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.
Bernie Sanders raises as fist as he speaks at his caucus night rally Des Moines, Iowa February 1, 2016. (Rick Wilkin/Reuters)
The vast majority of votes are counted in Nevada (88%). Bernie Sanders in a 8-person race got almost 50% (47%). Yeah, it’s a small state but it adds to the big “mo” for Bernie and his bros as he heads into Super Tuesday and its treasure trove of delegates. If Bernie was placed on a color swatch in the Home Depot paint department, he would be full-on red with the others still huddling around the darker end of the slip of paper.
Now begins – if the Dem hierarchy succumbs to what appears to be inevitable – the effort to mainstream his socialism. Bernie, his bros, and the Squad try to emphasize the “democratic” in front of “socialism”. Poison, whether administered through so-called “democratic” or totalitarian means, is frankly irrelevant. It sells, though, to a small slice of our over-credentialed but grossly ill-educated population.
Socialism is toxic no matter its modifier. Government with its army of employees, lawyers, regulators, enforcers, laws, programs, and regulations will make the word “private” in front of “citizen” a dead letter. Government and its politics will overhang and penetrate nearly all aspects of life like a Beijing smog. Albania as the Socialist People’s Republic of Albania wasn’t a basket case because a dictator – Enver Hoxha – ruled over it. It was ruined by socialism.
Enver Hoxha as communist dictator of Albania.Shkoder, Albania, 2017. The consequences of Hoxha’s socialism.
Now, Bernie, his bros, the Squad, and many in the activist base of today’s Dem Party want to recapitulate Albania right here in America. Of course, they try to dodge that reality by hiding behind the word “Scandinavian” like they do “democratic”. Scandinavia shed its 1960’s-70’s socialism by the 1990’s because it was making them into Albania. Rather than learn that lesson, Bernie and company want to relive the disaster.
The rest of this year’s Dem offerings are just slightly lighter shades of red on the swatch – still, though, on the darker end. They differ only in the size of the dose of poison.
Democratic presidential candidate and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg speaks during his campaign launch of “Mike for Black America,” at the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum, Thursday, Feb. 13, 2020, in Houston. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)
As a community college student back in the day, my college’s football team (Bakersfield College) would host a team from the LA area. LA team supporters would chant “sooie” while amply spicing their outbursts with “redneck” and “hayseed” and cow bells. I didn’t think much of it because our team frequently sent them packing soundly defeated, but the incident came to mind as I listened to Michael Bloomberg’s denigration of farmers. Cosmopolitanism is classically meant to indicate a broad exposure leading to refinement. No more. It’s a synonym for narrow-mindedness. Bigotry can be found not only under Klan robes but also in faculty lounges, corporate boardrooms, and Manhattan penthouses.
Bloomberg has as much familiarity with agriculture as the Peter Sellers character, Chance, in the movie “Being There”, did with modernity. For Chance, spending his entire life in the mansion and educated by tv, he was mentally out of place with the outside world as Bloomberg is in flyover country or among anybody who makes a living with their hands.
Chance (Peter Sellers) as his benefactor lays dying.
Bloomberg was raised and continued to live in an urban cocoon. Born in a Boston neighborhood, raised in Medford, Mass., and afterward attended Johns Hopkins and Harvard, Bloomberg went into high finance at Salomon Bros. on Wall Street before he founded Bloomberg, Inc., in New York City. It’s safe to say that not much dirt ever got under his fingernails. Yet, he confidently pontificates on the alleged superiority of air-conditioned office occupants over the millions of hard workers in pickup trucks travelling the fields of the American heartland. Similarly, another Dem huckster, Joe Biden, with a wave of the hand, condemned the fossil fuel industry and totalitarianly announced that all its workers would be transformed into coders. Frankly, it’s nauseating.
Check out this interview with Victor Davis Hanson on this subject and others (click on the Hanson picture below). I don’t agree with Hanson on everything, but I think he hits the mark here.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) on The View, Feb. 19, 2020.
The old term “yellow dog districts” needs an update. If you’ve forgotten, there really were districts in the Jim Crow South filled with white people who would sooner vote for a yellow dog than a Republican. The 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act began the process of sending them into extinction, and rightly so. Though, that hasn’t stopped the rise of village idiot districts. These are districts filled with people who would sooner vote for a village idiot than a Republican. In this case, it’s more than a caricature. They actually do vote them into office.
Granted, idiocy crosses the partisan divide; however, it’s a special kind of idiocy that runs deep in today’s Democratic Party. The lunacy stems from the mental maturity of a toddler and extends into a person’s 30’s, and maybe beyond. These are adults who espouse tooth-fairy economics for example. Watch Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez provide proof of the existence of the “village idiot district”.
Many things stand out as I watch her performances. One thing is her glibness and confidence as she spouts nonsense. When pressed on how she’ll pay for her list of freebies, for instance, she mentions such things as a “transaction tax” on securities trades to pay for the scheme. She has no concept of the impact of her tax on behavior. Her notion of economics has much in common with a slave economy. Slave economics functions on the principle that you can whip and chain people with taxes and regulation and they will continue to perform as before. In other words, she is a college economics major without a high-schooler’s understanding of incentives and disincentives. You punish people in a free economy and they will seek to avoid the lash. Welcome, Alexandria, to Reality 101.
So, two things will happen under the tutelage of the Democrats’ dominatrix: (1) businesses find it harder to get capital, and therefore fewer businesses, usually startups – something not totally unwelcome to a socialist – and (2) she ends up with less dough for her cockamamie handouts. Welcome, Alexandria, to lecture #2 of Reality 101.
She reminds me of the high school sophomore who goes home after History class to tell dad of the Battle of Khe Sanh, of which he participated and said nothing. She looks and speaks with the self-assurance of an oracle while taxing the patience of dear old dad. The only problem on The View is that she is sitting with 3 other self-assured sophomores; McCain deserves to be excluded.
Kids say the darndest things, and so do some adults who think like kids.
The miscreant in camo and flack jacket.The miscreant arrested.The 17 victims.
People distant from an event have a tendency to nationalize it. The occurrence is shoe-horned into some broader issue, or, better yet for activists, a politically opportune crisis. The shooting at Marjorie Stoneman High School would descend into the gutter of national gun-control politics. The most impactful circumstances surrounding the shooter are glazed over in the pursuit of a hot-button issue. Useful lessons are avoided as the coffers fill with contributions from any number of frightened citizens and well-heeled political exploiters (Michael Bloomberg, et al).
The most relevant facts, though, are those that directly relate to the cultprit. Right there, we find a convoluted and perplexing school discipline policy – the Promise program – in the school district, all meant to dilute the reality of bad behavior in the classroom, no matter the violator’s background. The result is a discipline system that few can understand, including the miscreant. The old rule of investing applies: if you don’t understand it, don’t do it.
The second factor to come out of the horrid affair is the insipid reactions of our public employees up and down the federal system. Take district superintendent Runcie and his use of gross and misleading numbers to defend his discipline system that in reality can’t and won’t remove real threats. Disgusting. Or the behavior of local law enforcement to refuse to enter the building to stop the shooter. Or the school’s security personnel who saw the guy coming and did nothing to stop him. Appalling. Or the warnings coming from citizens over a number of years to authorities about the shooter’s disturbing behavior. Warnings were plenty, and unheeded.
This only proves that real public safety begins with personal responsibility of the individual citizen. That’s the reason for the Second Amendment. Gun-free zones are in practice safe zones for killers.
Crass language would refer to the Parkland incident as one huge government “cluster #$&?@”. Either way you cut it, it was an entirely avoidable disaster … if government worked as designed in its flow chart. Fact is, it seldom does.
Instead, we get the parade of demagogues who promise a more centralized and bureaucratized version of the same. A good place to find them was on the stage Feb. 19, 2020, in Las Vegas.
The lineup of demagogues in Las Vegas, Feb. 19, 2020.
Yes, Mike Bloomberg, the Democratically Party is a crazy-left snake pit. Many people commenting on last night’s Democratic debate dwelled on Warren’s takedown of Bloomberg and the knife fight between Klobuchar and Buttigieg. I saw it differently. It was a brawl over who is most crazy-left. Combine the back-and-forth with the looney-left audience and you have a debate in an antifa bubble. Mike, face it, you have no place in that cuckoo’s nest.
Mike Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren at the Las Vegas debate.
Ironically and sporadically, the only one to approach sanity on the stage was Bloomberg. Yes, he’s crazy about goofy gun control, he’s a living insult to agriculture, and he’s got a Leninesque streak to control what’s on our kitchen tables. But on some matters – government-run health care, the absurdity of socialism, recognition of the basic responsibility for law enforcement – he was speaking truth to the power of the mob. On those occasions, he was the adult in the room.
Take Elizabeth’s Warren’s play to Bolshevik feminism at Bloomberg’s expense. True, Bloomberg may have been a pig in the workplace (NDA’s anyone?) but she plays up to it to support the aggrandizement of state power to manage more of the intimate details of our lives. I don’t know what’s worse: a male chauvinist or a hyper-left commissar of all interpersonal relations.
The Buttigieg/Klobuchar spat contained some real whoppers. For instance, Buttigieg assailed Klobuchar for voting to confirm Trump’s director of ICE. In that exchange, Buttigieg stepped all over his tongue in claiming that it was only Trump and this official who separated families. No, Pete, when illegal border-crossers with children were taken into custody, the children were separated – under Obama too. You can read about it here.
It became a burgeoning problem when Obama sent signals in thought and action, like DACA, that children can be a transit ticket into the US. Trump became saddled with a growing number of illegals who grabbed a kid, or parents who had one or more at hand, to illegally enter our country. Families became an increasing feature of illegal immigration at the start of the Trump presidency. But don’t interrupt Mayor Pete with facts as he jumps on the party’s train to no borders.
Mike, do you really belong in a party reeking with no-borders socialism and its inevitable cousin of central planning? I would think that last night’s snake pit would be enough for anyone to seek safer political environs. Sorry Mike, your indulgences in money to the party, gun grabs, and your conversion to climate change hysteria apparently aren’t enough to excuse the fact that you’re a rich white guy who can’t quite buy into the socialist fantasies. I don’t know where you belong, unless you’re a fetishistic masochist.
Christopher Caldwell of the Claremont Institute says “yes”. In a presentation before an audience at Hillsdale College’s Kirby Center, Caldwell lays out his diagnosis of our current rupture. It’s an argument worth serious consideration.
In a nutshell, Caldwell sees the country split into winners and losers, purported villains and heroes, and the much-abused oppressed and oppressor. I attribute it to Marxist theory seeping into the schools, media of almost any type, and the broader culture. Caldwell views it as a byproduct of the extension of our civil rights crusade beyond any prudent limit. He asserts that it created a second constitution – a subversion of the original one. The second and unratified constitution created law by bureaucratic and judicial decree, and began to short-circuit popular sovereignty. Then, all began to notice that they were, without approval, placed into the categories of winners and losers, villains and heroes, and the oppressed and oppressors.
For me, the Marxist paradigm entered the social bloodstream from the cultural commanding heights of our urban centers. It’s there that we find it lavishly evident in our faculty lounges, urban political machines, media headquarters, and even the corporate boardroom. Thus, the much talked-about blue/red divide.
2016 election results by county.
Caldwell, though, has a point. He illustrates how a noble cause – civil rights, equal protection, etc. – can fall down the rabbit hole of malign governance. Please read the speech in the latest edition of Imprimis.
Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe testifies before a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in Washington, U.S., June 7, 2017. (REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque)
If what your enemies say about you can amount to a claim of credibility, then Andrew C. McCarthy passes the test. He’s been lambasted by the Dem-Left as a hack and Trumpkins as a partisan of the “deep state”. They are both wrong. As a seasoned US attorney, he tries to objectively see the subject from many angles. When looking at the McCabe case, his analysis may not be dispositive but it lacks the hyperbole often found on MSNBC and the Trump-o-philes on Fox News. In McCarthys’ rendering, as I discern it, the McCabe case stinks of DC.
Andrew C. McCarthy
The DOJ’s decision not to pursue prosecution of McCabe has 3 factors swirling about. First, it’s hard to convict when star witnesses for the prosecution (like Lisa Page) are twisting testimony to the advantage of the defense.
Second, Trump smears the criminal justice process with his Tweet-rants. It’s hard to convict when all involved are continually exposed to announcements from the White House that the defendant is a “liar”, etc. The president as the ultimate chief prosecutor is mucking up the constitutional right to a fair trial. He has a “right” to free speech, as Hannity is wont of saying, but his “right” clashes with the “rights” of others. If Trump was a prosecutor – which he is as chief executive – he’d be sanctioned by the court. And he does this in DC, a place already with a deep and popular disdain for him and Republicans in general.
That leads me, finally, to the messy matter of a forever-tainted jury pool in DC. Overwhelmingly anti-Republican and anti-Trump sentiment are so deeply embedded in the DC population that Democrats are more-likely-than-not to skate. The story of the jury forewoman in the Roger Stone trial is a good case in point. For prosecutors of any Obama associate, they’d have to get beyond jury selection from a broad Resistance demography. It’d be like getting a conviction in a lynching case in the Deep South after Reconstruction. Currently in DC, a prominent Republican in the dock would get a hang ’em jury and a Democrat would have the advantage of jury nullification (a blanket refusal to convict). In DC, just remove the blindfold from the statue of the lady of justice.
All the more reason to strip DC of many of its administrative functions. Ship them out to environs less congenial. Pick a Midwestern state. Otherwise, we’ll be saddled with an unhinged and Democrat-dominated federal government for as far as the eye can see. Elections, all of a sudden, become less important. Were they ever, at least since FDR?
Much has been made of the urban/rural divide in America. It’s real and shows in many ways. The reactions in the Michael Vick dogfighting case are emblematic of the split. Federal prosecutors, the press (mostly urban), and urbanites emitted a profound revulsion. Most of Vick’s neighbors may have disapproved – or not – but didn’t see it as the equivalent of serial capital rape.
The local DA decided not to charge, reflecting in a sense the values of his hometown. The principle of subsidiarity (overwhelmingly most government should be local) is an unstated truth in our governmental system, and active here.
The immense publicity and concomitant mostly urban outrage stepped up the case to a more distant level: the feds. For city slickers (of which I’d have to include myself), anything is justified to get the abuser of the counterpart of the beloved family pet. The prosecutors, appropriately pedigreed in universities and suburban upbringings, turned the immense powers of the federal government on Vick. He went from shame and no charges to two years in a federal lockup. His life’s preparation and career were emasculated.
Michael Vick leaves federal prison in 2009 to serve the last few months of his sentence in home confinement.
Cock and dogfighting, and animal abuse in general, should be criminalized. No doubt. But this is a case of proportionality. For suburbanites, their personal exposure to animals is limited to Fido. For many childless adults – of which there are increasing numbers in our cities – Fido is a surrogate son or daughter to shower all their love and wealth. They’d sooner see Vick drawn and quartered. For Vick’s neighbors, it’s yawner.
The drawing and quartering of François Ravaillac, the assassin of Henry IV of France, 1610.
For me, a conviction, fine, probation, and all the bad publicity and shame that he heaped upon himself would be sufficient. For sheltered suburbanites, who would consider a lesson on Lewis and Clark’s eating of their dogs and horses to survive the Rockies to be akin to the distribution of child pornography, nothing short of waterboarding and a decade in Supermax would do.
Michael Vick recounts his journey to a restored faith to students at Liberty University on Jan. 29, 2018.
See the 2-part program. You can get it on ESPN’s “On Demand”.
William Barr at a press conference on Feb.11 announcing court filings against California, King County, Wa., and New Jersey.
“All the indications are that this treasonable inflammation – ‘secessionitis’ – keeps on making steady progress week-by-week. If disunion becomes an established fact, we have one consolation. The self-amputated members were diseased beyond immediate cure and their virus will infect our system no longer.” — George Templeton Strong in his diary as Southern states voted to leave the union in 1861.
George Templeton Strong
Once again, we are replaying the scene in the immediate aftermath of the presidential election of 1860. Local and state entities, under the spell of radical multiculturalism, have decided shortly after the election of Donald Trump to effectively negate federal immigration law in their jurisdictions. “Sanctuary” cities and states have taken the place of South Carolina and the ten other Southern states of 1860-1. This time, the sanctuaries’ target is immigration law and not the tariff or the spread of slavery. Attorney General William Barr, like Lincoln before him, has decided to reign in the “diseased members”, in Strong’s words, by announcing federal court action against California, King County, Wa., and New Jersey for inhibiting federal enforcement of immigration law. Barr’s press conference was the equivalent of Lincoln’s call for volunteers after the firing on Ft. Sumter.
Hurray, it’s finally on!
The sham logic of the seceding jurisdictions goes something like this: we need to maintain the cooperation of immigrant neighborhoods by not assisting federal immigration authorities as we enforce our laws, so we will ignore Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1996. Section 287(g) empowers state and local authorities to assist in the transfer of illegal immigrants with federal criminal violations. One of the sheriff’s elected in 2018 with the support of $175,000 from the ACLU was Gary McFadden in Mecklenburg County, NC. He crowed on election night, “287(g) is going to be history!”
McFadden runs for Mecklenburg County sheriff with the support of Maxine Waters (D, Ca.)
Leftists like McFadden use rationales that are invented to hide a real purpose, which in this case is the goal of advancing the idea of a nation of disjointed tribes (radical multiculturalism). Immigration law stands in the way of bringing about this utopia – or dystopia in reality.
If you think about it, the rationale succeeds at reaching new heights of silliness. Why single out immigration law for this exclusive treatment? The same logic could apply to federal larceny, counterfeiting, contraband, and kidnapping suspects who were taken into custody by local authorities on state charges. Illegal immigrants are by definition lawbreakers and are preternaturally nervous whenever ICE officers appear anywhere for anything. Whether it’s the receipt of stolen identities, drug dealing, the kidnapping of an adolescent girl across state lines, or nothing, by an “undocumented” neighbor, the rest of the “undocumented” will concentrate on remaining under the fed’s radar. The “woke” localists’ reasoning is actually a call for an abandonment of all federal law anywhere a large concentration of illegal immigrants exists. And we have massive concentrations of millions of the “undocumented” (10-22 million, anyone’s guess) since the spigot of immigration – legal and illegal – was first thrown wide open in 1965.
Migrants who crossed the US-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas. (photo: Photo: AP / US Customs and Border Protection)
The secessionists hang their hat on their interpretation of 287(g) as “voluntary”. Voluntary or no, a state or local government can’t inhibit the federal government from carrying out its constitutional powers. Court rulings have protected state and local governments from being forced to financially support a federal responsibility. But when does “voluntary” and “not being forced” stray into interference? Do these jurisdictions generally withhold cooperation with other local jurisdictions, other than the federal government on immigration law? Are the costs for holding a local suspect for violations of federal law so burdensome? In a federated republic, like ours, the police powers are shared; therefore, law enforcement in a governmental arrangement of overlapping layers ipso facto mandates the incurring of costs of cooperation since criminal activity strays across the nation and levels of government. Call it the costs of doing business in a federated republic.
In the end, we are left with radical left-wing localities and states who have in effect nullified federal immigration law as if they have the power to pick and choose the federal government’s constitutional powers that they will recognize. They refuse to share information and release suspects before the feds can get their hands on them. The behavior goes beyond the exercise of state and local sovereignty and into blocking the enforcement of federal law.
Segregationists of the old South would be proud. No state or local government has the power to act as if the 14th Amendment or federal immigration law has been repealed. The costs of intergovernmental cooperation aren’t burdensome when they are limited to briefly holding suspects or sharing information. It’s nonsense to conclude that any cost is the equivalent of the forceful conscription of local government for the benefit of the feds. Otherwise, we are the United Nations General Assembly and not the United States of America.
Bernie Sanders strides to the podium to announce his victory in the New Hampshire Democrat primary, 2/11/2020. (photo: Jessica Rinaldi/Boston Globe)
The red/blue assignment on our election maps is wrong. The Democrats should be red, like the Labor Party in Britain. Now, anywhere from 25% to 35% of Democrat voters favor an avowed socialist. With Sanders’s narrow plurality in New Hampshire, to go along with his plurality in Iowa, he is in the hunt to win the nomination if not earn the moniker of “front runner”. In the past, the Dems got away with it through advocacy of slow-motion socialism – espousing socialism with plausible deniability.
Plausible deniability was accomplished by flippant self-identification as a “capitalist” – Warren’s trick. Capitalist or no, the Dems have pressed closer and closer to more and more government control of the economy and much of everything else. Socialism should be defined as “control” of the economy and not limited to “ownership”. Control is achieved with or without ownership.
Elizabeth on the campaign trail, 2019. (photo: Ethan Miller)
Sorry, Elizabeth Warren, you ought not get way with denying your true self. Sanders is more honest than you are.
Last night’s results removed the mask. To be a Democrat, you have just painted yourself one of the many shades of red … along with the espousal of taxpayer-funded abortion from conception to the drive home from the hospital – another kind of red.
