin, 8th February 1981. (Photo by Alex Bowie/Getty Images)
Her sources for her opinion are people with the same views. It’s nice to know that she has compatriots who are similarly misguided, but it’s not dispositive of anything, other than the misguided have company. She quotes Education Week Magazine, the organ of the education blob. It suffers from the overweening and smothering lefty orthodoxy of the self-proclaimed socialist John Dewey. I’ve spent 30 years of teaching in public schools and can’t recall spending more than 30 minutes perusing its pages. You learn to teach by teaching, not patterning your job around Dewey’s loopy constructivism.
People like Feldkamp try to thwart any criticism by quoting someone with “prof” before their name. Her “prof” is Phillipe Copeland of Boston University’s School of Social Work and “assistant director of narrative” for Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research. He’s no more coherent than she is. The “Center” is run by the infamous CRT grifter, Ibram X. Kendi. Check out this mass of verbiage from Copeland:
“Critics cannot be satisfied because the criticism about Critical Race Theory is not being made in good faith. It is part of a systematic effort to discredit and undermine anti-racism while generating and manipulating white anxiety and resentment for political gain.”
Boston University’s Phillipe Copeland speaks at the School of Theology in 2015.
Wait a minute! He can’t, and doesn’t, prove the theory to begin with, but then rushes to condemn those who would make everyone aware of it. Now that’s a sweet gig at a tidy salary and tenure.
Parents, if you want your kids to be the next edition of the Red Guards, by all means, be my guest, but don’t complain when the world that they create looks more like today’s Minneapolis, Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, et al.
The schools are having enough trouble successfully imparting the academic core and any pertinent vocational skills. What plausible educational or fiscal reason can excuse a foray into political activism? I don’t think that statue-toppling and spittle-laced fulminations in the face of police officers are marketable skills.
Social justice warriors in New York City, 2018.
Please read the piece if for no other reason than to know what we’re up against.
Shira Steinbeck, the parent of an 11-year-old in Pleasant Hill, recites an anti-distance-learning poem at the Mount Diablo Unified School District board meeting on Wednesday, February 10, 2021. (Screenshot)
An article in today’s San Jose Mercury News article is about the attempted recall of five members of the Mt. Diablo Unified school board. One unintended outgrowth of the pandemic was the self-besmirching of a growing class of “experts”. These scientific and technical professionals quickly confused scholarship with activism. Others, such as elected officials skilled in the arts of public utterances and little else, seek the confirmatory esteem of a science that they scarcely understand. They bring with them an unexamined assumption which elevates a near-utopian sense of pristine safety to the exclusion of everything else. The result is a society with the wheels coming off . . . and parents irate over their shuttered multi-billion dollar schools.
Once we knew the nature of the virus, which we did within a couple of months, and had a collection of therapies, efforts should have focused on the vulnerable. Instead, universal masking, distancing, and a shuttering of lives and livelihoods proceeded apace. Schools were closed, or nearly so, and children lost a year-and-a-half of learning, something that’ll be difficult if not impossible to recapture. Of course, inequality will be magnified as those with the wherewithal continue to excel and those not so well situated languish. It’s amazing that those most concerned about “equity” are doing the most to worsen it.
The absence of a vaccine is frankly irrelevant at this stage.
The reigning safetyism is a disabling crutch. The ill-fruits are all around us. Massive academic failures for our Zoomed children, a riddled economy on the cusp of rampant inflation, the decay of personal agency in the government bribes (lavish unemployment benefits) to stay at home, and growing political and social discord are abundantly on display. Waiting in the wings are escalating interest rates and a gargantuan federal debt service for the exploding red ink that’ll eat up the federal budget.
The most stringent measures were universalized in a mammoth wet blanket that some potentates worshipping at the altar of safetyism can’t find within themselves to lift.
I say this not as a political partisan. Both parties were and are culpable. Many of the commentariat – left, right, and center – perpetuated the strangulation. Looking back on it, within a few months of the outbreak, measures should have targeted those facing the greatest harm. Concentrated measures were ignored in favor of totalitarianism.
Now it’s time for the common man and woman to find their inner Patrick Henry and right the ship. Go get ’em parents.
How ironic for it was Karl Marx who coined this pithy phrase in reference to the German philosopher Friedrich Hegel: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” The same applies to the current state of our colleges and universities: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.
The tragedy is cramming anyone capable of breathing into another four years in a classroom. The effort has quickly become farce. It’s rapidly being turned into a burlesque of lefty fascinations as standards are simultaneously shredded. I’ll let Bill Maher tell the story; he does a better job.
Now that’s ironic, once again. I find myself often disagreeing with Maher, but even a blind man can hit the dart board after enough tries.
Something is in the ether or water. Call it a moment of flux. The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English defines “flux” as “a situation in which things are changing a lot and you cannot be sure what will happen.” Also call it a our totalitarian moment. Do we really understand the gravity?
It happened so sudden. Race vengeance is taught in the schools under the call sign of “equity”. SecDef Austin is conducting a political cleansing of the ranks. Fortune 500 boardrooms have joined the pogrom. A virus is the catalyst for suspending the Bill of Rights and making America look more like Communist China, literally. The primary function of government to ensure public safety is forfeited in “reimagining policing” campaigns at the same time that sweeping controls on the private ownership of the means of self-protection are seriously considered. Under the banner of hyper-politicized “climate change”, government will confer upon itself the power to control nearly every aspect of our lives. To keep the revolutionary commissars in power, elections are to be rigged ala Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela. Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) or George Orwell (1984, Animal Farm) can’t compete with this emerging reality.
SecDef Austin announces campaign to politically cleanse the ranks of “extremists”.
Pres. Biden announces more gun control measures, 2021.Radical congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey announce their Green New Deal in February 2019.Visitors at California’s Universal Studios theme park following the state’s universal masking mandate.Mailed ballots lying on the floor of a Paterson, NJ, apartment building during the 2020 election.
John Adams in 1775 once quipped, “Liberty once lost is lost forever”. I think that he was drawing upon the words of William Penn, the founder of the Pennsylvania Colony. In 1687, Penn ordered the printing of the Magna Carta and other English constitutional documents to remind generations of their English rights and liberties. He advised them:
“not to give up anything of liberty that at present they do enjoy, but take up the good example of our ancestors, and understand that it is easy to part with or give away great privileges [rights and liberties], but hard to be gained if lost.” *
In 1701, Penn issued the Charter of Privileges, and in 1751, in commemoration of it, the Assembly of Pennsylvania commissioned a great bell to be installed in Assembly Hall. Today, we call the building Independence Hall and the bell the Liberty Bell.
Oh, how are we quickly forgetting.
RogerG
*From “Albion’s Seed” by David Hackett Fischer, Oxford University Press.
