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Useful Idiot

Austin (l) and Milley before Congress on June 23.

Useful idiot: noun; a derogatory term for a person perceived as propagandizing for a cause without fully comprehending the cause’s goals.

The “useful idiot” is a term that is often wrongly attributed to Lenin, but can be traced back to post-WWII Italian politics when centrist democrats used the phrase in reference to the social democrats who were considering an alliance with the Italian Communist Party. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley’s comments before Congress on June 23 (see below) are a shocking admission that post-WWII Italian politics are analogous to the emerging alliance between the radical left and the people managing our arsenal of democracy. We might be viewing the beginnings of a new Red Army, and I’m not exaggerating.

His remarks were, to put it succinctly, appalling. Most egregiously, he used lefty jargon to justify lefty indoctrination of the ranks. That’s right, lefty indoctrination. The mashup of illogic began with a partisan rendering of the Jan 6 capitol riot. Let Milley speak for himself: “So what is it that cause[d] thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the constitution of the United States of America?” The former US District Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Andrew C. McCarthy, put the kibosh to that story line (read his piece here).

McCarthy’s point is that what happened on Jan. 6 wasn’t an insurrection. The protesters weren’t trying to “overturn the constitution of the United States of America”; they were mistakenly trying to rescue it at the behest of the commander-in-chief, the then-president Trump. None of those arrested are likely to be charged with anything close to treason. The legal equivalent of trespassing and its derivatives are mostly in the offing. The reason: there’s no evidence of patriotically-inspired, flag-waving rioters wanting “to overturn the constitution of the United States of America”. 49-year-old grandmas and a shaman-pretending clown don’t make for an overthrow. Yet, Milley chooses to sound like AOC.

The protest crowd around the Capitol Building, Jan. 6

He then goes on to use his mischaracterization of Jan. 6 to justify radical left brainwashing at the military academies. That’s because he misconstrues the purpose of a military academy with that of a university. West Point exists to create an officer corps. UCLA exists to broadly educate a population, albeit, today, oriented extreme left. The SDS and Weather Underground of the 60’s, and their offspring, have filled today’s faculty lounges. The alleged call for free thought created a huge safe space for the nurturing of a whole host of lefty-inspired and self-defeating balderdash. Out of this hothouse came the buffoonery of critical race theory (CRT), its jargon, illogic, and Milley consequently making a fool of himself. That’s just what we want: a military closer in its thinking to Code Pink or the Black Panthers than George Washington.

Antifa on a US college campus.

The foolish premise to Milley’s bombast was a complete confusion of propaganda and teaching. He began by surrendering the validity of lefty boilerplate when he said, “. . . I want to understand white rage and I’m white, and I want to understand it.” What’s this “white rage”? It’s lefty lingo for anyone who opposes with them. Of course, it was used to brand the protesters as “white supremacists”, and Milley repeats the lie. They were Trump supporters and this group is more diverse than ever before. I guess in Milley-babble Trump’s people of color are now trying to reinstate the KKK. Milley’s brain is just a hot mess.

After surrendering the rhetorical battlefield to lefty banalities, he used the excuse of an “open mind” to condone indoctrination. Ideas studied for analysis (real teaching) is far removed from accepting their validity and engaging in political confessionals. This isn’t a scholarly study of Lenin or Mao but a form of brainwashing. Milley has little clue as to what he is saying.

Milley’s comments were an insult to the American people and all those laboring in the ranks trying to defend what Milley apparently believes to be an irredeemably racist country. That’s the “systemic” aspect of systemic racism, the essence of the radical doctrines emanating from the radical high priesthood of CRT. Now we have proof that the farce is the governing doctrine of the people commanding the most sophisticated fighting force in history.

I’m scared! Should you?

RogerG

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Who’s Dumber?

Who’s dumber, a person without a college degree or a person with one? Additionally, who’s dumber, a person with a BA, MA, or PhD? Is it possible for a person to educationally advance and get dumber? A response might be to dismiss the questions as misleading for many reasons, but the common assumption is that a degree is a visa to smartland. Is it true? Recent voting patterns force us to confront the questions, and the answer may shock some of us.

I’m speaking of Tuesday’s NYC mayoral primary election. Boroughs heavily populated with blue collars, ethnics, and minorities – cohorts with few college degrees – are voting as if they have a dislike for socialism and affection for law and order. The lower the percentage of whites in the district, the lower socialist and woke vote. What? Yep!

Eric Adams greets supporters at a New York City primary mayoral election night party in New York City, June 22, 2021. (Andrew Kelly/Reuters)

The pundit Kyle Smith put it succinctly: “The socialists just can’t seem to process enough white people through Oberlin to get themselves to a majority, even in their intellectual capital, New York City.” Middle and upper-income whites have moved left, along with their sheepskins. Everyone else likes cops and abhors the coddling of thugs and the government largesse for the pampering (like Andrew Yang’s mass mailing of checks). Now that’s some real cognitive dissonance for the ladies on The View.

Ex-cop and law-and-order candidate Eric Adams won 46% to 17% for MSNBC lawyer Maya Wiley in early voting in the Bronx. Blue collar whites and Hispanics dominate Staten Island and turned out 31% for Adams and 13% for the AOC darling, Wiley. Over all, Adams holds a 9% lead as of now.

Where do we find the enthusiasts of wokeness? It’s clustered in tony, hipster micro-districts in Manhattan and Brooklyn, any place with the highest concentration of whites.

Affection for socialism is my metric for gauging dumbness, which is popularly synonymous with stupidity. Simply put, the mental contraption doesn’t work. Its boosters – AOC, The Squad, Bernie, the activist core of the Democratic Party – cite countries, especially Scandinavian ones, who are in reality more free market than these zealots’ dream for America. Sweden, et al, dumped the nonsense long ago, and the demise of the USSR showed that Green New Deal central planning, as with all central planning, is a prescription for chronic depression. Non-whites have a gut instinct for the reality that escaped the geniuses from Oberlin, et al.

A degree hasn’t inoculated many upper and middle-class whites, and everyone else who grace these ivy-covered halls, from stupidity. Does a modern college degree befuddle the mind with inanities? I’m sure that it depends. But as of now, it would have been better for many of our degree-holders to skip the expensive indoctrination, and the 5-figure debt, and follow dad and mom into the work world.

Moving left is moving socialist and into forever oppressed/oppressor victimhood, and voting like it. It’s stupid and morally corrupting. Is that what is meant by the ‘burbs turning blue, ergo dumb? One has to wonder.

RogerG
*Source: https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/eric-adams-probably-defeats-socialism-in-new-york-city/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=featured-writers&utm_term=third
*Also on my website: libertatevitute.com

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CRT Is Marxism in Drag

Parents of children in the Poway, Ca., school district protest critical race theory in their schools, June 3, 2021.

A recent column written by Bonnie Jean Feldkamp of the Cincinnati Enquirer illustrates the shallow, activist-oriented mind that inhabits so many of our newsrooms and has broadly penetrated the education Borg and faculty lounges down to the elementary school a few blocks away. Critical Race Theory IS clearly, unmistakably Marxism in drag. People like Feldkamp seem to be blind to it.

Bonnie Jean Feldkamp

At issue in her piece is the parent opposition to a proposed adoption of a “social equity” course for Highlands High School in Ft. Thomas, Ky. Let’s be clear: “social equity” is a euphemism for critical race theory (CRT). The elements of CRT are at its roots, as is the moniker “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI). Both apples don’t fall too far from the same tree.

Her argument in support of the class was embarrassingly incoherent. She presents the CRT-driven “social equity” course as an attempt to address “outcomes”. She writes,

“When you put the emphasis on outcomes and look at the data, it’s difficult to deny things like systemic racism and white privilege, which hits the core of the pushback on CRT, mostly from conservatives.”

That is, pure and simple, the post hoc fallacy (look below) run amok. Because slavery and Jim Crow preceded today’s lagging socio-economic numbers for African-Americans, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the former caused the latter. That’s jumping to conclusions; that’s ideology; that’s bias; that’s political activism; that’s Marxism in drag!

For the benefit of Feldkamp and CRT enthusiasts, there’s a lot that can come between 160-year-old historical circumstances and today’s crime-ridden slums. Try the War on Poverty. Try the rampant fatherlessness. Try the serial assault on traditional faith.
Try the failing inner-city public schools. Try the serial indoctrination of victimhood that strips a person of their agency. Actually, the conclusion is a baby with many fathers, least of all the one stretching back a full three hundred years.

This isn’t logic. This isn’t even serious history. This is an over-complex scheme to justify a political crusade, a campaign for a militant reverse discrimination. Thus, it is classic indoctrination when imposed on unsuspecting young minds and pushed by half-aware newspaper columnists and a few recruits from the education blob.

The missionaries for CRT, DEI, “social justice”, “social equity” are marinated in the mind of Marx. First, the cognitive monstrosity begins with a huge and unsupportable assumption: groups defined by some physical or socio-economic attribute determine the course of all of our arrangements throughout history. For Marx, it was class. For CRT’s minions, it’s race. From this hunch, it’s open-field running to the end zone of political power. The first stop along the way is to germinate an army of young activists like the child soldiers of the Khmer Rouge who marched off hundreds of thousands to the killing fields and death pits.

Khmer Rouge child soldiers at a base camp in the Cardamom Mountains of western Cambodia, north of Pailin, 8th February 1981. (Photo by Alex Bowie/Getty Images)

Her sources for her opinion are people with the same views. It’s nice to know that she has compatriots who are similarly misguided, but it’s not dispositive of anything, other than the misguided have company. She quotes Education Week Magazine, the organ of the education blob. It suffers from the overweening and smothering lefty orthodoxy of the self-proclaimed socialist John Dewey. I’ve spent 30 years of teaching in public schools and can’t recall spending more than 30 minutes perusing its pages. You learn to teach by teaching, not patterning your job around Dewey’s loopy constructivism.

People like Feldkamp try to thwart any criticism by quoting someone with “prof” before their name. Her “prof” is Phillipe Copeland of Boston University’s School of Social Work and “assistant director of narrative” for Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research. He’s no more coherent than she is. The “Center” is run by the infamous CRT grifter, Ibram X. Kendi. Check out this mass of verbiage from Copeland:

“Critics cannot be satisfied because the criticism about Critical Race Theory is not being made in good faith. It is part of a systematic effort to discredit and undermine anti-racism while generating and manipulating white anxiety and resentment for political gain.”

Boston University’s Phillipe Copeland speaks at the School of Theology in 2015.

Wait a minute! He can’t, and doesn’t, prove the theory to begin with, but then rushes to condemn those who would make everyone aware of it. Now that’s a sweet gig at a tidy salary and tenure.

Parents, if you want your kids to be the next edition of the Red Guards, by all means, be my guest, but don’t complain when the world that they create looks more like today’s Minneapolis, Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, et al.

The schools are having enough trouble successfully imparting the academic core and any pertinent vocational skills. What plausible educational or fiscal reason can excuse a foray into political activism? I don’t think that statue-toppling and spittle-laced fulminations in the face of police officers are marketable skills.

Social justice warriors in New York City, 2018.

Please read the piece if for no other reason than to know what we’re up against.

RogerG

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Safetyism Is a Disabling Crutch

Shira Steinbeck, the parent of an 11-year-old in Pleasant Hill, recites an anti-distance-learning poem at the Mount Diablo Unified School District board meeting on Wednesday, February 10, 2021. (Screenshot)

An article in today’s San Jose Mercury News article is about the attempted recall of five members of the Mt. Diablo Unified school board. One unintended outgrowth of the pandemic was the self-besmirching of a growing class of “experts”. These scientific and technical professionals quickly confused scholarship with activism. Others, such as elected officials skilled in the arts of public utterances and little else, seek the confirmatory esteem of a science that they scarcely understand. They bring with them an unexamined assumption which elevates a near-utopian sense of pristine safety to the exclusion of everything else. The result is a society with the wheels coming off . . . and parents irate over their shuttered multi-billion dollar schools.

Once we knew the nature of the virus, which we did within a couple of months, and had a collection of therapies, efforts should have focused on the vulnerable. Instead, universal masking, distancing, and a shuttering of lives and livelihoods proceeded apace. Schools were closed, or nearly so, and children lost a year-and-a-half of learning, something that’ll be difficult if not impossible to recapture. Of course, inequality will be magnified as those with the wherewithal continue to excel and those not so well situated languish. It’s amazing that those most concerned about “equity” are doing the most to worsen it.

The absence of a vaccine is frankly irrelevant at this stage.

The reigning safetyism is a disabling crutch. The ill-fruits are all around us. Massive academic failures for our Zoomed children, a riddled economy on the cusp of rampant inflation, the decay of personal agency in the government bribes (lavish unemployment benefits) to stay at home, and growing political and social discord are abundantly on display. Waiting in the wings are escalating interest rates and a gargantuan federal debt service for the exploding red ink that’ll eat up the federal budget.

The most stringent measures were universalized in a mammoth wet blanket that some potentates worshipping at the altar of safetyism can’t find within themselves to lift.

I say this not as a political partisan. Both parties were and are culpable. Many of the commentariat – left, right, and center – perpetuated the strangulation. Looking back on it, within a few months of the outbreak, measures should have targeted those facing the greatest harm. Concentrated measures were ignored in favor of totalitarianism.

Now it’s time for the common man and woman to find their inner Patrick Henry and right the ship. Go get ’em parents.

RogerG

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College as Farce, By Bill Maher

Bill Maher on the set of his HBO show.

How ironic for it was Karl Marx who coined this pithy phrase in reference to the German philosopher Friedrich Hegel: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” The same applies to the current state of our colleges and universities: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

The tragedy is cramming anyone capable of breathing into another four years in a classroom. The effort has quickly become farce. It’s rapidly being turned into a burlesque of lefty fascinations as standards are simultaneously shredded. I’ll let Bill Maher tell the story; he does a better job.

Now that’s ironic, once again. I find myself often disagreeing with Maher, but even a blind man can hit the dart board after enough tries.

Check out the clip.

RogerG

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A Lesson For All Seasons, The Movie Clip

Here’s the relevant scene from “A Man For All Seasons” mentioned in my previous post. Substitute young Roper for the cancel-culture mobs patrolling our campuses, infecting our children’s curriculums, manning the halls of power, and swarming the newsrooms. Mob rule has the upper hand over the rule of law and decency. These, indeed, are tumultuous times. We must keep our heads on straight in this period of malevolent madness.

RogerG

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A Lesson For All Seasons

The pertinent scene from “A Man for All Seasons”.

The movie, “A Man For All Seasons”, has a pertinent exchange between Sir Thomas More and his daughter’s fiancée, William Roper. Roper proclaims his desire to steamroll any law to suppress an evil. More counters with this: “And when the last law was down – and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?” As the kids in the backseat would say, “Are we there yet?” Are our laws, like the Bill of Rights, made flat?

I don’t know, but we seem to be close. The Biden posse is coming after guns, embarking on a crusade against its political foes under the banner of the fight against the illusory “White Supremacy”, and rigging the federal election system to sustain its grip on power by making it easier to vote and easier to cheat. We are quickly becoming a banana republic with Stalinistic overtones.

Pres. Biden at recent press conference.

“A Man For All Seasons” is worth a look. It isn’t the cup if tea for those raised on films with thin dialogue and abundant eye candy, but it more than makes up for it in gripping moral lessons.

RogerG

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A Woke Defense Is No Defense

Our military isn’t to be political. Our Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, is making it so. One could be excused for concluding that the Squad is running the Defense Department as it does the Democratic Party.

In a CNN interview, Austin tried to rebut claims that the military is “soft” because of its embrace of wokeness. No, he’s dangerously wrong. Secretary Austin is undermining the most important asset of a fighting unit: the willingness of its members to sacrifice for each other. Tell me how cramming down the throats of our fighting men and women racist and identity-mongering screeds will lead to combat effectiveness.

(Read about the interview here.)

Treason is defined as making war on the United States. This isn’t treason, but it has the effect of treason. It destroys the ability of the country to defend itself by dividing the troops into squabbling camps of identity groups.

The Navy came out with a reading list for the “growth and development” of sailors that included Ibram X. Kendi’s extremist tirade, “How to Be an Antiracist”. The Navy’s Second Fleet created a book club for discussing and reading Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility”. Vice admiral Andrew L. Lewis, you should be ashamed of yourself. These are extremist left-wing spiels that are being normalized in the ranks.

Vice admiral Andrew L. Lewis being interviewed by Joe Pascal.

Austin uses the left-wing jargon of “look like America” which in reality will compete with competence. Do you want an engineer “to look like America” or do you want a bridge that won’t collapse under your car? This is not only nonsense; it’s dangerous nonsense when it’s given a stamp of approval from the top.

The Army is running ads about “Heather has Two Mommies” in the ranks. What effect does all this identity obsessiveness have on morale? It produces nothing good. A constant refrain that encourages prickliness is a threat to the nation, and is not just another policy choice. For this reason alone, Austin is deserving of censure.

A scene from a recent army ad: Corporal Malonelord has Two Mommies.

He may want a military that “looks like America”, but it won’t look, or act, like an effective fighting force. See, Lloyd, looks can be deceiving.

RogerG

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The Mansions of the Lord

Arlington National Cemetery

Memorial Day is a time to remember that we are mostly a decent people. No measure of decency can compete with this divine insight from the Gospel of John: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” We have patriot graves all over the world that are testament to the greatest love. Their headstones are a rebuke to today’s insidious malcontents who seem to have a grip on the cultural gateways of today. As they besmirch the nation and anybody older than them, these graves are the ultimate censure. They died so others might live, live in Lincoln’s “last best hope of earth”.

We should not forget that ours is a good nation, not a perfect one. Nothing touched by the hand and mind of man is without fault, including, and most poignantly, the fevered beliefs of those who would tear it all down in their profound ignorance. There are too many in graveyards scattered around the country and world who practiced that greater love. Today, we honor them and condemn the misguided who belittle them and the nation for which they died.

“The Mansions of the Lord” seems most appropriate in this troubled time.

Here are the lyrics:

To fallen soldiers let us sing

Where no rockets fly nor bullets wing

Our broken brothers let us bring

To the Mansions of the Lord

No more bleeding, no more fight

No prayers pleading through the night

Just divine embrace, eternal light

To the Mansions of the Lord.

Where no mothers cry and no children weep

We will stand and guard though the angels sleep

Through the ages safely keep

The Mansions of the Lord.

(Words by Randall Wallace and music by Nick Glennie-Smith)

RogerG

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The Battered Bastards of Baseball

Robert Manfred, MLB Commissioner, in April announced the relocation of the Allstar Game out of Atlanta. The reason? In his own words: “Major League Baseball fundamentally supports voting rights for all Americans and opposes restrictions to the ballot box.”

Robert Manfred, JD, MLB Commissioner

Of course, he was lambasting Georgia’s new election law which was meant to correct some of the impromptu and ill-conceived, panic-inspired changes to voting last year. The law included the hated but popular – hated by radical activists – “voter id” for all voting, absentee and in-person. What led Manfred to hitch MLB’s wagon to the horse of radical politics? It was more than talks with radicalized groups associated with Al Sharpton, Stacey Abrams, and Big Sports’ mega-millionaires like Lebron James (worth $500 million+). The sport is bureaucratized and, as such, is as isolated as LeBron James in his sprawling estate in Akron or his $20.5 million mansion in Brentwood. When you’ve become separated from the fan base, it’s easy to mistake the barking of a few well-situated extremists for a popular groundswell.

LeBron James, one of the NBA’s activist mega-millionaires
LeBron James’s Brentwood mansion

Just last October, at the World Series trophy ceremony in Los Angeles, Manfred was stunned after being heartily booed by the remaining fans in the stadium. Earlier, he had truncated the season to 60 games in a COVID-panic. From his lawyer’s mind, he tried to upend a century of baseball tradition with “pace-of-play” rules. Honestly, some of the rules might be justified, but lawyers are famous for producing a host of unintended ill-consequences. And, quite frankly, the whole scene is another one of those big-moneyed Harvard lawyers in a pin-striped suit telling main street America what’s best for them.

Yes, Manfred was a labor lawyer for Morgan, Lewis, and Bockius, LLP, when he came to the attention of the MLB big wheels in New York City, home of MLB, Inc. The guy is only familiar with the corporate suite and has less familiarity with the locker room than the queen of England. She has more exposure to reality since her love of horses and horse racing regularly took her into the stables.

The detachment leads to dealings only with groups, groups that aren’t representative of the people buying the tickets, gear, or putting their eyes and ears to the broadcasts. Manfred is an organizational man, far removed from the lives of ordinary wage-earners.

Organizational men and women are, by definition, bureaucrats, functionaries in an administrative state. We can see this unique social eco-system gestating in MLB in the 1970’s. It was abundantly on display in the short history of the Portland Mavericks as portrayed in “The Battered Bastards of Baseball”, currently showing on Netflix.

Bing Russell with his players and batboy.

MLB is sport as entertainment, as is true of all professional sports. The fan goes to the park to root for the team in a drama whose uncertain outcome has to be played out on the field. Bing Russell, the founder of the Mavericks, understood better than the corporate heads what drives fans, all fans. He gave them people to root for, care for, and have an emotional investment in. He didn’t see his single-A franchise as another cog in the wheel of the corporate machine. He loved being around the players and fans. To people like Manfred, it’s the opposite: the hoi polloi are statistical abstractions that are buried in the corporate balance sheet.

Bing reminded me of the early swashbucklers of Silicon Valley, or the Howard Hugheses in the young years of aviation: take chances and fly by the seat of your pants. That world is alien to a person whose chief qualification arose in matriculation from Cornell to Harvard Law to a federal clerkship to a law partnership to legal retainerships with the corporate suits.

In the end, we get a homogenized product without any of the grit of the qualities that make for personal attachment. We also get the blunders of an insulated nomenklatura. And all of us should know what happened to the Soviet Union by 1991.

See “The Battered Bastards of Baseball” on Netflix. You’ll enjoy it, and get a glimpse into MLB’s current condition. Oh, by the way, Bing’s son is Kurt Russell, the actor, who obviously has important memories to contribute to the story.

Kurt Russell in “The Battered Bastards of Baseball”

RogerG

*Also on my Facebook page.