A blog in defense of western civilization by Roger Graf
Author: RogerG
I am a retired teacher and coach, Social Science Department chairman, community college instructor in Physical and Human Geography. I have attended 4 colleges with relevant degrees and certificates in History, Religious Studies/Philosophy, Education, and Planning and Community Development. I am also a 3rd generation native Californian, now refugee living in northwest Montana.
Donald Trump enters Manhattan for his arraignment hearing 4/4/2024.
* A common origin story attributes the quote to P.T. Barnum, but that is unlikely. Versions of it have been around for centuries. It probably was in widespread usage among 19th-century gamblers before anyone attempted to smear Barnum with saying it.
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Some have referred to the Republican Party as the “stupid party”. Certainly, more than a few use the phrase to denigrate anyone who disagrees with them. However, if the last three elections are any indication, the GOP might not be “stupid”, but they are proving themselves to be susceptible to Lucy’s tactics to get Charlie Brown to kick the football.
Trump is a loser because he’s repulsive, but all the Democrats have to do to get the Republicans to make Trump the face of the party is to make a grand show of persecuting him in impeachments, investigations, serial attacks on him and his family, and now indictments. Indicting him worked wonderfully for the donkey party. Trump, at least for now, is the face of the GOP. The result could be a four-peat after 2018, 2020, and 2022. Simply put, Donald Trump is the Democrats’ most effective weapon against the Republicans. And watch Republicans walk right into it. Lucy walks away laughing, thinking that “There’s a sucker born every minute” as Charlie Brown lies flat on the ground in humiliation.
The Democrats’ Lucy has learned that the Republican Charlie Brown walks right into the confidence scheme every time, like a moth drawn to the light. Opinion polls show, once again, that it is working. Trump’s approval numbers and donations skyrocket. Polls abound showing Trump with a growing and sizeable lead over DeSantis as publicity built in anticipation of the indictment mounted (see below). Since last Thursday, the day before the indictment, a Trump campaign spokesman said the campaign reeled in $7 million in contributions (see below).
A measure of Trump-mania in the GOP could be a comparison of the reactions to the possible indictment between the general public and registered Republicans. Right off the bat, I believe the indictment to be a moral monstrosity; yet, the comparison sets the stage for what will likely happen in a 2024 general election. Two polls a week before the indictment indicated 55-56% of Americans found the Bragg investigations into Trump fair. But for Republicans, 80% considered it to be a “witch hunt” (see below). However you slice it, a thoroughly senescent Democrat candidate in 2020 – or a Democrat stroke victim in a Pennsylvania Senate race against a Trump-endorsed opponent in 2022 – becomes competitive in the general election when running against Trump. What’s popular in Republican circles – like Trump – turns out to be not so popular among the general voting public. We’ve got a history to prove it.
If GOP partisans brush me off by pointing to the 2016 shocker, you are like the big post man in basketball who couldn’t make a free throw but drains a three-pointer at the start of the game. For the rest of the game, he’s camped at the three-line launching airballs. Trump hit a three in 2016 but then threw bricks in 2018, 2020, and 2022. Now, Republicans are ready to reinstate Trump at the three-line once again with the now usual result.
The senescent Joe Biden is greeted at the airport by the stroke victim John Fetterman.
The Democrats are ready, as they never were in 2016, with their fount of small-dollar donations, big-chunk contributions of lefty billionaires, and vote-by-mail harvesting schemes. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. The Democrats aren’t waiting to be fooled.
But Republicans are. The Democrats are doing whatever it takes to keep Trump in the limelight and therefore the face of the party. They can’t run on an inflation-rattled economy; energy costs driving people into the poorhouse; soaring crime; fiscal insanity; a bumbling foreign policy; boys in girls’ sports, locker rooms and bathrooms; neo-Marxist school curriculums; and greenie utopian campaigns that are destroying livelihoods. But they do have Trump. Trump is repulsive; he turns off more people than he turns on. He’s a winner among a rattled base in a party primary, but loser in the general. The Democrats know it.
The Democrats are quite crafty. They know enough to indict a ham sandwich, and watch Republicans flock to the rancid ham sandwich. Apparently, Republicans never listened to The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again”. They are all into that – getting fooled, that is. Gamblers are right: there’s a sucker born every minute, and there’s a lot of them in the GOP.
Trump baggage!
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Trump’s Support Is Growing Among GOP Voters—Even As Possible Indictment Looms”, Sara Dorn, Forbes, Mach 27, 2023, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-s-support-is-growing-among-gop-voters-even-as-possible-indictment-looms/ar-AA198UkZ
* “Donald Trump cashing in on indictment, as news pays off for his 2024 presidential campaign: ‘witch hunt’”, Paul Steinhauser, 4/4/2023, Fox News, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/donald-trump-cashing-in-on-indictment-as-news-pays-off-for-his-2024-presidential-campaign-witch-hunt/ar-AA19qWpc
“It’s legally pathetic.” — Law professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University School of Law on the Trump indictment on Bret Baier’s “Special Report” program, Thursday (3/31/2023). See the Turley interview below.
Yep, Bragg pulled the trigger. Alvin Bragg’s indictment crusade against Trump is more than legally pathetic. It’s more proof that the United States is descending into a banana republic. The moral distance between us and Putin’s Russia is shrinking.
Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s KGB chief and close confidant, once said, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” Putin follows the same script, and now we must add Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg and the Democratic Party’s vigilante posse to the list of the maxim’s adherents. But there’s a big “if”, if what has long been reported on the case is accurate. I’m skeptical of anything new on a case that has been combed and vacuumed by the party’s hitmen in the DOJ and Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance, Jr., for at least six years. All of it came to naught . . . until Bragg ascended the throne of vigilante-in-chief in ultra-blue Manhattan.
In a nutshell, the case appears to be the brew of a legally dead accusation (vaguely worded accounting entry) hitched to another murky, hypothetical federal one (an enigmatic federal campaign finance violation) in order to conjure a felony and escape the statute of limitations. Got that? And this from a guy whose campaign pledge was to get Trump. According to ABC News,
“During the campaign, Bragg spoke openly about the DA’s investigations into Trump and cited his experience in the AG’s office as a qualification. He won the election and assumed office in January 2022, becoming the first Black Manhattan DA.”
Alvin Bragg campaigning for the office of Manhattan DA in 2021.
In an electoral cluster hot to hang Trump, Bragg was rewarded with the keys to power. Vendetta justice is chic in Manhattan. Good luck in gathering a fair-minded jury from that snake pit.
By the way, don’t let the 34 counts in the indictment fool you. In Turley’s words, it’s just “count stacking” by multiplying the same charge in each one of multiple evidentiary documents in Bragg’s possession – a favorite ploy to sell the unsaleable.
Funny thing about Bragg, he cares more about the vocabulary on an accounting ledger and federal law outside his jurisdiction than robbery with a deadly weapon within his jurisdiction. He was caught red-handed when the public learned of him issuing an office staff directive shortly after moving into his sinecure. It ordered staff to not prosecute certain crimes while ordering a downgrade of entire classes of assaults and robberies. Playing footsie with the statute books, five classes of armed robberies will be reduced to misdemeanor larceny and third-degree robbery charges – “forcibly steals property” – are to be dropped entirely. He works overtime to hang Trump on phantom charges while the city’s streets and subways become war zones. Let Christopher Herrmann, professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, paint the picture for Bragg: “. . . crime is up in New York City, and it’s up quite a bit.” And to think that Bragg is working to release the miscreants back onto the streets. Is this guy out this mind?
If anything, rather than pursue Trump, Bragg should be investigated because he is in open defiance of his oath of office and thus deserving of impeachment. He swore to the following oath upon taking office (see below): “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the State of New York, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of ……, according to the best of my ability.” Does “faithfully discharging the duties of the office” cover categorical refusals to prosecute certain categories of crimes? Bragg, with the wave of his hand, has, in effect, repealed entire sections of the New York state penal code. Sounds to me like Bragg is in open rebellion against his oath of office. Prosecutorial discretion doesn’t apply to blanket reductions in charging decisions and refusals to prosecute. Instead, that’s a DA with a Caesar complex itching for removal from office.
I can’t, with a straight face, look upon our role in monitoring the behavior of other countries as if we are a beacon of decency. Look at us: we advance racism under the guise of anti-racism; abortion up to and including infanticide is ballyhooed; our children are robbed of their innocence in curriculums littered in gay porn; child sexual mutilation is a protected activity in some of our states; much of Hollywood’s exports are a moral afront to other cultures; our elections aren’t a model to be emulated as we shotgun ballots hither and yon and have meltdowns counting them; our fiscal incontinence is putting us in the same category with Argentina; education in America for Americans is a scandal; and the world sees a form of justice that is already frighteningly familiar to them. Our moral high ground is collapsing into a sinkhole.
The foregoing indictment of our country, mostly brought to us by the neo-Marxists in our midst, is making us an embarrassment. Bragg’s indictment will in all probability add more shame to our growing ignoble reputation.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Alvin Bragg made tough-on-Trump record central to campaign for DA”, Joseph Clark, The Washington Times, 3/31/2023, at https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/mar/31/alvin-bragg-made-his-tough-trump-record-central-hi/
* “What to know about the Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg Jr., who will be prosecuting Trump”, Iban Pereira, ABC News, 3/31/2023, at https://abcnews.go.com/US/manhattan-da-alvin-bragg-jr-prosecuting-trump/story?id=97989545
* “Let’s break down exactly what Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s memo says”, Nicole Gelinas, The New York Post, 1/11/2022, at https://nypost.com/2022/01/11/lets-break-down-exactly-what-manhattan-da-alvin-braggs-memo-says/
* “New York Constitution Article XIII – Public Officers; Section 1 – Oath of office; no other test for public office”, JUSTIA US Law, at https://law.justia.com/constitution/new-york/article-xiii/section-1/
* “The Trump Indictment: Making History in the Worst Possible Way”, Jonathan Turley, Jonathan Turley: Res ipsa loquitur – The thing itself speaks, 3/31/2023, at https://jonathanturley.org/2023/03/31/the-trump-indictment-making-history-in-the-worst-possible-way/
Nashville killer in hallway of Covenant School as she hunts for more victims (from school surveillance camera).People pray during a community vigil for the victims of the Nashville Covenant School shooting spree in nearby Mount Juliet, Tenn., on March 28, 2023. (photo: Andrew Nelles, AP)
This past Monday a young woman, age 28, walked into an elementary school in Nashville and murdered three children and three adults. I was nearly brought to tears watching the police body cam footage that shows courageous police officers in a frantic rush through the rooms and finally ending the madness by killing the shooter. The tears were for the shock and horror of children having to face another murderous miscreant. Quite frankly, it was hard to watch. Prayers go out to all the families who now have a huge hole in their hearts to bear, and to the parents of the killer who now must continue their lives knowing that their child is a mass murderer. Thinking about it, the sadness must be almost unendurable.
After these events, and even more horrifying, we’ve seen people too regularly jump to their agenda in grotesque exploitation. The president, Monday, went before the press to comment on the event and opened with a standup comedy routine and then shifted to his favorite hobby horse of gun control (see below). The bodies are still at the coroner, loved ones are devastated and groping for ways to cope, and a president shames himself before cameras and microphones. The White House scene was obscene.
We don’t know much at this stage about the shooter and her motive. It’s far too easy for us to join the crowd and connect the tragedy to our personal social and political hobby horses. I will try to refrain from doing that. Yet, there are certain aspects about the shooter to come to light that may or may not be relevant. Absent evidence, though, keep in mind that the known facts of her trans-identity as a man and the killing spree should be treated as unrelated at this moment.
But it doesn’t mean that killings by a trans person suddenly prevents us from continuing our public discussion on transgenderism and the strong possibility of a social contagion. Regardless of the outcome of this investigation, this debate must proceed for the stakes are too great for our children.
The argument against a trans social contagion relies on a suspension of common sense. Peer pressure and social media contagions apply everywhere else but magically they are blocked from operating on this topic. The entire advertising industry and cancel culture rely on the triggering aspect of peer pressure. People buy Coke over Pepsi (and vice versa) and censorship on campus is justified by alleged “hurts” that transmit through the social ether of the student body. Sorry, the argument lacks merit.
And other facts clearly point to a social contagion. Where is trans-identity most prevalent? It isn’t evenly distributed. Madeleine Kearns (see below) has followed the subject for quite some time. She noticed that California has young people identifying “as trans at a nearly 38 percent higher rate than the national average”. In the very progressive California city of Davis, according to numbers provided by the Davis Unified School District, the rate is three times that of California. What is there in the California social eco-system that is causing a teen rush to transgenderism? The scale of the increase suggests something more than children are now free to expose their inner trans self.
Trans-identity certainly happens everywhere but concentrations strongly imply a contagion is at work. A bump in the numbers not only occurs by geographical location but also by sex. Just a short time ago, it was boys who mostly suffered from gender-dysphoria. Now, it’s girls by two to one. What happened? Social media happened as other influences were locked down during the pandemic. Kids were isolated in long stretches with their cellphones. The isolation and the well-known sensitivity of teenage girls about their bodies brews a perfect storm.
Consider this: any husband will rue the day he ever suggested to his wife that she is getting a bit plump.
My position on the social contagion aspect of transgenderism is unrelated to the Nashville event. Her trans-identity didn’t pull the trigger. Until proven otherwise, trans people aren’t prone to murder any more than anyone else. The willingness to take life stems from something much deeper in the cranial recesses than gender dysphoria, genitalia, or chromosomes.
That said, we need to take seriously the fact that young people are intensely more impressionable than some gratuitously let on. Drag queen story hours, anal and oral sex picture books for adolescents, the instant networking of tweens/teens on their cellphones, the pervasive online content, and parental detachment from the lives of their children make for a toxic brew. Are we weaponizing normal tween/teen insecurities into rampant dissatisfaction with their bodies? Yes, we appear to be. Its modern manifestation is transgenderism.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Biden makes ice cream joke in first statement since Nashville shooting”, Stephen Nelson, The NY Post, 3/27/2023, at https://nypost.com/2023/03/27/bidens-bizarre-ice-cream-joke-in-nashville-shooting-remarks/
* “Trans and Teens: The Social-Contagion Factor Is Real”, Madeleine Kearns, National Review, 2/20/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/02/20/trans-and-teens-the-social-contagion-factor/
Trump and Biden at their last presidential debate in 2020.
Please watch, if you haven’t already, this recent 60 Minutes report (below) on the CCP’s PLA Navy. It’s eye-opening . . . or should be.
How did we get to this juncture of potentially losing a war against a rising hyper-power, Red China? If you look closely, an answer becomes apparent in the mediocrity that lies at all levels of our society, modern culture, and in our institutions. We are riddled with corrosive ideologies that sap our determination and abilities to respond to the threat. Mediocrities have filled the ranks of our political leadership from Obama to Biden. The predicament is frightening.
How frightening? Defense experts constantly war-game the likely outcomes of military conflict, like the emerging one between the US and Red China that culminated in a report released last December. In 18 of the 22 rounds of the war game, the US lost 500 aircraft, 20 surface ships, and two aircraft carriers. Our capabilities have stagnated as the CCP’s has grown by leaps and bounds. Everybody in the know knows it. The 5,000 sailors on the USS Nimitz should be nervous about being cooped up on a huge target beset by a swarm of anti-ship hypersonics. They should realize that military service has the potential of being a commitment that involves much more than seeing the world or the GI Bill.
The sinking of the USS Oriskany off the Florida coast in May of 2016. A harbinger of things to come?
At the same time as we allow our military capabilities to degrade, we plunge a dagger into the ranks’ morale with DEI and anti-racism crusades. These ideological jihads descending on the ranks on orders from the Pentagon dispirit them in charges that America, and all that it stands for, is a through-and-through oppressor. If you buy into it, what happens to your loyalty as your finger sets ready at the trigger of some of the most lethal weaponry in the world? If not, you might be driven to insubordination. What a way to run the nation’s defense.
Our multi-decade of mediocrities in the White House, Congress, and the Pentagon, including the present and previous occupants sitting behind the Resolute desk, have played Tiddlywinks as the Red Chinese are occupied with chess. The linkages between international actions seem to be beyond their mental capacity.
First, Trump. As the rest of the Indo-Pacific, particularly the first island chain and beyond, became abundantly aware of Red China’s encirclement of them in military and Belt-and-Road initiatives, and as they sought closer alignment with the US, Donald Trump attacked their economies with good old-fashioned American protectionism. Remember TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement? Not only did he quash it, he bragged about it (see “Read more here”).
Soon, in May 2018, Trump is pasting tariffs on imported steel from allies like Canada and Australia. The so-called shift to face Red China was blunted by efforts to make enemies of allies. The logic is straight out of the sandbox. In a tweet from May 2, 2018, he announced in a shallow display of economic reasoning,
“When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win. Example, when we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don’t trade anymore-we win big. It’s easy!”
Trade wars are good? Did anyone attempt to remind him of Smoot-Hawley, even if it wouldn’t have had any effect? And good for whom? Certainly, appliance manufacturers, and anyone else using steel, and consumers wouldn’t be better off. Plus, it’s a charade that ignores the causes for the evolution of the Rust Belt. Bluntly put, we did it to ourselves in falling into the grip of militant unionism, the snake pit of eco-red tape, and a mounting tax burden. Business goes elsewhere once you become hostile to it. As we speak, California is learning that lesson all over again. Dah!
Donald Trump shows the executive order withdrawing the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Jan. 23, 2017.
Until we clean up our own act, slapping tariffs on competitive products only puts lipstick on a pig. It’s a loser for most of the country. Consumers and steel users get shafted; allies seek solace from our enemies; and all of it just to pander to a few union bosses and a few thousand dues-payers at a cost to hundreds of thousands of other American workers. It’s a classic one step forward and six steps back. Donald Trump can’t count steps.
Then, the man from Mar-A-Lago got it in his craw that the Bushes should be slapped with “establishment” and “forever wars”. Of course, the “forever wars” rhetoric, if applied to the Cold War, a classic “forever war”, would have meant a surrender to the USSR and the world turning into a Soviet playground. Some “forever wars” are worth fighting, because “forever” can turn into collapse of an adversary ill-equipped to keep up.
But Donald Trump got his way in the sordid Doha Accords which established the predicate for a withdrawal from the Middle East, only to be additionally botched by his successor who, according to Robert Gates, has “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades” (see below). Now, Trump, in his third bite at the apple, has decided to pander to the isolationistic wing of the Republican Party by favoring a weakening of our resolve on Ukraine. A bugout from Afghanistan will be followed by another one from Ukraine.
A C5a Galaxy taking off at Kabul airport as part of the Biden withdrawal from Afghanistan, August 2021.
Donald Trump and his senescent successor seem incapable of playing chess. If the grotesquerie of a Kabul bugout is condemnable for its encouragement to aggressors, what do you think an evisceration of Ukraine on the heels of Kabul would mean? And while we’re floundering in this self-defeating wrangle over isolationism, we assault our own troops with charges of racism and other bigotries. Shortly after Biden takes office, a standdown was issued throughout our national defense to expose the ranks to anti-American indoctrination predicated on American being a hateful country. Mediocrities running the country may be a greater threat than a decaying national defense.
A disaster awaits, and it will be plaid in blood, the blood of those who volunteered to defend the country. The scene of charred bodies going down with the ship and many of our injured sailors swimming in seas ablaze may be the real cost for choosing mediocrities to control the ship of state.
Will we idly wait till it happens? Will we continue to turn to mediocrities? Please watch the video.
Philosopher Herbert Marcuse makes a speech at the Praxis Summer School, 1968
“Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.” —- Herbert Marcuse in “Repressive Tolerance”, 1965 (see below)
Let’s face it, the above quote from Herbert Marcuse (an acolyte of Antonio Gramsci) is emblematic of the rise of the Left’s totalitarian thought control that plagues our times. You know, you’ve seen its fruits in the neo-Marxist critical theory littered in your child’s school curriculum, our teachers’ training, and the campus anarchy spawned by “restorative justice” disciplinary policies. Even casual attention to the news during the 2020 summer of mayhem would expose you to the wholesale defacing of monuments and memorials and urban centers being set ablaze. The gray lady, The New York Times, jumped into the fray with a neo-Marxist rewrite of our history in “The 1619 Project”, which is inserted in bits and pieces in the instruction in many of our classrooms. And let’s not forget the campus mob beatdowns of contrarian voices to the zeitgeist in higher ed from Middlebury to Stanford. Speaking of repressive tolerance (?).
Herbert Marcuse in a heated exchange with a student, from the 1960’s. Practicing a little “repressive tolerance”?
Taking apart the above witticism from Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance” essay, it’s a call for intolerance by hiding it in oxymorons. Repressive tolerance? Liberation by repression? But it is convincing to minds heavily marinated in the intellectual mush.
These young minds are immersed in “woke” thought, and “woke” thought is critical theory, and critical theory is obeisance to the claim of systemic oppression. You see, the whole civilization, its society and culture, according to critical theory are oriented to oppress the “other”, or so-called outgroups as defined by characteristics such as race, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, etc. Everything about the civilization, its law, principles, institutions, are cynically appraised for their supposed malevolent impact on the “other”. The basic rights of free speech, association, conscience, religion must be reinterpreted as part of the system of oppression. The effort is a very longwinded way of saying that we, the self-appointed spokesmen of the oppressed, have the power to silence you. Welcome to the college campus of today.
Something is afoot, and it ain’t pleasant. Our culture and nearly all our institutions are being hijacked by this neo-Marxist junk-thought. And as happens with a radicalization of the Left, there is a commensurate radicalization of the Right, which oddly takes the form of a cult of personality and performance art politics. Trump and dramatic displays of bellicosity replace strategic and reasoned confrontation to the nonsense. Fringe extremes they may be, but we still are in a hell of a mess.
Neo-Marxism is now the prevailing doctrine of the Democratic Party. It comes in the form of “diversity, equity, inclusion” (DEI — or DIE if you will) and furtherance of ESG (environment, social, governance) in the c-suite. It’s a combination of a neo-Jim Crow (race/gender/sexuality-based favoritism) and a dismantlement of western civilization in private sector venues. As for the Right, they have the utterances of Fox News primetime and some talk radio hosts. These venues are deathly afraid of the personality cult in their audiences.
Hugh Hewitt on his radio show regularly declares himself to be in Switzerland (neutral) in the coming Republican presidential primary fight. All contestants will be treated as moral equivalents, probably in a bid to avoid angering the large Trumper listener base for talk radio. The fear is certainly evident at Fox News. The Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News unearthed a treasure trove of duplicity and alarm on the part of Fox News’s celebrity pundits and execs. In released emails and tweets, the channel’s stars spitefully attack the news division over its coverage of the 2020 election and aftermath. The vitriol is lathered in ample dollops of hubris – “we have the power”.
The anxiety in Fox News headquarters in the wake of the 2020 election was palpable. Execs and producers noticed the absence of evidence to support the election-was-stolen angle. Tommy Firth, Laura Ingraham’s producer, is exasperated with the storyline of Dominion rigging the vote for Biden: “This Dominion shit is going to give me an aneurysm – as many times as I’ve told Laura [sic] it’s bs, she sees shit posters and trump [sic] tweeting about it.”
The call of Arizona for Biden was particularly galling to Fox’s commentariat. Laura Ingraham blames exec Irena Briganti for the call: “She is coordinating this.” To which Tucker Carlson responds, “Without question. She hates us.” Sean Hannity chimes in, “Why would anyone defend that call [the Arizona call] [sic].” Later, Laura noticed a ratings fall after the announcement and concludes, “Friday numbers aren’t that surprising with Trump impending loss – but how much of the bleed is due to anger at the news channel [division]”. She levels her distaste for the news division: “My anger at the news channel [division] is pronounced”.
Tucker’s response is telling because he predicts ratings damage by angering the channel’s Trump-laced audience:
“It should be [sic] We devote our lives to building an audience and they [the execs] let Chris Wallace and Leland fucking Vittert [host, reporter] wreck it. Too much.”
After asking, “What can we do?”, Laura answers her own question in a series of tweets: “I think the three of us have enormous power” – “We have more power than we know or exercise” – “Together”. Hubris follows from immense power, the power to craft the story to appease an audience? I can’t say at this point, but the communications are suggestive.
Sean Hannity cuts to the chase in a tweet exchange with Steve Doocy: “You don’t piss off the base”.
So, the Left’s cancel culture joins the Right’s reluctance to aggravate its base to produce either indoctrination through censorship or information that conforms to only blatant confirmation bias. Either way, dangerous fairy tales take root to mangle the public discussion.
Both sides are pandered by only information and stories congenial to their sensibilities. The effect on the young is shocking. They are the ones who are immersed in a Marcusian cognitive hellscape. Herbert Marcuse and his colleagues at the Marxist Frankfurt School – aka Institute for Social Research at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany – scattered like rats on a sinking ship when the Nazis seized Germany. Many came to the U.S. and joined faculties at prestigious American universities such as Harvard, Columbia, UC Berkeley, etc. Therein spread the mental straitjacket of neo-Marxism for our young.
Marcuse’s “repressive tolerance” intolerance became deeply embedded in campus culture. Most recently, on March 9, it was on full display at Stanford when the school’s Federalist Society invited Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan to speak. The essence of Marcuse’s logic to stifle speech from the Right came out of the mouth of the school’s Dean of DEI, Tirien Steinbach, when she took to the lectern after students prevented Duncan from speaking and lectured him on how “hurtful” his opinions and rulings were to the “community”. She and the bullying students claimed the total power to determine what was “hurtful” and prevent any further discussion. It’s classic Marcuse; repressive tolerance in operation.
See video below. Watch Stanford’s DEI dean takeover the lectern from Judge Duncan.
Marcuse ended his academic career at UC, San Diego. For academics braying against capitalism and western civilization, they clearly flock to western civ’s most comfortable, well-paid sinecures in the most pleasant spots on earth.
Herbert Marcuse enjoying the good life at UC San Diego, the 1960’s.
Check this out: they even had a “summer school”, the Korčula (Praxis) Summer School, or camp, on Croatia’s soothing Adriatic coast from 1963 to 1974 when the Marxist Yugoslav dictator Josip Broz Tito shut it down. Some participants referred to it as “Marx on the beach”; others called it a gathering for “dionysaic socialism” (see below). Tenure, hobnobbing with similarly privileged fellow Marxists, adequate incomes, and academic freedom work to insulate them from having to live in the consequences of their detached ruminations. It makes for a very special caste of Brahmins, one that will produce a living hell for everyone not so privileged to be among the revolution’s vanguard elite.
Come to think of it, this is a time of “repressive tolerance” intolerance and a broad depravity on both the Left and a slice of the Right. The Left tries to set themselves up as commissars of daily life, allowing only what conforms to their sensibilities. Some on the Right want to be cradled only in the pronouncements of the chief priest of the Trump cult. The reality is that we need to seize back control of K-grad school from this brewing totalitarianism, and Trump-the-drama-queen should hang up the MAGA hat and enjoy retirement.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Repressive Tolerance (full text)”, Herbert Marcuse, 1969, at https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1965-repressive-tolerance-fulltext.html
* “Texts from the Dominion lawsuit reveal the real Fox News”, Bent D. Griffiths and Rebecca Zisser, Insider, 3/22/2023, at https://www.businessinsider.com/texts-from-the-dominion-lawsuit-reveal-the-real-fox-news-2023-3
* “Marx on the beach: the forgotten story of Yugoslavia’s rebel communist summer school”, Jonathan Bousfield, The Calvert Journal, 8/21/2021, at https://www.calvertjournal.com/articles/show/13038/marx-on-the-beach-the-forgotten-story-of-yugoslavias-rebel-communist-summer-school
Mark Twain’s famous quip of history seldom repeating but at least rhyming comes to the fore once again. The isolationism of William Jennings Bryan (failed 3-time Democratic presidential candidate), Eugene Debs (socialist), Charles Lindbergh (1940-1, America First Committee), and the 1960’s anti-war left has found a home in some of the boisterous ranks of the GOP. Now, must we add Ron DeSantis to the list of people dipping their toe in the tepid water of today’s isolationism, a form of reflexive non-interventionism?
Recently, Gov. Ron DeSantis declared on Tucker Carlson that Ukraine is not a “vital” interest of the US when he said, “While the U.S. has many vital national interests . . . becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them” (see below). He had the nerve to incoherently call it a “territorial dispute”. Putin’s stumbling blitzkrieg in February and March of 2022 had more than the Donbas in his sights. It was an attempted seizure of the whole country. Mere territorial dispute?
Russian tanks and other vehicles on the road to Kyiv, February 2022.
First, Trump senses the popularity of the new isolationism too and seeks to exploit it by using the banal canard of domestic problems leaving little room for a superpower foreign policy: “The Democrats are sending another $40 billion to Ukraine, yet America’s parents are struggling to even feed their children” (see below). If the presence of starving children in America is an argument against our involvement in the world, Spain would still control much of the Caribbean and the Philippines; the Panama Canal would have remained the unfinished and overgrown mess that Ferdinand de Lesseps left it; the Kaiser would be free to redraw the map of Europe; Hitler might have turned London into another one of his vacation retreats; and a free-ranging USSR would still have a hammerlock on Eastern Europe with an array of Third World proxy satraps menacing our borders and access to rare earths.
Republican Senator Josh Hawley is more forthright in his isolationism when he said in a February speech before the Heritage Foundation, “We should cut off U.S. military aid to Ukraine until our European allies step up.” Again, “I don’t think we should give any more funding right now” (See below). He talks as if stopping naked aggression on the continent of Europe is not in our interests all by itself, as if 104,812 US deaths and 552,117 total casualties in 1940’s Europe were wasted.
Is DeSantis beginning his transition into Charles Lindbergh, to join the other trans-Lindberghs in the House GOP’s neo-Squad (move over AOC for Gaetz and company) and their supporting cast of huckster pundits. Lindbergh was noted for his advocacy of neutrality from the start of the war in 1939 until Japanese naval aircraft turned Pearl Harbor into a burning hulk. Isolationism works until it doesn’t.
Charles Lindbergh making a speech before the non-interventionist American First Committee in Des Moines, Ia., September 11, 1941.
That Metternich of the right, Matt Gaetz, in a display of thundering obtuseness in 2021, proclaimed to Gen. Mark Milley, “We are an Atlantic power. . . .” Right there, Gaetz made us a regional power, and as one, incoherently, we ought not support Ukraine. His latest concoction is the “Ukraine Fatigue Resolution” which demands a halt to further military and financial aid to Ukraine (see below).
It joins the ranks of other stoppages to US intervention such as the Democrats’ abandonment of South Vietnam. They got us in – JFK, LBJ – and now enthralled by the 60’s neo-Marxist New Left, they were determined to desert the South Vietnamese. After the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973, a Democrat-led Congress approved an end to funding slated for August of that year. As things in the South heated up in 1975 under a full-scale North Vietnamese invasion, they rejected any more assistance to our beleaguered ally. The communist North Vietnamese flag flew atop the presidential palace in Saigon.
And let us not forget Biden’s August 2021 bugout from Afghanistan. A new flag flies over Kabul. It was an expression of the same phenomena: get out, stop supporting, end the intervention, cease the “forever wars”. They always, though, seem to end in the same manner: quarter million boat people, reeducation camps, genocidal atrocities, calamities in adjacent countries, and years of subsequent US feebleness and fickleness.
The Florida tin-hat Metternich is not even playing checkers as Putin, Xi, and the mullahs play chess. A key to playing chess is understanding the linkages of moves. Such as, a bugout of Afghanistan led to Putin’s 2022 imitation of the North Vietnamese brazen assault on the South back in 1975, and a Ukraine bugout would be a green flag for Xi to cross the Taiwan Strait. I’m not sure if the GOP’s neo-Squad in Congress can even conceive of the connection between a surrender in Ukraine and Xi’s plans for Taiwan. They sure as heck make hay of the consequences of Biden’s bugout of Afghanistan. Bugouts are bugouts regardless of whether they are under the donkey or elephant banner.
Three members of the GOP’s neo-Squad (l to r): Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene.
With his finger up in the proverbial popular winds, DeSantis joins Trump and the GOP’s neo-Squad in falling under the spell of a new Vietnam Syndrome. Remember it? It referred to a period of pathological fear of US intervention after the fall of Saigon. What did that give us? The world became a meaner place with a massive Soviet military buildup and rabid Soviet adventurism all around us. Then the over year-long humiliation of the US by the Iranian mullahs after taking American embassy personnel hostage in 1979-80. We wrung our hands, proved flagrant incompetence in a failed rescue mission, and had to wait till Reagan was sworn into office in January 1981.
They all talk of peace. Matt Gaetz does. In his surrender resolution, he blusters, “. . . the United States . . . urges all combatants to reach a peace agreement.” Of course, the simultaneous cutoff of assistance to Ukraine will guarantee a peace agreement . . . under Putin’s terms. That’s not peace; it sets the stage for the conquest of the Baltic republics and Taiwan. It’s Munich 1938 and Czechoslovakia 1939 all over again. That’s right, Gaetz, prove that you have a spine by showing that you don’t have one.
Neville Chamberlain, making his infamous “peace in our time” address in September 1938 after the Munich Conference, an exercise in appeasement. (Photo: Central Press/Getty Images)
A new Vietnam syndrome – the “forever war” syndrome – has gripped the dim bulbs in the GOP, my party. It is disheartening to witness the normally level-headed, like DiSantis, become so infatuated with willful historical blindness.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “DeSantis saying Ukraine support is not ‘vital’ national interest sparks backlash in GOP”, Jack Forest, CNN, 3/15/2023, at https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/14/politics/desantis-republicans-ukraine-aid/index.html
* For Matt Gaetz’s Ukraine fatigue Resolution go to his website: “Matt Gaetz Leads 11 Lawmakers in Introduction of ‘Ukraine Fatigue’ Resolution to Halt U.S. Aid to Ukraine” at https://gaetz.house.gov/media/press-releases/matt-gaetz-leads-11-lawmakers-introduction-ukraine-fatigue-resolution-halt-us
* Charles Lindbergh’s speeches against US intervention in Europe can be found here: “Two Historic Speeches: October 13, 1939 & August 4, 1940” at http://charleslindbergh.com/americanfirst/speech3.asp
* “Josh Hawley’s U-Turn on Military Aid to Ukraine”, John McCormack, National Review Online, 3/1/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/03/josh-hawleys-u-turn-on-military-aid-to-ukraine/
* “The two biggest 2024 Republican names would mean bad news for Ukraine”, Stephen Collinson, CNN, 3/15/2023, at https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/15/politics/2024-republicans-trump-desantis-ukraine/index.html
Trump supporter and Antifa member confront each other, 2017.
“We are divorced, North from South, because we have hated each other so.” — Mary Boykin Chestnut from her diary at the onset of the American Civil War.
Today, one could substitute “urban from rural” for “North from South”. Please be cautioned, though, that some blowhards will manage to warp the nature of the divide. Marjorie Taylor Greene, that grand dame of unhinged hyperbole on the right, recently tweeted and repeated on Sean Hannity, “We need a national divorce.” She added, “We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government.” Her national divorce is incomprehensible since her blue/red dividing lines don’t neatly conform to state boundaries. It is more intrastate than anything, between a plethora of blue freckles against a sea of red across the entire national domain. That reality captures the essence of the current impasse. The root of our disjunction is cultural. A fundamental difference of ethos separates the blue dots from the red swaths.
The split consists of mutually incompatible mindsets with one being revolutionary and the other defensive of America’s founding. Both sides didn’t mutually move way from each other. One leaped from the other as if it had the plague. The key precipitating factor is the adoption of a radical cultural revolution by social, commercial and political elites in concentrated urban and academic nodes. Ronald Reagan once said, “I didn’t leave the Democratic party, the Democratic Party left me.” Well, America didn’t leave rural areas, but it certainly was kicked out of these nodes of concentrated power and influence. The separation is the logical outgrowth of the radicalization of our cultural elites.
The radicalization of the blue dots – what today makes them blue (actually red in its historical meaning) – consists in the adoption of a particular Marxist’s ideas on how to advance the revolution in spite of popular resistance to it. Antonio Gramsci in the 1930’s penciled out his grand strategy to advance the worldwide revolution. Karl Marx’s original idea was the organic development of a worker class consciousness which would culminate in the seizure of the means of production and set the world on the path to utopia. Others, including Lenin and Gramsci, noticed that it wasn’t happening as predicted. Lenin’s solution was a vanguard elite to precipitate the overthrow of the existing order. For his part, Gramsci advocated a “long march” through cultural institutions and civil society, the social elements that lie mostly between the people and government (civil society: churches, charities, social organizations, schools, businesses).
Antonio Gramsci
Lenin’s coup d’état expired with the implosion of the USSR in 1991 – speaking of internal contradictions that culminate in revolution (typical Marxist rhetoric). Gramsci, who died before he was set to be released from Mussolini’s jail in 1937, would posthumously succeed beyond his wildest dreams. He became the darling of the 1960’s New Left that would quickly morph into today’s progressivism. A hive of intertwined Gramsci acolytes dominates many of our important institutions such as the schools, the Fortune 500 c-suite, media, entertainment, foundations, charities, mainline churches, the administrative state, the Democratic Party, and of course higher ed.
The danger of this new Gramscian upper class to the rest of the country, so isolated as they are, was best expressed by Charles Murray in his book, Coming Apart:
“Many of the members of the new upper class are balkanized. Furthermore, their ignorance about other Americans is more problematic than the ignorance of other Americans about them. It is not a problem if truck drivers cannot empathize with the priorities of Yale professors. It is a problem if Yale professors, or producers of network news programs, or CEOs of great corporations, or presidential advisers cannot empathize with the priorities of truck drivers. It is inevitable that people have large areas of ignorance about how others live, but that makes it all the more important that the members of the new upper class be aware of the breadth and depth of their ignorance.”
Truckers descend on DC in 2022.
So ubiquitous are Gramsci’s ideas that you at least know them intuitively. They are everywhere. The notorious CRT is just the application of Gramsci’s Critical Theory to racial matters. It’s the same formula when considering gender, ethnicity, or mixtures of the host of identities (intersectionality) encompassed within the “other”, the so-called oppressed. Favoritism and oppression in the Gramscian hivemind are embedded in the culture, even if it has been superficially expunged from government. It’s systemic in the culture, they say. Real revolution won’t happen if the broader culture isn’t enlisted in the effort. Today, they succeeded for the most part.
The influence of the hivemind may be what John O’Sullivan had in mind in his law of organizational behavior: all organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing. The prevalent hivemind is too powerful to ignore. The evidence is all around. TV commercials are replete with representations of the “other” far beyond any reasonable relationship to their portion of the population. Those same ads are boosters for the ideology’s favorite products such as ev’s, as well as campaigns against the hated plastics and fossil fuels, alongside a push for the stakeholder corporate-management nonsense that threatens the health of my pension. MLB moved the Allstar Game; the NFL diluted the national anthem with the addition of an identity anthem; the kneelings; the black power fist thrusts. Popular entertainment and their awards extravaganzas are not without their ritual display of the putative threat of systemic racism and illusory attacks on the “other”. DEI and CRT are everywhere in curriculums, hiring, and admissions, with a baleful effect on standards and morale.
An entire industry has appeared overnight to cater and push the agenda on adults and their children. All of it is meant to bend the mind to accept the advantaging of one group at the expense of another, all of it based on race, gender, and ethnicity identity. We’re back to a new Jim Crow.
The assault on the minds of children is the most outrageous. Outright pornography is introduced to adolescents under the guise of furthering tolerance for the sexual “other” (transgendered, etc.). The distinction between mere tolerance and ideological recruitment won’t be fully appreciated on the part of the teacher-as-propagandist or obviously an impressionable high school sophomore, thereby artificially swelling the ranks of this new “other” in a social contagion. Behavior and language – if presented on radio or television, they would be eligible for a fine or loss of license – is now part of school and training curriculums, and the inventories of school libraries, for 8-year-olds in some places. Child abuse laws in states like California have been warped to shield children from parental interference in a minor’s choice to engage in essentially experimental sex-change interventions.
California has gone so far as declared itself to be the newest kind of sanctuary: a haven for a minor’s decision to break free of their parents’ influence, from any place, state, or country of origin. An underground railroad to the golden state for legally protected child sexual mutilation will soon follow.
A child’s newfound identity as a gender “other” will be reinforced by an absence of countervailing views, opposing opinions having been quashed by entrenched activists dominating society’s institutions. The struggle in the newsroom at the NY Times is instructive. Prior to 2021, the paper treated the issue of trans ideology as if there was only one side, the trans activists’ side. You know, it’s the same one given to your kids in their school: sex isn’t binary; denial of gender identity is bigotry; refusals to affirm a child’s self-diagnosis are akin to murder by suicide; a medical consensus exists in support of all things trans; the recent increase in teen trans self-identity isn’t evidence of a social contagion. Truth be told, a defensible counterpoint can be made to each one of these contentions, but it didn’t appear on the pages of the Times. Then, dissenters found other outlets like Bari Weiss’s Substack page.
After activists in the newsroom got opinion editor James Bennet to resign for approving a Tom Cotton op-ed, his replacements began to show some spine in not kowtowing to the radicals in their midst. Some opinion pieces questioning the newsroom orthodoxy began to appear. The hive was riled about having to face an opposing point of view. LGBTQ+ activist groups penned a letter to the paper condemning the openness. A group of contributors sent one railing against the simple recognition of another side in the debate. For them, there is no debate.
Their mind is closed and want to see everyone’s mind similarly clamped shut. In one of the letters, they declared, “. . . stop questioning science that is SETTLED.” Where have we heard that before? End a debate by simply issuing the fatwah of “SETTLED” without stooping so low as to prove their position.
The censorship makes the unproven and untrue seem plausible. At this point, the Gramscian “long march” sheds its cloak of tolerance to expose its true totalitarian nature. The philosopher Robert P. George has an eloquent description of the difference between an authoritarian and totalitarian:
“Ordinary authoritarians are content to forbid people from speaking truths. Totalitarians insist on forcing people to speak untruths.”
Cancel culture is forcing the gullible to speak untruths. We are running the danger of an entire generation being coaxed into believing contestable ideas are uncontestable. That’s dangerous. It’s one sure way for humaneness to disappear from humanity. People are frog-marched out of their jobs and free speech and conscience are suppressed. Public intellectuals, academics, and people of professional accomplishment who disagree are dismissed as “deniers”, “. . . phobics”, haters, and blocked from outlets.
The reigning neo-Marxists have, maybe forever, mutilated the meaning of words such as “consensus”. Their “consensus” – “the science is SETTLED” – is the wedge that is driving rural from urban. The blue nodes are the nexus of this Gramscian cultural revolution. Pardon people in the countryside for noticing this lurch into insanity. A good portion of the country doesn’t want to go where DEI consultants want to lead it.
Previously travelled routes to the socialist hyper-state have only led to misery. Now, will I be “cancelled” for saying it?
RogerG
Read more here:
* Charles Murray’s book “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010” is an excellent place to start research into our current predicament.
* “Biography of Antonio Gramsci”, Nicki Lia Cole, PHD, ThoughtCo.com, 8/14/2019, at https://www.thoughtco.com/antonio-gramsci-3026471
* An additional concise survey of the life and influence of Antonio Gramsci can be found here: “The Long March Back”, Nate Hochman, National Review Online, 2/16/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-long-march-back/
* A brief account of the philosophy of Princeton’s Robert P. George can be found here: “The Georgian Way”, Andrew T. Walker, fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, National Review Magazine, 3/6/2023
* The struggle in the NY Times newsroom is captured here: “All the News That’s Fit to Debate”, Madeine Kearns, National Review Magazine, 3/20/2023
CPAC may be turning into a pure Trump personality cult. The first “C” in the anacronym stands for conservative, but truth in advertising demands that it be replaced by a “T” for Trump Political Action Committee – TPAC. If Steve Bannon’s recent speech before the group is any indication, and the thunderous reception that it received, the Trump hero-worship brigades are fully prepared to torpedo the GOP’s chances in 2024 and saddle us with more of the looney left in the seats of power.
Watch a portion of the Bannon speech in the link below.
Bannon is nuts, and so is the TPAC audience. If the numbers in a recent poll are reasonably accurate, 43% of registered Republicans support Trump as the party’s nominee. 43% of Republicans equates to 12% of all registered voters because 40% of all party registrations nationwide are Democrats versus 29% Republicans. Do the math. 43% of 29% equals roughly 12%.
A good portion of that 12% are diehards for an intensely polarizing figure. Let’s say half of the 12% are zealous true-believers (only-Trumpers) which reduces the kamikaze recruits to 6% of all registered voters. Trump only gets more polarizing as he pushes a “stop the steal” story that he can’t prove in court and mires others who were sympathetic into more legal trouble for lending some credence to it.
Dominion v. Fox News is only one case in point. The network and its primetime lineup should be applauded for their honesty rather than castigated by a fanatic like Bannon. The depositions and disclosures of Fox News internal communications in court forces me to partly reevaluate some of my earlier criticisms of Fox’s celebrity pundits. Those disclosures further confirm the out-of-their-mind emotional state of that 6%. The Bannon audience at TPAC, if it’s typical of the cranks attracted to Trump, can only lead the party to more dismal electoral performance – 2018, 2020, and the red wave of 2022 turning into a ripple.
The attacks on Paul Ryan are particularly galling. Somehow, the low-tax/small-government/free-market philosophy of every Republican from Coolidge to Reagan as represented by Ryan is besmirched by ad hominem attacks by the cult’s agitators. It’s just that Ryan won’t pledge fealty to Trump, and that list of dissenters from Trump megalomania has only grown as more people cross paths with the alleged demi-god. Now, we must add Fox News to the ever-lengthening enemy’s list. How many more dissenters from Trump worship must there be before the TPAC crowd begins to question their slavish devotion to a self-absorbed and octogenarian adolescent.
Ryan promises not to attend the Republican convention if Trump is the nominee. I’ll leave the presidential line on the ballot blank if he once again bamboozles the party into the nomination. The argument that it’s a binary choice has worn its welcome.
Trump is a loser. He turns off more than he turns on. His electoral performance over three elections is proof. The only way for him to deny the numbers is to label them as fraud without the proof to convince a judge and jury, let alone a majority of the electorate in a presidential contest. At a certain point, Trump is just embarrassing. Embarrassment doth not make a winner.
RogerG
* “CPAC Crowd Stands and Cheers as Raging Steve Bannon Vows to Bring Down Fox News: ‘We’re Going To Fight You Every Step Of The Way!’”, Mediaite, 3/3/2023, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/cpac-crowd-stands-and-cheers-as-raging-steve-bannon-vows-to-bring-down-fox-news-we-re-going-to-fight-you-every-step-of-the-way/ar-AA18cqic?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=e82b976dd18142c187e4f85ded29053a&ei=32
A mural by street artist PBOY depicting yellow vest protesters inspired by Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People. (photo: Philippe Lopez/AFP)
“The green dreams of urbanites spark outrage in rural areas.” – Joel Klotkin, executive director of the Urban Reform Institute, and respectively Presidential and Washington Fellow at Chapman and Claremont Universities
Joel Klotkin’s newest piece on the urban/rural divide would be a revelation for those comfortable in their biases and lifestyle in their insulated, well-to-do urban enclaves (see below).
Joel Klotkin
They control urban-dominated states like California and are conducting a Sherman-esque scorched-earth march through the hinterlands to make them “howl” in forced conformity to a dubious enviro ideology. Their William Tecumseh Sherman flanking strategy involves the annihilation of vast stretches of flyover country in windmill forests and blankets of solar panels in conjunction with attacks on the farmers’ products and production inputs. Make no mistake about it, it’s at least a cold war, and occasionally a hot one, on those who feed the world’s hungry and provide the material backbone for the cultural commissariat’s own luxurious lifestyle.
Ironically, it’s an attack on themselves if they only thought deeper than a star-struck Davos groupie totally consumed in enviro agitprop. Anyway, they’re relaxed because it’ll bankrupt others further down the wealth pyramid first. They’re like Rome’s patricians laughing at Nero fiddling as the flames slowly approach their villas.
It’s an ideological crusade centering on climate change and should not be mistaken for real science. Leaps of faith are required to overcome huge holes in logic and fact. Here’s some “What’s” to ponder. What’s the degree of human impact on climate to ascertain urgency? What’s the level of positive effect on climate from a sudden shackling of the U.S. population to unreliable and expensive energy? What’s the influence on other countries, or will it be ignored? No amount of computer modeling can overcome these holes in the train of logic since software has always been susceptible to GIGO – garbage in, garbage out. The model is only as good as its designer. Artificial intelligence isn’t immune. On this topic, ideology trumps scientific objectivity all too often.
One fact constantly escapes the synapses of this secular faith’s upscale adherents: energy density. No amount of “we’ll innovate our way through the problem” can mask this ugly reality. Their favorite sources for energy “sustainability” are the feebly dense wind and solar – they need an awful lot of space to be practical. These contraptions require vast state-sized stretches of landscape on the order of magnitude of Tennessee to Texas, depending on how close you want to get to “net zero” in carbon emissions. What does that mean? It means the consumption of huge swaths of open space, wilderness, and land devoted to food and fiber. A dystopian future awaits in the nerve-rending and constant hum of wind turbines and a consigning of small town and rural residents to a hellish view of much of their surroundings under expansive pavements of solar panels or intimidating chorus lines of giant towers extending over the horizon. Watch real estate values and quality of life plummet for rural, small town, exurban residents.
A wind project in Michigan farm area in 2013.A sea of solar panels in Portugal.
And guess what? You still need fossil fuel backup which adds to the cost misery of the whole scheme. If batteries are to be your lifeline around the problem of blackouts and having to fire up backup gas-powered steam turbines, remember, the law of tradeoffs isn’t suspended. More resources pumped into this black hole translates into lost investment in medicine, manufacturing technology, food production and distribution, water, etc. The alternatives sacrificed are too numerous to mention.
That’s the glory of free markets, though; the voluntary choices of thousands, if not millions, sort this out. The rule of bureaucrats and pandering demagogues in elective office, when given billions and trillions of dollars to play with, are more famous for boondoggles. Remember Solyndra or California’s train to nowhere, parts languishing and graffitied like a LA Stonehenge in the Central Valley? I don’t expect Millennials, Gen Z’ers, and those following to have an inkling of life in the old USSR under a vast bureaucracy’s central planning, given the sorry state of our schools. California is chugging full speed into this fog of ignorance.
California’s upper crust may be the most visibly intoxicated by the eco-jihad but the mania is evident worldwide. Farmers and rural and small-town residents around the world are about to be engulfed in a plundering of their spaces by the half-witted infatuations of zealots with money and influence. But a counterrevolution is kicking in. In Europe, French truckdrivers and farmers rose up in the “gilets jaunes” (yellow vests) protests in November 2018 against the new greenie fuel taxes. Dutch farmers were brimming with hostility over crippling emissions and fertilizer regulations just last year. So devastating are the potential impacts of the new rules that a projected 3,000 Dutch farms may be lost in the next few decades.
Europe isn’t alone. African countries like Nigeria, Senegal, and South Africa have registered similar protests to Davos flights of fancy. The path to the ecotopia is lined with appropriated farmland, farmers, and everyone else who provide the hands, backs, and brains for the jet set to live in luxurious isolation.
Yep, ecomania among the insular well-to-do is poison to blue collars and everyone outside a country’s super zips. Joel Klotkin is right to use the world “colonize” in describing the imperial designs of cultural power brokers for the areas of the country who don’t vote and live like them. Occasionally, colonists rise up. Does Lexington and Concord remind you of anything?
The yellow vest protests in Paris, November 2018.Farmers gather with their vehicles next to a Germany/Netherlands border sign during a protest on the A1 highway near Rijssen, Netherlands, June 29. They are protesting the Dutch Government’s nitrogen plans, which would eliminate a sizable number of farms. (photo: Vincent Jannink / AFP via Getty Images)
Please read Joel Klotkin’s piece below.
RogerG
Read more here:
* Much thanks to Joel Klotkin for his research in “Energy Colonialism Will Worsen the Urban-Rural Divide”, Joel Klotkin, National Review Online, 3/3/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/03/energy-colonialism-will-worsen-the-urban-rural-divide/
* “’Yellow Vests’: The elites talk about the end of the world, when we talk about the end of the month”, Le Monde, 11/24/2018, at https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2018/11/24/gilets-jaunes-les-elites-parlent-de-fin-du-monde-quand-nous-on-parle-de-fin-du-mois_5387968_823448.html
* “Farmers’ Protest in Netherlands Reflects Rise of Popular Revolts in Europe”, National Catholic Register, 7/29/2022, at https://www.ncregister.com/news/farmers-protest-in-netherlands-reflects-rise-of-popular-revolts-in-europe
It was said of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in the 1930’s that he was naïve, that he really didn’t comprehend what he was up against in Germany’s Chancellor Adolf Hitler. A career in business, consensual government, Parliamentary debate, and compromise among political actors and parties didn’t prepare him for dealing with the time’s new brutal, totalitarian utopians like Hitler – more street thug, but with a vision, than anything. Mistaking the chancellor for opposition mp’s in the House of Commons led to appeasement and a goon’s growing appetite for more in Czechoslovakia, Poland, lebensraum, and six years of the bloodiest war in history.
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain waving the piece of paper with Hitler’s signature announcing “peace in our time” after his arrival at the airport in London in 1938.
Chamberlain was honest but naïve. In contrast, Sen. Josh Hawley’s Russian appeasement is grounded in reasoning so confusing and disjointed that a person can be excused for questioning his sanity or drawing the conclusion that it’s pure demagoguery. In sum, it’s a thought process that might sell in a schoolyard to people who still believe in the Easter bunny.
Hawley is following in the footsteps of John Kerry, erstwhile Democratic candidate for president in 2004. In a 2004 March debate (see below), Kerry declared, “[I] actually did vote for the $87 billion [$87 billion Iraq War appropriation] before I voted against it.” Kerry was sending reassurances to the dominant left wing of the Democratic Party. Here’s Hawley expressing his own flip-flop in support for Ukraine (see below):
February 24, 2022 – “Russia’s brutal assault on Ukraine and invasion of its territory must be met with strong American resolve.”
February 24, 2023 – “I would just say to Republicans: You can either be the party of Ukraine and the globalists or you can be the party of East Palestine and the working people of this country.” Adding, “It’s time to say to the Europeans: No more welfare for Europeans.” Shortly before these comments, he said more succinctly, “I don’t think we should give any more funding right now.”
John Kerry, Democrat presidential nominee in 2004.
What to make of that Hawley hash? One year passes and he’s ready to act like the Democrat-led Congress of 1973 when they approved a cut-off of funds for military operations in Indochina (see below). It could simply be the pandering demagogue that resides in many a politician’s soul. He’s certainly got his nose in the air and is picking up the scent of the reinvigorated isolationist right.
It doesn’t make any more sense after dissecting his meandering rationalizations. We can’t support Ukraine and address a train derailment? What? Are we Guatemala? This is a policy pronouncement groping for a justification.
The thought-funk doesn’t get any clearer as he bounces from complaints about Europeans not doing more, to amazingly suggesting that the Ukrainian success means . . . end the support. Got it? It doesn’t make any more sense to me either. Do I need to say it? Ukraine’s successes can be greatly attributed to our willingness to keep them in the field with the weapons and munitions to grind down the Kremlin boss’s Wehrmacht (see below for an excellent piece on the Russian losses and failures), and all the while sending a signal to Xi that taking Taiwan won’t be made easier by the influence of the trembling knees of appeasers like Josh Hawley.
Destroyed Russian tanks and vehicles piled in Ukraine.
Let’s face it, the posture may be more of the schoolyard at work: Biden’s for it so we must be against it. To be fair, I find the Left’s totemistic virtue-signaling with the Ukrainian flag flying from dorm windows, like the Viet Cong flag of yesteryear, chintzily exhibitionistic. Still, I don’t care how they get there, or how they express it, so long as they continue to support sticking a thumb in the eye of one of Xi Jinping’s allies.
It’s stunning to find the Right more like Chamberlain or Code Pink than Theodore Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan. This may come as news to the isolationistic right, but this isn’t 1814 when it took three weeks for the letter announcing the end of the War of 1812 to reach New Orleans after the battle had been fought. Oceans no longer insulate us from the world’s travails, especially if they’re patrolled by Putin’s and the PLA’s navies or leaped by tribesmen and disgruntled urban jihadis who decide to express their hate by seizing airliners. ICBM’s, hypersonics, jet aircraft, prosperous economies, super cargo ships, the space domain, satellites, trade, and modern communications should remind anyone that the security value of oceans has long been downgraded.
Hypersonic flight path compared to a conventional missile over an ocean.
Like it or not, the world is interconnected, and so are human endeavors. Fecklessness in international relations isn’t a virtue. Appeasement toward Russia diminishes the value of any bellicosity toward the CCP. Deterrence becomes a dead word. The “pivot” to Asia will be imperiled, not enhanced, by a retreat in Ukraine.
The Roman general Vegetius was famous for writing, “Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum” – if you want peace, prepare for war. I don’t know where appeasement fits into the equation.
RogerG
Read more here:
* Hawley’s 2022 stance on Ukraine was uncovered in a Tweet by the reporter John McCormack on Feb. 24, 2022 at https://twitter.com/McCormackJohn/status/1496878265138806784
* John Kerry’s Iraq War flip-flop can be found here: “Kerry discusses $87 billion comment”, CNN, 9/30/2004, at https://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/09/30/kerry.comment/
* “Josh Hawley’s U-Turn on Military Aid to Ukraine”, John McCormack, National Review Online, 3/1/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/03/josh-hawleys-u-turn-on-military-aid-to-ukraine/?utm_source=recirc-&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first
* US congressional actions to restrict and prohibit military actions in Indochina can be found here: “Congressional Restrictions on U.S. Military Operations in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Somalia, and Kosovo: Funding and Non-Funding Approaches”, Congressional Research Service, 1/16/2007, at https://sgp.fas.org/crs/natsec/RL33803.pdf
* Excellent piece on Russia’s losses and failures in the Ukraine War: “Russia’s Winter Offensive Is Criminally Incompetent”, Mark Antonio Wright, National Review Online, 3/1/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/russias-winter-offensive-is-criminally-incompetent/?utm_source=recirc-&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=second
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