Matt Gaetz (R, Fla.), “Chairman” of the Imbecile Caucus
The GOP has its Freedom and Mainstreet Caucuses in Congress, among others. Now, we must add the Imbecile Caucus to the list of GOP factions. The charter members are Matt Gaetz, Ralph Norman, Andy Biggs, Bob Good, and Matt Rosendale, with room for the meanderings of Lauren Boebert. For some reason, they don’t like Kevin McCarthy as Speaker and are holding up the Republican majority from organizing the House. One of the Democrats’ greatest allies is this confab of the witless in Republican ranks. Thank them for the subsequent misrule and return of the neo-socialists to power in a couple of years.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell must be in a state of amazement when he glances over to the other wing of the Capitol Building. Maybe that’s the reason for the Republican support in the Senate for a big-spending omnibus bill instead of something smaller and of shorter duration. Any budget bill awaits the House chaos and the maw of the Imbecile Caucus after January 3. Better get something through before Republicans get blamed for another government shutdown.
Like McConnell, I shake my head in befuddlement. In a twist on an old banality, these knives couldn’t cut butter. What is this claque up to? What do they want? Right off the bat, let’s recognize that the only demographic group that they represent is the constituents of the kamikaze brigades. They represent no one but people who get giddy about flying planes into ships or rushing headlong through interlocking fields of machine gun fire.
They don’t seem to want anything but ways to systematize pandemonium. No Speaker for them who could discipline the wackos and present calm, mature leadership. Here’s their camera-hogging guru, Matt Gaetz: “House Republicans need a leader with credibility across every spectrum of the GOP conference in order to be a capable fighting force for the American people.” He adds, “That person is not Kevin McCarthy.” Who’s this clown to say that McCarthy doesn’t represent “every spectrum of the GOP conference”? First, no one can represent “every spectrum” because inevitably within that crowd of 222 there are a few cranks and fetishists – like the Imbecile Caucus. The best that can be hoped for is a realization that the outliers understand themselves to be outliers and agree to suppress their nuttery.
Well, I’m not holding my breath. Even the additional congressman granted my home state of Montana was apparently wasted on Matt Rosendale. He has signed onto the Imbecile Caucus manifesto. He said, “Each member of Congress has earned and deserves equal participation in the legislative process.” Sure they do, but that shouldn’t be an invitation to replicate the worst of the anarchic Italian electoral system. He and the rest of the Imbecile Caucus shouldn’t be allowed to subject the Speaker to the whims and piques of a constantly disgruntled five, which is what they want.
At root, the problem for McCarthy is rooted in math. Five dimwits run the show in a Republican House. It wasn’t true for the Democrats. Pelosi managed to govern with 222 seats in spite of the four Squad kooks. Republicans are different. They are the party of principle, the principle of being shoved around by a few headstrong dullards.
RogerG
Read more here:
“5 Republicans publicly oppose McCarthy’s speakership bid, putting ascension to leadership role in jeopardy”, Haris Alic, Fox News, Nov. 28, 2022, at https://www.foxnews.com/politics/republicans-publicly-oppose-mccarthys-speakership-bid-putting-ascension-leadership-role-jeopardy
“McCarthy offers key compromise in exchange for support on House speaker bid: Report”, Cami Mondeaux, Washington Examiner, Dec. 30, 2022, at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/mccarthy-offers-compromise-in-exchange-for-house-speaker
* The History Channel’s “The Cars That Built the World” prompted the following reaction.
History shows that we go through periods of frenzy. Nearly everything gets sucked into a time’s all-encompassing and obsessive manias. We’re in one of those crazy times. You can’t escape the time’s convictions. The idea(s) permeates every nook and cranny of modern culture. There can be more than one overriding and widespread infatuation, but “climate change” seems to rise heads and shoulders above most others. It’s an ideology and is only science insofar as science can be recruited to lend it some credence and therefore an aura of irrefutability. Thus, a seemingly objective excuse is presented for intolerance of countervailing views and force-feeding the people into the narrow confines of its beliefs.
It’s an ideological enterprise with overtones of authoritarianism, even straying into totalitarianism. The difference between the two is summarized by the fact that authoritarians don’t really care how you think and live so long as you don’t threaten their power. Totalitarians seek to control everything about you. The “total” thing enshrines a surveillance state to manage your life in the most intimate details.
Can democracies be totalitarian? Impossible, you say? We are in the midst of an experiment to prove them compatible. Totalitarianism enters through the door of the mass acceptance of an ideology that has many of the characteristics of a religion – with or without God of course. Most often, if God is mentioned as part of the equation, He is the caboose trailing the train of thought. As a quasi-faith, environmentalism has its dogmas, such as “climate change” and an assortment of sacraments like “net zero” in carbon. One manifestation of “net zero” is the full-frontal assault on the internal combustion engine and the drive to get everyone into electric vehicles (ev’s).
The infatuation with the ev is a product of our time’s Secular Great Awakening: the vast upsurge in ethusiasm for Environmentalism. Environmentalism entails a severe preservationism that implants a loathing to alter the natural world for man’s benefit. It’s a prejudice against convenience for humankind. The ev is one allowance approved by the faith’s ecclesiastical leadership because it is said to address the cardinal sin of climate change, similar to the purchase of an indulgence.
Au contraire to The History Channel, the electrical vehicle has a distinct developmental history as compared to the rise of the SUV. The modern all-electric auto is not the outcome of the earlier scattered, hit-and-miss process of freedom-loving actors that led to the conventional automobile. The ev was essentially commanded into existence by the faith’s politically powerful adherents. In that sense, the ev mandates have much more in common with Stalin’s Five-Year Plans rather than anything recognizable in Adam Smith’s free market.
The track record of command-economy technologies isn’t impressive. Mao thought that he could jump-start Chinese industrialization (The Great Leap Forward) by turning the country’s peasants into steel producers with smelters in village backyards. It all was a bunch of hooey and culminated in the worst famine in history.
Chinese people working in a commune during the Great Leap Forward
Then along came the Soviet MIG-25 “Foxbat” fighter. A Soviet pilot defected one to an American airbase in Japan in 1976, and, low and behold, its materials and avionics were outdated. Like most everything coming out of the Soviet Union’s command economy, it was as flawed as the fake tractor that first rolled out of one of Stalin’s first new tractor factories in the 1930’s. Politicians, ignorant of production processes and engineering, are agog over flashy, showy things. The impracticality of their hairbrained ideas is unknown to them, and irrelevant to them anyway. In today’s political eco-system, environmentalism’s dogmas are assumed to be true and therefore windmills, solar panels, and ev’s are commanded to be the only true path to the Promised Land.
Soviet MIG-25 fighter that was flown by Soviet pilot Victor Belenko to Japan on Sept. 6, 1976
These thoughts were lurking in the background as I watched the four episodes of The History Channel’s “The Cars That Built the World”. I kept expecting the ubiquitous reference to the threat of man-caused apocalyptic climate change to rear its ugly head in the program’s rendition from the development of the internal combustion engine to Toyota, like so much of today’s litany of programming. It’s usually lurking in there somewhere. It finally did at the end of the last installment by associating the development of the electric vehicle to the creative energies of the bygone era.
The parallel is misleading to say the least. The ev is the dream product of today’s ideologically driven central planners. The thing’s glaring deficiencies are overlooked in the headlong rush to get people into them. True, advances in the ev have been made but not enough to overcome its inherent shortcomings and justify a junking of nation’s entire car fleet in a few decades. This can only happen when powerful political actors stray outside their limited lane of competence to force us into their preferred choice.
By contrast, no one was forced out of their horse-and-buggy at the dawn of the twentieth century in order to go further, faster, more cheaply and reliably than ever before. But our choice today isn’t between facing the back end of a horse and Henry Ford’s Model T. It’s a choice between a cleaner and fuel-efficient multi-cylinder and something that can’t be charged quickly, drains quickly the moment you turn on life support (heating, a/c), and is tied to a grid that ev-enthusiasts have made astonishingly unreliable. The trajectory of the internal combustion engine is toward lower emissions and greater fuel-efficiency. Ev’s have an improvement ascent as well, but where’s the cost-benefit for the centrally planned disruption that will inevitably ensue?
Answer: There isn’t one. Cost/benefit commonly stems from a calculation of the opportunity costs and tradeoffs of competing options. What opportunity costs and tradeoffs are entailed in the massive shift to ev’s by government command? What are we giving up by doing so? Therein lies the limiting principle for these politically driven economic schemes. It’s not that the product doesn’t look and sound great – you know, the all-agog reaction of our elected nincompoops. It’s what we are forgoing as we turn a good portion of our lives upside down. The amount that we spend or give up on this choice isn’t available for other things.
The result isn’t a seamless transition but a chaotic, disruptive mess. It won’t be anything like the shift from analog to digital recordings (cd’s, etc.). Digital’s advantages were immediately apparent. Leaving aside its recording superiority, its portability and ease of transition across multiple platforms using its storage advantages, flash drives, WIFI, streaming, cellphones, and assorted peripherals, it turned music into an easy-to-access commodity. Music was democratized every bit as much as personal transportation was by Henry Ford’s Model-T. Can we expect the same glorious outcome when we are forced to scrap our $30,000 sedan in exchange for a thing that will introduce us to serious “range anxiety”. It’s a step down, but for what?
We will be expected to accept the devolution because of the faith’s catechism in the original sin of climate change. So, we must forego something that has only gotten cleaner and more efficient in return for something with inherent difficulties in recharging, long recharge times (1 hour to 2 days) producing long wait times, a range dependent on ambient temperatures and use of basic accessories (such as a/c), and a dependence on a fitful grid.
To iron out the some of the most glaring deficiencies, batteries, batteries everywhere will be necessary for the zillions of ev’s and to level out electricity generation from an uncooperative nature with her flippant spasms of wind and her half-day time off when the sun is on the other side of the planet. More open-pit mining and disposal facilities for all those environmentally unfriendly batteries will be imperative. And, by all means, if you happen to live in a flood-prone area, park your drenched ev blocks away from anything of value. They spontaneously combust like Spinal Tap’s drummers.
Luxury electric vehicles bursting into flames after being damaged by floodwaters and car batteries catching on fire have prompted a new warning from the state after Hurricane Ian. (ABC News)
The electric vehicle – like the secular catechism’s other components such as wind, solar, locking up the forests, and the assault on suburbia – is a product of an ideology that functions as quasi-religion. Though, an ideology is different from a religion. While exhibiting many of the characteristics of one, ideology possesses one fundamental difference: a religion doesn’t generally concern itself with your choice of car, but an ideology can. A religion is primarily limited to the condition of your soul. An ideology can march you off to the death pits or simply shame you into fealty to the ordained lifestyle. Puritanism never really faded. Our modern version just stripped away the God-garb and donned the raiment of the prig. Only this time, the self-righteous are commissars.
Progressives pride themselves in being in the vanguard of history’s arc of betterment, thus Obama’s “wrong side of history” claptrap. But history has no arc. While one technological advance can lead to others, amidst the science and gadgets, we are the same hoard of clashing ambitions, prejudices, and interests. We can still spend ourselves into oblivion and turn the knowledge to malevolence such as robust ways to kill babies, surveille the population, force everyone into lockdowns, and believe in the unbelievable. So, history isn’t an ascending glide path but the teeth of a saw blade. The quality of life bounces up and down. It can register a descent if the balance of nonsense overwhelms the sense.
The electric vehicle as a substitute for your regular family sedan makes no sense. One sure way to institute a new dark age is to force people into making their lives more difficult. The ev aligns more appropriately with the rule of Xi Jinping. Welcome to the reign of today’s eco-Puritanism.
Here’s a disturbing tidbit: tweens (8-12 years old) are on their cell phones for an average of five and a half hours per day; teens (13-18 years old) average eight and a half hours (The Common Sense Census, see below). In addition, as of 2019, half of adolescents and tweens owned a cell phone, and 84% of teens owned one. I suspect that it’s only gotten worse. Why “disturbed” and “worse”? Think of the behavioral and mental contagions unleashed by these “pocket computers”.
The mania can be measured in “eyeball minutes” by Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. For them, they are the equivalent of the oilwell gushers of old. Much that they do is geared to maximizing the fixation of the eyes, particularly of the young.
Now, we have a new meaning for “viral”. What used to be applied to contagious diseases has greater relevance for today’s addiction for that eyeball-and-thumb rummaging through websites and pictures. It’s easy to alter mental states as never before. The emotional enslavement to the device was properly characterized by Bill Maher when he said on 60 Minutes,
“The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they’re friendly nerd-gods building a better world, and admit they’re just tobacco farmers in t-shirts selling an addictive product to children.”
Think of the emotional conditions that are sparked by the incessant activity on the thing. Anorexia nervosa, gender dysphoria, experiments in alternate sexual orientations, teen jealousies, distorted expectations, new and toxic behavioral norms, flash mobs, are just some examples of mental and behavioral contagions that a tween or teen can potentially experience through their incessant connectivity.
No wonder that a good chunk of today’s under-30’s are moonbat crazy.
RogerG
Read more here:
* Bill Maher quote at “Tech Insiders Call Out Facebook for Literally Manipulating Your Brain”, Jon Brooks, KQED, May 25, 2017, at https://www.kqed.org/futureofyou/379828/tech-insiders-call-out-facebook-for-literally-manipulating-your-brain#:~:text=%27The%20tycoons%20of%20social%20media%20have%20to%20stop,to%20children.%27%20Bill%20Maher%2C%20on%20his%20HBO%20show
* “The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teen (2021)”, Common Sense Media, at https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/research/report/8-18-census-integrated-report-final-web_0.pdf
* Much thanks to “I Was One of the Last Kids in America to Grow Up before the Smartphone”, Alexandra DeSanctis, National Review Online, Dec. 17, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/12/i-was-one-of-the-last-kids-in-america-to-grow-up-before-the-smartphone/
Okay, I’ll come out and say it: The young are moonbat crazy. Not all, but stunningly large numbers are. “Moonbat”, what’s that? Crazy is the easy part. The word “moonbat” in this context has been attributed to conservative commentator Howie Carr in referring to California governor Jerry Brown, Jr., who was caricatured in an online poster, “Before Moonbats, there was Jerry ‘Moonbeam’ Brown”.
It appears to be getting worse – the moonbat craziness, that is.
I know about youthful kookiness because “Been there, done that”, as any child of the 60’s should know. “Drugs, sex, and rock ‘n roll” isn’t exactly a clarion call for mature judgment. The nutty stuff is rooted in the young’s unappreciation for the arduous path that was trod by others to get to the present. It stems from the young’s newness to the world. All they really know is what’s around them.
They can be taught history, but they have no experience with prior struggles, and telling and showing them won’t be enough, even if someone lectured them. My WWII-generation parents experienced life before air conditioning, and when capable of acquiring it, they did in a heartbeat. Today, large percentages of the young, pampered by modern conveniences, prefer to end a/c in a holy war to defeat climate change. Yet, they wouldn’t last long without it, along with their trendy ev’s and obsession with connectivity. There’s only so much room on the coastal plain to accommodate the added millions fleeing the oppressive heat everywhere else. And the attendant blackouts and spiking utility bills won’t be good for streaming and the apps on their cellphones that direct them to the nearest Starbucks and car charger that won’t charge, the cell towers and relay centers absent the juice to run.
The moonbat in our young came out in all its glory in the last few elections. No, this conclusion isn’t ageist prejudice. Once again, “Been there, done that.” Epidemics of STD’s and drug abuse, riots, and mass displays of self-righteous posturing were as characteristic of my youth as flower power. The peace movement’s catastrophic demand to withdraw from South Vietnam led to the fall of Southeast Asia and millions exterminated and millions more shoved into tortuous reeducation camps. Not quite a Dark Age – for us, that is, a Dark Age for SE Asia – but certainly the quality-of-life lights were dimmed.
Well, the young are at it again. Kristen Soltis Anderson, pollster and partner of Echelon Insights, unknowingly lays out the evidence for moonbat craziness in the under-40’s. Large portions of youthful voters are committed to social and economic suicide. On the social side, they aren’t marrying and having kids at levels of previous generations, support sexual unions that can’t produce them, and want to treat pregnancy as a disease. I guess to make it all go down easier, they favor legal and social approval of THC intoxication in today’s highly potent, selectively cultivated pot (5 to 6 times more lusty than the kind passed around in the smoking circles of my youth).
The economic side of the self-abasement is a toxic embrace of socialism and eco-madness. Unknowingly for them, the socialist paradise of North Korea didn’t invent the microchip. No socialist Shangri-la had a hand in that. It’s a product of free-enterprise entrepreneurialism, capitalism. You know, private property and profits, all that “evil” stuff. Socialism is an assault on private property, profits, and the rich who got rich because they brought all that stuff to the Antifa zealots so they could virally coordinate to close down Portland.
The eco-madness is their poorly thought out but loudly espoused mitigations of “climate change”. Well, prove it. Prove that “climate change” is a man-caused apocalypse. Prove that your chic measures – ev’s, a grid reliant on windmills and solar panels, and chicken-coop housing in today’s urban hellscapes – will make more than a dimple of improvement on the hypothetical crisis. Convince me that it won’t lead to central planning, the ideological cousin of totalitarianism. Convince me that it won’t lead to the iron fist of totalitarianism to socially engineer the Sierra Club’s ideal person. History shows a link between moonbat utopianism in power and thuggery. What makes the young so confident in thinking that the historically evident travel from an imposed fantasy to full-throated coercion can be successfully suspended? History isn’t encouraging.
Here’s Soltis’s scoop on the political status of the young: they are strong Democrats, stronger than earlier renditions of youthfulness. The upper end of millennials has reached 40 and they punched the Democrat ticket by nine points in 2022. The bulk of them, though, are in their 30’s, and combined with the twenty-somethings, they favored the Democrats by 28 points! The Republicans are in a world of hurt with them. It’s been particularly true in the last three election cycles.
Long lines of students waiting to vote at a Michigan college.
What animates these young folks to ignore the urban filth and crime, inflation, a looming recession, the wildlands as open-air combustion chambers, the blackouts, the crippling national debt, the invasion of boys into girls’ sports and bathrooms, and schools that function more as lefty finishing schools than places of learning? The affection for the donkey party can’t solely be laid at the feet of Trump. The young obviously care more about other things. Among those under 30, 53% want abortion to be legal “under any circumstance”. That could unthinkingly include late term/partial birth abortions, ending the life of babies who survive the procedure, sex-selection abortions, and excusing those mothers who see a baby as an obstacle in the climb up the greasy corporate pole.
“Under any circumstance” is an awfully grizzly affair. Many of the young seem to be fully onboard with the “right” to abortion translating into the “right” of the mother and doctor to be executioners. Or do they? “Under any circumstance” precludes any consideration of viability. Pardon me, but I can’t accept the claim that 53% of the young are so inhuman. For many in the polling, I speculate, the response was a visceral reaction to Dobbs, which was caricatured by a similarly ill-informed press as a ban on abortion. But explaining the decision as a return to federalism would require an understanding of federalism. The trillions of dollars spent on the schools has yet to succeed at reading, writing, and math (NAEP scores). What makes you think that they will be any better at conveying the meaning of federalism?
Trillions more and dismal results (NAEP scores). Dismal results and political illiteracy. Political illiteracy and hitching a ride on the Democrats’ train of affection for government as super daddy.
Economic illiteracy too. Young people support labor unions because they supposedly have a “positive impact on the country”, more so than the church and the military. As long as we keep the discussion out of reality, America’s adversarial unions are seen in poorly developed young minds as fighting the battle against the exploitation of innocent workers by robber barons. But it isn’t that simple. A strong historical case can be made that industrial labor unions killed Detroit and sent American steel into a tailspin. Unionization was contorted into corporate and job euthanasia. Their extravagant demands, wrapped in a promiscuous right to strike and lavish collective bargaining agreements, paved the way for the rise of Toyota and the other Asian and European automakers. The industrial heartland became deindustrialized to a great extent by their workers.
Abandoned office/industrial building in Detroit.
The Rust Belt became as rusty as its unions. Who wants to invest in a dive into the jaws of our labor unions, so long as we still have the freedom to decide where to put our money? Better to avoid the Upper Midwest Rust Belt and go to friendlier places, like the American South, who are without laws that grant power to unions to force everyone into their clutches. “Right to work” laws in the South weren’t a ban on labor unions, but merely made them voluntary. Such nuances aren’t the stuff of K-to-grad school curriculums. We’ve trained a generation in AFL-CIO urban myths.
It doesn’t end there. More immediately, our young folks seem to be okay with not getting the latest edition of the I-phone, or even underwear. Those container ships anchored over the horizon at San Pedro were a gift of the Pacific Maritime Association (an affiliate of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union) representing dock workers. As of October 2022, 77 ships remain anchored outside the port. Our supply chain is dependent on the featherbedding of $171,000/year dock workers (2019 numbers). Monopolies of labor have the funny tendency of behaving like any other monopoly.
Even “the most pro-union president” (Biden) is feeling the heat of another possible disruption from a rail strike. Once the containers get off the ship, the most congested docks face the most congested railyard in the country. Its expansion faces the usual suspects: organized eco-zealots and California’s exhaustive eco-regulations. The state’s EIR’s (environmental impact reports), to go along with the fed’s EIS’s (environmental impact statements), to go along with multiple layers of bureaucratic meddling, prompted endless delays and lawsuits. We may get the expansion, but not without a taxpayer breaking and company busting and bloated price tag, not an unusual experience in the Democrats’ Mecca and Medina of California. Remember the state’s high-speed rail monolith to nowhere?
Unfinished California high-speed elevated rail line outside Fresno, Ca.
Such episodes don’t register with the young. I think that too many of the young are into the excitement and drama normally found in their personal diversions and aren’t attracted to the boring and tedious work of reading and contemplation. They won’t read a magazine of substance but will glance at Twitter burps and anything on their Instagram feed.
Why bother to vote If that is the case? Has anyone ever pondered the possibility that voting could be an immoral act? Think about it. An uninformed vote is the equal of an informed one, a frivolous one equal to a serious one. As in a fraudulent vote, one cancels the other. If you don’t know, don’t care, and won’t inform yourself, don’t you have a moral responsibility to stay away from the ballot . . . and power tools? Such an ethic of responsibility cannot be encapsulated in a law, but it should be implanted in our minds – to go along with honesty, charity, and love – from a young age. Before you do something, do it responsibly.
Today’s young are less inclined to be responsible because some parents and most of our schools have failed to prepare them to face the issues of their time. Take marriage as an example, same-zex marriage in particular. The young favor it by upwards to three-quarters in recent polling.
But is same-sex marriage an oxymoron? Has the thought ever graced their mind? Same-sex marriage might be sensible if marriage is construed as nothing but assuaging the interests of adults. In history, however, marriage has always been tied to civilization’s stake in procreation. For that to happen, heterosexual behavior is required. Not every married couple of a heterosexual complexion can or chooses to have children. That’s not the point. The long nurturing process of our young requires the tight bond of the people who brought them into being. The state and its disconnected operatives are no stand-in.
That tight bond is marriage, and it should be reserved for heterosexual pairings. Whether they have children or not is a personal matter. Other conceptions (civil unions, etc.) with many of the privileges and protections of marriage can be made available for same-sex couples. But heterosexuality is a privileged coupling because without it, there is no next generation. A society of the incontinent and gray-haired, because we have elevated everything else but childbearing and childrearing, doesn’t bode well for survival. Heterosexuality must be privileged. Marriage is the way, born of necessity, to do it.
The reservation of marriage for complimentary sexual pairings isn’t a prudish ban on “loving who you want”. That’s pure sophistry. Marriage is society’s minimal requirement for there to be a next generation.
Has this argument ever been presented to the three-quarters who think that same-sex marriage is a great idea? The overwhelming numbers in support of something is not proof of the thing’s validity. More accurately, it’s evidence of a lack of exposure to the history of our institutions, and to a real debate. Like much else involving the young, they don’t know any better and nobody told them.
It comes back to maturity. One element of maturity is tied up in the economic concept of tradeoffs: you can’t have it all. No one can. We give up one thing to obtain another. So, for our fulminating statue-topplers and Antifa zealots, and our twenty-somethings whose education didn’t educate, you can’t simultaneously have your socialism and 5G and the next generation of connectivity. That stuff is born of freedom, the freedom to live a life, to think anew, to acquire, without undermining the prerequisites for their being generations to come. It’s not the freedom of bureaucrats to meddle.
The young are just moonbat crazy. Is this what degringolade (downfall) looks like?
RogerG
Read here for more:
* “Republicans’ Lost Youth”, Kristen Soltis Anderson, National Review, Dec. 1, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/12/19/republicans-lost-youth/
* “NAEP national test scores fall to lowest levels in decades!”, Anthony Picciano of CUNY, Sept, 2, 2022, at https://apicciano.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2022/09/02/naep-national-test-scores-fall-to-lowest-levels-in-decades/#:~:text=Driving%20the%20news%3A%20The%20results%20on%20the%20NAEP%2C,in%20learning%20outcomes%20were%20starkest%20among%20lower-performing%20students.
* “77 box vessels waiting outside San Pedro Bay ports”, World Cargo News, Oct. 25, 2022, at https://www.worldcargonews.com/news/news/77-box-vessels-waiting-outside-san-pedro-bay-ports-67501#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20Marine%20Exchange%20of%20Southern%20California%2C,Los%20Angeles%20are%20due%20to%20arrive%20at%20anchor.
Senator Raphael Warnock (D., Ga.) gestures during an election night party after a projected win in the midterm runoff election in Atlanta, Ga., December 6, 2022. (Carlos Barria/Reuters)
The dust is beginning to settle, or so I thought. The Trump-endorsed Herschel Walker lost in the Georgia runoff to the sharp-tongued leftist masquerading as a man of the cloth, Raphael Warnock. Georgia has a rabble-rousing socialist to represent it in the U.S. Senate, to go along with the state’s other non-card-carrying member of the Socialist International, Jon Osoff. But the state’s leadership went red. Go figure. And just as things were settling down, Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema dropped the Democrat label yesterday morning and officially became an independent, and we are back to choking on dust again. What does all this mean? Who knows, but I suspect there’s much to clean up on isle . . . for both parties.
The Georgia situation is perplexing. The results of the 2022 elections left the state in a condition of political dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality disorder). Think about it: the radical left in the US Senate for the state and solid conservatives from the governor’s mansion to majorities in the state houses. How? What?
Republicans have some “cleanup on isle . . . ”. The mess comes in the form of the person of Donald Trump. The guy is simply not the winner of his boasts. He’s a big turn-off. He appeals to a narrow slice of the electorate, but he’s toxic in suburbia. One step forward, three steps back. Walker carried the Trump label, a liability too strong to overcome in a rough-cut newcomer.
Some reports indicate that Trump convinced Walker to run, and thus exposed himself to the Democrats’ usual rectal examination. He came up short after the smears, but everywhere else on the ballot, Republicans did very well. Jim Geraghty of National Review Online lays out the results. He reports that Republicans in all the statewide races broke the 50% threshold in the general election and thus avoided runoffs, with the lone exception of Walker. And roughly 200,000 fewer Georgians voted for Walker in the runoff than the general. I won’t speculate on the meaning of that, but it’s clear that Walker is less appealing than the rest of the Republican slate. He’s got personal baggage, and additionally he’s got Trump to live down.
Walker joins a broad cast of characters who, instead of the union label, had the Trump label and lost. It was particularly true in battleground states, the states that Republicans have to win to become a majority. Pennsylvanians preferred a stroke victim to Oz. In the governor’s contest, Arizonians favored a millennial uptalking airhead who wouldn’t debate, and couldn’t win one, and avoided public appearances over the quick-witted, fast-talking, Trump-endorsed telecaster, Keri Lake. Like her inspiration, she’s suing and caterwauling over the election results. The Senate race wasn’t even close with Trump’s novice, Blake Masters, falling way short. To no surprise, In the deeper blue bastions of Lefty lunacy, Trump’s imprimatur didn’t prevent a shellacking.
It seems that Trump threw around his endorsements like a drunk trust-fund brat tossing chips in a Las Vegas casino. He appeared to be so flippant, focusing on the oddball, the ill-prepared, the inexperienced, anyone who could parade around under the clichéd banner “outsider”. Sometimes, there are very good reasons for some people to be “outsiders”. Trump has proven to be not very adept at distinguishing them.
Part of the Republican cleanup should include a better ground game. The Democrats adjusted the election system for theirs, which is chock full of the ill-informed, easily distracted, and unmotivated. First, they eliminated the concepts of election day and the secret ballot. The party of government used government to deform elections to their liking: depreciating personal responsibility in voting (like registering, staying informed, getting off the couch to vote in-person), and having a month to do it. Then, all they have left to do is to mine the rich veins of the politically illiterate in their base. That means a data base to identify them and the paid minions to harvest the ballots.
Certainly, it’s an insult to one man, one conscience, one vote. The loss of the “conscience” part is critical since mailing the things in the millions will land multiples of them on a kitchen table, or lie around the floor of the communal mailboxes, waiting for . . . whoever . . . to mark them. It’s a scam-made-legal. Republicans need to play the game by the Democrats’ rules.
If the Republicans succeed in shedding the Trump stigma, the Democrats’ own “cleanup on isle . . .” will be more glaring. The Democrats have to live down The Squad, “birthing people”, a reverse Jim Crow (CRT, “systemic racism”, punishing racial preferences, racial reparations, etc.), their disdain for holding hoodlums accountable for harming the innocent, the filth and degradation in places under their chronic suzerainty, and their destruction of prosperity in a wave of radical eco-mongering and spending. They will persevere in spite of their craziness if the Republicans continue to make Trump the face of the party.
Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) at a Sept. 13 gala wearing a gifted “Tax the Rich” gown, for which she is being investigated for House ethics violations.
Is there a broad and popular appetite for this stuff? The Republicans offer a cult of chaotic personality. The Democrats peddle lunacy. If there ever was a good reason for complacency, this is it. I’m pinning my hopes on the Republicans’ cleanup brigade because their task is easier. All they have to do is send Trump packing. The radical chic ethos runs too deep in the Democrats.
Protest in Minneapolis against the appearance of Pres. Trump in Oct. 2019. Prominent state Democrats energized the protest crowd with their appearance and chants, including the radical Democrat State Representative Aisha Gomez (DFL-Minneapolis).
Roger
Source:
* Jim Geraghty’s take on the Georgia election scene: “Are We Ready to Learn Our Lessons Now, Republicans?”, National Review Online, Dec. 7, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/are-we-ready-to-learn-our-lessons-now-republicans/
The backstory on Dylan’s “My Back Pages” is a teaching moment for the censorious zealots who happen to dominate the commanding heights of our culture and many of our political institutions. So are the lyrics, if rightly understood.
Here’s what I’ve been able to glean in my research into the song. In the mid-60’s, Dylan was given the Tom Paine Award for social activism by the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. Before this, he was getting irritated at being pigeonholed as a radical activist. He got drunk, made a speech at the award ceremony, and much of that speech made its way into the lyrics. As one source put it regarding the song, “. . . Dylan intensely criticizes his younger self for his moral arrogance and intellectual naivety. More than anything, he’s mocking his own hypocrisy. His outlook on these subjects, on himself and on the progressive movement he lambasted from the awards ceremony pulpit . . . .” Further, according to this source, “The way Dylan saw it, he was becoming the authoritarian by continuing on his old path.” Sound familiar?
The song’s chorus, “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now”, was a personal admonition for turning into a vain know-it-all. In the following lines, he upbraids himself for his hypocrisy in becoming as narrow-minded and pushy as the other side:
“In a soldier’s stance, I aimed my hand
At the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not that I’d become my enemy
In the instant that I preach”
Equality at all costs was every bit the holy grail among the radical Left in Dylan’s time as it is today among the so-called social justice warriors spitting and fulminating in lecture halls against anyone who disagrees. Dylan saw it in the mid-60’s and portrayed it in the following lines:
“A self-ordained professor’s tongue
Too serious to fool
Spouted out that liberty is just equality in school
‘Equality,’ I spoke the word
As if a wedding vow”
What we are experiencing today is a rehash of an earlier time; only some people saw their descent into inhumanity and corrected. Others didn’t and won’t. The full lyrics are below.
***********
Crimson flames tied through my ears
Rolling high and mighty traps
Pounced with fire on flaming roads
Using ideas as my maps
“We’ll meet on edges soon,” said I
Proud ‘neath heated brow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth
“Rip down all hate,” I screamed
Lies that life is black and white
Spoke from my skull, I dreamed
Romantic facts of musketeers
Foundationed deep, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
Girl’s faces formed the forward path
From phony jealousy
To memorizing politics of ancient history
Flung down by corpse evangelists
Unthought of, though, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
A self-ordained professor’s tongue
Too serious to fool
Spouted out that liberty is just equality in school
“Equality,” I spoke the word
As if a wedding vow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
In a soldier’s stance, I aimed my hand
At the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not I’d become my enemy
In the instant that I preach
My existence led by confusion boats
Mutiny from stern to bow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats
Too noble to neglect
Deceived me into thinking I had something to protect
Good and bad, I define these terms
Quite clear, no doubt, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
***********
Enjoy the all-star version at Dylan’s honorary concert from the 1990’s with Neil Young, Tom Petty, Roger McGuinn, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, and of course Bob Dylan (below).
RogerG
Source:
* Backstory of “My Back Pages” at https://www.songfacts.com/facts/bob-dylan/my-back-pages#:~:text=Those%20lines%20clearly%20mirror%20the%20chorus%20for%20%22My,More%20than%20anything%2C%20he%27s%20mocking%20his%20own%20hypocrisy.
On the masthead of The Washington Post is this aphorism, “Democracy dies in darkness.” The country may not be in complete darkness, but the lights are fading, and the people at the dimmer switch are the same people who have loudly proclaimed “We need to save our democracy”. Yes, they are trying to save it by destroying it.
Democracy and its prerequisites are disfigured to mean their opposites by this delirious clique. The franchise is reshaped to mean almost anyone with a pulse: the uncaring, ignorant, the young to age 16 if Boston and others get their way, possibly those in comas, noncitizens (that means the citizens of other nations), and maybe even some without a heartbeat or brain waves. So, even a pulse is unnecessary. The freedoms of conscience and speech are constrained by the nebulous and capricious concept of “hate”, to be managed by a class of entitled and biased monitors and fact checkers. Equal opportunity is turned into a bean-counting exercise to the benefit of the fashionably “oppressed” and harm to the unfashionably “privileged”. The terms are flexible to fit the occasion. And a massive campaign of indoctrination is turned loose on everyone to buttress the whole sorry edifice. Did I miss anything?
Is this democracy in any meaningful sense? How could it be, with thoughts and speech monitored, the enforcement of a new Jim Crow, just pointing in a different direction, voting without any expectation of responsibility or qualifications, and a propaganda offensive to rival anything that came out of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth? This is a “democracy” to produce the desired outcomes of a pampered and revolutionary few, of the kind that delivers 99% of the votes for Stalin as General Secretary. As for the other 1%, like those of today who run afoul of the chic views of the powerful and influential, they are disappeared.
Elon Musk’s dump of Twitter’s earlier internal communications exposed a rats’ nest of mini control freaks. Speaking of the beaming of light into dark places, the rats are now attacking the guy with the flashlight.
I am no Fox News groupie, but you don’t have to be to find this swarming behavior deplorable. Notice the playing of footsie with words? Old fashioned censorship is renamed as the fight against “misinformation”. “Safety” and “hate” became the excuse to ban contrarian ideas and people. Of course, the cult was encouraged to inflict punishments by influential others (politicized “experts”) who offer up more justifications. This supportive cast superficially qualified their charges with “seemed” and “has all the hallmarks” of Russian disinformation. Think of the Hunter Biden laptop story in the New York Post. The qualifiers sound like plausible deniability to avoid civil liability. Hunter Biden was a booster of the concept as his favorite escape hatch from accountability, as is it is for this manipulative web of political insiders. It’s the language of skullduggery.
Silicon Valley Democratic Party Club
California, as the Mecca and Medina of wokeness, went national. Rudi Dutschke, the German radical Left activist of the 1960’s, spoke of the “march through the institutions”. The Long March began in Berkeley, spread to any place with a Sociology Department, gained a stranglehold in Sacramento, and then the nonsense was marketed far and wide into all of civil and public society.
These dogmas became holy writ, and, if threatened, the hive swarms. Too many parents protesting the indoctrination of their children into Antifa and transgenderism? If you’re the National School Boards Association, contact your political compatriots in the DOJ and watch parent protests acquire the patina of terrorism, or organized crime, to federal agents with guns – a service which AG Garland dutifully initiated on Oct. 4, 2021 (memo below). Parents were marked with an FBI “threat tag” despite Garland’s denial of doing what he was exactly doing. Protecting the Lefty edifice through legal jargon is a gambit of those other “people’s democracies” in Cuba, North Korea, and that huge one based in Beijing.
And what about that incestuous relationship between the Twitter gang and the Democratic Party? If censorship is your game, turn to your fellow travelers running the show at the social media giants to quash your opponents. No need to exclusively rely on the feds with their badges and guns. People were disappeared by Twitter’s “safety teams”. In October 2020, Biden’s campaign emailed Twitter to remove 5 tweets. What is even more startling is how quickly the Twitter people complied: “handled these”.
“Handled these” was the outcome if the Party objected to comments by celebrities such as Stephen Liuhuan and James Woods. Woods was banned, I kid you not, for parodying a meme about Democrats wanting men to step aside in favor of a women’s takeover of our society (see below).
Twitter banned The Babylon Bee for a joke about Rachel Levine, a transgender member of Biden’s cabinet. Yoel Roth, ex-Head of Site Integrity at Twitter, said in an interview (see below), “. . . the targeting and victimization of the trans community is very real, very life threatening, extraordinarily serious . . . .” So, transgenderism is above debate because to question it through humor is, by itself, the equivalent of a violent assault. If so, every member of the Communist Party USA should be guilty of murder 110 million times over. Assaults are committed by sociopaths, for instance, not ideologies. Physical attacks aren’t intrinsic to people who find ridiculous the idea of biological sex being reduced to a state of mind. Twitter can’t grasp the idea that the refusal of a person to participate in another’s discordant mental state isn’t an assault.
I could go on and on about the bizarre idea of applying “gender” – a word taken from the masculine, neutral, and feminine appellations in some languages – to chromosome pairings. For the folks running the show at Twitter, we must play-act as if biology can be suspended by personal fiat, and to think otherwise is yelling “Fire” in a crowded theater. Treating some people’s oversensitive triggers as “Fire!” dilutes the seriousness of real fires.
Throughout Trump’s term, Trump was caricatured as Putin’s lapdog. Could “lapdog” be an apt description of Twitter’s consensual relationship with the Democratic Party?
No more egregious example of lapdog behavior can be found than Twitter’s aforementioned deep-sixing of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story. Even one of Twitter’s social justice warriors in the c-suite, Yoel Roth, admitted it was a mistake to strike it from Twitter (see below): “It didn’t get there [banning it] for me.” The NY Post story should never have gotten anywhere near the death penalty because Twitter’s policy requires a law enforcement action to instigate a ban. The reporters at the New York Post were engaging in journalism, not running a crime syndicate or extortion ring. It was a real story that the American people deserved to see, but weren’t.
An unrepresentative political cult dominates our culture and institutions. Who believes this stuff? Who believes that “woman” can be divorced from chromosomes, and “mother” should be replaced by “birthing person”? Who believes that the lack of racism by individuals is somehow proof of “systemic racism”? In other words, the unprovable “systemic” variety is used to justify a jihad against what cannot be proven to exist in the first place. Who believes that our language should be debased by euphemisms – “hate”, “threats to safety”, “systemic . . .”, the multitudinous pronouns, “racist”, the plethora of thought phobias, “misinformation”, etc. – in order to pursue a revolutionary agenda? Who believes this stuff? Answer: no one, but that narrow class of ideologically infected hysterics coming out of our defiled colleges and universities.
One more example before I drop this rant: John Gibson, ex-CEO, co-founder, and largest shareholder of Tripwire Interactive, was mobbed out of his position by the cult (see below). Why? He tweeted the following: “Proud of #USSupremeCourt affirming the Texas law banning abortion for babies with a heartbeat. As an entertainer I don’t get political often. Yet with so many vocal peers on the other side of this issue, I felt it was important to go on the record as a pro-life game developer.” Yep, he’s pro-life and that made him a threat to “women’s health”. Just think, for the cult’s initiates, pregnancy is no longer a blessing; it’s a hazard, like COVID-19. The cult is a social suicide machine. And for his belief that a baby resides in the womb, he was subjected to social terrorism (to borrow his words).
It’s mindboggling.
Yes, I agree that our democracy is imperiled. The threat comes from a half-mad political cult that has ascended to great heights of political and cultural power. After their “saving” of our democracy, we will wake up to find that we don’t have one, with a shriveled next generation to boot.
RogerG
Read more and watch here:
* AG Garland’s memo to initiate an investigation of parental protests at school board meetings: https://www.justice.gov/media/1170056/dl?inline=
* Musk transferred the Twitter communications to Matt Taibbi: https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598822959866683394
* James was banned by Twitter for the following tweet at https://twitter.com/Millerita/status/1043179275812306944?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1043179275812306944%7Ctwgr%5E0bb2d3095508bffe9983e152690085794a51dbb0%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.westernjournal.com%2Ftwitter-legend-james-woods-hit-sjws-hard-twitter-blocked-platform%2F
* Yoel Roth interview after leaving Twitter explains the banning of The Babylon Bee for its parody of Rachel Levine at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFxjUF0uq6o
* Yoel Roth in the same interview exhibited the same ritualized use of euphemisms to hide his predilection for censorship of The Babylon Bee at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFxjUF0uq6o
* Tucker Carlson conducted an in-depth interview of John Gibson at https://www.foxnews.com/media/former-tripwire-ceo-looks-back-canceled-forced-step-down-from-company-over-pro-life-tweet
* Letter from 50 intelligence experts critical of story about the emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop at https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000175-4393-d7aa-af77-579f9b330000
The other night I watched the director’s cut of Ridley Scott’s “Kingdom of Heaven”, all 3-plus hours’ worth. Since I’m retired, I have more time to devote to culture, or anti-culture depending on your point of view. The whole thing struck me as a polished, elaborate reflection of Howard Zinn’s indictment of western civilization. I can’t think of a more biased portrayal of the Crusades and Crusaders.
I know that I’m not unique in this portrayal of the movie, absent the connection to Howard Zinn. It was observed when it first premiered in 2005.
Who is Howard Zinn? Some of you may know of him. He is no minor figure in our current edition of the Democratic Party. When you think of our current “woke moment” – sometimes referred to as the “Great Awokening” – think of Howard Zinn. Remember 2020 and its wave of memorial defacements (statue-toppling, etc.) and Antifa and BLM riots? Howard Zinn’s characterization of our country and civilization animated the hyper-activity of the radicalized perpetrators. The Fortune 500 c-suite’s campaign against Georgia’s 2021 voting law, and their current threats against Elon Musk’s Twitter, were based on at least an intuitive acceptance of Howard Zinn’s opinion of American history. When I’ve said that a good chunk of the “beautiful people” have turned left, I meant that they have Howard Zinn’s definition of America roiling between their ears.
Howard Zinn
So, what is Howard Zinn’s grand thesis about America and western civilization? To put it bluntly, he believes that ours is a history of hate, racism, sexism, and general hostility to any of the “other” or so-called “out” groups in the world. In other words, overt and systemic oppression explains it all. Zinn is the historian’s version of Marcuse.
Of course, the Church (the latinate or Roman Catholic) comes in for particular abuse in the script. Priests, bishops, archbishops, the hierarchy are portrayed almost universally as venal, vicious, self-serving, and hypocrites. From the very beginning to the last scenes, Church figures are yuck!
The actual history of the Church’s involvement in the Crusades is more complicated, which is likely to be true regarding almost any accurate portrayal of many large-scale human endeavors in history. The Middle East of the Middle Ages was a diverse religious and cultural tapestry, much more so than it is today. The Crusades were triggered by Muslim depredations of Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land. The cruelty was evident in an age of cruelty, when war and crime was conducted at the length of a man’s arm, up close and personal. Believe me, there was enough inhumanity to go around from all sides. This movie’s rendition of the siege of Jerusalem simplistically kept the focus for evil on the Christian side.
Another interesting aspect of the film’s story is the movie’s admiration for religious skepticism, bordering on secularism and atheism, in some of the characters. The film’s good guys fit that mold. But how true is that in actual history? The bloodiest century in history, the 20th, was made a bloodbath by atheists (110 million killings by Marxists) or people who rejected Christianity as a “slave” religion with a “slave” morality (the National Socialists, drawn from Nietzsche).
Murderous secularists have far bloodier hands than any of the laity and clergy of the Church. In fact, Christianity and its “slave” morality has generally been a moderating influence on human conduct. And further, the reality is that war and battlefield miseries does not generally turn people away from faith but will probably intensify those yearnings for the deeper and more profound meaning of life that is found in faith. The movie’s depiction of the wise and grizzled veterans as skeptics is a self-serving lefty trope.
If you’re wondering why surveys have registered a decline in the numbers who identify Christian (see below), part of the reason may lie in the fact that we are more of a visual people. The audio-visual arts surround and consume us. Howard Zinn’s ideology dominates Hollywood, so the story gets out and is repeated ad infinitum. Almost uniformly, Hollywood is an America self-hate enterprise.
Think of it, Disney, the company of Mickey Mouse, Cinderella, and Bambi, can’t bring itself to defend children from sexual mutilation. A company devoted to making children’s movies is so under the sway of Zinn’s dogmas that it kowtows to Zinn-influenced employees in opposing a Florida law to protect children from this grotesquery. Thank you, Howard Zinn and Hollywood.
Please, watch the movie . . . particularly if you’re a Howard Zinn groupie.
