Have you been paying attention to the Rittenhouse trial? A frightening prospect is presenting itself. “Justice” is quickly becoming a handmaiden to a radical cause. Justice doesn’t look like justice. It looks like political vengeance. That’s because it’s Revolutionary Justice and not anything like the kind that you or I would recognize as justice.
The die was cast in summer 2020. Riots flared in American cities without a word of condemnation from one of America’s major political institutions, the Democratic Party. The party’s power elite sided with goons and mobs as businesses were torched, a dozen people or more were murdered on the streets, and entire downtowns resembled Richmond in 1865.
Richmond, 1865
Some of the party’s shrillest voices sounded like cheerleaders for the violence and cut checks to the bail funds for the arrested hooligans. One happens to be our sitting Vice President.
Kamala Harris, then presidential candidate, contributed to “Minnesota Freedom Fund” that bailed out arrested rioters in Minneapolis during the George Floyd riots.
In juxtaposition, the sword of something officially titled as justice is enthusiastically unsheathed against the politically unfashionable. The uncouth is defined by a cloistered cultural elite isolated in blue bubbles. Throw the book at Sitting Bull and his Capitol trespassers on January 6th and seek murder convictions against a 17-year-old defending himself from the kind of thugs who turned Kenosha, Portland, Seattle, and Minneapolis into hellholes. Furthermore, if parents are unwilling to surrender their kids to the propaganda ministry’s commissars, the DOJ and its armed wing, the FBI, stand ready to force compliance.
Loudon County parents protesting before their school board
A counter-revolution is brewing. The National School Board Association’s letter to the DOJ alienated a good portion of their state affiliates. The group portrayed the protests of incensed parents to be the “the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes” in a letter to AG Garland. In coordination with the NSBA, Garland dutifully responded with an order to the FBI to coordinate a Parent Scare to rival A. Mitchell Palmer’s Red Scare of 1919-1920. That’s right, justice now means an enforced conformity to the party line.
AG Garland in testimony before Congress in October
*Update: The Garland memo to the FBI to investigate parent activities at local school board meetings was more than a response to the NSBA letter. Newly obtained documents indicate some level of coordination between the NSBA and the Biden White House in mid-September which was before the Garland/FBI memo in October. Read about it here.
It’s a bridge too far for many state school boards. 20 state associations have ended the relationship, suspended their dues payments, or in various ways are distancing themselves from the NSBA. The national group is taking on the same partisan branding as MLB, the NBA, the NFL, Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, and Big Tech’s lunchrooms in this period of radical political fervor. Buying a ticket or soft drink, and showing up at a school board meeting, is either a political act or will draw the gaze of the ever-watchful eyes of the commissars of state security.
Yesterday, the judge in the Rittenhouse trial was clearly fuming about prosecutorial misconduct. Prosecution witnesses sounded like defense witnesses. Wisconsin is an open-carry state; even the restrictions on minors is nebulous to say the least. Sum it up: regardless of the jury’s verdict under mob threat, obvious conditions of self-defense exonerate the kid under our time-honored rules of justice.
Astonishingly, knowing the shoddy nature of their case, prosecutors may be trying to incite the judge into ordering a mistrial without prejudice; meaning a retrial to torture the kid more. It’s scandalous.
We’ve had much experience with “revolutionary” justice. It came in the form of the Reign of Terror’s tribunals in the France of 1793-4. The guillotine was made a popular totem. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and lesser miscreants holding to the same creed left mounds of dead and archipelagos of gulags in service to it. One group of French scholars put the death toll at around 100 million in the 20th century’s long-running flirtation with Marx-inspired “justice”. Following their lead, the woke universe’s hitching of justice to their political crusade is leading us to a repetition of the nightmare.
Lavoisier’s trial. Historical artwork of the French chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794) being tried during the French Revolution by a radical, revolutionary tribunal. Lavoisier (standing, at left) was one of the leading French scientists and the father of modern chemistry. He was prosecuted because he had been a tax official, even though he had tried to introduce reforms. The president of the tribunal claimed that ‘the Republic has no need of scientists’. Lavoisier was guillotined on 8 May 1794.
Veterans, on this Veterans Day, is this what you were fighting for?
If you want to win a major public debate, first and foremost, mischaracterize the issue. This is actively being done by our self-anointed and overweening media custodians who don’t bother to explain critical race theory (CRT) in any meaningful way, especially its ideological heredity. The absence of a usable description is combined with an erroneous depiction of its opponents. Those standing athwart its injection into their children’s classrooms are portrayed as hostile to the teaching of slavery and racial discrimination in our history. So, we get a befuddled population with no understanding of what it is and the impression that the opposition must be a bunch of rubes, Bull Connors, and Klan sympathizers.
Frederick M. Hess, resident education scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, correctly states (read here), “… news accounts seem to suggest that the argument is really about whether ‘schools should teach slavery.’” As Hess poignantly presents, the argument over CRT has nothing to do with the teaching of slavery and Jim Crow. The contest is about whether the schools should be training grounds for Marxist revolutionaries. CRT is revolutionary indoctrination.
As I’ve written many times before, CRT is rooted in Marxist political theory. It traces nearly all disparities to racism, or any of the other filling-in-the-prefix phobias, and ultimately to a systematic oppression of the “outs” by the “ins”. Out of this percolates rhetoric like “systemic racism”, “white rage”, to the host of other theoretical oppressions in feminist theory, queer theory, postcolonial theory, postmodern theory, etc. It’s classic post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc lunacy – one thing (racism) is assumed to be the cause of what follows (modern disparities) without ever having made the evidentiary connection – but the illogic of it hasn’t stopped these over-paid consultants from spewing the nonsense, and scurrying down to the bank to deposit the fees. Scurrilous nonsense pays very well.
Two hucksters of critical race theory, Robin Diangelo (l) and Ibram X. Kendi at a seminar at Roger Williams University.
“Critical” is the key word. CRT is an offshoot of critical theory which blossomed into critical legal theory and critical pedagogy. See, there’s lots of “crits” out there, but they all owe their existence to Marx’s battle of groups (the dialectic). For those ill-informed journalists, CRT is being taught in its various ideological pieces in the classroom, and is the latest craze in teacher training colleges.
Paulo Freire, a godfather of critical pedagogy
In schools of education, it’s called critical pedagogy. Paulo Freire is the Mao figure in this movement. In his “little red book” of writings, like his 1968 “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, the purpose of teaching is to produce a “critical consciousness” in students. What’s that mean? Make radicals to go out and burn things, get elected to construct the mega-state to dictate the solutions, and for all practical purposes be the militant wing of the Democratic Party.
“Critical” everything shows up in the local DA office, the school staffs that have your kids 6 hours for 5 days a week, their textbooks, and anyone with a degree is exposed to it from the civil engineer to the underemployed barista who got elected to Congress. It’s everywhere. Remember, “critical” is just a pseudonym for Marxist. If you want to avert your children from joining an American Viet Cong, stand up, call it out, and insist that it stop being presented as a “truth”. Don’t be cowed into submission.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, at a press conference in July of 202021.
This is a no-brainer: honor our vets. The people who sacrificed a part of their lives, maybe their limbs and entire lives, deserve our highest respect. This is their day. I humbly salute all veterans.
And what better time to also bring to light a sickness that has entered the services? Nearly all corners of our society are subjected, including the ranks and service academies, to a noxious and radical neo-Marxist ideology. It comes under a number of monikers like Critical Race Theory, ESG (“Environment and social governance” in business), DEI (“Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”), “Anti-racism” training, and “The 1619 Project” pedagogy. It has penetrated the upper echelons of command. Who can forget Gen. Mark Milley’s infamous endorsement of this neo-Marxism, “I want to understand white rage, and I’m white”? The comment was more than a reaction to January 6 and any “extremism” in the ranks. The “white rage” in Milley’s blast was presented as a factual premise, not a call for analysis and debate. And now the officer corps is getting a steady dose of it in their academy coursework. That’s right, we are training officers to hate the country that they are expected to defend. Now, all of us in our fair land are in jeopardy.
The neo-Marxist, race-based radicalism shows up in theater commander reading lists and into academy classrooms. Former cadets have come forward to describe the insidious indoctrination (see below). As one recounted, “I found myself instead in the classroom learning about how to be more sensitive.” She continued, “And this woke ideology that had taken over West Point really surprised me.” As a tutor for some students, she recalled cadets writing essays sympathetic with critical race theory and socialism. The students exclaimed that’s what they thought their profs wanted.
It appears in guidance reports about “diversity” and “inclusion” plans for West Point (see report here). Favoritism in admissions to certain races, alt-genders (?), and orientations hides under the cloak of “inclusion” and “diversity” – all this because the numbskulls in the Pentagon think that this gibberish is what the younger generation wants. And I quote from one report: “We must create an environment that appeals to the aspirations of American’s younger generation.” How do they, or any of us, know that these are the “aspirations” of the youth? And should it matter? Come on, wokeness, like the fear of leaving home, needs to be broken to create the kind of person who can kill our enemies and destroy their things.
Where will this lead if not stopped in its tracks? History provides a lesson in the Russia of 1917. Much revolutionary trouble for the Czar came from the newly drafted reserves billeted and milling around the capitol, Petrograd (fully described in Solzhenitsyn’s Red Wheel series and the writings of the historian Richard Pipes) . Radical socialists and Bolshevik agitators frequented the barracks of these large masses of idle soldiers. The troops participated in strikes and demonstrations and on numerous occasions marched to the homes and offices of civil authorities threatening their lives and creating ferment and instability. The navy anchored offshore proved to be a special hotbed of revolutionary fervor. Many of these same individuals were later recruited into the ranks of Lenin’s secret police, the Cheka, and Red Army to conduct the Red Terror. We seem to be repeating the grievous error. Bolshevik-like activists have found a home at West Point, Annapolis, Colorado Springs, etc.
The radicalized Preobrazhensky regiment marching on Nevsky Prospect, St. Petersburg. It’s a main street in Petersburg and designed by Czar Peter the Great as the route south to Novgorod and Moscow
What better way to celebrate the sacrifices of our vets by cleaning house at the Pentagon, throughout the command structure, and our service academies? Our country deserves something better than a restive and neo-revolutionary armed forces, or one so dispirited that it will fold in the face of the People’s Liberation Army.
Glann Youngkin in his victory speech after being declared the winner of the Virginia gubernatorial race.
One of my most frequently used clips in one of my World War I lesson plans was from PBS’s first major documentary on World War I, “The Great War”. In it comes this narrated passage about Woodrow Wilson: “Above all else, Woodrow Wilson was a passionate champion of democracy.” He was not. Above all else, he was a champion of rule by credentialed technocrats, and wanted to revamped our political order to shift power to them; the Constitution be damned. Popular sovereignty comes in second to the trained “expert” in his mind. Now that’s the real progressivism in definition and spirit. Yet, today, he’s Saint Woodrow.
A similar misconception revolves around the hot-button critical race theory (CRT). Some dismiss its threat and existence in the schools. Take for instance this question from PBS’s Yamiche Alcindor at Wednesday’s Biden press conference: “What should Democrats possibly do differently to avoid similar losses in November, especially since Republicans are now successfully running on culture wars issues and false claims about critical race theory?” “False claims”? Later, in a follow-up question, she proclaimed they are lying about it. MSNBC’s Joy Reid used a segment on her program to profess it isn’t being taught. Fact is, it is being taught and has been for quite some time. The troop is lying, or they don’t know what it is.
Yamiche Alcindor
Such is the sorry state of public discourse at this time of stark division in our country. Anything requiring more then a few seconds to explain is reduced to rhetorical compression, making it easy for the facetious to sound reasonable to the gullible. CRT becomes a “ghost” and amazingly autocratic progressives become champions of democracy.
The issues rose to the surface in the weeks leading up to Virginia’s election. The uglier side of progressivism appeared in Terry McAuliffe’s famous debate quip, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” The comment may lack some context, but it can also stand on its own. For progressives like McAuliffe, everything in life is a matter of “science”. Science requires scientists, and scientists, including those pervasive “social” scientists, do it better, including the raising of your kids. So, parents, please go away. It’s progressivism in a nutshell.
McAuliffe in debate with Youngkin.
More directly, CRT was in Gov. McAuliffe’s own Department of Education 2015 directive for schools in the state to “embrace critical race theory” (original document can be seen here).
The thing that McAuliffe claims isn’t being taught, but is, was also a big part of Alcindor’s matriculation though New York University to her master’s degree in “broadcast news and documentary filmmaking”, like it is in any place with a faculty lounge. Maybe it was so foundational in its bits and pieces that she can’t identify it as a full-blown theory, as the same thing is being done to all those kids laboring behind masks and plexiglass in COVID classrooms.
In a classroom it appears as “equity” or “anti-racism” teacher training. Buzz words hide the reality. In a textbook, it shows as a greater emphasis on oppression in its varied forms and less on those white males and the glories of western civilization in such things as Christianity’s equality of souls, rule of law, natural rights, popular sovereignty, personal and economic freedom, etc., etc.
The elements of CRT, such as “equity”, are presented to teachers at training sessions such as this one.
Marx provided the paradigm. Feudalism can’t help oppressing the commoners. Capitalism can’t help oppressing the “wage slaves”. It’s in the system’s DNA. CRT takes the dialectic and places the oppressor-whites and oppressed “people of color” in the combative roles. Simple. After that, it’s all downhill to ascribing differences in socio-economic stats to, you guessed it, racism. And the whole hodgepodge will carry the aura of “science” since there’s a bunch of people with degrees after their name selling it.
Never mind the illogic of it all. When you’re on a roll to the revolution, don’t let out-of-wedlock births, higher levels of crime, and high dropout rates stand in the way of the revolutionary clamor. Just with a wave of the hand make these also part of the indictment instead of being the explanatory factors that they are. In the hands of the revolutionary, stats are like kneading dough.
Tuesday’s election exposed the flim-flam of the two abstractions. McAuliffe’s progressivism is inherently authoritarian and Alcindor’s CRT is warmed-over Marxism. I can only hope that the electorate in years to come can cut through the noise and reject the poison.
What’s in store for us in the not-too-distant future? The tea leaves before us aren’t so encouraging.
Most of the threats to our well-being emanate from our imagination running wild, but the resulting anxiety seriously alters our behaviors. Among the troubling trends is the possibility of hysterics routinely finding a home in government policy. The corresponding shocks to our workaday lives promise an endemic decline in the standard of living. The disruptions in our economic lives foretells disorder in our social, cultural, and religious spheres. Psychologically, we’ll forever be scarred by a gripping fear of contagions and hypothetical health crises. Crises, mostly imaginary, won’t be limited to the next virus. An accelerant for a mindset of terror is seen in the steady drumbeat of more speculative dooms. Our progeny will be swept up in it. In addition, progressive authoritarianism is waiting in the wings which will play havoc with our settled legal and political arrangements. The list may not be long enough, but it’s sufficient to present a vision that should keep you awake at night.
And, just think, we’re doing it to ourselves. No external enemy need apply as agent.
The response to corona pointed the way. A population now inured to mandatory isolations will find it easier to fall in line in regards to more mundane contagions to follow. The flu vaccine is taking on the rhetorical trappings of the COVID vaccine in popular media and public health bureaucracies. Reality could easily follow the rhetoric. Soon, masking, social distancing, stay-at-home orders, and business and school closures could be a recurring feature of life. A society in the perpetual grip of fear is one on the cusp of disintegration . . . or conquest.
Don’t expect an economy to thrive in this condition of instability. Investing for the long term will be replaced by retrenchment – the focus on the protection of life, immediate family, and assets. Hunkering down will be the order of the day, not the rambunctious risk-taking that makes for the economic expansion that is necessary to absorb the coming generations. The uncertainty could set the stage for a revival of medievalism, its increasing isolation, and a corresponding decline in the quality of life.
Look around you. Our quality of life is under stress. Shortages abound either due to hording, a lack of labor, or government’s infatuation with environmentalism’s inbred prejudice against commerce and its energy needs. COVID is the excuse to retard business activity while at the same time bribing much of the workforce to stay home with inflated government benefits.
What happens to the social maturation of children in this atmosphere of isolation? What happens to young adults when dating customs becomes more cumbersome? What then happens to marriage and the birthrate? What happens to family and friends when the holidays are zoomed? And, indeed, for adolescents and young adults, when education is zoomed? Graduating high school seniors at the junior high educational level does not bode well for upward mobility or social peace. Feudal-sized gaps in educational attainment will appear as the richer demographic cohorts utilize their willingness and means to break free of the straitjacketed and zoomed public schools.
Of course, that education will be increasingly festooned with the hysterias-of-the-moment. “Climate change” is at the top of the list. Evidence strongly suggests that “climate change” is happening and man has a role, with the pollution-belching power plants of China and India as the chief suspects: 2.8 billion in combined population, 35% of the world’s total humanity, and developing an affection for air conditioning and upwardly-mobile jobs.
The burning of coal at a Chinese steel plant.
But how much of a role? The widely parroted eco-apocalypse is a stretch to say the least, and any benefits – longer growing season, CO2 as fertilizer – largely ignored. Off-the-shelf mitigations – sun screen, more efficient housing design, natural gas/nuclear/hydro power – are readily available. And all this riding on a projected 1.1° C increase by the end of the century. Even this prognostication is more of a WAG (wild a** guess) or SWAG (affix numbers to the wild a** guess) than anything else. The extent of man’s role, the intensity of impact of GHG (greenhouse gases), and longevity of the temp spike is more up in the air (no pun intended) than is admitted. Yet, it’s hair-on-fire time. And off we go to a mutilation of our way of life, all made more palatable by the opinionated lab coats in the CDC or the University of East Anglia.
The craziness extends beyond a politicized science. The politicized lab is an indicator of the reign of progressive authoritarianism throughout the high status, elite sectors of our society. Much has been written on this. Muscular progressivism has become a status marker and overwhelmingly dominant in top drawer institutions. Society’s upper echelons are an ideological and social monoculture maintained through intermarriage (homogamy) and discrimination. It shows up everywhere from the Ivy League to the campus of Google to the boardrooms of the multinationals to the faculty senate to the newsroom to the people around the broadcast camera and movie studio. It’s ubiquitous and exceedingly stifling.
Prejudice abounds. Surveys from 2019 and 2020 show rising ideological intolerance among the self-designated “better” people; the most perfidious bigotry comes from the much larger progressive-left cohort. Dating sites such as eHarmony show a greater prevalence for partisan affiliations as filters: the left refusing to have romantic relationships with the right in much greater percentages than the other way around.
Not only are student bodies increasingly radical-left but they’ll easily jettison “free speech” for something tyrannically defined as “safety”. The “safety” is a euphemism for the abstracted threats to fashionable and recently-minted victim groups. The threat to that “safety” is the feeling of rejection by the alleged victim from someone simply expressing disbelief for their claim of victimhood and self-description. At this point, “safety” is cover for thought control when it’s translated into speech codes, “safe spaces”, and into curriculum. And today’s twenty-somethings and younger are four-square behind it.
The thinking muddles institutional autonomy and individual autonomy. Popularly elected legislatures and governors are castigated for trying to restrict an institution’s power to trample individual rights at the insistence of a radical student clique. Ironies of all ironies: institutional academic freedom is transmuted into a prohibition of basic individual rights.
The prejudice and bigotry of the young will be carried into their adult lives. Whether it be the classroom, tenure, boardroom, government, or employment, power positions will be the province of the progressive-left. If you want an example of the Kendi’s marriage of prejudice and power, here it is, albeit without the race-obsession. Here’s systemic bigotry staring back at them in the mirror. They have met the enemy and it is them.
What does this mean for our constitutional order? It means a simultaneous mixture of “expert” authoritarianism (meaning more power for people like them) and the dismantlement of hesitant Constitutional institutions such as a conservative Court, the Senate, and Electoral College. Anything is laid waste if it stands athwart the left’s path to the holy land of self-defined “equity”.
NEW YORK, NY – OCTOBER 25: People march across the Brooklyn Bridge to protest the Covid-19 vaccine mandate for municipal workers on October 25, 2021 in New York City. (Photo by David Dee Delgado/Getty Images)
To make the revolution permanent, unchecked and unassimilated immigration and control of the schools is essential for guaranteeing a pliable electorate. Empowered by a socially engineered electorate, the country’s traditional principles and ideals will end up on the trash heap for this permanent governing class. No more is justice to be fair – i.e., blind and neutral. Lady Justice must peek under her blindfold to grant favorable rulings to people of the right race, genitalia, gender self-designation, or intersectionality (combination) of any of the previous. No more is there to be fealty to equal protection of the laws. Far from it. Awards and penalties are to be assigned by race, et al. Paying heed to the geographical and cultural diversity (real diversity) of the country through federalism or other governing institutions will be discarded for the imposition of a left-wing conformity from an administrative center (DC). Consensual government is transformed into the North Korean kind. Elections will be of the perfunctory type.
Others, many more than I, have raised the alarm. Our world is changing before our eyes, and not in a wholesome way. At root, many of our young people are proving that an education can make you stupid as well as wise. The breadth and depth of understanding of past generations is lacking. In the end, many college graduates manifest the traits of a cult. They have beliefs that are, in essence, unexamined assumptions, unprovable and highly questionable. And to think that this is the generation that threatens to sweep way the legacy of a thousand of years.
“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34)
And so, many of you might still say that we have nothing to fear. Really?
College classroom during the May 1968 uprising in France.
While watching the multiple episodes of Netflix’s “Last Chance U: Indy” (Independence Community College in Kansas), two things stood out: the young men in the football program need structure, and they are being indoctrinated in the classroom. The propaganda angle should be the most terrifying aspect because it reaches the entire enrollment. The program scenes shift from the practice field to the student interactions with a sincere writing/literature instructor and the art and sociology classrooms. A recurring theme of the literature and sociology instruction appears to be oppression, victimhood, and both are portrayed as a product of a pervasive system of injustice. I got enough in the brief scenes to instantly recognize the all-too-familiar pedagogy.
Sound familiar? If not, it should. Your kids are getting a steady diet of it from the tear-jerking first day of kindergarten to college commencement.
The indoctrination didn’t happen overnight. It had been building since the notorious 1960’s. A pivotal moment came in the worker/student uprising in Paris of May 1968. The mob dubbed themselves the “Soixante-Huitards”. It was a complete assault on “bourgeois” society with demands for a takeover of government, campus, and factory. Charles De Gaulle, the then French president, was frightened enough to seek momentary refuge in Germany. (The best rendition of this page in history can be found here.)
Soixante-Huitard demonstration in Paris during the May 1968 uprising.
The ideas behind the uprising are the same ones spouted by today’s propagandists such as Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DeAngelo, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and a majority of the professoriate in our country’s 4,500 campuses, public and private, secular and religious. The inspiration came from revolutionary apostles that included the Italian communist, Antonio Gramsci, the neo-Marxist Herbert Marcuse, with a host of others. Then came a shift in strategy in the 1970’s: rather than burn it down, take it over became the cry. The German radical Rudi Dutschke pointed the way in an action plan that he dubbed the “long march through the institutions”. Clean up and attain tenure. Be the teacher of the scions of the Fortune 500 and soon the revolution will have the necessary acolytes in Big Sports, Inc., the NCAA, the corporate boardroom, the media centers, the schools, the publishing industry, Big Tech, and anyone in any position with a college prerequisite, all advancing the grand coup.
The success of the scheme is found everywhere, and especially so in entertainment. Take two recent examples from the fare on Netflix and Amazon Prime: “Red Joan” and “American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally”.
First, “Red Joan”. Ever since the public availability of the Venona decrypts of Soviet espionage operations in the US, Americans and Brits, some in top governmental posts with high security clearances (Harry Dexter White, Asst. Sec. of the Treasury, and Alger Hiss, State Department and adviser to FDR, for instance) were exposed as espionage agents for the Soviet Union, along with many others littered throughout the federal government, which included the most sensitive reaches of the Manhattan Project. Joan Stanley (“Red Joan”) was reputed to be the longest serving KGB spy transferring hundreds of British atomic secrets to Stalin’s Soviet Union. The film provides important context but, in the end, soft-pedals her treason. It treats her rationalization at the end of the film – the USSR with the bomb would balance the US and make for peace – as the Sermon on the Mount. An ounce of thoughtful analysis would expose its irrationality and quite possibly its duplicity.
If she was so concerned about world peace, why was she hell-bent on only giving the bomb to Stalin? Why not Hitler? If world peace through a balance of power is the goal, why not gift it to the National Socialists instead of just Marxist socialists? Instead, early in the film, she frequently states her desire for the Brits to get it before the Germans. Then, later, she wants the Soviets to have it. Her espionage only points one way.
Clearly, she has a bias for the international struggle against capitalism. Throughout the 1930’s, and thereafter, Stalin had proven himself to be as homicidal as Hitler. Picking one mass killer over another as the recipient of the ultimate WMD can’t be grounded in balance-of-power rhetoric. Only one answer stands the test of logic: she wanted the survival of the USSR, and, as it turned out, the suffering of billions for decades into the future.
One mass grave among many in Katyn Forest near Smolensk. 22,000 Polish officers and civic leaders were murdered here in 1940 by Stalin’s NKVD.
Additionally, a penchant for Marxist totalitarianism apparently goes hand-in-glove with a heightened sense of personal omnipotence. She arrogantly confers on herself the power to decide the policy of a popularly-elected government. For me, this is the ultimate treason. She supplanted the judgment of the people’s representatives for her own. This is a betrayal far graver than espionage. She avoided the noose due to age but she should never escape the shame that she so richly deserves.
The dominance of neo-Marxism in our cultural commanding heights makes it easy to retrospectively exonerate a betrayal for a Marxist cause. It’s even possible to transform the truly repugnant into a victimn. And so, we have “Axis Sally” on Amazon Prime. Mildred Gillars, Nazi propaganda broadcaster, is portrayed as a victim of Nazi extortion (seizure of her passport, threats) and rape by Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels. Yet, no evidence exists that Gillars and Geobgels ever met, let alone that he had the opportunity to rape her in a studio control room, let alone that they had a tryst where she put a gun to his head. Still, the fictions are a two-fer: heap mud on the already disgraced-but-dead and transform a noxious female opportunist into a chic victim.
It’s a given that Hollywood takes license with facts – nothing new. But the liberty with the facts is also the liberty to inject “Me Too”. How else to create a sympathetic character out of a vile anti-Semite and American functionary in the Nazi war effort? That’ll keep Madonna and her vagina heads energized in their perpetual state of victimhood.
“The March Through the Institutions” has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of the Soixante-Huitards. Even the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff sounds like Ibram X. Kendi. Even corporate heads are bolstering the political fortunes of a political party bent on destroying them. Surfing the offerings on tv and the silver screen is a joy-ride through the woke mind. At one time, tv was thought to be a wasteland. Well, it has metastasized into brainwashing.
Parents, your kids are being pummeled with it. They are getting it from everywhere. If you don’t want your kids destroying the prosperity that you inherited, seize the cellphone, watch your school board like a hawk, monitor your kids’ instruction, and restrict the influence of Hollywood’s baleful offerings. Above all, be an active shaper of the culture, not a passive recipient of it.
Black Lives matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors poses for a photo at the Summit18 in Los Angeles in 2018. (photo: Amy Harris/Invision/AP)
Once again, a lefty scam artist finds exoneration in institutional fact-checkers, like Rick Rouan of USA Today (read here).
Rick Rouan of USA Today.
Most of you have heard the story: Black Lives Matter co-founder, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, went on a house buying binge from 2016 to 2020 with purchase prices ranging from $415,000 to the $1.4 million one in LA’s Topanga Canyon. The story broke in the New York Post in April 2021 and chronicled the now-familiar story of lefties making revolution pay. The story implied the possible corruption of Cullors in using BLM Foundation money to establish a personal real estate portfolio. Rouan, running interference for Cullors, refutes the story. As always with these things, the fact-checker provides useful information but misses the big point: lefty politics pays, especially for the leaders. Odd, very odd, since this comes from a self-described “trained Marxist”, by definition a hater of capital accumulation . . . while she assiduously accumulates. Mmmmmmmmmmm.
Patrisse Cullors and her real estate empire.
She announced her Marxist allegiance in a 2015 interview, a year before she plunked down 510,000 clams on an LA house. The new mortgage signifies no change of heart about the revolution. This is a committed Marxist who discovered that the path to riches lies in lefty celebrity, and lefty politics is all the rage among the beautiful people.
So, what of the Post charge, or insinuation, that she’s using BLM donations to join the ranks of the Obamas? Okay, Rouan is probably right when he states that BLM, officially the BLM Global Network Foundation, wasn’t conferred with a 503c IRS designation till December 2020, but that only means, prior to that point, the sloshing around of money within the group is, let’s say, murky. In other words, no records. She admits to receiving a total salary of $210,00 since 2013. So, how does $210,000 – roughly $30,000/year – amount to qualifying for a $1.4 million purchase in LA’s prestigious Topanga Canyon?
Interesting question. One answer is in Rouan’s piece. The girl collared two book deals and a production deal with Warner Brothers, probably due to her growing fame. YouTube contributed to the gravy train. She does speeches for a fee, owns an art gallery, and has a teaching gig at a small college in Arizona; Wikipedia ads a second. She’s an entrepreneur of Marxist politics. It’s a non sequitur in logical coherency, but not so money wise.
Thus, Rouan misses the great income-making potential in appeals to the higher reaches of high-status wokism. Corporate suites and the mushy world of government contracting and employment could be marshaled to accumulate a huge mound of wealth. It may legal, but it is certainly unseemly using the role of apostle to the downtrodden to escape being downtrodden – using the doctrine of expropriation to appropriate. In comparison, televangelism looks saintly.
Or, maybe, it’s just good old-fashioned graft. It’s the same path trod by Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, the Obamas, etc. – race-hustlers all. George Washington Plunkett would be proud. Call it the modern version of “honest graft”.
Sometimes idiocy gets so entrenched that it’s mistaken for wisdom. For the rest of us, we should start to shake our elites’ false aura of authority and easily recognize some of their chic passions for what they are – nonsense. In this, I refer to our the corporate suits’ enthusiasm for woke ideology. How could adults embrace something so ludicrous? The farce would be apparent to a child.
I’m reminded of the old gag of a tractor-trailer hauling a tall earth mover but at a standstill at a bridge. Stumped as to how to get it under the bridge, a kid in a mini-van rolls by with the window down and yells, “Let some air out of the tires!” Staunching the drivel, before they mutilate our livelihoods and retirement systems, is as obvious as letting some air out of the tires.
It might take a kid to cut through the overwrought bunk to help return us to sanity. Right now, overwrought lefty foolishness is piloting the ship of our retirements. Pay attention those of you at the mercy of CalSTRS and CalPERS and the rest of the public employee pension gang. Lefty ideologues control your pension checks. One such lefty avatar is Kirsty Jenkinson, Investment Director, Sustainable Investment & Stewardship Strategies for the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS). Whew, what a mouthful, but a title that can be simply translated as “useful idiot in selling the rope that eco-totalitarians will use to hang us”.
Kirsty Jenkinson
Lenin was famous for his characterizations of supportive capitalists as “rope sellers” and “useful idiots”.
Taking a closer look at Kirsty shows the scope of the threat. This girl has an illustrious leftist pedigree, albeit one in carefully coiffed hair and suit (see below). She went from a four-year stint at Edinburgh University with a MA in “International History” to six years as an executive director at Goldman Sachs, innocuous enough till we find her as Director of “Governance & Sustainable Investment” at BMO Global Asset Management. What’s that obtuse title mean? Well, it’s a rephrasing of the leftist tag “ESG”, or Environment, Social, and Governance.
Whose Environment? Not ours, but the greenie utopia that people like Kirsty, schooled in all the lefty jargon, want to impose on us.
Whose Social? Not ours, but the “social” of the lefty faculty lounge and their legions of acolytes. Yep, that’s the stuff fed to your child through their curriculum and shows as Critical Race Theory and hides under the acronym EID – Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity. All of this lingo boils down to perpetual victimhood of the “other” which is defined by a laundry list of immutable characteristics and a host of mental dispositions (“My genitalia doesn’t define my sex.”). Of course, the “social” encompasses an explosion of so-called remedies in government commands, rewards, and punishments. It’s a complete omni-competent state, as in the one contemplated by Karl Marx.
Whose Governance? Yes, ours. Meaning, they want to control us in every possible way. This political disposition leads to the reflex to funnel campaign cash to eco-socialist parties, like today’s Democratic Party. It also seeks to rope the Fortune 500 into the revolution. That gets us back to Kirsty Jenkinson.
From BMO, she ends up at the World Resources Institute as Director of Markets & Enterprise Program. Media Bias/Fact Check rates them “left-center”. It’s an eco-group with the same eco-mantras.
The BMO and WRI stints uncovered her as a lefty political activist in the corporate suite. She continued her march through the boardrooms as the Managing Director & Sustainable Investment Strategist at Wespath Institutional Investments. Are you getting the picture? This lady is into funds that have millions of dollars of other people’s money at their disposal which can be turned into seats on corporate boards. The sheer weight of shares counts for a lot. All the better to foist ESG, EID, CRT, and the rest of the lefty litany on the nation from the classroom to the workplace. What doesn’t get through in the Green New Deal will be swept up by the Fortune 500.
Racial Equity indoctrination – CRT is foundational – in a North Carolina Episcopal Diocese in 2017.
That’s not the end of Kirsty’s sojourn. She’s now the Investment Director of Sustainable Investment & Stewardship Strategies at CalSTRS, the second largest pension fund with $275 billion in assets. Thus, this eco-activist has an outsized influence over the financial well-being of 949,000 teachers and staff. She can wield the fund’s $300 million stake in Exxon/Mobil like a Swiss halberd and force them to renounce any effort at producing affordable energy, their core business.
Bear in mind, that greenie stuff – “sustainable” – is expensive and unreliable, and that’s before we start the slide in our and our kids’ quality of life. And that’s before pensioners begin noticing the stories of CalSTRS’s difficulties in cutting the checks. At the end of the day, eco-fantasies don’t make for corporate health, and corporate ill-health becomes the basis for a bad portfolio, and a bad portfolio equals a bankrupt pension. Get it?
People like Kirsty Jenkinson, with her lefty fairy tales, have no business using my pension to advance their ideological crusade. The fiduciary rule requires the fund managers to work on behalf of the best financial interests of their clients. A totalitarian eco-utopia is not in the best interests of the beneficiaries. If individual beneficiaries want to send a little cash to the eco-blob, more power to them. But Kirsty should have another job, other than political activist. In fact, a proper functioning fiduciary rule would demand an end to titles such as Director of Sustainable Investment & Stewardship Strategies.
Either she finds another role or send her packing.
Arthur Brisbane, newspaper editor, wrote the following in 1911: “Use a picture. It’s worth a thousand words.” Yep, it is, since words require more brain juice than eye candy. Visual images strike our limbic system with greater force than words on a page. Goebbels and Lenin knew this from the get-go. Many times, illustrations or cartoons, more so than photos, get right to the point without the limitations of reality. The uber-left activist Craig Froehle in 2012 gave to his ideological compatriots an iconic absurdity. His tall-to-small threesome behind a fence on crates (see below) appeals to the zealots but does nothing for understanding.
A big part of the problem lies in the vacuousness of the political sloganeering that is “equity”, the point of the image, and one third of the verbal contraption “equity/diversity/inclusion” (Interesting to note, the more apt acronym DIE is possible by changing the order.). Oftentimes, “equity” is used without definition, as if it burst from the brain of God and to the mouths Lori Lightfoot and the radical activists running the show in the Biden administration. “Equity” is the criminal cousin to “equality”. We have at least a playground understanding of “equality”, but “equity” at the hands of our racialist carnival barkers isn’t what lights our eyes after our house’s assessment. It’s a weapon. It’s forced equality of outcome. And, for that, our lives are left open to state-run malevolence and malfeasance writ large.
A crowd whose brains have been softened to the agitprop will miss the folly and danger. Equity is a crutch for activists traumatized by life not being equal. Everywhere they look, they are horrified by inequality, inequality everywhere. They are forced to confront disparities in everything from size, talent, quick-wittedness to the incidence of low-birthweight babies by race, genitalia, income, bed partner, whatever. It’s enough to drive the traumatized to thumb-sucking.
The cure for the anxiety is found in the seizure of power to force equality. Freedom, as in equal opportunity, is repealed by the invention of “systemic racism”, or systemic . . . whatever. Just make the threat improvably “systemic” to empower the commissars to make things equal by imperial edict. The so-called malevolent “system” is a ghost presence but don’t bother with inductive or deductive reasoning for verification. We are coaxed to rely on the ghostbusters instilled with the secret gnosis, like the racialist grifters Ibram X. Kendi or Robin DeAngelo from their tenured academic redoubts.
Karl Marx played the same scam, only he didn’t leave this world with a fat bank account. But his pupils succeeded if you measure success by over a 100 million dead in the 20th century. How much ruination will Kendi, et al, visit upon us?
Back to Froehle’s cartoon scam. It doesn’t take much to dispense with the message. Life isn’t a matter of crate-sharing. Those crates in the illustration are actually other people’s income, jobs, property, and their children’s education. Froehle is actually practicing a zero-sum game: the state takes from one to give to another. And the assignment of forced contributor and assigned recipient is based purely on race, or any other grouping with the political clout to nose their way into the trough.
The cartoon is childish, but even children have an instinctual grasp of the unfairness of it all. They know that one kid getting two suckers based on melanin count isn’t fair. So is the award of benefits due to genitalia, bed partner, or personal declaration that supersedes their chromosomal makeup. A child has a better grasp of intrinsic fairness than some who’ve spent too much time in classrooms, a place where education has evolved into mal-education.
But that’s where we are at: the land of Orwell’s Oceania. The Ministry of Truth practiced “doublethink” and “Newspeak”, a language that undermines language. Language relies on common meanings so sharing and interaction can take place. In this world, everything is political, including words. Language is distorted to push the “defence [sic] of the indefensible”. So, racism and sexism became “equity” to the great detriment of ourselves, our children, and our nation.
Gov. Gavin Newsom at his victory bash after surviving the recall.Gen Mark Milley at his June 2020 commencement address to the National Defense University.
Cosseted: adj.; cared for and protected in an overindulgent way; pampered.
David Mamet:
“We’ve often heard, ‘I’m a fiscal conservative but a social liberal’; but everyone is a ‘fiscal conservative.’ So the phrase can be most usefully translated: ‘I’m perfectly capable of controlling my own finances. Now I intend to control yours.’”
*From Mamet’s essay “The School Dream” in National Review, May 17, 2021, in a footnote.
Two events erupted recently: Governor Gavin Newsom survived a recall and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, was reported to have subverted the authority of the President in communications with subordinates in the chain of command, the military leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, and the President’s political opposition. Obviously, both are, or can be, deeply disturbing. Which is worse? You choose.
Yet, both instances are evidence of a troubling trend among the citizenry (and uncitizenry since certain places have effectively erased the distinction). In the one, California clung to its current class of baneful leaders. In the other, according to reports coming out of Bob Woodward/Robert Costa’s new book, a member of an elite class of administrators – these happen to be military – may have attempted to supplant the Constitutional authority of the duly-elected President with his own, even possibly going so far as to cooperate with an acknowledged and powerful foreign adversary. It’s what happens when an increasingly cosseted people surrender personal sovereignty to elected or unelected lords and oligarchs in an administrative state. It’s a horrible deal for rulers and ruled. It comes down to a people who longingly desire to be ruled and a group chomping at the bit to do it.
California has frequently asserted the mantle of being on the cutting edge. From Prop 13 to high tech to the counterculture, California expanded on its reputation by justifiably being the first to go from Ronald Reagan to the embrace of the Fabian socialist dream of a cradle-to-grave nanny state in the span of less than 20 years.
I suspect that demographics had a monumental role to play in the transition. It’s much more than immigration. The state changed social complexion by changing its economic complexion (and I don’t mean skin pigment) after the end of the Cold War. Defense industries and the kinds of people attracted them faded as their numbers were replaced by elements drawn to the burgeoning workplaces of entertainment, the college campus, unionized public-sector employment, and the pampered, climate-controlled world of computer screens on the elongated coastal plain west of the Coast Range – the denizens east electorally less consequential. The newly burgeoning cohort demand a different form of governance as opposed to those inspired by Chuck Yeager, and can be rightfully called subjects and not citizens. This new class of subjects is all-in for anything and anyone who’ll promise to build, extend, and maintain the public romper room. The state’s Democratic Party is the breeding ground for this claque of wet nurses and hall monitors.
That distinction between a subject and citizen is critical. A subject accepts a role of inferiority in the status ladder and looks to their “betters” for guidance and restraint. A society of citizens is a society of peers.
For the state’s segment still considering themselves citizens who find this state of affairs repugnant, you still have the right to travel . . . if Biden hasn’t repealed it for the unvaccinated. So, move, leave the place to the emotional midgets in desperate need of a helicopter-parent state.
The dependency demographic, or subjects, is always in search of a mommy or daddy who’ll protect them from the vagaries of life. When the real mommy and daddy go into chronic care or the rest home, the urgency for a cloying adult stand-in becomes paramount. Stepping into the breech is the vaunted, credentialed public-sector “expert” and administrative functionary. The subjects’ hopes and affections goes to the head of the those exalted with power. The laureled class morphs into a law unto themselves to rule over the subjects. Enter General Mark Milley, showing in a more martial manner the symmetry between the Pentagon and the nanny state.
In California, the elected leadership and the massive, unionized administrative state that they birthed are unsurprisingly on the same page. Nationally, the situation is quite different. Many states aren’t as affectionate of rule by credentialed autocrat. That’s where you find the greatest concentration of citizens. Since there is a whole other expanse to the country between the coasts, sometimes elected federal leadership doesn’t correspond to the wishes of the Google and Harvard campuses. Yet, the specific ethos of the minions of DC and its environs is more at home on those campuses than Texas-to-North Dakota.
The Pentagon is an administrative state par excellence. Think of it as a microcosm of Sacramento, and Sacramento is solely a microcosm of LA to San Francisco. Milley sounds like he stepped out of CRT/Faculty Lounge central casting, or the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, only in uniform. For instance, why was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff weighing in on an ongoing criminal matter – the Derek Chauvin case – imitating Rev. Al Sharpton? If your eyes were closed, you’d mistake his June 2020 National Defense University commencement address for a Jeremiah Wright sermon. Here’s a snippet:
“I am outraged by the senseless and brutal killing of George Floyd. His death amplified the pain, the frustration, and the fear that so many of our fellow Americans live with day in and day out. The protests that have ensued, not only speak to his killing, but also to the centuries of injustice towards African Americans. What we are seeing is the long shadow of original sin in Jamestown, 401 years ago.”
Mind you, Chauvin’s trial hadn’t begun but that didn’t stop Milley from declaring his guilt with as much caution and reserve as Maxine Waters at a BLM rally. Little did we know back then that we were experiencing our first woke, safe-space, four-star general who functions at the frontier between a racialist neo-Marxism and treason.
Who can forget his following year’s comments before Congress? He sounded less like a mature adult and more like the infantile statue topplers of the previous summer of manufactured “rage”. In response to a question on the teaching of CRT in the military academies, he said, “I want to understand white rage and I’m white, and I want to understand it.” The answer assumes the existence of “white rage” and is not a call for the academic study of its legitimacy.
Milley – and Austin – subsequently tried to backtrack on their “white rage” and “white supremacy” remarks. He later said, “I want America to know that the United States military is an apolitical institution.” It’s pure hokum. Of course Austin and Milley are politicizing the military in their ideologically-laced purges and neo-Marxist indoctrination.
Austin and Milley being questioned on CRT in the military in June 2021 testimony before Congress.
To better understand, let’s turn to an instructive hypothetical. Let’s say that the concern is about the teaching of Marxism in the academies. Suppose Milley had said, “I want to understand capitalist exploitation of the working class and I’m a capitalist, and I want to understand it.” Already he’s gone more than halfway to accepting the premises of communism. Marxism and CRT are claptrap. “Understanding” claptrap is a mealy-mouthed way of accepting many of its fundamentals. Who’s he trying to fool? The cadets are being indoctrinated in a form of ideological self-loathing.
And I haven’t gotten to the most disturbing charge against Milley. Most frightening is his alleged usurpation of civilian control of the military and his pre- and post-election cooperative assurances to the head of the CCP’s People’s Liberation Army. The latter behavior comes very close to the Article III, Section 3, clause 1’s definition of treason. A portion of which says, “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” Milley certainly may have given the Communist Chinese “aid and comfort”, even though technically and legally Red China isn’t a formally declared enemy. But Congress never declared war on the USSR and there is many rotting in prison for giving “aid and comfort” through espionage to the Kremlin.
That’s how Milley gets off: he didn’t commit espionage. He allegedly just picked up the phone to openly declare the “aid and comfort”. No sneaking around . . . apparently. But that puts him in the same category as O.J. Simpson. Everybody knows they’re guilty but the technicalities of jury nullification and legal jargon saved them from the chair and Leavenworth.
California is a sickening role model. Don’t expect citizens to emerge from the cosseting of perpetual adolescence in a nanny state. The best hope for citizen-Californians was made familiar by Cubans braving the waters of the Florida Strait on rickety rafts to flee Bernie’s workers’ paradise in the land of Castro. Just like them, Californios, rent yourself a box truck before the fee eats up your 401k and flee east across the border. To reformulate Horace Greeley, “Go east, young man.”
More tools are available to cage the federal Leviathan. At least the rest of the country can bring to heel the federal administrative state and prevent it from being a cheap imitation of the California nightmare.
