A British cartoon from the days of the French Revolution that portrayed the Sans-Culottes, “relaxing after the fatigues of their day”.The day after one of the Minneapolis riots, May 2020.
Right now, the Left from their newly acquired bastions in the executive branch and Congress are empowered to embark on their long-desired jihad against inequality. These campaigns seldom go well. Indulging in fantasies of the kind that seriously ignore reality leave a path of desolation. How many times must we embark on the same crusade with the same excuses using the same means (government) and producing the same disastrous results?
Weaponizing language is the real and last refuge of the scoundrel, not patriotism. The revolutionaries utilize rhetorically useful euphemisms and creative pejoratives to hide their intentions and provide cover for their actions, thus the Bolsheviks’ widespread application of the word “kulak” (Russian for “fist”) to landowning peasants before they enunciated their war on the peasants, or today’s demagogues who employ “rich”, “top one percent”, “pay their fair share”, “white privilege”, “systemic racism”, or just plain “racism”. Our modern scoundrels don’t a take a back seat to the Bolshevik rabble rousers stirring up Petrograd factory workers or the thousands of reservists milling around the capital in the months before the 1917 coup.
Russian army reserve conscripts, heavily influenced by Bolshevik agitators, march in Petrograd in opposition to the Provisional Government, October 1917.
Add to the euphemism list “equity”. “Equity” is resplendent in the proclamations coming out of the Biden administration in its first few weeks. It’s a classic example of word as sword. What are they really up to? “Equity” simply means “impartial” or “fair”. No, no, no, not for this crowd! That isn’t good enough for our Jacobins. “Equity” is the veneer for racial vengeance. Throughout the Biden Leviathan, “equity” will provide cover for a return of Jim Crow with a different cast for the winners and losers. Race and the rest of the fashionably oppressed labels will make their return as the basis for distributing public goodies. Of course, what goes to one group is withheld from another. They make no bones about it. Their rhetorical repertoire includes “patriarchy”, “social justice”, “white privilege”, “systemic racism”, “white fragility”, and “Uncle Tom/Tío Taco” to dismiss complaints.
Without a doubt, this isn’t your normal lofty aspiration for “equality”. If it is, it is of a form that seeks to repeal nature. People are born with so many different gifts and qualities that divergent outcomes can only be suppressed by force, thus the holy war for “equity”. The long arm of the state is employed to forcibly flatten things. Who gets hurt, for many will be? How will the public good be advanced, for in many ways it will be retarded? What happens to the personality of a people raised on a steady diet of envy and the receipt of earnings that once belonged to others, for there will be an inflation in the numbers of the entitled? Think of it; it won’t be pretty.
Biden sits with the executive orders that he signed to repeal the Trump era and set the U.S. on a path to a reverse racism called “equity”, January 26, 2021.
Edmund Burke in England and John Adams in America saw its vile corruptions in the late 18th-century streets of Paris with its rampaging mobs and their vicious agitators in the seats of power. For Adams and Burke, physical inequality was in the nature of things. Inequality resulted and quickly became the political whipping boy for the demagogue. A moral equality – as in the equality of all souls – gave way to an equality in all things material, or Adams’s “false Notions of equality”. As Adams correctly predicted at the beginning, it would end in despotism.
John Adams , 1785 Mather Brown Portrait
It’s the same idea that animates Antifa and its cousin, Black Lives Matter, lest we forget. The abyss that consumes us is evident in the burned-out hulks in the business district, the flight of refugees from the “paradise”, the occasional beatings and killings (47 killings in June, July, and August), and the escalation of violence as permissiveness for one side’s rampages leads to complimentary fury from the other side. It is happening before our eyes.
Get prepared for a hurricane. Jacobinism, whether in the streets of 1789 Paris or 1917 Petrograd or downtown Portland or Biden’s “equity” crusade, isn’t a recipe for paradise. It’s a calamity. Lest we forget.
New York election workers coping with a deluge of absentee ballots, November 3, 2020.
No, I can’t leave the 2021 election alone, nor should anyone else. As of now, though, it is, as per Churchill’s quip about the Soviet Union, “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”. Analysis varies so much and is often infected with wishful thinking and partisan bias. Maybe it’s just that it’s too soon to tell. Maybe we’ll just have to wait for analytical competence. I don’t know.
Part of the problem lies in our affection for generalizations. Generalizations stray into oversimplifications. Many Republicans ask themselves the question, can we have Trump without Trump? Meaning, can we have Trump’s good parts and not his bad parts? The answer frequently swirls around stats that compare his numbers with R’s down ballot in an attempt to measure his toxicity. And that picture is murky. He did better in some places and worse in others. In the battleground ‘burbs, the scene is equally cloudy. The plain fact is that the numbers are all over the map making general conclusions difficult.
In addition, the raw vote totals for Trump don’t paint a clear picture. He added to his vote totals in some states, counties, and precincts, but in many of those places so do did Biden. In Texas for instance, Trump added 1.2 million more votes, but Biden added 1.3 million. In other locations, he didn’t. Thus, the percentage differential between him and Biden fluctuated wildly. Post-election boasts from either side is probably pablum.
Processing ballots in Michigan, November 3, 2020.
Two factors missing from the analysis are secularization and the weird election system that was concocted this time around. Secularization is a trend that predates Trump. Broadly speaking, it has been on the march long before Trump, even in places that have been Republican strongholds. How much has it weakened the strength of the elephant party? As of yet, I haven’t seen any numbers for this election. I suspect – and suspicion is all that I have at this point – that it has continued its onward march. Religiosity has been known to have a clear relationship to political affiliation and voting patterns. The trend has been going ill for Republicans.
2012 Secular Society march.
And then there’s COVID. The virus was destructive, and so was our reaction to it. The economy, the schools, our social life was laid waste. Elections weren’t spared. Distance voting joined social distancing and distance learning and distance working in our lives, with equally deleterious effects. It was imposed by purely authoritarian means, and out the window went voter authentication at the point of voting, which was the precinct polling place in normal times. Not this time. The point of voting happened to be a home with any number of people to fill them out, cajole, harangue. The person alone with their conscience became a social affair.
Increasingly conducting an election by mail is fraught with serious credibility problems. In many states, the simple authenticating act of presenting an ID to a precinct worker in normal in-person suffrage was replaced by county registrar worker bees functioning as graphologists. I didn’t know that handwriting expertise could be so easily performed by temporary, underpaid, and overwhelmed election workers. Software can help, but I wonder about its efficacy. This and other mutilations of our vote system resulted in mail-in votes accounting for over 60% of the total cast. This election system was weird, very weird, making comparisons highly suspect.
What would never have been tolerated in prior elections was done with zeal in this one. In some states, ballots were shot-gunned through the mail from voter registration lists littered with inaccuracies. Absentee ballots laid in clumps beneath mail boxes in apartment complexes in some documented cases. Forget about voter verification; forget about knowing what happens behind a home’s four walls to the four ballots that arrived. Out the window went the secret ballot. The normal election system was completely upended in many states.
The process so skewed the vote numbers that this election stands as a one-of-a-kind phenomenon, hardly analogous to any other. The process dictated the outcome to a great degree. The Democrats have long maintained the advantage in the suspicious kind of voting that doesn’t require your presence. Combine this with their longstanding vetoes of voter authentication measures and efforts to clean up the voter lists and you have an election system that feeds into their wheelhouse. They now have a legalized means to round up the large cohorts of the uninterested and ill-informed in their potential fan base. Their numbers were inflated in ways that hopefully will be never replicated again. All numbers were artificially inflated, with COVID-panic as the underlying excuse. As a result, once again, any comparisons with earlier elections to draw out trends will be fraught with misperceptions.
Since vote-by-mail asks so little of the voter – after all, the ballot comes to them so they don’t even have to go get it – it places premium on the uncaring and moron voter. In normal times, they won’t get off their couch. I intuit – and intuition is all that many of us have at this time – that a large increase in the moron vote in this election had some effect. To whose benefit? Can’t say. I have my suspicions.
Then we have the person of Trump, a third underappreciated element in this campaign season. How did his outsized personality affect the results? The spectrum of reactions to him ranged from repulsed to merely tolerated to loved, with not much between the markers. The personality-driven election may have made it possible for Biden to run his “not Trump” campaign from his basement and thereby hide his mental incontinence by simply laying back to garner the repulsed, something easy to do with ballots scattered by mail and postage-free voting. Trump here, there, and everywhere may have altered the normal election landscape.
In so many ways, this was an election like no other. It stands alone, and may not be comparable at all. So, when I see talking heads make bold claims, I shake my head in wonder at the silliness. They take the black swan election of 2020 and place it in a line with previous ones. But that’s like bringing onto the stage the 7’2” Kareem Abdul Jabbar and then claiming that he’s proof that we’re getting taller.
To the editors of publications of the literary set: 2020 was a huge black swan event which mangled everything within its calendar. Please exercise caution before you spout.
Politico reached out to the punditry class for suggestions on how to unite the country (see here). First, let me say, “unity” can be a very dangerous word. Totalitarian rulers seek unity, albeit through a police state and elimination of opposition in the form of a well-armed cancel culture, the antithesis of real rule-of-law democracies.
Visage of Big Brother on the Ministry of Truth from Orwell’s “1984″.
The overwhelming majority of the pieces in Politico fall into this trap like “Root out extremism in the military ranks” (Beirich/Singh), “A White House task force on white supremacy” (Miller-Idris), “Punish politicians who lie” (Uscinski), “Update national standards for U.S. history” (Cooter), “Rebuild a shared reality” (Enders), “A new voting rights act” (Albright), “A truth and reconciliation commission” (Shim), “Increase access to affordable housing” (Sugrue), “Investigate Trump’s treatment of immigrants” (Garcia-Rios), “Reparations for Black Americans” (Galea), etc. These authors’ partisanship leaves no doubt.
This advice is proof that the Overton window (a group’s range of acceptable thought) of the Democratic Party has leaped to the extreme Left toward state-sponsored indoctrination, coercion, and federal Soviet-style central planning. It is the attempt to manufacture unity through the barrel of the state’s metaphorical gun. If followed, don’t expect unity but await irreconcilable and deepening division.
There were a few in the batch deserving of honorable mention: “Reaffirm the First Amendment” (Bauerlein), “Call out new threats to freedom in America” (Eberstadt), and “A nonpartisan, no-nonsense virus strategy” (James).
The actual cause of our division – beyond the fact that it’s natural in a democracy – is the false and malignant campus cancel culture that has entered the public square’s mainstream through one of our two institutional political parties, the Democratic Party. To paraphrase Reagan, we didn’t leave the Party; the Party left us. By left us, I mean that they went off the left-wing cliff.
If we really want to remove the road blocks to calm, reasoned deliberation, we must expunge the toxicity at the root of our inability to dialogue. Yes, noxiousness can be found on the right, but it’s a coopting of the Left’s identity-mongering. The left-wing variety has all of the backing of our cultural commanding heights. The Left has all the wind in their sails. Tune into Netflix, the networks (except Fox News), and social media with their decidedly left-wing workforces and you’ll get the monotone voice of a leftist monoculture.
Our rancor won’t disappear with a rearming of the federal government with crusades for racial reparations or an “Investigate Trump . . .”. The enmity will fade once the donkey party opens its ranks to pro-life Democrats and people who could carry the mantle of Truman, Scoop Jackson, and Hubert Humphrey. No need to worry about the crazies on the right. They’ve already been ostracized. The donkey party needs to look in the mirror and excise the radical left inquisition in control of it.
Half the country not only disagrees with them. They are justifiably afraid of them.
Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, was quoted recently as saying in a comparison of the skilled-labor pools in China and the U.S., “In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields.” Other than the usual crony-capitalist plea for more H1B visas and cheap labor, what is he actually saying about our education system and the broader American culture? I construe nothing positive. We should sit up and take notice, though.
Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks during an Apple event on Monday, March 9, 2015, in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)
Is he right? Is it fair to draw these implications? Mostly . . . yes and yes. For decades, from the commanding heights of our culture has come a corrupting message that has severely damaged our long-term prospects. We have incessantly advertised the idea that personal well-being is found in the possession of a piece of paper from an institution with a similarly questionable piece of accreditation paper, called a college. And this has simultaneously occurred as powerful political currents have demolished academic rigor and classroom decorum, and morphed our schools into indoctrination camps. The result is a growing class of opinionated dunces, a divorce from reality for many, and a country that has to import the brains that are capable of delivering the stuff on our Amazon wish lists.
The culture drives our problems, a culture from the individual to the family right up through the entire federal system. Human beings don’t just pop out of the ground as in Gimli’s joke about the birthing of dwarves in “The Lord of the Rings”. People are born and raised in a social setting, a setting of distracted or, at the other extreme, smothering parents who themselves were a product of the same social eco-system, as were their parents. It’s been around that long. The whole notion of practical realities is fading from the social memory. Nature abhors a vacuum and similarly our social and mental vacuum is being filled with drivel.
One of the worst ideas to come down the pike is the ethos of collectivism, or as Hillary was fond of saying: “the things we do together”. The personal accountability of the Genesis story, the prophets, and the Gospels is erased by an imperial group identity. Personal souls become group souls. Group guilt and rewards are the necessary by-product. Racial vengeance in the form of racial reparations and a check-the-box of “oppressed” identities for new hires and promotions are the expected norm. Social cohesion is the first casualty as some groups realize that they are screwed.
The past is contorted to fit the new reigning obsession, and when things go awry, as they inevitably will, more fallacies in thought and action will be implemented to cover the tracks. For instance, order in the classroom will come under attack as soon as it is discovered that suspensions by group don’t conform to neat proportionalities. The old justice for the individual turns into group justice – a noxious idea no matter where it has reared its ugly head in history, a history we are quickly forgetting. The classroom spirals downhill only to lead to more permissiveness, ad infinitum. The only operative principle to draw is never having to admit you’re wrong (from what movie?).
“Statistical disparity” enters the lexicon as the bogeyman to all things good and right. Now, we are no longer expected to look at the particular circumstances of each incident of mayhem. From the classroom to the street, some people who’ve shown the propensity to harm people and their things get essentially a free pass because any rightful application of justice trips the group’s proportionality.
Group oppression in the form of race and the ever-expanding number of phobias is the go-to explanation for the misalignment, the “statistical disparity”; thus, the rise of “systemic” racism, sexism, and the phobias to drive the left’s social engineering crusades. Using the airy adjective “systemic” makes it possible to say it without proving it. It’s impossible to prove an ill-defined abstraction. Just say it and that’s tantamount to proving it. Never entering the mind of these dunces is the possibility that social pathologies don’t conform to proportionality. But that’s roundly rejected as further proof of, you guessed it, “systemic” fill-in-the-blank. Is there something grossly absurd in this fever swamp of thinking?
Southside neighborhood in Chicago
Nonetheless, off we go to the land of fantasy where we find leprechauns and unicorns. And it shows in the people trashing Portland and manning (and womanning, or whatever) the Biden administration. Toppling the statues of people who established their right to believe in nonsense has been one of the miscreants’ highest priorities. Has the irony occurred to them?
Not stopping there, many coddle a fascination with socialism of almost every shade, from, once again, the people trashing Portland and manning (and womanning, or whatever) the Biden administration. Some deny it while still talking like it, like our new commander-in-chief. Has it occurred to these people that a society corseted by the overweening principle of government massively taking from one group to give to another is disruptive to national cohesion and prosperity? The coerced giver has little incentive to produce the means to give and the recipient of the largesse has little incentive to earn it. It doesn’t matter if you reclassify the waste as “investment”, a mere play on words. You’ll still end up with less of what you want – the stuff on our Amazon wish lists – and more of what you don’t – more people on the dole.
The self-styled progressives aren’t espousing Christian social teaching. Don’t fool yourself. This is social suicide. I don’t think that Thomas Aquinas had a suicide pact in mind.
What we are getting is less demanding of our people and more of a demanding people. The work ethic declines as we increasingly distance ourselves from the practical realities of life. An infatuation with leisure, individual license, a wallowing in falsehoods, and schools reflecting the morass is not likely to fill a stadium with mechanical engineers. China may not eat our lunch, but we are certainly making it possible for everybody else to do it.
Our only recourse to date would be to export the madness. Win by making others equally as corrupt. Beijing, how about taking in more of the faculty of our grad schools of education? Many of them are already with the Party program anyway.
Last night, I watched the first installment of The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring. It’s an entirely fitting thing to do given what has happened to us in the general election and what is about to happen to us thereafter, whether you voted for the guy or not. Joe Biden and his coterie have the ring of power.
The movie opens with Galadriel’s haunting premonition of evil tidings and a recitation of the past that led to this new and ominous dark time.
“The world has changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost. For none now live who remember it. It began with the forging of the great rings [to the rulers of the three races of Middle Earth].
But they were all of them deceived for another ring was made. In the land of Mordor, in the fires of Mount Doom, the dark Lord Sauron forged in secret a master ring, to control all others and into this ring, he poured his cruelty, his malice, and his will to dominate all life. One ring to rule them all.”
I can’t think of anything that better captures the awful sense of foreboding that dominates the mind of many Americans today. Nothing that Biden said in his speeches allayed those fears. He exacerbated them.
His inaugural speech was replete with calls for unity and an end to the “uncivil war”. Good, as far as it goes. But “a more perfect union” has a different ring coming out of the mouth of the leader of a party whose Overton window has lurched in the direction of Marx. “Racial justice” is tantamount to witch hunts against an ill-defined “white supremacy” which may mean a crusade against political opposition. “The cry of survival from the planet” is code for the enhanced central planning of the Green New Deal.
Back to “unity”. What kind of “unity” was it? “Unity” was the rhetorical device to express the portentous power of the ring. Biden used “unity” innumerable times to the point that it suffered from a Weimar level of value debasement. If anything, it was the “unity” of capitulation. “Shared values” meant their values.
Inauguration Day was more than the speech. Yesterday, something like the discovery of the ring of power was encapsulated in other parts of an otherwordly ceremony. Watching the COVID inaugural festivities was another one of those surreal experiences that goes right alongside the scenes from the COVID election, COVID anti-socialization in quarantined homes, the COVID anti-learning in COVID “distance learning”, the COVID shuttering of economic life, and COVID anti-romance for those seeking a mate – something hard to do with two-thirds of the face hiding behind a mask. COVID mangled life and now gave us an expensively-produced infomercial masquerading as an inaugural ceremony that could have come right out of the History Channel’s “Life After People”. There were few, very few hominids around, with the exception of the speech itself.
“Virtual reality” must be expanded to include “virtual inauguration”. Ceremonies and celebrations without people leave the impression that people aren’t necessary, and the first step toward inhumanity.
It was an inauguration signaling the rise of new power in the east. It had nothing to do with a transference of a ring of power since the losing party is less about power – therefore no need for the ring – than it is about the restraining and channeling of power to allow a free people to function freely. The winning party in its current manifestation is almost purely about power, the power to bring about an eschaton that is founded upon a set of fallacies. This end state has to be imposed by force since few in their right mind would freely accept it. It’s as if Sauron gained possession of the ring.
An inkling of where things are going is evident in Biden’s inaugural 17 executive orders. Globalism replaced nationalism as he will hogtie us back into the CCP-dominated World Health Organization and CCP-favored Paris Climate Accord. American health and economic policy will be laboring to breath under an UN and CCP wet blanket.
Uighur concentration camp in Xinjiang, Red China.
The chaos at the southern border is set to return. The first step in scotching the wall was made. Legislating from the Resolution desk was endorsed with a rechristening of DACA. It’s the very thing that helped sanction a new approach to gain illegal entry: grab a kid. The signal was sent that the possession of a kid necessitates favored treatment.
Making asylum really mean asylum and not just another means to make “poor” the unofficial-but-real criteria for access to the U.S. will be obliterated in present and future proclamations in Biden’s orders. Be prepared for the play-acting that countries who are known to germinate terrorists aren’t, and that vetting asylum-seekers from these places can actually occur. These countries don’t even have reliable birth certificates. How can anybody be traced from these places? I don’t think that Al Qaeda or ISIS operates on the principle of ID cards. Still, we’re going down this moral and rational dead-end.
Immigrants try to swarm the border wall near San Diego, April 2018.
Instead, we are going to be showered with announcements on the “real” threat of “domestic terrorism”. We will be told that the real danger does not lie with Islamic fanatics who would behead a teacher for showing Muhammed cartoons in a lesson on free speech, as what recently happened in France. No, Biden and company say that we’ve got to hunt down people who might have strong reservations about the donkey party’s socialist revolution. Will the rank and file of the FBI allow itself to be used as the Biden administration’s NKVD (Stalin’s secret police)? The worry is not out of the realm of possibility given the Comey/McCabe/Brennan/Clapper/Obama shenanigans of recent memory.
Biden ordered a return to the shackling of the US energy industry in a Don Quixote tilting at global greenhouse-gas windmills. No more Keystone/XL pipeline. Federal emissions standards will follow the lead of California’s eco-socialists. Federal taxpayer-owned lands and continental shelf will fall under the gaze of Biden’s own eco-socialist commissars. Thousands will be given their last paycheck and back to the union hall they will go seeking work from a vastly depleted list of opportunities.
Buttigieg’s comments on the repeal of the permits for the Keystone/XL pipeline at his Senate confirmation hearing had all the compassion of a NKVD requisition officer dispossessing a farmer and his family (“kulaks”) of their land, home, and last bit of food in the heady days of Stalin’s collectivization campaign. Chilling, absolutely chilling.
Buttigeig at his confirmation hearing for the post of Secretary of Transportation.The expropriation of a Ukrainian Farmer’s land and home by a NKVD requisition squad in the 1930’s as part of Stalin’s collectivization campaign.
If that’s not enough, out goes Trump’s 1776 Commission and in comes the dangerous and facetious 1619 Project. The former would instill a sense of thankfulness for our country while the latter is meant to foment disgust. The latter is about to be force-fed to the kiddies on a grander scale now that the federal Leviathan is gearing up to cram it into the schools. Our schools may come to mirror Red China’s Uighur reeducation camps or Cuba’s schoolhouses.
Cuban school kids, 2016.
The “be prepareds” are in order. Be prepared for a taxpayer-funded shaming campaign for owning a SUV. Be prepared for the whole graph of fuel-price gyrations to be shifted upward. Meaning, starting up the car might become a family budget-busting activity. Be prepared for an economy that’ll be expected to run on wind gusts and solar farms the size of a western state. Be prepared for the hosing of taxpayer dollars in the direction of any claque of eco rent-seekers with their snouts fully buried in the public trough. These people are bound and determined to make the impossible possible with your money.
More “be prepareds” are in order. Be prepared for the march of woke authoritarianism. Out goes the First Amendment amid the reclassification of unwelcome speech into hate speech. Racism will reappear as “equity”, “equity” being the official sanction of racial vengeance. The approved melanin count, genitalia, self-diagnosed gender, and any combination thereof will be the new privileged Boston Brahmins. The longstanding Boston Brahmins will continue their inside track to status and fame. The ones on the outs will be the children of Asians, blue collars and the working middle class of paler complexions.
Power is the necessary ingredient for this revolution. It must be forced. If Biden didn’t gain possession of the ring of power, he certainly is acting like it. The Lord of the Rings is the perfect accompaniment to his new revitalization of Mordor.
The totalitarian N.I.C.E. from CS Lewis’s That Hideous Strength.
Or maybe the more accurate parallel is the totalitarian N.I.C.E. in C.S. Lewis’s The Hideous Strength. It’s a tale of science without morality and in the service of totalitarian social engineering. Either way, “The Lord of the Rings” will do for now in getting you in the proper mood for what’s coming.
