Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)
A blog in defense of western civilization by Roger Graf
Here’s the relevant scene from “A Man For All Seasons” mentioned in my previous post. Substitute young Roper for the cancel-culture mobs patrolling our campuses, infecting our children’s curriculums, manning the halls of power, and swarming the newsrooms. Mob rule has the upper hand over the rule of law and decency. These, indeed, are tumultuous times. We must keep our heads on straight in this period of malevolent madness.
RogerG
The movie, “A Man For All Seasons”, has a pertinent exchange between Sir Thomas More and his daughter’s fiancée, William Roper. Roper proclaims his desire to steamroll any law to suppress an evil. More counters with this: “And when the last law was down – and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?” As the kids in the backseat would say, “Are we there yet?” Are our laws, like the Bill of Rights, made flat?
I don’t know, but we seem to be close. The Biden posse is coming after guns, embarking on a crusade against its political foes under the banner of the fight against the illusory “White Supremacy”, and rigging the federal election system to sustain its grip on power by making it easier to vote and easier to cheat. We are quickly becoming a banana republic with Stalinistic overtones.
“A Man For All Seasons” is worth a look. It isn’t the cup if tea for those raised on films with thin dialogue and abundant eye candy, but it more than makes up for it in gripping moral lessons.
RogerG
Biden can’t have his cake and eat it too. I mean that he can’t be a firebrand for eco-extremism and an advocate of American manufacturing. The core problem lies in the so-called rubber meeting the road. His eco-allies won’t tolerate the reality of a manufacturing plant while he announces an airy platitude about eco-manufacturing from the rarified altitude of Mount Washington, DC. You know, like his professed fondness for the manufacturing of wind turbines here in America. He must realize that eco-zealots will torpedo, or wreck, the actual building of an actual manufacturing facility. A total disconnect is at work here.
Eco-zealots, by definition, can’t allow it. These acolytes of the religion of Environmentalism are stuck in the memory of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland catching fire 52 years ago. They can’t handle the idea that today’s manufacturing isn’t the manufacturing of 1969. They lie down in the brush waiting for a project to appear and pounce.
Well, it happened. The Allegheny County Health Department torpedoed US Steel’s $1.5 billion improvement and expansion project at its Mon Valley Works in the Pittsburgh area, and a thousand direct jobs, along with thousands of indirect ones, disappeared. You can read about it here.
Stalin used “wreckers” to hide his monumental mistakes in his grand industrialization plan. It included extracting farm produce from the peasants – some 80-90% of the population – in order to finance it. It, in turn, resulted in the Holodomor famine of the 1930’s – 8-10 million starved to death. Stalin’s new plants produced a lot of rubbish and the country’s breadbasket would forever come up short.
Biden’s “wreckers” aren’t mere scapegoats as they were for Stalin. Biden’s wreckers lie in his coalition: eco-fanatics don’t mix with his alleged fondness for manufacturing. He can bellow all he wants, but try to get a real plant approved. That’s the problem when a walking contradiction gets elevated to power. Crap happens.
Please read the article.
RogerG
President Biden in his first speech to Congress on April 28, 2021: “Independent experts estimate the American Jobs Plan will add millions of jobs and trillions of dollars to economic growth in the years to come.”
“Experts”, it’s become a cliché, a buzzword, famous for its new-found vapidity and banality. All apply because its meaning has been soiled by media-hungry activists, politicians exploiting the moment to foist their fanatical vision on the country, and far too many technocrats and technocrat wannabes stepping outside their lane with disastrous results. The word has been stripped of its force in the language. It’s developed a darker connotation to those who happen to fall on the wrong side of the fashionable zealotry of the age.
Part of the problem lies with our misplaced faith in a technocracy, the tendency of seeing nearly all issues as if they were matters to be addressed by technical expertise. Values such as liberty, decency, self-reliance, civil society, faith, personal achievement, cultural preservation, etc., are reduced to a secondary role. Questions are reduced to mere calculation, the calculus of the technical expert.
Funny thing, though, most everyone with an animating cause or set of zealous ideological commitments desires the security from challenge that the moniker “expert” confers. Partisan, ideological crusaders seek protection from opposition under a pseudo-expertise invented for the purpose. It’s how they make their positions unassailable. The drive for paper credentials (college degrees, certification) – that staple of the expert class – is extended to cover good old-fashioned extremist provocateurs. Thus, the expert umbrella is stretched into a canopy sheltering everyone from the lab coats to the fanatical huckster.
No doubt, the pandemic has diminished the value of the word “expert”. Doctors Fauci and Birx in the previous administration, and the ubiquitous Fauci and Walensky in this one, have made “expert” a matter of scorn for many. The reputations of many “experts” are sullied when they conveniently forget their place. Policy – meaning the directions and actions of government’s decision-makers – must consider more than the physical “science” of an issue. “Science” is a necessary but not sufficient factor in developing a course of action. Certainly, it’s more at the top of the list in some matters than others. But the last time that I checked, Fauci, Birx, and Walensky aren’t Constitutional scholars, social psychologists, economists, and cultural anthropologists who understand the high priority of liberty in our society. “Science” in their hands becomes cold, hard government aggression. As one sensible pundit put it – I paraphrase – we should consult their expertise, not submit to it.
Speaking of submit, right now, the “science” of the “expert” is a form of Islam, in the purest definition of the Arabic word. Its literal translation is “submission”. For a Muslim, it’s submission to Allah. For our power-hungry collectivists, it’s submission to their version of “science” under the cloak of their coterie of “experts”, as if no other voices matter, so long as it produces submission to the orders of the powerful. It conjures images of conversion by the sword sweeping the Middle East to the plains of France and gates of Vienna of centuries past. Only in this case, the hardy activists in the seats of power, with their politicized “experts” in tow, are scything any opposition to their authoritarian edicts. It’s shocking to watch the overturning of the Founding by this bastardized form of “science”.
The bastardization sullies its reputation, but the interference of politics isn’t the only cause for the decline in the status of “expert”. The inherent value of the college degree – the base requirement for “expert” – has an inverse relationship to its ease of acquisition. The college degree in the ever-growing panoply of fields, in its current state of depressed value, still strives to share in the glow of a PhD in nuclear physics. In fact, PhD’s are offered in nearly everything, but without the rigor. Much of the coursework is balderdash, sophistry, or disguised ideology. Yes, ideology, as in a systematized but shallow viewpoint masquerading as a form of higher thought.
Enter “Doctor” Jill Biden, an archetype of the genre. She’s an obsessive/compulsive hoarder of degrees with two masters in reading and English and a “Doctorate” in educational leadership. Does all that time and expense in a college classroom designate competence? Maybe, maybe not, many times not. As a 30-year veteran as an instructor in public high schools and a community college, in many leadership posts, I’ve seen this breed of cat many times. With their advanced sheepskin in Education, many with the Jill accolade (Education PhD, empty awards and certificates) on their résumé, they prance before the faculty in training sessions with their alleged silver bullet for reform but can’t handle penetrating questions into their scheme. It quickly becomes obvious that their “competence” is actually a faith in a set of highly tendentious assumptions for which they are ill-prepared to defend when confronted by skeptics. They stammer, unless they stand before a staff equally in the dark. It’s an embarrassing charade.
Don’t trust the presenter to realize the embarrassment and then expect that to be a corrective. Some are so immersed in their loose theory that they are oblivious. Some go so far as to mistake a dubious ideology for scholarship. Indeed, some manage to parlay the cognitive blur into a sweet faculty gig, like Nikole Hannah Jones, author of the discredited “The 1619 Project”, now a professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. It’s easy to becloud the boundary between political dogmas and scholarship when you don’t know any better. I suspect that she doesn’t know any better.
Either she doesn’t know any better or she does but has forsaken truth-seeking for political activism. The reality is that she’s more of an advocate of a political dogma than a real scholar. Scholarship, like science, is a coherent search for truth. That’s not for her. She has built a career on the false analysis of starting with a conclusory dogmatic belief (“systemic racism”), then engages in an extrapolation from that unproven assumption (the need for “equity”), and then moves onto unfounded speculation to serve her preordained political vision (racial reparations). It’s perfect for protracted political agitation. And it’s an insult to scholarship.
Her affront to logic is astounding. As a point of comparison, the form of truth-seeking and sound logic in the field of science is the scientific method. It begins, absolutely begins, with a testable hypothesis. The proposed answer to a problem (hypothesis) must be stated in a testable manner. A person can’t start with “systemic” as a governing adjective. It’s too ill-defined to be subjected to verification. Jones’s method of thinking has more in common with the Buddhist Sutras than rigorous scientific analysis. She, like others of her ilk, simply claim a “truth” and then run with the ball.
She is part of a tribe of abusers to serious scholarship. Like them, she tries to present an ersatz proof in the form of “statistical disparities”, which are unequal socio-economic measures by demographic group. Blacks suffer a higher rate of maternal deaths for instance. Okay, now what? She jumps to her favored conclusion of “systemic racism”. But that’s not proof of a “system” disfavoring Blacks. She hasn’t even dealt with the question of whether the possible causes are external or internal to the group. That would require a legitimate process of elimination which she doesn’t even attempt, or can’t perform.
If our “system” is a knee on the neck of Black America and a fixed competition to advance whites as Jones claims, why aren’t whites doing better? Going back to those maternal-mortality rates, whites don’t lead the pack with the smallest maternal death rate. They are tied with Asians, and Hispanics are at the head of the pack with the smallest number. When Jones bellows that she wants “white people to give up whiteness”, does she now mean that “brown people give up their brownness”?
The bankruptcy of “statistical disparities” doesn’t stop there. Average life spans by race don’t cooperate with the Jones’s hallowed belief in “systemic” white supremacy. Whites have been on a slide in longevity for a couple of decades since the onset of the opioid epidemic’s “deaths of despair”. Whites, as in maternal-mortality rates, aren’t on top in life expectancy. The peak is occupied by Asians (89), followed by Hispanics (83), and whites (79) and blacks (73) finish behind. Should “Asians give up their Asianness”?
She gets away with it because she, like her prototype, Jill Biden, has buried the incompetence in a layer of sheepskin and paper in the form of awards from organizations that are equally as corrupted by the fashionable political manias of our time. Corruption begets corruption.
It extends to the academy that hired her, UNC-Chapel Hill’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media. A freebooting activist like Jones, masquerading as a scholar, will face many journalism students who avoided the rigor of an academic core, maybe like her. The School removed the requirements for Econ 101 (basic econ principles and concepts), History 128 (US History, 1865 to present), and Poli Sci 100/101 (US government/state and local government). Forget about any expectation of any learning in Western Philosophy and Civilization, and Logic. They are primed for her nonsense.
The core can be dodged by adhering to a curriculum more attuned to political activism in courses such as “Defining Blackness” (African Studies 50), “Environmentalism and American Society” (Anthro 51), “Collective Leadership Models for Community Change” (Comm 53), “Supernatural Encounters” (Rel 246), and “Emotion and Social Life” (Soc 51). See where Biden’s extra four years of taxpayer-funded education in his “American Families Plan” leads? It heads straight to academic charlatans like Jones, transcripts littered with radical infatuations of the moment, and an untrained and empty head ready to fill slots in the newsroom at The New York Times.
And just think that the Jones brigades of critical race theory (CRT) are spreading into your kids’ primary and secondary schools. Yeah, the schools down the street. “Equity” is CRT’s cover for the use of statistical disparities to force a levelling. That means in today’s doublespeak that your kids, if they are white or white enough, are going to go through Maoist struggle sessions to force them to admit their role of oppressor. Take for instance , the Inclusion and Equity officer for the mostly white Hamilton Southeastern School District, northeast of Indianapolis.
She promises an eternal crusade for “equity”. She boasts, “You’re on a journey but you never arrive, you get closer [to equity], but you never really get there. It’s continued work, it doesn’t stop, because I think the moment that we stop is the moment that old systems can come back.” The poor kids are being set up to get an unending dose of this lefty indoctrination, or until parents get wise and yank their kids out of this ideological hothouse.
If you’re looking for the clean-cut, button-downed alternative in your “expert”, not the kind in college faculty posts that give birth to the Marxist hoods manning the BLM or Antifa barricades in our big cities, you’ll turn to the bland representatives of McKinsey & Company, a multi-national consultancy operation. Here you’ll find the morally, but appropriately certificated, empty suit. McKinsey puts a premium on the prestigious paper, prestigious degree, from the prestigious university. Pedigree matters more than moral depth. They’ll even take those Humanities majors. From there, McKinsey alumni frequently gravitate to government or to the heavily bureaucratized Fortune 500.
No better example can be found of the McKinsey Associate in government than our first gay Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg. The callousness of the tone-deaf empty suit can be seen in this exchange between Sen. Ted Cruz and Buttigieg on Biden’s order to cancel the Keystone pipeline:
Cruz: “So for those workers, the answer is somebody else will get a job?”
Buttigieg: “The answer is we are very eager to see those workers continue to be employed in good-paying union jobs, even if they might be different ones.”
“Different ones”? Once you kill 11,000 jobs, Buttigieg and the rest of the gang over at Biden central can’t guarantee the avoidance of economic despair for the 11,000 now having to resort to unemployment benefits. He can’t wrap his head around the human cost of playing the demi-god with the lives of others.
The mindset around Biden, including Buttigieg’s, is a military one. The workforce is a mass of cogs in a machine who are treated like grunts in the Army, ready to be shunted around as needed. For the Buttigieg types, highly specialized welders are a number to be moved from one column to another in their Excel spreadsheets. Indeed, it’s as simple as Excel to our Harvard and Oxford-trained alumnus of McKinsey and Company. Flesh and blood, personal aspirations, and family welfare be damned for this disconnected careerist. It’s shallow thinking at its harshest and worst.
John Maynard Keynes wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace to explain the troubling outcomes of the Carthaginian peace at Versailles in 1919. Keynes followed the academic script by clinically focusing on the economic consequences, but at least he was aware of serious fallout from the decisions made at Versailles. Buttigieg is also probably aware, but seems not to care. For him, he thinks that he can add another field to his Excel federal spending spreadsheet for a retraining program for defunct workers in defunct-by-edict jobs. He hits the enter key and it’s off to the gym as if “problem solved”.
McKinsey-style aloofness, almost callousness, isn’t due to the lack of goals. If anything, this suit is all about goals in his means-ends analysis. However – and I paraphrase James Carville – it’s the goals, stupid. In this manner, he’s like our newest faculty member at UNC-Chapel Hill. Both take a tendentious claim – Jones’s “systemic racism”, apocalyptic climate change for Buttigieg – and run to its mitigation no matter the destroyed livelihoods and ruinous ramifications from their suicidal jihad against the whole of the American way of life. For Jones, it’s “burn baby burn”. For Buttigieg, it’s a cold calculus toward dubious ends. Both will burn down the house.
America is in the grip of a death cult, one that originated on the campus and spread to big philanthropy, the Fortune 500, big sports, and the big-moneyed class in trendy places. The cult is partly populated by a compromised and myopic claque of experts, too many of them caught up in a fanaticism-of-the-moment and cruising way out of their lane. Others in the sect have the accoutrements of “expert” (a degree) but, in reality, are revolutionary firebrands. It’s as if we have created for ourselves a pseudo-technocracy gone mad, or, more specifically, gone woke.
RogerG
*Sources:
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/05/17/inequality-of-equity/
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/reject-the-mckinsey-mindset/
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/critical-race-theory-the-enemy-of-reason-evidence-and-open-debate/
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/university-of-north-carolina-disgraces-itself-with-latest-faculty-hire/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first
https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2021/05/school-of-journalism-or-ministry-of-propaganda/
Dr. Now in TLC’s “My 600-Pound Life” is confronted with morbidly obese patients. The show reveals the gross flaws of human nature when people are advised to stop destroying themselves in gluttony. They lie, cheat – sneak pizza into their hospital room – and wallow in atrocious self-pity. Well, the first two of those behaviors were on full display last night before a joint session of Congress by President Biden, with the addition of demagoguery and an LSD-inspired disconnect from reality. To be sure, Biden isn’t the doctor; he’s the troubled patient.
And this on the heels of President Trump’s previous 4-year litany of “best ever”. He exaggerated. Biden out-and-out mangled the truth, probably intentionally lied, and presented all the integrity of a used car salesman. He out-Trumped Trump, and every other politician since Tammany Hall.
Let’s face it, last night’s spiel was a “Welcome America to Your New Soviet Future”. Where to start? Start where he started. He shamelessly claimed credit for the good news on the virus. The guy’s been above room temperature while in office for only 100 days, and he struts around taking credit for other people’s accomplishments. The vaccine came out of Trump’s Operation Warp Speed; the distribution and jabs began under the orange man; and the decline in the death rate began before a pandemic-mutilated election put Biden in the oval office. Of course, the contributions of the man from Mira Lago were erased from history. Welcome to Biden’s Bizzarro world.
Biden’s unwitting comic routine continued under the ages-old political tactic of distorting a crisis to stampede the public into the Leviathan. We should have known that we’re in trouble when “the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression” came off his lips. Funny thing that “worst economic crisis”: it was an overt government act to euthanize society in response to the virus. More accurately, it was a government-induced coma, and one that blue state governors want to extend beyond the horizon. Let’s get this straight: they engineer a deadening of life; work to continue the suffocation; and then exploit these outcomes to bring the Soviet’s Gosplan (Soviet central planning agency) to America. The hutzpah is off the charts.
Speaking of Gosplan, Biden’s 26-minute prattle was Soviet central planning galore. He plans to flood the country with tidal waves of fiat, paper money – 4 trillions of it on top of his already-passed 2 trillion – for Democratic Party constituencies and hangers-on. He wants to buy off blue-collars with coerced unionization for everybody as he works to destroy their jobs in order to pander to Environmentalism’s zealots among aloof, semi-literate white-collars and uber-wealthy. Oh, he says, not to worry. The working stiffs will be drafted as laboring foot soldiers in the Great Leader’s greenie transformation of all of life, which is reminiscent of Stalin’s Industrialization campaign of the 1930’s, a scheme that had the unhappy consequences of massive official maldistribution of resources and stunning brutality: 10 million starvation deaths in the Ukraine (the Holodomor), ill-suited and untrained peasants herded into factories and new cities, and the production of a lot of crap. Wild imaginations of the powerful can kill you and your livelihoods.
The suicide pill of a $15 minimum wage was childishly asserted. Who’ll be forced to take it? The pill will be swallowed by the hundreds of thousands who’ll lose their jobs as employers shed folks who can’t produce $15 worth of product. It’ll be a boon to automation . . . as if we need any more reasons to hand over wads of cash to techie lefties.
Be warned, the rest of this account depicts Biden’s and the entire Dem firmament’s rampant abuse of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Playing loose with the language is a hallmark of the blinkered ambitious. It was on full display last night. Take the word “infrastructure”. If you thought that it meant roads, bridges, water projects, the grid, oh how you misjudged the creative duplicity of ambitious people with too much power. “Infrastructure” means The Squad-economy. Say goodbye to your fuel-efficient sedan; say hello to a $50,000 electric cart, made affordable by making somebody else share the cost without their consent. Say goodbye to affordable and consistently available energy; say hello to blackouts, vast stretches of the landscape blanketed in solar panel plantations and artificial forests of huge steel-towered propellers, and utility bills that’ll force you into a hippie lifestyle. Greenie energy isn’t cheap energy, never has been.
“Clean energy” is another one of those abortions to clear thinking. Cut the crap; it’s code for the destruction of reliable energy – “managed decline” (?) – and its replacement with the kind that’ll be foisted on us after upending our entire way of life at humongous cost to us. See, our politicians only produce words, words that satisfy their unhinged imaginations but make a mockery of good sense.
Here’s more words. All this talk about the “21st century economy” isn’t the “economy of the future”. It’s the economy of the whimsical imaginations of people who are divorced from the mundane task of making and selling stuff in the real world, of people who live a Beltway existence, have the lifetime sinecure of a safe district, and a steady six-figure paycheck. Their whimsies become our nightmares.
Biden was not finished making a shambles of the Oxford Dictionary. He introduced “The American Families Plan” which has little to do with families, and more to do with padding the bank account of the NEA. The centerpiece turns “free” K-12 into “free” pre-K-to-senior thesis. 13 years at taxpayer expense quickly became 17, as if the “21st century economy” requires more sociology and grievance/identity majors. Once they get done with your child’s schooling, your kid will be ready for a job behind a Starbucks counter and primed to head to Portland in a black hood, ready for the ongoing fight against “white privilege”.
As for “free”, nothing is “free”. We all know that, or do we? Don’t expect four more years in an ideological hothouse to enlighten the kids. “Free” is another one of those words to go through the etymological shredder.
The word “free” is frequently attached to “investment” in the steel trap of Biden’s mind. “Investment” is a nicer word for “spending”. Mind you, he’s not talking about “investment” to defend us and our way of life with a 350-ship navy. He’s talking about pumping money into more social programs. “Investment” actually means an expense in the reasonable hope of a profit. What is the reasonable result from many of the earlier “investment” boondoggles? Remember FDR’s New Deal that turned a market correction into a decade-long castration of national wealth and personal fortunes? Remember urban renewal? Remember AFDC? Remember public housing, Section 8? Remember the additional trillions pumped into public education over the past three decades with embarrassing results? Yes, remember Head Start? It’s proof that entrenched lefties still try to put lipstick on that pig. If you want a glimpse into Biden’s future for us, look at California.
He’s not done with saddling us and future generations with more debt. He plans to lard up the bill with more “free” (meaning somebody else pays) stuff: day care, family leave, etc. The only ray of light is the child tax credit which gives working families a voucher, in essence, to escape his Education Department’s and DOJ Civil Rights commissars. It might be worth Biden’s gift for parents to have the option of getting their kids out of Biden’s public schools, the ones that are riddled with the mayhem of “restorative justice” discipline, school boards under the thumb of the teacher unions and the mentally bankrupt Schools of Education, and the racist indoctrination of critical race theory and other mind-numbing ideologies. How long will it be before Biden discovers that he unleashed a form of choice that he hates: school choice? Parents, take the checks before the teachers’ unions wake up and put the kibosh to it.
The flood gates for more government are further thrown open when the word “right” is promiscuously tossed around as Biden did by attaching it to healthcare. If something is declared a “right”, then it must be guaranteed, guaranteed equally to all. The 13th Amendment prohibits enslaving providers to give it up, but no such protection applies to the taxpayer. A “right” in this context means that taxpayers, now and in the future, must pony up.
Just think about it: how can a product or service, scarce by definition, be guaranteed to everyone in the amount that they demand? Scarcity means a limit to the number of doctors and nurses, medical facilities, money for same, equipment and supplies, and the rest of the supply chain inputs. To pretend it to be a “right” – and that’s all it is, a pretension – is to eventually reach the reality of resources being sucked away from the other necessary components of life. You’ve got healthcare, but the cost of housing, food, and heating goes through the roof. In the end, your healthcare will be limited by quality and some form of rationing. That’s the real world, but it’s not where we find the minds of the donkey party and our president at the dais last night.
How will the giver-in-chief pay for these additional trillions and trillions? “Pay” goes into the same meat grinder of meaning with the rest of the relevant vocabulary. It’s a flight of fancy away from the real capital flight. You see, if he succeeds in raising your employer’s taxes, he or she adjusts. Some flee the jaws of Biden’s IRS, and they take a few jobs with them, maybe yours. In the end, a hike in taxes always disappoints. The money coming in doesn’t match the lofty expectations, but the spending certainly continues as before. As for those that head for the tax haven of Ireland, Lizzy Warren (D., Mass.) wants to man the exit points with agents to corral the flight to freedom. Sounds like East German guards at the Berlin Wall.
It’s interesting to note that Biden’s threshold for tax hikes is $400,000. 400,000 bucks encompasses a well-paid techie lefty and places the bar high enough to protect another valuable constituency: dues-paying members of the teachers’ unions, an essential constituency if you running for office with a “D” after your name. Comfortable suburban white-collars can’t be irritated with tax increases at a time when the Dems need their support to replace other lost constituencies. No need in angering a demographic that you rely upon to continue the revolution down the road.
Biden then gets to another one of those tactless monikers: “fair share”. He throws it out there as if he said something profound. He didn’t; he demagogued it. He should know, as does Pelosi’s CBO, the top 20% pay 69% of all federal taxes. What’s “fair share”? A 100%? This is pure malicious demagoguery. It’s either a lie or Biden is absolutely clueless. You choose.
The speech then mashed together two huge self-negations: his fascination for the rigid ideology of climate change and his promise to protect America’s national interests. Tell me, how does that work? He acts to run down the country with massive regulations, taxes, and life-degrading mandates as he promises to put China in a box. The Paris accord, which he demands that we re-enter, exempts China and India from most of its most deleterious edicts while they fully fall on the U.S. It’s a plan to chop off one of the U.S.’s legs in the race with Red China. Strangulation of the domestic economy makes mute the promise to make Red China play fair. Biden is doing to us what the Red Chinese would do if they could.
Is Biden an unwitting Manchurian candidate?
The whole speech was a combination of how-to-be-Argentina and government-by-leftist-junta. Calm, soothing tones are meaningless if you’re rampaging the train of the country off the rails. “Sleepless in Seattle” became “Shameless in DC” last night.
RogerG
Good public leaders don’t attempt to ride a wave of falsehoods. Right now, our mediocre leadership does! Take today’s enthusiasm for race-hustling among many of our elected leaders at the top of our political establishment. The whole edifice of “critical race theory” and its companion charge of “systemic racism” rides on a blatant mangling of facts, inventing them in many instances. The George Floyd case has turned into another example in the sorry saga.
Universal connectivity now makes it possible for cat videos, daily cop interactions with the public, and acts of rank stupidity to spread like the 1906 San Francisco Fire in the immediate wake of the 7.9 earthquake. Back then, fire-storms rampaged almost unimpeded, like the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Today, fire-storms are limited to wildlands; however, another kind is let loose on the public. Under conditions of instant connectivity, everyone gets to see what somebody else has taken with their cellphone, and frequently, before it has a chance to go virile, someone will have cropped it to fit a crazed political fetish. Sadly, not unexpectedly, it happened again regarding the arrest of George Floyd.
Watch the video below of the prologue to the famous 9-minute Chauvin segment that was hyped by our race-hustling halfwits in elected positions. I’ve said it before: resisting arrest increases the risk of an encounter ending in a bad place. Add the facts of the suspect being high as a kite, universal cell-phone cinematography, and near-illiterate revolutionary fervor of a narrow clique running at a fever pitch, and we get to see our cities explode.
Does anyone do real risk assessment anymore? Many of our leaders go overboard into authoritarianism to pursue zero risk because of a virus, but find excuses for resisting arrest as if the risk of refusing to follow officer requests is negligible in the haste to brand cops as covert KKK members. Little risk is permissible in one while high-risk behavior is ignored in the other. How does that work?
Do we produce good leaders anymore who can sensibly navigate the nonsense? If we don’t find some soon, get prepared for a major rupture in our national cohesion. Red-state locales won’t countenance the craziness that appears to ride at the top of our society.
RogerG
It seems that we go through periods of poor public leadership like the spate of presidents prior to the Civil War (Pres. James Buchanan?). Great leaders don’t get caught up in momentary public manias, nor are they demagogues grasping for approval and feeding the passions of extremists who they mistake for a fount of wisdom. Dead ends and discord are the results, which is horribly and amply displayed in our history.
The quality of our leadership of late came to mind after surveying the campaigns of the 2020 election season and its aftermath down to the present. Of particular note is the reaction of Congressional leadership and Biden and Harris to the inflammatory Chauvin case. Either through ignorance or demagoguery, after the verdict, they paraded before cameras and went from the abuse of a single police officer right to “systemic racism”. It’s a leap without a scintilla of evidence. It wasn’t even an argument made by prosecutors, nor was any evidence presented that implied that Chauvin was a racist. So how do these public luminaries get from “A” to “Z”? Easy, just say it!
The whole edifice of “systemic racism” is similarly constructed. The ideology’s enthusiasts go from statistical disparities right to racism. They can’t imagine any other explanation for the inequalities in the numbers across demographic groups. They childishly paste “systemic” to “racism” so they don’t have to prove it. In the Chauvin matter, the scandal doesn’t only lay in the abuse by a single cop but in the ritual abuse of good sense by an increasingly radicalized wing of our political establishment. Where’s the leadership to reign in the foolishness?
A review of the trial record makes clear the reality of the Chauvin case.
First, George Floyd died from asphyxiation from Chauvin’s persistent and excessive pressure to Floyd’s neck and back. Chauvin was responsible for his death.
Second, the cops weren’t on a hunt for black people to harm. They had a legitimate reason for attending to George Floyd. Cops were responding to a call of a criminal act: the use of a counterfeit $20 bill. On prompting from the store clerk, cops – not Chauvin – approached Floyd, who was obviously under the influence, possessed a second phony bill in the car, along with drugs and pills with Floyd’s saliva on them.
Third, Floyd resisted the initial officers’ attempts to bring him into custody, with Chauvin and his partner arriving later, and for Chauvin to make matters worse. Throughout this early phase of the arrest, before Chauvin, it is interesting to note that Floyd made claims of “I can’t breathe” with no one having him in a stranglehold or knee on his back.
Fourth, no evidence was presented by the prosecution of Chauvin’s, or anyone else’s, alleged racism. Not a hint, inference, or otherwise. Possibly, one could argue, this was due to the need to keep the trial focused on Chauvin’s actions. Still, if Chauvin was a raging bigot, something would come light that would lead a person to believe it. Nada.
Fifth, so how do we go from bad cop to racist America? The answer lies in pure demagoguery. A virile video clip of the actions of a bad cop, combined with a mania to find authority figures, preferably white, to publicly humiliate, breeds the ill-starred crusade of our crazies in elective office. It brings out the worst in our current crop of abysmal leaders.
However, it must be admitted that these people were elected. If there is a broader guilt to be assessed, we must bear some of the blame. Enough of us chose them. Could it be that we get the leadership that we deserve, or could it be that some of us just made a poor guess? I think the latter.
RogerG
From 1937 to 1938, Stalin oversaw the politically-motivated liquidation of “13 of 15 army commanders, 50 of 57 corps commanders, 154 of 186 divisional commanders, 220 of 406 brigade commanders, all 11 vice-commanders of defense, 98 of 108 members of the Supreme Military Soviets, all army political commissars, 25 of 28 corps commissars, 58 of 64 divisional commissars. Even the lower ranks were not spared.” The Communist Party leadership never fully trusted the Red Army partly because it was associated with Trotsky. For purely political reasons, Stalin decimated the officer corps just before their talents would be sorely needed three short years later when Hitler’s Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941.
Is Biden and company copying a page from Stalin’s political playbook in his SecDef’s stand down order to weed out “extremists” in the U.S. military in the face of a resurgent Red China? Are we being laid open to a forcible retreat and catastrophic losses – or worse – like Russia as the Wehrmacht swept across the vast Russian European plain to the gates of Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad? Are we prepared for the real-world consequences of political tinkering with the primary agency responsible for protecting us? The combination of Democratic Party neglect and the evisceration of morale in the ranks could spell our doom.
There’s much to keep a person awake at night. The rot predated the Left’s recent capture of the two political branches of government. The upper echelons in DC have long been encrusted with careerists whose distance from the rank-and-file and comfy billeting in one of the most financially rewarding playgrounds on earth has nurtured a receptivity to the worst of Lefty ideology. It’s jarring to watch bemedaled and uniformed big wigs talking like college snowflakes.
The sight begs another comparison with the Russian defense establishment, the one before and during World War I. It has been voluminously described as a kind of aristocracy resplendent in personal enjoyments, security of position, and completely divorced from reality. In World War I, dilettantes spelled disaster. In World War II, megalomaniacal politics did the country in.
Same here, or is gestating before our eyes. When riots engulfed our cities this past summer and threatened to overrun the nation’s capital, Trump was condemned by the likes of the retired Mattis, Allen, and Mullen and 280 other retired military officials and diplomats for advocating the use of troops to quell the mayhem. Last time that I looked, not a word was heard from these titans about the over 5,000 troops that Pelosi has ordered stationed around the walls and concertina wire of the nation’s capitol. I smell Lefty political agendas all over the Pentagon, among its comfortable pensioners, and in its academies and war colleges. Hmmmmmmm.
Maybe a person ought not to be surprised since our military is highly bureaucratized. Bureaucracies have a history of an ear tuned to chic thought since any threat is far removed from their air-conditioned office. One of the hot reads to appear on the navy’s reading list is Ibram X. Kendi’s trendy How to be an Antiracist – he being the director of Boston U’s identity politics indoctrination center, the Center for Antiracist Research. In complimentary fashion, Biden doubles down on the agenda by mandating a more “inclusive” military, which means more women on the front lines, pregnancy flight suits, and fully taxpayer-funded sexual reassignment surgery. It’s madness.
This is happening at a time when China’s navy is beginning to surpass us, its land and air forces are rapidly modernizing, and its nuclear arsenal is growing larger and more potent. Their advances in high tech and space are proceeding apace. They are manning up as we are manning down.
I’m afraid that we’ll wake up one morning like Russia did on June 22, 1941, facing Operation Barbarossa and find ourselves confronting a full-throated invasion of Taiwan with a couple of our carriers and task forces totally obliterated, the sea lanes left open to Hawaii. Don’t think that it can’t happen simply because we haven’t lost a major war. (Vietnam doesn’t qualify because it was a negotiated settlement, then violated, and we did nothing in response. It was abandonment, not defeat.)
The Pentagon’s reaction to Tucker Carlson says volumes. Here is Carlson’s report that drew their ire.
RogerG
Coach John Mosley of the East Los Angeles Community College basketball team, and a focus of Netflix’s “Last Chance U: Basketball” (highly recommended), stated, “Rules without relationships are rebellion.” When you think about it, he’s onto something. Rules in the absence of an interpersonal connection can easily be received as a cold and blind force, and frequently are. In a related fashion, I remember counseling young teachers against angling a troubled kid into a corner with no escape because he or she might violently lash out. When rules box people into corners without escape, expect rebellion.
The makings of a serious national rupture are happening as I write. The near complete monopoly by the Left in our society’s centers of power and influence is forcing an unpalatable choice upon the many dissenters. Right now, the safety valves of free speech and thought are being closed by the Big Tech oligarchy as the Democratic Party pursues a redesign of elections to keep themselves in power for generations, emasculation of our borders to chronically expand the critical mass of their supporters, redesign of our schools into their indoctrination centers, and removal of the last symbol of citizen self-reliance in the neutering of the Second Amendment. What will the loyal opposition do if this new Borg leaves the people with no recourse? My guess is that it’ll no longer be loyal. Don’t box people into corners.
In a relatively brief span of time, the hegemony of a narrow set of beliefs has descended upon us. For some, the deplatforming of Trump “for life” by the tech oligarchs was the omen of a new Dark Age of absolutist control of thought and conscience. The contradictions are glaring and instructive. Twitter bumps Trump but must be forced by a to Department of Homeland Security to take down a video of her son’s sexual assault. Amazing.
Hardly does Trump deserve much of a defense for some of his actions. I’m not in the Hannity world of Trump-worship. But neither am I in the habit of blinding myself to the first real exercise of raw power to erase a prominent figure from the world stage; though, it’s been happening for quite some time to the less notable. It’s raw power and used in a brazen manner.
Mark Zuckerberg famously stated before Congress that Silicon Valley is an “extremely left-leaning place”. He’s got that right. “Left-leaning” means a techno-utopian ideal of gauzy socialist-egalitarian, libertine, and greenie bliss brought into existence by universal techno-connectivity. It’s certainly a way for them to feel good about themselves by the self-elevation of the importance of their work. For the people who aren’t caught up in this romper room of the mind, they get cancelled.
It’s unapologetic censorship, like what happened to Brandon Eich, the brief (for 11 days in 2014) CEO of Mozilla. He was “forced” out by something loosely called the “Mozilla community” – a more accurate term would be “mob” – for daring to support traditional marriage (2008’s Prop 8 in California). Key to any mob’s “cancellation” is the recognition that there aren’t other legitimate points of view to be tolerated.
An excursion into the functioning of tech central’s totalitarian mind was provided by Forbes magazine in 2014 when it republished a Quora piece by Ian McCullough, “consumer tech”, of San Francisco, on the forced resignation of Eich. McCullough’s defense of the disposal of Eich pivoted on two claims: Eich’s opinion is beyond the pale and an extremely odd notion of freedom of speech.
Unbeknownst to McCullough, the unpopularity of opinions frequently depends on location. Eich’s opinions on marriage aren’t fashionable in Zuckerberg’s “left-leaning place”, and in McCullough’s San Francisco – thus, beyond the pale – but neither are McCullough’s and those of Zuckerberg’s left-leaning place as popular in the vast stretches of flyover country. There is a difference, though: McCullough’s support for gay marriage won’t by itself result in his forced resignation if he stated his views in Arkansas, at least as far as I can determine. If it does happen, there’d be a groundswell of opposition for making a person’s employment status contingent on rectitude with an area’s popular slant on a contentious issue. No, that kind of thing is routinely reserved for Zuckerberg’s “left-leaning place”.
In that “left-leaning place”, fundamental rights such as freedom of speech is contorted out of all recognition. In McCullough’s twisted mind, the freedom of speech of a mass can be used to intimidate a single person’s exercise of free speech. In a way, ironically, he’s right. Every single person in the mob has freedom of speech individually, but the bigger question involves self-control. Ought we to practice it in that manner? Arkansas is much more into “ought” and Zuckerberg’s “left-leaning place” is all into gang-style suppression; that’s the difference.
And even more importantly, does the First Amendment have any practical relevance if an opinion is more popular in other locales but is unpopular in the little node where we find the oligarchic power of Big Tech to blot it out everywhere? By what legitimate right should one locale and their nest of opinions have the power to censor the opinions about traditional institutions in the communities that hold these traditions dear? McCullough, no one should have that power. No one, not you nor anyone like you, or me for that matter.
Today, Big Tech has the power and they use it. It does so by banning information that doesn’t comport with their socio-political prejudices. Look at what happened to The New York Post’s Biden family corruption story just before the election. In an informal, or formal (?), alliance of interest, Big Media and Big Tech shut out the story. No such forbearance was granted Trump regarding the grand smear that went by the name of “Russia collusion”. The fiction had a 3-year lease on life despite the fact that it was predicated on a demonstrably proven pack of Democrat-funded lies.
Another alliance member – the upper echelons of DC’s permanent Fed Administrative State – were giddy at the possibility of dragging Trump through the mud and only ended up with a two-year $40 million probe that was led by a doddering Robert Mueller and his band of partisan hacks who produced . . . nothing.
What did we get for $40 million? We got 3 years of hair-on-fire, a perpetuation of the smear, unsuccessful impeachments, and conservative websites hidden on page 5 of a Google search. Like the Biden corruption story, uncooperative sites go down the memory hole. Of course, initially, Google feigns that it’s due to their software “protocols” or “algorythms”. Then they dropped all pretense by calling it “misinformation”. It’s still a crock.
Big Tech’s “misinformation” campaign targeted the pesky Breitbart media operation. Breitbart News noticed clicks on Google dropped 99% from 2016 to 2020. Their entire website was given the NYPost treatment.
And if that’s not enough, complete platforms were deplatformed. Parler, the social media competitor to Twitter, was destroyed by Big Tech’s near-Gang of Eight. Like Trump and Breitbart, it was steamrolled by the big wheels of Big Tech. Read this quackery of a write-up on Wikipedia:
“Parler is an American alt-tech microblogging and social networking service. It has a significant user base of Donald Trump supporters, conservatives, conspiracy theorists, and right-wing extremists. Posts on the service often contain far-right content, antisemitism, and conspiracy theories such as QAnon.”
Not a word about the charlatanism of the Green New Deal and the buffoonery of its eco-apocalypse and the 30-something adolescent mind from New York’s 14th congressional district behind much of it. Not a word about the potential for descent into Venezuela-land from socialism’s new found popularity. Not a word about the buffoonery of “settled science” since real science means a real scientific method that is operative all the time. Not a word about the provable unsustainability of “sustainable energy”. Not a word about the scientific backlash to the “settled science” of Fauci and World Health Organization. The paradox is that the most frequent purveyors of “misinformation” are the people combatting “misinformation”. Franz Kafka looking at our time would see abundant evidence of life imitating art, his art.
What will people do if they come to conclude that there is no recourse to submission? If the Democrats have their way, elections will have the legitimacy of loan sharking and only keep the Socialist Revolutionary Party (Democratic Party) cemented in power for the foreseeable future, thereby proving the Marxist revolutionary’s maxim: one man, one vote, one time. Voices are to be silenced by a formal unity of purpose among entrenched elites at the commanding heights of our society. The kids are to receive no respite in the assault on their minds from every quarter in entertainment and the schools. Traditional institutions and the morality of self-defense are systematically upended. For those standing aghast at this turn of events, some may sadly seek redress in more violent means, no other option having been left open to them. Boxing people into corners has dangerous consequences.
Friedrich Hayek had many reasons for the failure of socialism, but one was the “knowledge problem”. Big government’s attempt to manage the many affairs of its people requires a level of knowledge that no one person or small group of individuals can possess. Crap happens and human existence enters a dark place.
Coach Mosley and his team experienced the consequences in the state whose governing elites are infatuated with government’s top-down management of its residents, but aren’t, and can’t be, as knowledgeable and wise as they think themselves to be. After completing a 29-1 season and surviving the first round of the state championship tournament, and after loading on the bus to travel to West Hills College in Lemoore for the Final Four championship round, Coach Mosley received a phone call to announce the cancellation of the tournament due to COVID. It was part of a state of California lockdown that proved to be no more efficacious than states who left their residents free to live a more normal life. A season of hard work, trials, and tribulations was ended just as the prize for going through all the trouble was near at hand. And it was all for naught.
Coach Mosley properly acceded to the state’s decision. What else could he do? But what’ll happen when the one-party state of California is transferred to DC and the one party blocks all avenues of civil opposition to the ruling ideology? The Democrats are playing with fire.
RogerG
*Today’s short comment is mostly based on the work of Nicholas Eberstadt, the Henry Wendt Chair of Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute.
Our “experts”, the ones that grab the attention of the mathematically and scientifically illiterate in Big Media, are essentially bureaucrats in Big Government’s agencies of public health, corporate Big Pharma, and the university schools of public health. And all of them were asleep at the switch, the switch to throw the alarm on the catastrophic jump in working class “deaths of despair”: drug overdoses, cirrhosis of the liver, and suicides. Putting a number on it would be over 300,000 premature deaths from 1999 to 2015. And these are our gurus on all matters public health. With friends like these, do we need any enemies?
The disaster occurred under the noses of Clinton, Dubya, and the first term-and-a-half of Obama. Obama didn’t notice it, and maybe didn’t care. The alarm was tripped by Princeton’s Anne Case and Angus Deacon during Obama’s second term. Don’t forget that at this time, Obama was too busy lambasting the blue collars of western Pennsylvania as “bitter clingers” to their sky god and guns.
These same bureaucrats were the ones who fed the prejudices of the Big Government Left in the Democratic Party and the Party’s allies in Big Media during COVID. Fauci and company were elevated to sainthood. Behind the scenes, as our social and economic lives were castrated on the advice of these very same desk-jockeys, the death toll in “deaths of despair” accelerated.
These “experts” are said to be public servants. But which public are they serving? I can’t avoid the insights of James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock in their famous work in public choice theory. They start with the simple premise of self-interest: it applies to everyone. It’s true every bit as much among GS-level employees and their politicized head honchos as it does for any budding entrepreneur. The cloistered ecosystem of the bureau, combined with occupational self-absorption, make for a unique animal who misses a whole lot.
Just think, with the Green New Deal and the jihads against “systemic racism” and for genderism, these same fools will be put in charge of nearly every aspect of our lives. If that doesn’t startle you, I don’t know what will.
RogerG