We are in an age of personality cults. Maybe we always have been to one extent or another. Regardless, we are in one, big time.
The decline in religiosity could be a partial explanation for people who need something to look up to after they have relegated heaven to myth. It’s easier to replace God with a human being. It’s evident across the political spectrum. The Left has theirs in the many academic offshoots of Karl Marx. On the Right, icons have arisen in the person of people from Jordan Peterson to Donald Trump. They may be correct in much that they say, but being human, they occasionally step on a rake. Then, the followers parrot the mistake while jettisoning their brain, the same brain that God gave them, that they don’t recognize that it was God who gave it to them.
Today’s brain is ill-informed of history. The schools have failed. We study history for what it says about human nature. And, yes, there is such a thing as human nature. Many won’t recognize the errors of the present because they are unaware that we’ve committed the blunders many times before. For instance, some of what today’s Right seems to be saying about the Ukraine War is an imitation of the rhetoric of the 60’s radical Left. Jean Kirkpatrick, a longtime Democrat and a defector from the looming socialistic, neo-Marxist takeover of her party, spoke to the 1984 Republican Convention nominating Ronald Reagan for a second term (see below). Her speech was a bold rejection of the “San Francisco Democrats” (Sound familiar?) and the Left’s “blame America First”.
Today, you’ll hear echoes of the same condemnable language of the 60’s radical Left coming from the likes of Donald Trump, Jordan Peterson, and their media apologists.
Trump introduced the Left’s oratory to the Right when he morphed the Left’s “blame America First” into “American First”. His 2015-2016 bombast against the Bushes led to a harangue about “endless wars”, i.e., the War on Terror, almost identical to the Left’s complaint about the Vietnam War. Trump made the chant of “America First” and its cousin “MAGA” into a reflex for isolationism, something ever-present in the GOP going back to 1940 and Lindbergh’s America First. Don’t’ forget, implicit in “Make America Great Again” is the claim that we aren’t great, which for the Right is due to our decadence. For the Left, we are censured as “exploiters”. As decadent or “exploiters”, the Right has made common cause with Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda.
Seemingly taking their cue from Trump in his odd admiration for Putin, some on the Right chide our support for Ukraine. The culture war is used as the excuse to criticize support for Ukraine. Tucker Carlson is scornful of the Zelenskyy government for its alleged autocratic tendencies; Laura Ingraham complains of our aid lost in purported Ukrainian corruption; and Jordan Peterson provides an alibi for Putin’s invasion as Putin fending of western decadence, a decadence resplendent in transgenderism. He comes close to aligning with Putin and when confronted backs off. The quote that got him into trouble was as follows:
“The culture war is now truly part of why we have a war [in Ukraine]. It is certainly the case that we do not therefore have all the moral high ground…. In fact, how much of it we have at all is something rightly subject to the most serious debate.”
In my view, transgenderism is a civilizational catastrophe, but to mingle it with Ukraine is sophistry. That puts Putin as a defender of goodness and light. If so, where does that put the CCP’s Xi? After all, Xi is leading a campaign to stop the feminization of men. Have you seen those PLA recruitment ads? They’re nothing like those gushing rainbow LGBTQ+ ads by our Marine Corps. Carlson, Ingraham, and Peterson would find themselves boxed into the corner of opposing US support for Taiwan against a Red Chinese invasion just to remain consistent. What kind of world would we have if our decadence or any other domestic policy failing is a straitjacket on our ability to stop this generation’s fascist and communist aggressors? Look to history for the answer.
Jean Kirkpatrick in 1984 outlines the stakes of a Trump/Carlson/Ingraham/Peterson foreign policy. It’s the same one advanced by the “San Francisco Democrats”. If you have 21 minutes, please listen to her riveting speech. It’s the antidote to the bile in this new era of personality cults.
Former President Donald Trump speaks during a rally to boost Ohio Republican candidates ahead of their May 3 primary election at the county fairgrounds in Delaware, Ohio, April 23, 2022. (Gaelen Morse/Reuters)
Based on what I’ve seen of Trump’s public performances, I would not seek his company. Loud, overbearing braggarts are not my cup of tea. That aside, a vendetta, clearly partisan and dripping in class condescension, has accompanied him since the day he rode down the escalator at Trump Tower in June of 2015. If nothing else, the presence of Trump on the stage has exposed a persistent campaign to get Trump and almost any Republican of consequence by the powers-that-be. Now, the raid. How should we view any subsequent prosecution of him?
“Find a room full of Americans without college degrees, one in which partisan Democrats are scarce. In three minutes or less, lay out your best evidence and explain why what Trump has done is clearly and obviously against the law — obvious not just to lawyers, but to everyone. If the room is convinced, then and only then will you know that the case demands you cross the Rubicon.”
Given all that has been done to him by partisan, bureaucratic, and cultural elite interests in the Manhattan-Beltway union, anything less than an obvious and unambiguous case would be seen by at least half the country as a coup. And that includes the current civil suit pursued by the den of Democrat legal militia in New York under the suzerainty of the state’s Democrat AG, Letitia James. At work is more than an insidious institutional Democrat favoritism but a trampling of the equal application of the laws. Nothing galls an observant public more than selective prosecution for political gain.
Batten down the hatches and get prepared for a hurricane.
FBI agents block a point of egress at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate early morning 8/8/22.
Two days ago, the FBI conducted a raid on President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. All agree that it was unprecedented. More than that, it was shocking. We’ll have to wait for more information before anything more can be definitively concluded. Still, given all that has happened from 2015 to the present, maybe even going back further to the 1990’s, I am worried for my country.
Yes, we are divided. The red/blue thing is real. No surprise. Also, no surprise, DC is deep, deep blue, almost to the color of deep space, and it just so happens to be the seat of immense federal powers. DC down to its lowliest employee is as one-party as California. The District is a big seat for the Democratic Party, the party of government, alongside the DNC’s other seats in dysfunctional urban nodes, college campuses, most of corporate media, and Fortune 500 boardrooms – the narrow, isolated cultural satraps of America.
What we know at this point is that a DC-headquartered Justice Department directed the DC headquarters of the FBI to pursue a search warrant before a DC federal magistrate so that the DC FBI could fly down to Palm Beach to search the home of a DC-detested ex-president. These dysfunctional urban nodes already have an outsized and sometimes malignant influence on the rest of the country, and none is more noxious than DC, similar in toxicity to Mordor.
DC or Mordor?
Why the sanctioned incursion into Trump’s home? Frankly, it’s odd if we ignore the inordinate bias in the District. Andrew C. McCarthy in a piece yesterday morning reasonably speculates that Biden’s people and their natural allies in the bureaucracy are out to pin criminal charges on Trump. It’s about January 6 and not some classified materials in Trump’s possession. The documents and the Presidential Records Act were just a pretext. Breaking into an ex-president’s personal safe and seizing boxes of documents is actually about using the big net of a broad search to capture pieces of incriminating evidence of other flashier criminality for a big show trial later, a common prosecutorial tactic.
Now, think about it. If it’s about January 6, charges in the capitol riot up to now have centered on obstruction of a federal proceeding (counting electoral votes) and defrauding the government (perpetrating lies in order to obstruct). The AG Garland cabal would have to show that Trump plotted the riot and disseminated knowing falsehoods to encourage the criminal actions. That’s a big mountain to climb. Fraud requires a personal understanding that the theories are false. But they’re theories, maybe goofy ones but still theories. Belief in an exotic legal theory is not a crime.
After all, the henchmen of the Democratic Party have been foisting on the public racist anti-racism, CRT, identity favoritism as “equity”, the disjunction of gender from chromosomes, blatant discrimination against people of faith, defund the police, non-prosecution as public safety, and fighting inflation by opening up the fire hose of government money. If eccentric legal theories are fraud, well, how do you rate these? If that is our standard, search warrants could be easily acquired on the Pentagon, CIA headquarters at Langley, the J. Edgar Hoover Building (FBI headquarters in DC), the Justice Department offices, the Treasury Department, the White House, other DC federal office buildings, and almost any college humanities department in the country.
Hanging the prosecution hat on the peg of legal foolhardiness is an exercise in futility. Taking an active part in the riot has equal difficulties. Reveling in the scenes on TV is neither evidence of obstruction or fraud. Unseemly, yes, but not criminal. The anticipated smoking gun may turn out to be a pop gun that a kid put in the oven.
All in all, it’s a risky venture on the part of the donkey party. If nothing comes of this but embarrassment for Trump, red America will be enflamed. What a trade-off: Great dangers in exchange for the likelihood of little reward. The plebes in the hinterlands could very well conclude that the Democratic Party in their DC redoubt is at war with them. And, in a way, they’d be right.
After all, the historical record going back to the 1990’s would encourage the conclusion that a monumental threat to the people arises from DC’s cultural and physical cocoon. Remember Ruby Ridge and Waco? In both cases, DC-headquartered federal law enforcement in their isolation conducted military-style raids with disastrous results. DC FBI agents on a plane to Ruby Ridge wrote down broad rules of engagement to shoot anyone with a gun at Weaver’s home. And, that they did, killing Weaver’s 14-year-old son and his wife as she was holding their infant daughter. A federal agent in commando-style gear was also killed. The ATF for its part conducted a Battle of Kursk operation against a religious sect outside Waco culminating in a lethal fire. The stage for the cataclysms was set in the secluded environs of DC offices.
Staging area for federal agents next to Randy Weaver’s home at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, 1993.The Branch Davidian dormitories consumed in fire after nearly a 2-month siege by federal agents in 1993.
The barbaric overreaction took place in Oklahoma City in 1995, the second anniversary of the Branch Dividian debacle.
The destruction of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City after the bombing in 1995.
Fast forward to 2016, and DC and its patron, the Democratic Party, are at war with the results of the 2016 presidential election. The nexus of the Clinton campaign, the DNC, Obama operatives, the FBI, the CIA, the administrative agencies at one time or another conspired to remove, thwart, and hogtie Trump throughout his term . . . and after. The Clinton Campaign’s Steele dossier. The fraudulent FISC warrants based on it. Crossfire Hurricane. The impeachments, one based on a donkey party agent in the Pentagon. The Joint Chiefs chairman subverting the authority of the president as commander in chief to our biggest foreign adversary. And now the hunt for criminal charges against him. It’s monomaniacal.
This latest episode smells as bad as the others. If nothing else, any return of the people’s government back to the people demands that DC be broken up. Other than the immediate staff of the three branches, the rest should disburse into the boondocks.
Disband or move the DC Circuit Court of Appeals and DC District Court outside the District. Leave just a municipal court to handle judicial matters for the District’s residents. Currently, a double system of justice – one for R’s and one for D’s – is clearly evident in the District. No good has come of federal judges, prosecutors, juries, and grand juries fully marinated in the DC socio-political eco-system. Till that time, routine changes of venue should be the order of the day. It’s the only way to stop the inherent partisan weaponization of the District’s justice system.
Trump, as personally repugnant as he is, has given us the time of day. The clock says it’s time to give Mordor (DC) an induced coma, or induced recession, in order to save our constitutional republic. Having Mordor look more like today’s Detroit is far healthier for the country than a city with a burgeoning workforce that has forgotten “servant” in public servant. If allowed to fester untreated, a dark time awaits. I don’t think that people outside the blue bubbles are going to tolerate for long an oligarchy run out of Mordor.
Republicans are bedeviled by the spawn of Trump and Democrats are enthralled by neo-Marxism in their combination of rank socialism and malignant identity pandering. While Democrats engage in a headlong rush into college-campus extremism, many Republicans seem intent on adopting the philosophy of Smoot-Hawley, ignoring Adam Smith’s lessons on the inherent foolishness of politicians managing trade or the general economy, shunting Hayek’s knowledge problem to the corner, and an emulation of Soviet Gosplan (central planning) only with them in the catbird seat. As a Republican in the Buckley-Reagan tradition, it’s galling. Trump is responsible for unloading this hash of blustery claptrap on the sole remaining party that should know better.
The steamy love affair with government by some of today’s Republicans shouldn’t catch anyone by surprise. Every politician loves to bring home the bacon, so politics can make hypocrites of us all. Yet, this is different. An orthodoxy developed around Trump’s buffoonery. Suddenly, Republicans and others on the Right started walking around proclaiming the evils of the free market.
It’s not surprising that Trump should be their spiritual leader. Here’s a man who made fame and fortune in real estate, the economic sector most debased by politics and government at every level. Government can help you make millions, indeed billions. Government is a partner for a big developer who needs local potentates to eliminate competitors, get approvals, and steamroll recalcitrant homeowners. Trump happened to have a career in an industry that found government not necessarily an obstacle but just another factor of production. The transition from Big Government Developer to Big Government Republican is easy in that matrix. Add a little 60’s Queens street tuff to the public persona and you too can have people walk over broken glass to attend your rallies.
The Republican slide into incoherence came to the fore at the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s American Economic Forum on July 29. Billed as the antidote to Davos’s left-leaning World Economic Forum, it interestingly emulated Davos. Both confabs provided ample grist for government control of the economy. The only difference is the targeted beneficiaries.
A defensible role for government as referee against brute force and monopoly in the market is one thing. It’s quite another to play Karl Marx in distorting economic activity to the advantage of one class. For Rick Santorum, it’s blue-collar workers – not much different from Marx’s Cinderella class of the proletariat. Subsidies, the tax code, and regulatory powers should be geared to cementing the working class to the GOP in Santorum’s grand design – admirable as a political goal, but lousy economic advice. Did it ever grace his mind that blue-collar workers need blue-collar industries? And blue-collar industries need investment, i.e., capital, i.e., Wall Street. The economy is a synergistic whole. The only answer from Santorum and company is to grease the skids for manufacturing, mindless of the effect on the rest of the economic web.
Rick Santorum
It doesn’t work. Thomas Sowell’s famous dictum cannot be repealed: “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” The reality is that some manufacturers get favored treatment over others. Some get the resources that are sucked away from others.
And what of those labor unions who turned themselves into the false champions of those blue collars? Remember, the same unions that drove two of the big three automakers into the arms of a government bailout in 2008-9 are manifestations of the one currently aggravating the supply-chain crisis at west coast ports, the featherbedding International Longshoreman and Warehouse Union. Anchored cargo ships are visible over the horizon. A blue-collar organization meant to benefit blue-collars does so at the expense of every other facet of economic life, and other workers. Government has a congenital habit of only turning its gaze to the squeaky wheel and to heck with the other three. Try driving a car with three flat tires. Trade-offs anyone, aggravated by government winner-picking?
How do tariffs fit into Santorum’s quest for the blue-collar vote? Good question, but another participant at the talkfest, Trump’s trade czar Robert Lighthizer, is a fanboy of them. He is a practitioner of economic snake oil, just like his patron, Donald J. Trump. With “balanced trade” as code for tariffs, he proclaimed that they wrought “astonishing results”. Really? I hear “post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy” (two events happening chronologically with the earliest one mistakenly assumed to be the cause) in the bombast. So many reforms were swirling around in 2017-2018, thanks to a Republican Congress, to overwhelm the impact of the tariff silliness.
Robert Lighthizer
Thus, attributing the so-called “Trump economy”, pre-COVID, to the orange man’s tariffs is demagogic self-puffery. Take the “Trump” tax cuts. They were really the Paul Ryan/Republican-caucus tax cuts, a distillation of ideas running around Republican policy circles since at least the 1990’s. Trump just happened to be in office to put his signature to something that was mostly the work of others. The business tax reductions were testosterone for economic muscle growth. And it showed according to AEI’s James Pethokoukis. Let’s just call the “Trump” tax cuts what they really were: the “Paul Ryan/Republican” tax cuts.
Oftentimes, cutting regulations can act like tax cuts. Remember the Congressional Review Act (CRA) of 1996? It codified a Congressional veto power over the administrative state’s rule-making juggernaut. Keep in mind that the Democrats love the administrative state going back to Woodrow Wilson so don’t expect them to exploit the power. Thus, Congress’s successful use of the CRA is dependent on the vagaries of presidential elections. A repeal requires a president’s signature like any bill. From 1996 to 2001, a repeal succeeded only once when a Republican, George W. Bush, was in the Oval Office. We’d have to wait another 16 years for a Republican-controlled Congress to remind itself of its power. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell in 2017 jumped at the chance and sent to Trump’s desk 14 veto resolutions bringing to heel the federal eco-agencies, FCC, Department of Labor, SEC, the Ed Department, etc., of our community-organizer-in-chief, Barack Obama. Trump simply put his signature to a political impetus that began elsewhere by other people.
For Lighthizer to bully his way to the podium at the American Economic Forum to take credit brings braggadocio to new heights, like his mentor, the prince of Mar-a-Lago.
The tax cuts, reining-in the pit bulls of the Left’s administrative state, and unleashing American energy production have long been Republican talking points and planks in the party platform, and not the lab creatures of Trump, Robert Lighthizer, or Peter Navarro (by the way, a former SoCal Dem no-growther). The GOP has long been a booster of opening up ANWAR, fracking, horizontal drilling, pipelines, refineries, offshore platforms, things that would incite conniptions in Silicon Valley lunchrooms. Trump just happened to be the sympathetic warm body to not stand in the way of affordable energy.
As for Trump’s beloved tariffs, they are sand tossed into the economy’s gears. They are a drag since tariffs are taxes. Surprise! Impose them and you just increased the burden on consumers and businesses. The Trump 25% tariff on imported steel slabs is a case in point. American steel producers remanufacture these slabs into sheet metal for fenders and appliance housings among other American-made desirables. Well, guess what? Since March 2020, the price of steel ballooned by 215%. While Biden’s eco-craziness and socialism has a role, Trump’s contribution to our current travails is his mindless worship at the altar of “balanced trade”, i.e., tariffs. If business tax cuts are testosterone, then tariffs are a flesh-eating virus. Give ‘em a little time before we end up in intensive care. The Republican Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 showed the way.
Smoot-Hawley Tariff in the newspaper, June 17, 1930
Not only that, tariffs needlessly make enemies, especially at a time when you need allies, unless, of course, you want America First to be America Alone. Red China has discovered its inner hegemon. Many Pacific countries are fearful of entering the maw of the CCP and are turning to the US as the only counterforce. The relationship between trade ties and military ones is well known. Just as we were about to draw much of the Pacific rim into a closer cooperation with us, 2016, a presidential election year, came upon us. The Dems practiced their usual fealty to the AFL-CIO and Hillary trashed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), something negotiated across multiple administrations. Not to be outdone, Trump in his usual bombast blasted the deal as “a continuing rape of our country”.
Well, what is this “rape”? The pact would slash tariffs all around the Pacific rim from the US to Brunei to Chile. For an America First/Alone enthusiast like Trump, the TPP is the perfect whipping boy. He torpedoed the deal and then boasted about it, repeatedly. But he made it harder to begin a “pivot to Asia” by initiating a trade war with our natural allies. His economic advisors must have been aghast and suggested their own pivot from “rape” to “bilateral”. The rhetorical gimmick was to disparage the adjective “multilateral” (TPP) and substitute “bilateral” in agreements. So, Trump’s people scrambled around the region to cement a smorgasbord of individual pacts to substitute for the omnibus one, all to save face from admitting to the slander.
One way to prevent the much-hated “forever wars” and bankruptcy of the US treasury is to have many allies. Their contributions may be small but together think of them as forcing upon Red China a weakening by a thousand cuts. We provide the biggest military piece but it’s better than having to pay for the whole piece which would be the consequence of the America Aloners.
The Aloner evangelists such as Tucker Carlson or Tulsi Gabbard, or even the conservative Tom McClintock (R, Ca.), stray into the logical dead end of more-allies-means-more-wars. Actually, that is only one possibility, and the least likely one. More allies mean more deterrence. A worse buzzsaw cannot be imagined for Putin’s Russia and Xi’s CCP for them to venture into an attempted reconstitution of the USSR and a Red Chinese-led Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The addition of Sweden and Finland to NATO intensify deterrence on Russia and trade pacts with miliary cooperation in the Pacific rim makes Xi’s Middle Kingdom dream seem more like a nightmare.
Coups are frequently associated with costly adventurism by despots. Everyone does cost-benefit analysis, unless they’re crazy. Even then, deterrence raises the costs to prohibitive levels for any compadres-of-convenience in the regime to continue to follow the lunatics. Still, anyway, if the crazy should practice a Nigh of the Long Knives (Hitler’s 1934 elimination of his rivals), you’ll definitely need those allies more than ever.
Foreign relations and a nation’s economy are intricately connected. Our national prosperity cannot survive a world with the renminbi as the world’s reserve currency, the World Bank headquartered in Beijing, the world’s shipping lanes policed by the PLA Navy, a NATO decaying in its nearly vacant Brussels headquarters, and a new USSR bullying its way westward and southward. Then we will be really alone. And it begins when we start to mangle economics and our recent history to fit the ambitions of narcissists and the hucksters of economic nostrums. I am worried that we are seeing too many of both among the people who should know better.
PLA Navy on maneuvers 2022
Specifically, the golden years, pre-COVID, from 2017 to early 2020 should not be referred to as the Trump economy. It was the Republican economy, all of it emanating from the Republican “establishment”. Anyone but Tucker Carlson fanboys should realize it.
RogerG
Sources:
*“Did the Trump Tax Cuts Work? The Answer May Not Be What You Think”, James Pethokoukis, American Enterprise Institute, at https://www.aei.org/economics/did-the-trump-tax-cuts-work-the-answer-may-not-be-what-you-think/
*” Trump’s Steel Tariffs Still Harming Producers and Consumers”, Bob Luddy, Brownstone Institute, at https://brownstone.org/articles/trumps-steel-tariffs-still-harming-producers-and-consumers/
*”Congressional Review Act”, Ballotpedia, at https://ballotpedia.org/Congressional_Review_Act
*”Where Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump stand on Obama’s legacy trade deal”, Business Insider, at https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-tpp-2016-9
*” Central Planning with Conservative Characteristics”, Dominic Pino, National Review Online, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/08/central-planning-with-conservative-characteristics/
*Tom McClintock’s vote against support for adding Finland and Sweden to NATO in “One California congressman voted against Finland and Sweden joining NATO. Here’s why”, in the Sacramento Bee, at https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article263626043.html
Yard signs in Kansas regarding the upcoming vote on Amendment 2, August 2, 2022.
I’m reminded of the truism in military strategy of knowing your enemy. In the arena of great policy debates, it takes the form of knowing and being able to summarize your opponent’s arguments. Don’t expect such awareness among the general public. They have neither the time nor inclination to do the homework. More commonly, they have vague analogies and precepts in their heads to help them make sense of the world. The origins of these ideas are unknown, just blindly accepted as fact, and for which they have adapted their lives around. Thus, not knowing that these fuzzy ideas have a birthdate, it’s very hard to get the electorate to reverse a notion maybe born in their childhood but one that they have grown accustomed to.
We are simply stuck with the democracy that we have.
Yesterday, Kansas voters soundly rejected Amendment 2, an attempt to remove an earlier exercise of raw judicial power when the state’s high court wrote into the Kansas constitution something that isn’t there, namely the right to abortion. “Raw judicial power”, yes!
That gets to the crux of the matter. The general public is mostly unaware that the Kansas high court was egregiously out of their lane, actually to the point of deserving impeachment and removal from office. They legislated from the bench, a habit taught to them by the Warren Court and its federal progeny.
Formerly, new rights, powers, and privileges were in the wheelhouse of our elected representatives, our legislators. If you can’t get an idea past our elected representatives, well, that’s called a democratic republic. Don’t run to black-robed jurists trained in the application of laws to make the laws for you on the fly. That’s called autocracy. Distinctions in the basic functions of government aren’t taught and, therefore, most people only have the experience of their limited experience to guide them. Our instructional and informational organs have fallen flat on their face.
As a result, relatively new ideas – new in the sense of a lifespan of only a generation or two – have an extended grip for an understandably oblivious public. They do their duty, go to the polls, and express a discomfort in reversing something whose origin and basis is mostly unknown to them.
No, don’t mistake this for popular “wisdom”. It’s always “wisdom” if your side wins. It’s “racism” or some other scapegoat if your side loses. Welcome to the airheads of The Squad and fans of Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Who is to blame? Not the general public, for how can we expect them to exhibit a mental acuity that large groups have never shown before? If you have a desire to point fingers, aim them in the direction of the media and schools, or maybe the proponents for not doing the necessary groundwork.
The media and schools have been particularly derelict. Don’t expect your teacher or mediagenic news personality to patiently explain “raw judicial power”. That would require knowing the existence of the first three articles of the US Constitution. They establish three branches with their own lanes of competence: to legislate, to carry out the law, and to apply the law. Today, the appliers now legislate, ergo “raw judicial power”. How? The propagandists of the imperial courts claim the law says something that it doesn’t. Well, it doesn’t say it in clear words, they say, but the words that do exist can be stretched to cover what it doesn’t say. Got it?
For those 17-year-olds taking US History, it’s called “The Living Constitution”, and in the high school where I did the bulk of my teaching, the textbook has an entire chapter devoted to it. The “grooming” starts early.
No wonder people get attached to The Living Constitution. Yet, opinion polls consistently show disapproval of its consequences. How else can one get to racism as anti-racism from equal protection in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments? How else can one get to defund the police, no-cash bail, non-prosecution of crimes, blanket early releases from prison, and filthy, homeless, dangerous, and drug-addled streets and parks? How else can one codify in court opinions the newly minted wall of separation between gender and chromosomes? And as a result, get masturbation, new ideas for playtime, and drag queens in elementary school and public libraries? How else can sports designed for one set of chromosomes be destroyed by the forced acceptance of those with a different set? How else can we get to Obama and Biden Justice Department letters threatening Title IX actions against schools who insist on keeping distinct bathrooms for each set of chromosomes? Want your ten-year-old daughter to share a bathroom with a twelve-year-old XY “girl”? The Living Constitution folks do. The malformation of the Constitution knows no bounds.
It doesn’t stop there. Try to announce the obvious and you’ll face condemnation, maybe prosecution, disciplinary action, termination of employment, ostracism, and a life under the chronic threat of Twitter-hell. There are dire consequences for speaking truth to . . . .
If we are ever to get back to law being law, and not just an utterance of the zeitgeist, people who are cognizant of the nonsense must stand up and work to correct the miseducation coming from our educrats and telegenic poseurs. Strap on your waiters for this is going to be a long hard slog.
What is Lysenkoism and what does it have to do with California? Lysenkoism was a Soviet theory of biology that illustrates the corrupting influences of ideology on science. In addition to the bloodthirsty nature of communism, it would prove to be a force multiplier for famine in the 1930’s in the Soviet Union. In like manner, today, transgenderism is just the latest edition of the attempt to have ideology guide science, and still call it “science”. It too will have dire consequences particularly for the young who will be swept into it. California is trying to establish itself as the mecca for this latest thought experiment with our children as guinea pigs.
While pursuing this transgenderism delusion, California has a hard time keeping its people and businesses. For the second straight year, the state has registered an absolute reduction in its population, down some 117,552 in 2021 alone. From 2000 to 2020, the state shed a net of 2.6 million people. Similarly, increasingly, businesses in the state are decamping for parts beyond the reach of California’s legislators, tax collectors, and regulators. The consulting firm Spectrum Solutions counts a total of 265 relocations of California-headquartered enterprises from 2018 to June 2021. It’s undoubtedly an undercount since many fly under the radar – like the number for “apprehensions at the border”.
The published 2021 list of business out-migrations is quite impressive and includes Apple and Oracle (now Austin, Tx.) and Nestle USA (now Arlington, Va.). If the state won’t be hospitable to the spirit of enterprise, the state seems to be salivating at the prospect of becoming a kind of Vatican for the grisly arts: snuffing out unborn life and mutilating the bodies of confused tweens. Abortion from conception to birth (and maybe beyond) is lauded and subsidized, going so far as to advertise for out-of-state “customers”. The “gender affirming care” (euphemisms abound in the grisly arts) of double mastectomies, hormonal injections, castrations, genital reconstruction operations, and psychological indoctrination is favored in ways the real economy is not. Fascinating.
This medical assault on the bodies of the young is justified under “transgenderism”, today’s ideological clone of Lysenkoism. Lysenkoism is an artifact of the Marxist belief system dictating the architecture of science. The inherent qualities in basic biology are rejected – nothing is inherent in Marxism but all is said to be a product of socio-economic power structures. Sound familiar to the rantings of the race hustlers of critical race theory? Trofim Lysenko, Soviet biologist who was heralded in Soviet propaganda as a genius, rejected genetics and based his agriculture advice on discredited 18th century notions of inheritance (Lamarckism). The whole idea easily conformed to the pretensions of Marxism-Leninism. The result was the catastrophic crop failures leading to the Holodomor, the famine in the Ukraine and Donbas, the vast breadbasket of Russia and Europe.
Trofim Lysenko in 1938
Thus, what happens when ideology guides science? You have massive calamities. Like the Soviet-inspired famines, we will have cohorts of impressionable adolescents equally damaged, growing up psychologically scarred and physically mutilated, and it will all be chalked up as “gender affirming”. For many, they’ll end up like the 60-year-old regretting the body-covering tattoos, now fading and wrinkled, of their twenties. Only worse.
Inspired by the conceit of transgenderism, California State Senator Scott Weiner has introduced a bill that would create an interstate underground railroad for sex-change operations, in effect, neutering the laws of the other states, according to Jeremy Redfern, press secretary of the Florida Department of Health. Children from Florida, or wherever, could be placed in California foster care, with or without parental notice and consent, and in essence Mengele-like experiments would be conducted on their bodies (Josef Mengele was the sinister Auschwitz doctor). The bill promises to prohibit the enforcement of another state’s arrest warrant if the warrant is related to that state’s restrictions on sex-change treatments.
California State Senator Scott Weiner (D, 11th St. Sen. Dist., SF and San Mateo County)Josef Mengele, Auscwitz doctor and eugenics enthusiast, and a trainload of inmates arriving at Auscwitz-Birkenau in May of 1944.
Mengele was galvanized by a faith in another popular pseudoscience of the early 20th century: eugenics, or the idea that we should breed a “better” human being like we could a horse. Many academic, medical, and public health organizations of the day jumped onboard the eugenics train. Transgenderism has the same groupie effect, and sadly it’s frequently reported by the same people who have next to no understanding of science. What’s more astonishing is the ideological capture of people who should know better. The gambit was blown wide open when the American Academy of Pediatricians guidelines on transgenderism were shown to be written by a trans activist with a degree not in science but “women’s, gender and sexuality studies”. All-too-often, such organizational policy stands are written by a narrow claque of activists. It is neither reflective of the science or the membership.
In contrast, the euphoric and headlong rush into transgenderism is taking a pause in Europe and many states, except for the half-witted firebrands running the state of California, ironically as they run people and businesses out of the state. Dutch gender-dysphoria researchers call for “more research” before more definitive actions are taken. One Dutch gender-dysphoria specialist warned of the dangers in using sex-change chemical treatments by saying that “little research has been done so far on treatment with puberty blockers and hormones in young people.” Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare (NBHW) warned that “the risks [of sex-change treatments] outweigh the benefits at present.” They cited the “uncertain science” about the most popular sex-change prognoses. Thus, to put it succinctly, “gender affirming” is a nice way of saying “dangerous”. But still, California wants to go there.
It took 8-10 million dead in the USSR in the 1930’s and chronic crop failures to have Lysenkoism quietly go down the memory hole. What will it take for California to halt its breakneck slide into an “uncertain science”? How many kids will have to be disfigured and emotionally scarred before saner heads take over?
And to think that Governor Gavin Newsom is feted as a presidential contender for 2024. Given all that we know, who’d wish that on any nation, let alone our own?
RogerG
Sources:
*California’s population decline: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/04/us/california-population-decline.html
*Businesses flee California: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adammillsap/2021/08/27/businesses-are-fleeing-california-along-with-its-residents-and-president-biden-should-pay-attention/?sh=6fae8b722327
* Moms for Liberty Locked Out of Twitter after Criticizing California Gender-Transition Bill, National Review Online, Caroline Downey, July 25, 2022, https://www.nationalreview.com/news/moms-for-liberty-locked-out-of-twitter-after-criticizing-california-gender-transition-bill/
* Florida Is Following Europe’s Lead on Gender-Dysphoria Guidelines, National Review Online, Madeleine Kearns, April 27, 2022, https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/florida-is-following-europes-lead-on-gender-dysphoria-guidelines/
Ideology: noun; a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic, social, or political theory and policy.
Women’s studies, gender studies, and feminist anything are ideologies and not fields of learning, of scholarship. If they were the subject of real academic inquiry, their premises would be critically examined and not accepted as preordained truths. Dissemination of an ideology is propaganda and, if successful, indoctrination. Welcome to the modern university . . . and the yuck factor.
Years ago, the writer Robert Caro produced a multi-part book series on the life of the 36th president, Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ). I remember one literary critic after reviewing the book summing up the character of LBJ in one word, “Yuck!”
This is my reaction to modern higher education as described in Princeton undergraduate Abigail Anthony’s account in National Review Online of the smothering prevalence of sexual ideologies on our college campuses, particularly the Ivy League. As a high school teacher and Social Science Department chair, counselors and staff were beaming with pride when one of our seniors was accepted to one of the Ivy League schools. After reading Anthony’s exposé, no one should be beaming. Not only is “yuck” an appropriate descriptor for some important parts of the campus curriculum and intellectual climate but the acceptance letter should come with a warning label, “Parents Beware!”
And don’t think for a moment that warning should be limited to the Ivy league. Notre Dame, the most famous Catholic college in America, has a Gender Studies Program to propagate the many ways to subvert Catholic doctrine. The creed of the program is summarized on the school’s website: “Integrating learning and research with social change, Gender Studies identifies, examines, and challenges injustice, while imagining and creating better futures that serve the common good.” See those words “social change” and “challenges injustice”? They’re code for political activism, which means that the program’s central purpose is to create political followers of a particular political ideology, one whose premises are unexamined and accepted as truth, much like a new religion expunging an old one. Go figure, an anti-Catholic Catholic University.
The Baptists have their own problem. Baylor University, the largest Baptist institution in the world, not surprisingly has a Women’s and Gender Studies Program (WGS). The camel’s nose of physical and self-professed identity being central to the search for truth and wisdom is clearly visible through the college’s tent flap. The usual rhetorical markers of the ideology are littered throughout the program’s web page. On the program’s “About Us” page is this juicy tidbit: “The WGS program emphasizes the intellectual, artistic, political, social, economic, and spiritual contributions of women, which traditional scholarship long overlooked or denigrated.” In addition, “WGS uses the lens of gender to extend this analysis to a broader range of issues, including the social and cultural meanings of masculinity, femininity, and identity construction.” “The difference between gender and sex” and “The social construction of gender” are representative samples of “What you will learn”. One prof is described as an expert in “feminist theology”. Another colleague is presented as an expert in “feminist philosophy”. Still another proudly proclaims her membership in Christians for Biblical Equality (CBE), a group with the Squad-simpatico mission statement that reads, “CBE’s mission is to eliminate the power imbalance between men and women resulting from theological patriarchy.” This is the old Marxist oppressed/oppressor schtick under the guise of a “Christian” resumé.
Dr. Lisa Shaver opens the program by introducing the audience to Baylor University’s new minor in Women’s and Gender Studies. (Photo: Baylee VerSteeg | Multimedia Journalist)
If it is possible in places thought to be resistant to the fad thought, sectarian schools, what do you think is happening at your run-of-the-mill State U? These college operatives don’t have to face the skeptical gazes of a hidebound board of regents, people who are more likely to believe that the Word of God is actually the Word of God. The people running the show at your public colleges and universities are usually of the sort fully marinated in the junk thought. Go to any public university website and look up “Women’s Studies” and “Gender Studies”. Google it. It’s more in your face and a cause célèbre (arousing widespread controversy, outside campaigning, and heated public debate).
At the Ivies, Anthony recounts the septic tank of the mind. In alphabetical order, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, and Yale are littered with the usual litany of visiting lectures by drag queen (and Tufts University prof) LaWhore Vagistan; the ubiquitous Centers for Women and Gender “to engage the campus community through a feminist praxis of activism and academics”; a variety of pornography courses with the usual hands-on (pun intended) applications; some version of Columbia’s student-led BDSM group, Conversio Virium; courses like Cornell’s Nightlife to understand “queer communities of color” and “interrogate the ways in which nightlife demonstrates the queer world-making potential that exists beyond the normative 9-5 capitalist model of production”; and Dartmouth’s religion department sponsoring “Dragmouth”, a drag show. Get the picture?
University of Oregon students in Pride parade on campus, 2018.
Parents, do you understand what your daughters and sons are about to get into? A co-ed dorm filled with students immersed in pornography and BDSM? How about a catalogue of offerings that confuse ideological indoctrination for scholarship? They certainly will not be wiser after accruing $60,000 in student debt. It might be better for them to forego the superficial prestige of a degree, avoid the debt anchor, pick up practical skills in the real world, and maybe later attend a real college with a real classical curriculum. As one observer put it, Hillsdale can’t take everyone.
Young people, parents, steer clear of the yuck factor.
RogerG
Sources:
*Abigail Anthony’s piece in National Review Online, https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/the-sexual-experiment-at-the-ivy-leagues/
*Notre Dame’s Gender Studies Program, https://genderstudies.nd.edu/
*Baylor University’s Women’s and Gender Studies Program, https://genderstudies.artsandsciences.baylor.edu/
Detective Joe Friday of “Dragnet” fame interviewed a nervous and anxious witness by saying to her, “All right, whoa, just the facts, ma’am—when did you start hearing the strange noise?” It’s something that should be taught in journalism school, but isn’t. Communications majors stand before cameras and twist words in ways that reflect the worldview common in the rarified atmosphere of their self-reinforcing blue silos, rarely limiting themselves to just the facts.
In that cocoon, for instance, few know much about guns and fewer own them. Their familiarity with the rest of the country outside the bubble is from 35,000 feet. And it really, really shows.
Victor Blackwell and Alisyn Camerota of CNN
Watch CNN’s Alisyn Camerota and on-air sidekick Victor Blackwell report some of the facts on the recent Indiana mass shooting (see at (13) CNN’s Alisyn Camerota Reacts to Good Samaritan Who Killed Mall Shooter: ‘Are We All Supposed to Rely on an Armed 22-Year-Old?’ – Twitter Search / Twitter). The reportage was well and good until the end when Camerota ruined the just-the-facts about the shooting and the heroic actions of an armed citizen with a personal commentary: “I mean, but are we all supposed to rely on an armed 22-year-old in the food court?” Blackwell chimed in with, “Shouldn’t have to”. “Shouldn’t have to” suggests obvious preventions. Well, geniuses, what are they?
Elisjsha Dicken (l) killed Indiana mall shooter Jonathan Sapirman (r).
A just-the-facts to back up the “Shouldn’t have to” probably, in their minds, means getting onboard the gun control soul train, from Beto’s and The Squad’s mouths to your gun safe. Gun confiscation of those meanie guns used in Zero Dark Thirty – which by the way you can’t buy – the ones often dumped into the rhetorical category of “weapons of war” or “assault rifles”, has great appeal for the firearms illiterate. Of course, they can’t define the things in any meaningful way – never could – often confusing semi (legal) and automatic actions (illegal). Is it the looks, the pistol grip, the stock, the fact that most of the things are black? What? But take away the looks and what do you have? You have a plain looking gun with just as many bullets exiting the barrel. Are those exiting bullets any more lethal if emanating from a meanie-looking rifle as opposed to plain Jane? What’s the point of bans or takeaways if the weapons’ only transgression is looks?
Don’t expect Camerota, Blackwell, or Beto to be coherent in response. Their crowd hasn’t been up to now. That’s why they’ve hit upon the backstop of “high-capacity magazines”. Thus, a crazed killer will be stopped cold by a reduction from 15 to 7-cartridge magazines, or even 5. Right? You’ve got to be kidding. These lunatics practice dropping a spent clip to be replaced quickly by another. They all practice before they carry out their mayhem (news reports indicate that this murderer did). Seven rounds, seven people shot, and in a couple of seconds he’s reloaded to repeat the carnage. What’s the point, once again?
Universal background checks? Red flag laws? These sops require a competent government workforce from the ATF’s Instacheck workstations to DA’s not in a wokeness trance. Just because some of these maniacs would not qualify for a gun purchase or would be clearly eligible for temporary seizure of weapons from the home doesn’t mean they won’t get a gun. Just because the miscreants left a trail of bile all over the internet doesn’t mean people are awake and watching. A gun can travel down the grapevine like gossip with or without a civil service protected government employee standing as gatekeeper.
More laws mean more for these people to do. The new law could be award-winning poetry and be an exemplar of pure legal reasoning. Still, it has to be implemented by the descendants of Adam. All-too-often, though, the “Shouldn’t have to” is a reference to more laws, more laws to ignore or impinge on an enforcing employee’s collective bargaining rights. Camerota and company don’t think beyond getting more pages added to the criminal code. For them, it’s simply a matter of ink on paper and then off they go in pursuit of systemic racism.
For them, it’s nearly always an intense focus on the gun, the inanimate object. Not much airtime is devoted to the shooter. Who was he, for it is almost always a he? They overwhelmingly are young men in their early twenties. They, with few exceptions, show the classic signs of young male alienation. “Alienation” is a twenty-dollar word for isolated, forgotten, ignored, relegated to a place of self-absorption in front of a screen. Nobody seems to care that his anxieties are mounting and his views begin to percolate out of deranged self-delusion. Everyone from the union-protected school employee to his parents to a society obsessed with the “marginalized” is happy to have him out of their hair. It’s playing with fire.
Leveling the ship’s deck after years of severe listing to the benefit of everyone but him is extremely difficult, even if everyone agreed, which is as likely as pigs spouting wings. If that is true, what are we to do when these malcontents show up at any one of the numerous soft targets around us? More money and programs for mental health services might be a partial answer, but I’m skeptical given the failure of our current, vast, and expanding gun control regime.
A real answer may be staring at us, and the folks at CNN, in the face. The fact that an armed citizen ended the killing spree before the murderer emptied the magazine might have done more for public safety than all the bullet points (no pun intended) in the Democrats’ gun control agenda. That 22-year-old in the Indiana shopping mall with a gun and a state constitutional right to carry it probably did more to deter the homicidal from choosing a shopping mall than the ATF. Soft targets becoming hard targets might limit the miscreants’ acting out to Snapchat or TikTok.
At least by that time, somebody might notice, badger the police, who might then threaten a do-nothing DA to do something – like taking the suspect into custody and reminding the parents of their legal responsibility. Maybe the whole brouhaha might result in a groundswell to change our impotent commitment laws, giving something for our lawmakers to do other than make our lives miserable as they chase grandiose crusades like climate change or systemic . . . whatever.
If reporters want to act out the part of editor-in-chief, maybe their commentary ought to have a closer relationship to “Just the facts, ma’am”. Camerota and Blackwell, try being something more than a Democratic Party shill.
According to verywellhealth.com, a tumor is “. . . an abnormal growth of cells, which serves no purpose in the body.” In addition, “A tumor develops when cells divide too quickly and without control.”
Are tumors limited to biological manifestations? I think not. In today’s culture, the concept applies to the weird nexus of celebrity, media, activism, government, social class, and narrow geographic location that “develops” into an “abnormal” and tight-knit social grouping “too quickly and without control”. Two stories of late illustrate the existence of a kind of social tumor with a decidedly political complexion: (1) the Amber Heard op-ed which led to the famous (infamous?) Johnny Depp lawsuit(s) and (2) the Trump-Russia imbroglio. You won’t need better evidence for the actuality of socio-political tumors.
I find few things as amusing as when the public is shocked to learn of the chaotic nature of the personal lives of celebrities. The recent Depp/Heard dustup provides ample proof of the toxicity of some celebrity marriages. Johnny Depp sued Amber Heard for defamation after an op-ed appeared in the Washington Post under Heard’s name characterizing Depp as a wife beater.
Heard and Depp at the trial.
But that’s only the half of it. “Under her name”? Yes, the op-ed was ghostwritten by ACLU staffers after the organization received a windfall of $1.3 million from her after her divorce settlement with Depp. Her ex-boyfriend, Elon Musk, added $2.2 million to the promised total kitty of $3.5 million. Celebrity divorce, celebrity-sized payouts, and political activism came together in one socio-political tumor, or “abnormal growth”.
It seems that the ACLU was very appreciative to Heard, whom they referred to as an “ACLU artist ambassador on women’s rights”. ACLU communications people were all over the op-ed’s composition and dissemination to big media. All of this was born out in the trial. Robin Shulman, an ACLU communications staffer, wrote the first draft with edits from Heard’s lawyers, and Terence Dougherty, the ACLU’s Chief Operating Officer and general counsel, peddled it to the media. Humungous gifts lead to humungous help in hatching a smear.
Robin Shulman, ACLU communications staffer and ghostwriter of Amber Heard’s defamatory op-ed.erence Dougherty, ACLU Chief Operating Officer and general counsel.
In the end, the jury in the Depp defamation lawsuit would have none of it. Juries are tied to the evidence at least to some degree. The facts showed that these were two mutually abusive individuals wrapped in nuptials. The verdict ordered Amber Heard to be on the hook for about $10 million to Depp and his legal team. For the life of me, I fail to understand why the ACLU wasn’t in the dock as well since their fingerprints were all over the slander.
Then we come to Durham, the special counsel appointed by then-AG Barr to investigate the origins of the Trump-Russia fable. The Sussman trial and subsequently released court documents glaringly expose another “abnormal growth”. This one is composed of two types of cells – the Clinton Campaign and certain federal agencies – developing in cooperation “quickly and without control”. Indeed, they were intertwined like the common root system of birch trees, and like the cells of a tumor. Professional and social courtesies abound. This class of DC operatives are interwoven in a web of friendships, past and present occupational connections, and similar backgrounds and outlooks. All of this is cooped into the narrow confines of the DC metropolitan area. They can’t help running into each other at the soccer field, Whole Foods, and dinner parties. It’s a mutually reinforcing social ecosystem.
The prevalence of the bonds in the social petri dish of DC was on display in the Sussman trial, who was charged with making false and misleading statements to the FBI. Michael Sussman, one of Hillary’s key campaign lawyers and a veteran of the Justice Department’s cybersecurity team, called an old acquaintance, James Baker, the FBI’s general counsel at the time, to kickstart the Hillary campaign’s scheme to connect Trump to Russia under the contrived moniker of Trump being “under federal investigation”. Keep in mind that she was under investigation for the much more real charge of violating her legal responsibility to follow security procedures in her communications as Secretary of State, and the likelihood that she obstructed justice in destroying evidence (her emails, home brew server, hard drives, and cell phones). She desperately needed the distraction of something to pin on Trump.
Michael Sussman (l), Clinton Campaign lawyer, and John Durham, Special Counsel.
In stepped the malignant cells of the supportive DC tumor. Court records show that Hillary gave the go-ahead to begin the scam. The whole campaign apparatus in DC leapt into motion. The Campaign’s part of the tumor included Fusion GPS and co-founder Glenn Simpson to dig up dirt on Trump, Christopher Steele who provided much of the dirt, Igor Danchenko (a suspected Russian asset) who was Steele’s source, and Rodney Joffe and his Neustar data mining firm (hired by the Hillary Campaign) to help create the illusion of a Trump “backchannel” to Putin through Russia’s Alpha Bank.
Igor Danchenko suspected Russian asset and Christopher Steele’s source for the “dossier”.Glann Simpson of Fusion GPS, the company tasked by the Clinton Campaign to dig up dirt on Trump.Christopher Steele, the compiler of the fraudulent “dossier”.Rodney Joffe of Nuestar, the source for the fraudulent story of a Trump “backchannel” to Putin through Russia’s Alpha Bank.
The stage was set for the sales job to friends and acquaintances in the sympathetic administrative state, the other part of the tumor. Sussman texted his old friend at the FBI, James Baker, the FBI’s general counsel:
“Jim — it’s Michael Sussmann. I have something time-sensitive (and sensitive) I need to discuss. Do you have availability for a short meeting tomorrow? I’m coming on my own — not on behalf of a client or company — want to help the Bureau. Thanks.”
What did Sussman have for Baker? The next day, Sussman plopped on Baker’s desk Joffe’s concocted illusion of Trump-Russia collusion through Alpha Bank. The Hillary campaign lawyer, Sussman, gave the FBI an excuse to do what they were chomping at the bit to do anyway. FBI headquarters opened the investigation with enthusiasm according to the chain of command in Chicago. James Comey was said to be particularly jazzed up. The FBI higher-ups hid the Sussman/Hillary Campaign connection to the alleged “information” by carrying on as if it came from the Justice Department, not the Clinton Campaign. It’s clear that the FBI wasn’t really duped by Sussman. Come on, everyone in the halls of power knew who Sussman worked for. Let’s just say that they wanted to be “duped”. It provided great cover. The rest is a history that’ll live in infamy.
In the Depp-Heard case, a storied civil liberties group is muddied by its zeal to manufacture oppression through defamation. In the Trump-Russia fairy tale, Hillary campaign friendlies in the superstructure of the DC administrative state were essentially adjuncts of the Campaign and the Democratic Party. This is the reality of socio-political tumors that plague America. Like the biological kind, they can be malignant and need to be irradiated. After all, they “serve no purpose” other than as comfortable sinecures for government careerists.
How? Dismantle the administrative monoliths in DC. Scatter them to the wind. The country has about 300 cities in the 100,000 range who’d love to have the headquarters for the Justice Department, its FBI, its ATF, the Department of Homeland Security and its sundry appendages, the Department of Agriculture, etc., etc. It’d be nice to see the pressed suits running the Agriculture Department regularly having to clean manure off their shoes, or maybe the potentates running the show at the EPA having to live in the vicinity of the people whose jobs they destroyed. It’s juicy to think about.
Malignant tumors need oncological treatment. The events of the past six years show DC to be a dangerous concentration of cells that has developed “quickly and without control”. Congress needs to act like a hospital oncology department by flinging the functions of government to the far corners of the nation. Our mode of government would be healthier if DC was more of a ghost town.
As for the Heard-type smear, put an end to the mantra of always “believe her”. Chromosomes should have very little bearing on truth and guilt.
RogerG
Sources:
*Andrew C. McCarthy’s piece on Durham and the Sussman trial: https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/06/27/russiagate-misunderstood/
*Dan McLaughlin’s piece on the Heard-Depp case: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/amber-heards-aclu-ghostwriters/
Dr. Caitlin Bernard, the Indiana physician who broke the story.
On the right, we have QAnon and tales of a pedophilia ring under the watchful gaze of Hillary Clinton, or something like that. It’s hard to follow politically inspired derangements. If that doesn’t startle, Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, Ga., 10th District) has openly speculated on a Jewish conspiracy of space-based lasers to ignite forest fires in California. I hope she was kidding, but one can never be sure with this mouth without a filter.
Why do I mention the cuckoo Right? The delusions of the Left prove that the affliction isn’t one dimensional. Case in point: a story is heralded in the press of a pregnant Ohio 10-year-old who had to flee the “coat-hanger R’s” of the buckeye state to the “coat-hanger R’s” of Indiana for an abortion, all to heap scorn on the Dobbs decision. The president, exhibiting his usual foot-in-mouth antics before a mic, repeated the story. The story is starting to unravel, and it’s beginning to look more like a tale of an unenforced border, thanks to Biden.
I was initially skeptical of a pregnant 10-year-old. That part now appears to be true, though there’s much more to the story. A pregnant 10-year-old? That’s rape simply by the combination of the two words, and it was reported to Columbus, Ohio, authorities by the girl’s mom on June 22. A suspect was arrested: an illegal border-crosser from Guatemala.
The alleged rapist, an illegal Guatemalan immigrant (name kept anonymous)
The fable also opens up a can of worms for Columbus. The city, run by lefty Dems, hasn’t officially adopted the moniker of “sanctuary city” but it behaves like one. In 2015, the city issued a “Police Directive” to prohibit police cooperation in the enforcement of immigration law. In 2017, Columbus Mayor Andrew J. Ginther (D) was more emphatic. His proclamation announced that “no city department or employee may use city moneys, equipment, or personnel for the sole purpose of detecting or apprehending persons based on suspected immigration status, unless in response to a court order.” Can’t be much more “sanctuary” than that. Is he equally as insistent when it comes to holding suspects for violating federal counterfeiting or kidnapping laws? I kinda doubt it.
Furthermore, word is leaking out that the sole source for the breaking story was Dr. Caitlin Bernard of Indianapolis, a Dem activist and abortion enthusiast. And there is reason to believe that she may not have been the treating physician but only overheard another doctor who was. Anyway, either way, if she or anyone learned of the child sexual abuse and didn’t report it, they become eligible for enrollment in the hoosegow. Don’t be surprised that soon the story gets buried on A-10 as the public’s gaze is redirected to another phony outrage.
The real story is turning out to be the lengths that ideological hopes outrun the facts. Even more troubling, facts are invented or omitted to get at Kavanaugh, the Court, anybody running for office with an “R” after their name, or anyone opposing abortion from conception to the maternity ward crib. Lost in the shuffle is the grisly fact that we’re talking about snuffing out human life. There was a time when, even in states that legalized the procedure, people were disquieted enough about it to keep it private. Not anymore. A couple of days ago, the Schumer-led Senate gave a forum for some to loudly and proudly proclaim theirs. It’s grisly!
Now we have the disgraceful politics of the grisly to add to “defund the police”, neo-Marxist indoctrination everywhere from West Point to kindergarten, school buses unloading kids into a gauntlet of crack heads, immigration lawbreakers being shepherded around the country at taxpayer expense, and people and property under constant assault. And I haven’t gotten to the unraveling economy. Amazing, absolutely amazing!
RogerG
Sources:
*The Columbus Dispatch story: https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/2022/07/13/columbus-man-charged-rape-10-year-old-led-abortion-in-indiana/10046625002/
*https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/indiana-abortionist-dodges-questions-about-story-of-alleged-ten-year-old-rape-victim/
*https://www.nationalreview.com/news/illegal-immigrant-arrested-for-allegedly-raping-ten-year-old-ohio-girl-at-center-of-viral-abortion-story/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first
* Columbus’s sanctuary city status: https://www.fairus.org/issue/sanctuary-policies/10-largest-sanctuary-cities-united-states
*The background of Dr. Caitlin Bernard: https://spectator.org/caitlin-bernard-abortion-phony-story/
