In “Poltergeist II”, the little girl stares into the snow of the TV screen and announces, “They’re baaaaack!”. Who’s back? The ghosts, of course. For those chronicling the decline of California, the iconic declaration must be reworked. A person staring at their daily news feed comes away with stories of people leaving the state saying, “They’re leeeeeeeeeeaving!” This time, it’s Time magazine in “Americans Are Fleeing Los Angeles More Than Anywhere Else for First Time” (see below).
The little girl from “Poltergeist II”
And I quote from the story: “Los Angeles was not at the top of the list [of places to move to], instead becoming the area residents were most likely to move away from.” According to a Redfin report, “That marks the first time on record [LA] has been the number one place homebuyers are leaving, and the first time in over two years the Bay Area has dropped out of the number one spot.”
A dubious distinction for the not-so-Golden State. LA occupies the top spot, but the rest of the list is a who’s who of American urban dystopia, all of them Democratic Party satraps. San Francisco, New York City, Washington, D.C., Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit and Denver are kryptonite to businesses and the middle class. People are voting with their feet as they have for millennia. Hell on earth is not a magnet.
A common strip of homelessness in Los AngelesLitter from the chronic mobs of thieves along rail lines in Los Angeles
Welcome to urban America, and for the globe-trotting foreign traveler, reconsider that visit to the City by the Bay or Disneyland. Unless you’re a member of a major bowl game broadcast crew like the ESPN team reporting from the floor of the Rose Bowl, who’ll speed from the airport to hotel to the Rose Bowl in a limousine, you’ll risk face-to-face encounters with urban dysfunction.
For Californians, get out. For visitors, stay away.
RogerG
Source:
* “Americans Are Fleeing Los Angeles More Than Anywhere Else for First Time”, Suzanne Blake, Time, 12/29/23, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/americans-are-fleeing-los-angeles-more-than-anywhere-else-for-first-time/ar-AA1md8sC?ocid=msedgntp&pc=LCTS&cvid=483db5997a504d34a10fb00840ed94db&ei=52
The Trump slogan “Make America Great Again” is in my view a noble sentiment. America is a dispirited nation today. In some ways we have become a laughingstock on the international stage (Remember Kabul?). Our navy has fallen under 300 ships which means that a focus on saving Israel effectively could be an abandonment of Taiwan. Our defense industrial base is so emaciated that it can hardly support our peacetime military, let alone two stalwart allies like Ukraine and Israel willing to bleed in defense of the West. We eviscerate ourselves in masochistic eco self-flagellation and race/gender Marxism. This, for me, should be the impetus for a real campaign to Make America Great Again.
But inside that cluster of elements surrounding Trump comes a special definition for Great. “Great”, for them, is tantamount to isolationism: diplomatically, militarily, and economically. America for these folks becomes a better place when we abandon the world under the guise of our domestic problems. This won’t end well. MAGA has made itself into a funeral dirge for America.
Michael Ramirez is my go-to cartoonist for he captures our current moment so well. Ramirez harkens back to the conservatism of Reagan, Thatcher, Buckley, Goldwater, and back to a time when we had a 600-ship navy, and not to the Trump cult of personality with its infatuation for isolationism.
In the cartoon, Ramirez reminds us of the bloody future awaiting us when we let despots run wild on the continent of Europe. Trumpkins are oblivious. Dickens’s specter of Christmas Yet to Come stands before us.
Michael Ramirez has a nice way of encapsulating issues and events. In “Peaceniks on the Right”, the castigation of America normally found on the Left is appearing on the Right. Take for instance the rise of an anti-Ukraine caucus in the GOP. Here’s Ramirez’s interpretation. It’d be a hoot if the consequences weren’t so serious.
During the Cold War, the Soviets in their efforts to harness to their side the so-called Third World – mostly poorer, developing and nominally nonaligned countries (at least officially not tied to the western or communist bloc) – created a “university” to train the next generation of Marxist revolutionaries. Modeled on Soviet “education”, the schooling is premised, straitjacketed, on the absolute truth of Karl Marx’s revolutionary dialectic. Deeply implanted is the alleged Marxist reality of systemic oppression, the same kind of thing now commonplace in our schools of higher ed, and lower.
The Soviet tactic was to hide the indoctrination behind the name of a popular “hero” like Patrice Lumumba. Officially titled Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow implanted Marxist thought in the next generation of revolutionaries and activists from around the world. Notable alumni include a long list of murderous malcontents such as the terrorist Carlos the Jackal, Iran’s totalitarian mullah Ali Khamenei, the Sandinista dictator Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, and the one-man-one-vote-one-time ruler Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority.
Students at Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, 1985Carlos the Jackal
The politicized heirs could include much of the college graduating classes in the U.S. going back at least a decade or two. The Marxist-thought concept is infectious and is now established ideological orthodoxy throughout the college landscape across America. Scholarship is bastardized by Marxist jargon, politically weighted vocabulary for which no one is allowed question. Thought begins with the boilerplate, ends with the boilerplate. This passes for learning in America (and elsewhere).
In a previous post, I wrote of the troubles at Bakersfield College, the Kern Community College District, and the Community College System in California. Clearly, the intellectual rot doesn’t begin or end there. The results are found in the polling of the under-24s. The recent Harvard/Harris poll shows 51% of the 18-to-24 cohort supported the ending of the state of Israel and turning it over “to Hamas and the Palestinians”. Increasingly, these people aren’t just liberal; they’re Marxist, having applied the Marxist rhetoric of oppressor and colonizer to Israel. It is what is meant by “not being liberal enough”. Translation: being Marxist. Welcome to America’s future.
We’d be much more honest with ourselves if we renamed all American higher ed Patrice Lumumba Universities because that is what they are. Parents, beware, you might be subsidizing the future authors of the next holocaust.
The bodies of people, some of them elderly, lie on a street after they were killed during a mass-infiltration by Hamas gunmen from the Gaza Strip, in Sderot, southern Israel, Oct. 7, 2023. (Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad)
RogerG
Sources:
* “Poll: Most young Americans think Israel should be ‘ended and given to Hamas’”, Toi Staff, The Times of Israel, 12/17/23, at https://www.timesofisrael.com/poll-most-young-americans-back-ending-israel-many-find-jewish-genocide-calls-okay/
How did we get to this place? In one of the last remaining conservative bastions in a state gone neo-Marxist, the area’s community college district – Kern County CCD – is at the vanguard of the same poisonous revolution engulfing Sacramento and the Left-happy denizens on the populous coastal plain. I left the state, and a near 30-year academic career in the county, because there’s no escaping the toxic governing philosophy that holds sway over the entire state. County boundaries are no protection. The lines don’t shelter your schools from being engines of state-sanctioned revolutionary indoctrination.
I got out. You too may be left with no other option.
The happenings in the District and its main Bakersfield College campus are a scandal. A few names and words typify the sickening situation. Sonya Christian (no “Dr.” designation because it is reserved for those who passed their medical boards; PhDs in Education don’t qualify), English instructor Paula Parks (no “Dr.” designation; ditto), John Corkins (radicalized president of the Kern Community College Board of Trustees), radical jargon like DEI, and faculty counterrevolutionaries such as Daymon Johnson, Matthew Garrett, and Erin Miller of The Renegade Institute for Liberty at Bakersfield College (see Facebook page below)
Sonya Christian
Karl Marx wrote and spoke of a “false consciousness” among the people that prevents the revolutionary uprising. “False consciousness” is reserved for those who simply disagree, the counterrevolutionaries. It must be overcome and control of the schools is essential to that end. In a recent meeting of the Board of Trustees, its president, John Corkins, reminiscent of Lenin before his Council of People’s Commissars, called for the extermination of faculty who dare to oppose the revolution’s DEI ideology. Corkins said in reference to the faculty critics of the revolution’s doctrines – in essence, those guilty of “false consciousness” – of the need to “cull the herd”. He said, “We put a rope on some of ’em and take ’em to the slaughterhouse”.
John Corkins
In 1918, a Bolshevik organ, Krasnaya Gazeta, in the midst of their revolution put it in similar terms: “Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands; let them drown themselves in their own blood . . . . let there be floods of the blood of the bourgeois – more blood, as much as possible.” Culling the herd, indeed.
More shocking were the reputed erudites seated to his right at the trustee table who were smiling, giggling, and nodding in approval. See for yourself in the video clip from the meeting. It was a monstrous display of revolutionary groupthink.
Corkins was caught in the fever of a revolutionary moment, like the editors of Krasnaya Gazeta, and subsequently apologized. Yet, it’s a window into the mind of a revolutionary. In that mind lies a modern manifestation of an old revolutionary dialectic in the form of DEI – “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion”, or more accurately, “Discrimination, Exclusion, Indoctrination” in the words of Wisconsin’s Robin Voss (R.), Speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly.
“Diversity” is code for a return to race-based hiring, promotions, and admissions. “Equity” is code for a spoils system for selected “protected classes” (synonymous with the Marxist “oppressed”). “Inclusion” is code for excising western civilization from instruction and replacing it with a litany of oppression by oppressors noted for their light pigmentation, male genitalia, and membership in wealthier societies. “Privilege” and “systemic” is more jargon to that end.
How any of this can pass the muster of the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and UNC decisions (2023) is difficult to imagine. Chief Justice John Roberts put it succinctly in an earlier case (2007) when he wrote in the majority opinion, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” DEI is illegal if the rule of law has any meaning today.
Some didn’t get the Roberts memo, or more accurately ignored it in a brazen flaunting of the rule of law. The state’s Leninist Attorney General, Rob Bonta, rushed to the defense of Sonya Christian, chancellor of the state’s community college system and past president of both the Kern Community College District and Bakersfield College, and the target of lawsuits filed by faculty victims of the purge and loyalty oaths to the revolution. Bonta tried to recast the DEI mandates as advice, suggestions, or general guidelines, or “competencies” in Christian’s words. DEI “competencies” (or whatever) “advising” descriptions of the ways that the faculty will implement the revolution’s doctrines into classroom management, instruction, and grading is ipso facto forced endorsement of the revolution. Orwell’s Ministry of Truth would be proud.
Rob Bonta, state Attorney General
Others have also noticed the discrepancy between the law and California’s zeal for neo-Marxist revolution in the upper reaches of its community colleges. In a matter related to the lawsuit filed by the Institute for Free Speech on behalf of BC history professor Daymon Johnson against the district’s forced fealty to “anti-racist” ideology, a U.S. magistrate judge ruled that the district was wrong for stepping into a spat between faculty members Johnson and English prof Andrew Bond. At issue was an incendiary Facebook post by Bond:
“Maybe Trump’s comment about sh**hole countries was a statement of projection because honestly, the US is a f***ing piece of sh** nation. Go ahead and quote me, conservatives.”
Andrew Bond, left-wing activist and BC English profMatthew Garrett, BC History profDaymon Johnson, BC History prof
Johnson responded by suggesting that Bond “move to China”. And for that, Bond filed an administrative complaint of bullying against Johnson. Hyper-sensitive academics unable to engage in discourse have no business instructing anyone’s student body. The magistrate’s ruling is advisory while the lawsuit is pending before the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of California.
But it was the case regarding history prof Matthew Garrett that drew the ire of Corkins in his infamous remarks that “bad actors” like Garrett needed to be “culled” to the slaughterhouse. What was Garrett’s great and unforgiveable sin? He presented a different point of view to the reigning DEI orthodoxy on campus. He had the temerity of defending on free speech grounds “Smash Cultural Marxism”, etc., bumper stickers. And he was hauled before an administrative tribunal for criticizing the controversial University of Southern California Race and Equity Center poll on campus racism; trying to host a conservative speaker in violation of the school’s COVID restrictions at a time of approved progressive events, a jazz festival, football banquet, and a Day of the Dead celebration; and chiding “safe spaces” for black students as “segregation”. If Andrew Bond’s “the US is a f***ing piece of sh** nation” earns nary a glance of concern, what to make of the administrative hammer bearing down on Garrett for presenting a coherent alternative point of view?
Sonya Christian’s influence on campus during her tenure has been anything but salutary. She’s a lightning rod; her allegiance to neo-Marxist dogmas is provocative because the dogmas are provocative. They goad reaction because revolutions of this nature are totalitarian. They repudiate the central tenets of liberty which is a cornerstone of our society. The revolutionary ends now justify the revolutionary means.
Take a look, Kern County residents, at what your Board of Trustees is doing in your name. Please watch the clip. In the meantime, resist or leave the state. Your choices are simple at this juncture. Good luck.
RogerG
Sources:
* “California college trustee is forced to apologize after he was recorded saying anyone opposing woke anti-racism and ‘equity’ measures should be ‘roped’ and taken to the SLAUGHTERHOUSE”, Melissa Koenig, Daily Mail, 1/3/23, at https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11596097/California-college-trustee-apologizes-saying-opposing-anti-racism-roped.html
* “California’s Troubled Community-College System Just Got Worse”, Will Swaim, National Review, 12/16/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/12/californias-troubled-community-college-system-just-got-worse/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=fifth
* Daymon Johnson’s lawsuit case filing: “Johnson v. Watkin”, Institute for Free Speech, 6/5/23, at https://www.ifs.org/cases/johnson-v-watkin/
* The Renegade Institute for Liberty at Bakersfield College Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100048586580019
* “LENIN AND THE USE OF TERROR: SOME IMPORTANT QUOTATIONS”, World Future Fund, at https://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Quotes/leninkeyquotes.htm#:~:text=We%20will%20let%20loose%20the%20floodgates%20of%20that,bourgeois%20-%20more%20blood%2C%20as%20much%20as%20possible.%E2%80%9D
ntiwar March outside Crisler Arena on the University of Michigan Campus, September 20, 1969. Courtesy of The Detroit News Collection, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University.
Stalwarts of America First (SAF) approved the following manifesto on July 24, 2022: “[SAF] advocates that the U.S. get out of [Ukraine] for the following reasons: (a) the war hurts the [Ukrainian] people; (b) the war hurts the American people; (c) [SAF] is concerned about the [Ukrainian] and American people.”
The above is a bit of fiction. Most of the manifesto wording, with the substitution of “SAF” and “Ukrainian” for “SDS” and “Vietnamese”, was originally the official demand of the overt socialist Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) for an immediate U.S. withdrawal from South Vietnam that was approved prior to their notorious March on Washington, April 17, 1965. Give it a few years and their wish would be fulfilled, and the demons turned loose. All of Indochina fell in reeducation camps, gulags, executions, a genocide of the Laotian Hmong people, the Khmer Rouge bloodlust in Cambodia, a quarter million boat people, the hammer-and-sickle red flag flying over all of Indochina.
This time, it’s Ukraine on the chopping block, and the appeasement is coming from the right in a fit of real pretzel logic. Could it be “He must be for it; therefore, I must be against it” at work? People who placed Black Lives Matter yard signs out front in 2020 are flying the flag of Ukraine in 2022. Democrats and Biden cheer Zelensky; therefore, Zelensky and Ukraine are suspect. Is it that infantile? Don’t underestimate the slipshod reasoning of our so-called “thought leaders”, whether of the left or right.
Yep, peaceniks on the right. Who would have thunk it? It’s pretty bad when a person must turn to the always-wrong left for at least a glimmer of sense. Tucker Carlson, now banished to the hinterlands of podcast world, displayed a dose of the Left’s unhinged quality on the eve of the Soviet, er, Russian, invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In language reminiscent of the 1960’s New Left, Carlson accused Ukraine of being “a pure client state of the United States State Department”. After the invasion, he kept it up, throwing mud on Zelensky. He accused Zelensky of being a dictator, a demagogue. He, Zelensky, is charged by Carlson of taking “the opportunity to turn Ukraine into effectively a one-party state, which it now is.” He’s oblivious to the attempted obliteration of Zelensky’s country, or the fact that the martial law measures were passed by the Ukrainian parliament, a parliament that was really elected.
I wonder how long would it be before Carlson starts calling for the shuttering of the New York Times after the Peoples Liberation Army comes pouring over the Sierra Nevada. George Washington marched at the head of a militia force in 1794 to put down resistance to a tax. Carlson: “Der Fuehrer Washington”? I shutter to think about Carlson’s contempt for Lincon’s suspension of habeas corpus when Lincoln was confronted with the dissolution of the Union. Overwhelming threats to national survival make opposition to national existence under the guise of freedom a dangerous luxury. You may not agree but at least it’s understandable.
Tucker’s bloviating has earned him the respect of the Putin regime, the same junta that murders opposition at home and abroad, even before Putin’s tanks embarked on their misbegotten invasion in February 2022. He’s the go-to for Putin propaganda to buoy Russian spirits in the midst of the catastrophic losses. One headline in official state media, Russia Today, says it all: “Tucker Carlson wonders why U.S. elites hate Putin. Biden will pay for ‘defending freedom’ of Ukraine out of your pocket, controversial Fox host warns Americans.”
His compatriot at Fox News, Laura Ingraham, has similar sycophantic tendencies. Zelensky’s admonition to Putin to not attack his country was turned into “a pathetic plea” by Ingraham. She characterized the bid for conquest as just a “border dispute”. According to her, we are conditioned to “hate Putin” by the Dems, our media, the “establishment”, or something. There’s nothing to worry about from dear old Vlad. Whenever aid to Ukraine comes up, you can expect an insult directed at Zelensky or Ukraine from her. She did it again last night (12/15/2022).
Not everyone at Fox News agrees. Brian Kilmeade wouldn’t let Senator J.D. Vance (R-Oh.), a favorite of the Carlson/Ingraham crowd, get away with it. Vance on more aid to Ukraine: “It feels sometimes to me like we’re just shoveling money over there without any clear plan for what it’s meant to accomplish.” The no-plan, no-objective canard didn’t sell for Kilmeade: “Think down the line, though. You let Russia take 20% of a country, what about the next country? Give them another 20?… You gotta play this out. What don’t you understand about that?” Precisely.
rian Kilmeade on the couch to the right on Fox and Friends; Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Oh.) to the left.
Other voices from the newly emerging isolationist right have jumped onto the pro-Putin bandwagon with gusto. Candace Owens is foremost, after she removes her foot from her mouth. In a full-throated endorsement of Putin propaganda, she refuted Ukraine’s right to exist. She said, “Obviously Ukraine wasn’t a thing until 1989. Further, “Ukraine was created by the Russians. They speak Russian.” Actually, according to their latest census before the invasion, 29% of Ukrainians speak Russian as their first language.
Candace Owens
She went further. The Left has claimed for years that the U.S. is at fault for provoking our international conflicts. From the right comes Candace Owens to blame America first. She tweeted, “As I’ve said for [a] month— NATO (under direction from the United States) is violating previous agreements and expanding eastward. WE are at fault.” In her fevered imagination, we upset Vlad and we ought not tinker with the delicate sensibilities of a despot. This is akin to the hazy “systemic racism”. Think of systemic America’s fault, equally as vague as the chants of Antifa.
The retort to Owens came from an imminent historian of Soviet atrocities (the gulags, the Holodomor), Anne Applebaum. She succinctly tweeted in reference to Owens, “Behold the face of pure ignorance.” Quite right.
Anne Applebaum
The symmetry of the peacenik left and peacenik right is evident in recent remarks by that aging paragon of the 60s New Left, Noam Chomsky. He praises Trump for opposing aid to Ukraine. His compatriots at left-wing publications such as “Jacobin”, “New Left Review”, and “Democracy Now!” blame, like Owens, the U.S. and NATO for Putin’s brutal invasion. Is the horseshoe theory of politics – when the political extremes come to take common positions – validated in our time? Mmmmm, something to think about.
Appeasement doesn’t normally go well, especially on the continent of Europe. 1939-40 brought us the America First movement, and Hitler’s and Japan’s rampages over Europe and Asia. The 1960s brought us the New Left’s Anti-War Movement, and the bloodbath in Indochina. The Age of Trump has horseshoed us back to the old isolationism, this time under MAGA. What is in store for us under this New Right?
RogerG
Sources:
* “On the eve of war, Tucker Carlson defended Putin. Now he’s backpedaling”, Lorraine Ali, LA Times, 2/24/22, at https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2022-02-24/ukraine-russia-vladimir-putin-tucker-carlson-laura-ingraham-fox-news
* “Why America’s Far Right and Far Left Have Aligned Against Helping Ukraine”, Jan Dutkiewicz and Dominik Stecuła, Foreign Policy, 7/4/22, at https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/07/04/us-politics-ukraine-russia-far-right-left-progressive-horseshoe-theory/
* “Fox News Host Confronts GOP Senator J.D. Vance on Opposition to Ukraine Aid”, Fatma Khaled, Newsweek, 1/27/23, at https://www.newsweek.com/fox-news-host-confronts-gop-senator-jd-vance-opposition-ukraine-aid-1777122
* “Resistance and Revolution: The Anti-Vietnam War Movement at the University of Michigan, 1965-1972”, “The March on Washington”, at https://michiganintheworld.history.lsa.umich.edu/antivietnamwar/exhibits/show/exhibit/the_teach_ins/national_teach_in_1965#:~:text=The%20SDS%20March%20on%20Washington%20to%20End%20the,college%20students%20and%20others%20to%20the%20nation%E2%80%99s%20capital.
* “Tucker Carlson wonders why US elites hate Putin”, Russia Today (RT), 2/23/22, at https://www.rt.com/russia/550320-tucker-carlson-putin-hate/
* “Candace Owens Blames America For Russian Invasion of Ukraine: ‘WE Are at Fault’”, Caleb Howe, Mediaite, 2/22/22, at https://www.mediaite.com/politics/candace-owens-blames-america-for-russian-invasion-of-ukraine-we-are-at-fault/
* “‘Behold the face of pure ignorance’: Candace Owens mocked by Pulitzer-winning historian for Ukraine comment”, Gino Spocchia, The Independent, 3/19/22, at https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/candace-owens-ukraine-anne-applebaum-b2039581.html
* “Is Ukraine a Democracy? Separating Fact From Fiction”, Darragh Roche, Newsweek, 3/22/22, at https://www.newsweek.com/ukraine-democracy-separating-fact-fiction-russia-1690505
* “Tucker Carlson, downplaying Russia-Ukraine conflict, urges Americans to ask, ‘Why do I hate Putin?’”, Timothy Bella, Washington Post, 2/23/22, at https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/02/23/tucker-carlson-putin-russia-ukraine/
* “Tucker Carlson Challenges Zelensky to Prove Ukraine Is a Democracy”, Aleks Phillips, Newsweek, 1/23/23, at https://www.newsweek.com/tucker-carlson-volodymyr-zelensky-ukraine-democracy-1809590
* “Candace Owens Says U.S., NATO to Blame for Russia’s Ukraine Invasion”, Patricia McKnight, Newsweek, 2/22/22, at https://www.newsweek.com/candace-owens-says-us-nato-blame-russias-ukraine-invasion-1681589
* “Candace Owens Backs Putin’s Claim Russia Created Ukraine”, Katherine Fung, Newsweek, 3/16/22, at https://www.newsweek.com/candace-owens-backs-putins-claim-russia-created-ukraine-1688700
SF failure to sign: then-Los Angeles Angels designated hitter Shohei Ohtani reacts during the seventh inning at Angel Stadium in Anaheim, Calif., June 29, 2023. (Gary A. Vasquez/USA TODAY Sports via Reuters)
People are fleeing California and especially San Fransisco. San Fransisco is the tip of the spear in our current progressive-inspired wave of broad social decay. The fallout stretches from crime-ridden streets to ubiquitous disorder to business flight to join the residential variety — and in the difficulty in attracting promising young free agents, according to Buster Posey, recently retired player extraordinaire and part-owner and member of the team’s board of directors.
Buster Posey, Giants part-owner and member of the Board of Directors
Posey on the team’s difficulties: “Something I think is noteworthy, something that unfortunately keeps popping up from players and even the players’ wives is there’s a bit of an uneasiness with the city itself, as far as the state of the city, with crime, with drugs. . . . But as far as a free-agent pursuit goes, I have seen that it does affect things.”
Dan Lurie, throwing his hat into the ring for mayor, in an X post agrees with Posey. He posted,
“Players like Buster Posey have brought so much joy to San Franciscans, but now our city’s problems are affecting our ability to attract new generational stars. Our city should be a draw for players, not a reason to avoid our sports teams.
Current city leadership has let down the people who live and work in San Francisco every day. It’s time to call in the replacements and end the perception that lawlessness is an acceptable part of life in San Francisco. Then we will start our comeback.”
Dan Lurie, Levis heir and mayoral candidate
Yep, ideas have consequences, and probably the only real lasting consequences. The Lefty worldview is a disaster, and the calamity filters into everything, even my SF Giants.
San Fransisco poop map made famous by Gov. Ron DeSantis in his debate with Gov. Gavin Newsom
RogerG
* Dan Luries’s X post at https://twitter.com/DanielLurie/status/1735026315244528018?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1735026315244528018%7Ctwgr%5Ea4ecb030bd3537b9539ce9c7b19ade7f8ed3ca56%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nationalreview.com%2Fnews%2Fsnl-mocks-antisemitism-hearing-with-university-presidents-in-new-skit%2F
L-R) Harvard President Claudine Gay, former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, American University professor Pamela Nadell and MIT President Sally Kornbluth testify before the House Education and Workforce Committee on Dec 5. (Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
* “The Beast” is taken from Naomi Wolf’s latest book “Facing the Beast”.
You’ve all seen it or at least heard of it: the congressional testimony of the presidents of Harvard, UPenn, and MIT, particularly under the questioning of Elise Stefanik (R-NY). In monotone answers, as if coached by lawyers or PR experts, these people refused to declare that antisemitic speech calling for genocide of Jews by staff and students violates their schools’ official code of conduct (see video below). Their cagey responses say much about them and more so about the educational rot on their campuses and in their heads. It’s as if a malign beast has descended upon these places. Parents, beware.
What “beast”? The thing is more than a personification of evil. It’s the influence of ideas that can inspire people to do evil things. Some ideas are inherently evil. Some ideas are “beasts”, mostly because they contradict our nature. They bring out the worst in us and cause our demise. How do we know them? A biblical warning: “Ye shall know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16).
Today’s “beast” is the Marxist oppressor/oppressed claptrap. It’s everywhere in the quasi-mystical jargon in DEI, ESG, CRT, the politics of identity, etc., and throughout K to grad school. There aren’t many institutions not infected by it. Your kids are getting a steady dose of it whenever they step into a classroom, watch TV, go to a movie, and cruise the internet on their cellphone.
The “beast” has a family tree. The 60’s counterculture was a hip version of an older belief system, the same one that is now bombarding your kids from age 5 to 26. German Marxist agitator Rudi Dutschke in 1967 preached a “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” strategy, the so-called Long March through the institutions. In other words, he proposed that the zealots conquer the system from within rather than tear it down – co-opt it through infiltration. He rejiggered one of his Marxist inspirations’ (Antonio Gramsci) revolutionary “war of position” language from a few decades before. And, boy, did he and they succeed as evidenced by the prevarications on display in last week’s congressional testimony. The college presidents can’t bring themselves to condemn the now common Dutschke/Gramsci/Marcuse grotesqueries replete in their lecture halls and on their grounds.
Parents, are you sure that you are not bankrolling the ruination of your child’s mind in a leftist finishing school? And all this so your kids can have the prestige in possessing something that is quickly losing its prestige? How does that compute?
The degree and campus experience are rapidly losing their value. The indoctrination and subsequent lack of rigor cannot be hidden for long. Dunces and extremists with degrees cannot interminably escape the withering eye of reality. Every employer will come to realize the truth in “Ye shall know them by their fruits”. Statue-topplers aren’t likely to keep the sewer system in operation.
Send your kids and money elsewhere. Please watch the short clip.
Hugh Hewitt got me going. I was listening to his interview with Tim Alberta in last week’s program (12/6/23) about Alberta’s new book on the rise of Christian Nationalism (CN) in the evangelical movement. Hewitt disputed Alberta’s claim of a growing Christian Nationalist sentiment among evangelicals. Regardless of the trend’s size – and neither Hewitt or Alberta could put a finger on its actual magnitude – Hewitt misses the point. I think that Hewitt certainly understates CN’s impact, and, more importantly, he ignored the probability of it as a manifestation of Trump’s baleful influence within a good chunk of the Republican base, evangelicals. Today, Christian Nationalism is religious Trumpism.
Hugh Hewitt interviewing Tim Alberta
So, what is Christian Nationalism? Historically, it’s the identification of Christianity with American patriotism. The concoction is too strong for my tastes; however, I saw a reasonable commonality of interest of the two at a certain point in time. The term goes back to the Cold War. At the time, many Americans viewed the contest as a battle between a mostly Christian USA and godless Soviet atheism. It was a contest of powerful and obviously incompatible ideas. The latter was a serious threat to the former. The intersection of Christianity and American patriotism made sense.
In the interlude after the implosion of the Soviet Union, CN went dormant. In the last five or so years, it was reawakened in fits of despair over failures to break the Democrats’ and their neo-Marxist allies’ grip on political and cultural power.
And guess who appeared on the stage in 2015 to champion the dejected? Why, of course, Donald Trump. They wanted a fighter and they got one, and everything associated with it such as combativeness, bellicosity, and bombast. No deep thought and contemplation here, just in-your-face belligerence. The desire for drama quickly overshadowed policies and ideas. The Trump wave particularly spread over evangelicals and a reconstituted Christian Nationalism became just another manifestation of Trump’s cult of personality.
Yes, personality. Trump’s searing attraction was his pugilistic personality. It’s no surprise that a tabloid star would garner such loyalty in this combustible atmosphere. The Cold War’s battle of ideas degenerated into today’s mudslinging between the Democrats’ New Left and the Republican personality cult.
Trump didn’t bring anything to the table but histrionics, and a couple of policy ideas easily grasped and exploitable for visceral effect: the wall and evil foreigners stealing our jobs. There’s a great deal of truth in the need for a wall on the southern border, and much balderdash about the theft of jobs. While trade with Communist China is indeed a scandal for national security reasons, tariffing trade with allies is the height of stupidity. As the CCP becomes a global enterprise in Belt-and-Roads and a 300-ship and growing navy, Trump told our Asian allies to pound sand by taking TPP off the table and threatened tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum, and on the exports of a host of present and future allies. The guy loves and brandishes tariffs if all his talk of the glories of them is sincere.
Pres. Trump signs executive order imposing tariffs on imported steel from Canada and Mexico.Pres. Trump shows signed executive order withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Jan. 27, 2017.
The related issues of outsourcing and offshoring were demagogued; all the while, our contribution to driving American businesses away went down the memory hole. Alongside empowered NIMBY’s everywhere on American soil, EPA-like commissariats at all levels of American government, armies of neo-Marxist activists cropping up everywhere, and unions driving heavy manufacturing into bankruptcy, we voluntarily bludgeoned our home-grown enterprises with the highest corporate income tax rate in the world (see The Tax Foundation below). Yes, congressional Republicans and President Trump cut those rates beginning in 2018 (Tax Cut and Jobs Act), but that wasn’t part of Trump’s schtick in 2016 when the Trump sect made its appearance. It’s much more politically fruitful to blame foreigners than Americans for the situation. Instead, Trump’s tariffs were always the locus of his heart’s desire. They fit his style.
His allure washed over Republicans and the evangelical wing of the base. For the religious-minded, the cultural issues took center stage and Trump delivered the Supreme Court. For some with an evangelical bent, Trump would be identified with the Old Testament’s King Cyrus, a foreigner, a pagan who nonetheless was God’s agent to do good according to the prophet Isaiah. That formulation is the seed of a new Christian Nationalism centering on Trump. Today, when I read Christian Nationalism, I read Trump.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) speaks the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit held at the Tampa Convention Center on July 23, 2022 in Tampa, Florida.
The bright glow of the Trump personality attracted all sorts of imitators like moths to a lamp. Marjorie Taylor Greene, that Trumper of all Trumpers, pulls no punches in donning the garb of Christian Nationalism in 2022 at a Turning Point gathering when she declared, “We need to be the party of nationalism and I’m a Christian, and I say it proudly, we should be Christian nationalists.”
Lauren Boebert
For such people, brashness is a virtue. There’s no one more brash than Congresswoman Lauren Boebert (R, Colorado, 3rd Dist.). She scoffed at the commonly understood separation of church and state when she announced during a sermon at Cornerstone Christian Center in 2022, “I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk — that’s not in the Constitution. It was in a stinking letter and it means nothing like they say it does.” She goes further, “The church is supposed to direct the government. The government is not supposed to direct the church. That is not how our Founding Fathers intended it.” Brashness has no room for subtleties and nuance. Trumpian brashness is entertaining. There’s always time later to clean up the verbose mess.
Lauren Boebert speaking at the Cornerstone Christian Center
I suspect that Hewitt tried to diminish the influence of Christian Nationalism to protect the Trump brand from potential turn-offs to large swaths of the voting electorate in 2024. He’s got a big job ahead of him. Overt brashness, conceit, and narcissism invite trouble for those trying to piece together a winning coalition of voters. Hewitt’s tactic is to dismiss CN’s representativeness in the Trump base, and Trumpism, which is more stage temperament – i.e. personality – than policies or ideas.
We are entering dangerous territory in our current state of hyperbolic politics. Both parties are becoming extremely problematic. The Democrats’ neo-Marxism is a national suicide pill. For Republicans, toxic currents are swirling in their pool. What do I mean? The trumpeted marriage of Christianity to nationalism in the bluster of people like Lauren Boebert is, in fact, an inaccurate description. More properly, it’s nuptials between Christianity and Trumpism, that attempt to peddle the personality trait of brashness as a substitute for adult thinking. It’ll be a big turn-off once the 2024 campaigns begin in full swing no matter Hewitt’s declaration of Christian Nationalism to be insignificant.
Hewitt’s only hope is a greater loathing for Biden than Trump, a contest between who smells worse. Hewitt is doing his best to spray Glade over Trump’s pungency.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Corporate Income Tax Rates around the World, 2017”, Kari Jahnsen and Kyle Pomerleau, Tax Foundation, 9/7/2017, at https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/global/corporate-income-tax-rates-around-the-world-2017/#:~:text=Key%20Findings%201%20The%20United%20States%20has%20the,percent%20when%20weighted%20by%20GDP%29.%20…%20More%20items
* Marjorie Taylor Greene’s endorsement of Christian Nationalism: “Opinion: Marjorie Taylor Greene’s words on Christian nationalism are a wake-up call”, Amanda Tyler, CNN, 7/27/2022, at https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/27/opinions/christian-nationalism-marjorie-taylor-greene-tyler/index.html
* Lauren Boebert’s endorsement of Christian Nationalism: “Boebert says she is ‘tired’ of separation between church and state: ‘The church is supposed to direct the government’”, Brad Dress, The Hill, 6/22/2022, at https://thehill.com/homenews/house/3540071-boebert-says-she-is-tired-of-separation-between-church-and-state-the-church-is-supposed-to-direct-the-government/
* The full Boebert talk at Cornerstone Christian Center can be viewed in full on YouTube at https://youtu.be/P-G-oAl9pF8?si=qbQnoTmB4xxRSJE4
May 8, 2020, at a charging station in Dongguan, China, where an electric car caught fire when being plugged into a charger.
While perusing my news feed, I found a recent Fortune magazine article on the problems that electric vehicle owners are having with their cars, 80% more difficulties on average than conventional combustion vehicles (see below). The writer tried to deflect the problems into the category of “growing pains” for the new industry.
Yes, I agree with him, but he seems unaware of the much more fundamental issue. Problems or no, the EV is a politically driven product and, like any such good or service, has politically driven trade-offs. Growing pains? Growing pains or no, the whole EV industry probably would be immensely smaller but for politics. Politicians constructing their road to utopia understand that people must be bribed, and coerced, to mass adopt something that makes their lives worse off. The things still don’t make much economic sense compared to those efficient muscle engines.
Gasoline direct injection engine.An EV battery pack weighs on average 1,000 pounds. Your typical combustion engine and its transmission can vary from 300 (4-cylinder) to 1,000 pounds (V-8 powerhouse).
Lest we forget, politicians are camp followers, always with their fingers in the wind discerning the next fashionable thought or issue. Those leaning to the Left already have a laundry list of ready-made issues, just add water – i.e., donors’ money.
But there’s one huge complication: Politics is a poor driver of an economy. Utility (use and practicality) occupies first place in a normally functioning economy. Sellers invent and continue to produce the stuff that buyers find useful and enhances their lives. If it’s not as good as the alternatives, it’s essentially junk. It’s the economic definition of junk. When politics enters the fray, utility disappears from the equation. Practicality and usefulness take a back seat to powerful groups’ ideological demands. When the movement rises in prominence due to their momentary occupation of the commanding heights of the culture, they quickly gain the reins of political power to impose their preferences, and the artificially driven esteem for junk rises.
Trade-offs and opportunity costs are tossed to the wind. If pressed, the true believer can always interject their own wholly invented, unprovable costs into the equation. Prominent among the hypothetical eco-costs is the existential end of the planet. That’s always the gambit for the zealot: scare people into adopting the zealot’s choices. The Left’s ownership of the cultural commanding heights has made it easy for already Left-leaning politicos to engage in the hyperbole. Consequently, political power is married to an ideology’s agenda. In the end, your family sedan is forced into oblivion.
So, as politically inspired junk is imposed on the population, what is lost, or the opportunity cost? On the EV front, the auto producers’ resources are plowed into the less-useful and away from the more-useful. That’s a trade-off, and it’s unavoidable. The loss of the opportunity for producing the more useful things (opportunity costs) increases, and that’s equally unavoidable.
An EV depleted of chargeVandals cut and removed charging handles from this charging station on Vancouver Island, B.C.
What does all this mean for you? Your life changes, and for the worse. It always pencils-out that way when you are forced to choose the worst alternative. How bad is that alternative? The whole eco-agenda cascades onto you with its abundant unintended consequences. It goes beyond the problems with charging and the batteries (some of them catch fire) in the article. The additional resources to make the thing work as the numerous glitches of the impractical (“growing pains”) raise the costs of producing the impractical which will always translate into an increase in the cost of living. Higher standards of living do not ride the back of higher costs of production and living. The more that you try and do that, the worse it gets.
Save the planet by being worse off? But you aren’t saving the planet. Do you think for a moment that India and China and the rest of Donald Trump’s “shitholes” are going to give up cheap energy? Come on, get a grip. China is building new coal-fired plants at the same clip as they are warships. India, soon to be the planet’s most populous country, wants relief from the oppressive heat. Sorry, solar panels and windmills won’t cut it. Economies of scale in energy production, meaning a grid and power plants, is the only thing that’ll elevate people out of the sweat and filth. Everyone, if they were honest, knows it, except AOC, John Kerry, and our culture’s eco-barkers.
Wait a minute. That’s quite a crowd who’ve bought into the nonsense. And nonsense it is. The leap of faith from a period of warming temperatures to the apocalypse more resembles a religious doctrine than science. “Follow the science” is no such thing. It’s follow the eco-Pope.
That Genius of Lansing, Mi., Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, has decided to go California and follow the eco-Pope. She’s hellbent on bringing blackouts and skyrocketing utility bills to the wolverine state. She signed two bills establishing energy central planning (see below). The state must be 100% “clean energy” by 2040, 60% by 2035. That means a massive increase in solar and wind, 1.5 million acres more (Mackinac Center report, see below). The costs will be humungous, and it will be taken out of the hide of Michiganders. And out of the sovereign powers of localities. Their power to regulate these gargantuan scars on the land in their neighborhood will be proscribed. Expect each family in the state to shell out an additional $2,746 per year for energy (Mackinac Center report).
Declaring war on gas and petroleum and monopolizing all energy needs onto an electrical grid suffering from “intermittency” (solar and wind) is absolute folly. Do you want to live worse off? Do you want your children to be worse off? Don’t think for a moment that at least you’ve saved the planet, as they’ve made most people’s lives more challenging. By the way, it won’t be true for Jeff Bezos, nor Mark Zuckerberg, nor John Kerry, who married into the Heinz fortune.
Albert Gore and his mansions
The planet will be the same as before, and you’ll be less well off. All this brought to you by people who don’t know what they’re doing.
On second thought, they do. And it’s hooey.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Electric vehicle owners report 80% more problems than with conventional cars and trucks amid ‘growing pains’ for the industry, Consumer Reports says”, Tom Krisher of the AP, Fortune, 11/23/23, at https://fortune.com/2023/11/29/electric-vehicle-reliability-more-problems-gas-powered/
* “Michigan Gov Whitmer signs sweeping green energy bill forcing transition from fossil fuels”, Thomas Catenacci, Fox News, 11/30/23, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/michigan-gov-whitmer-signs-sweeping-green-energy-bill-forcing-transition-from-fossil-fuels/ar-AA1kJF4I
* “New Energy Bills Would Increase Costs and Blackouts”, Holly Wetzel, Mackinac Center, 10/27/2023, at https://www.mackinac.org/pressroom/2023/new-energy-bills-would-increase-costs-and-blackouts
