“Curator” is commonly used today to refer to the arbiters of contemporary culture. They emanate out of our metropolises and are increasingly homogenous in outlook and taste. It’s an accurate word, but doesn’t go far enough because it doesn’t address pedigree. Where and how did this outlook originate and grow to dominate the culture? It was slow in coming, gradually birthed in the late 19th century and spread throughout the high priesthood of the high church of art and academia. A verb, “incubate”, serves this purpose better.
Ken Burns’ “Hemingway” unknowingly highlights the process of a person’s conversion (Hemingway) to the pervasive ethos of the chattering classes, the self-appointed curators who incubated “higher” culture. In Burns’ reckoning, Hemingway was a fiercely independent, small government guy in the twenties, but he obviously changed. By the time of the Great Depression, he’s covering the Spanish Civil War as a journalist puffing up the socialist-loyalist faction, the same side that became a puppet of Stalin’s Comintern (international communist organization headquartered in Moscow) and therefore an adjunct of the Soviet state, going so far as to pressure his colleagues not to include left-loyalist atrocities in their dispatches. He would repeat the error in quietly favoring Castro’s takeover of Cuba. Everywhere he looked in his artistic, literary universe were leftists.
New York University students in the Lincoln battalion (American volunteers fighting in support of socialist-loyalist side), in April, 1938. (Photograph from AP)Ernest Hemingway (second from left) and Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens (left.) visit socialist-loyalist troops during the Spanish Civil War. Notice the loyalist officer leading the way in NKVD (Soviet secret police) uniform.
It’s easy to be of two minds in that situation since, on the one hand, he harbored deep-seated beliefs in masculine self-reliance while being pulled to the left by everyone in his social sphere, resulting in an incoherent amalgam of the head. If his mind was a car facing a fork in the road, it would rematerialize into two and take both roads at once.
Probably adding to his leftward lurch was the left-wing heft generated by the Great Depression. The Depression was more than an economic watershed; it was an intellectual one as well. An already left-leaning faculty lounge and literary world became tilted so far left that it would fall over. Sound familiar? The trend was echoed in Hemingway’s social circles. Not surprisingly, he probably was pulled along by the current.
Burns, himself, reflects the ruling zeitgeist that can be traced back to those bad times. His abbreviated rendition of the Depression in “Hemingway” repeats the unchallenged interpretative cliché: capitalism failed; big government is necessary. Burns caught the preexisting thought-virus, like so many today who accept it as a given, and so did Hemingway long before Burns.
The explanation never made any sense at the time, and still doesn’t today. Just think about it. A market correction turned into decade-long affair with seven-tenths of the time under FDR’s tutelage. For all of the New Deal’s feverish activity with its taxes, regulations, humongous bureaucracies, slaughters of “overproduction”, and a new centralized dole, the thing lingered right up to Pearl Harbor . . . and beyond.
Yes, beyond. World War II didn’t end the nightmare. It was only a timeout – unemployment was sent to boot camp and slack factories made bombers not refrigerators – and was set to resume its familiar hold after the War. Thank goodness that God called FDR home, and the appearance of the immediate post-War Republican Congresses with their loosening of the straitjacket that ultimately led to the economic monster following the forever-president to the grave, and the 50’s boom erupted.
Burns didn’t get the message, repeats the slander, and, looking back on it, the real Hemingway seems to have floated along in the same stream later occupied by our cultural arbiters.
Moving forward to the present, the bias incubated in the thirties would eventually spread to all social groups who absorbed the same cultural groupthink. Think of the occupants of today’s corporate boardrooms tripping all over themselves to condemn Georgia’s new election law. The Walmart of Sam Walton and ol’ Roy is no more. The corporate world is woke, functioning as subcommittees of the Democratic Party. They act as if they see themselves as world citizens, their companies as institutions-without-borders, and increasingly seek the affirmation of a “higher” seriousness in the manner of a Hollywood mega-star desiring accolades in lefty activism.
Patriotism? National loyalty? That’s for the ignorant rubes and not something for our sophisticates in corporate suites aspiring to a higher consciousness.
There you have it: our self-appointed cultural curators of what we ought to believe were incubated in a fiction that is evident in Burns, his “Hemingway”, and in the flesh-and-blood Hemingway. Something about repeated lies, they take on a life of their own in a public made unaware of an unreality that is sold as gospel.
They did it. MLB moved the All-Star Game from Atlanta. I’m done with them! And I’m done with their corporate colluders: Delta and Coca-Cola. They get political, and I get political.
Sports, air travel, and a soft drink have nothing pertinent to say about a Georgia state law that requires voter ID, thereby equalizing the treatment of in-person and absentee balloting. I suppose that Delta and Coca-Cola CEO’s, and their lackeys in MLB, think that liberal Justice John Paul Stevens was the personification of Jim Crow when he wrote the majority opinion in 2008’s Crawford v. Marion County Election Board in support of Indiana’s voter ID law. He said that the law “is amply justified by the valid interest in protecting ‘the integrity and reliability of the electoral process'”.
Something that was “amply justified” in 2008 is now Jim Crow to the ignorant oafs in corporate suites. It’s time for the American public to withhold their hard-earned money in like manner as a parent scolds a misbehaving child. If they don’t want to be treated like a child, then they ought not be acting like one. In this case, they are. There is no sound reason to justify corporate meddling in a law that was judged reasonable in 2008. Being the corporate muscle for Marxist BLM sloganeering is not becoming of adults.
Good bye MLB. As for Delta and Coca-Cola, your competitors will get my hard-earned dollars. If the rest of the suits join in, I’m happy with car tours and SodaStream. If you choose political sides, your products will be forever identified with that side. I’m not on your partisan side, and can’t in good conscience use my dollars to bankroll perniciousness.
LeBron James kneels during the national anthem prior to the game against the Oklahoma City Thunder, August 2020. (photo: Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)
Larry David in “Curb Your Enthusiasm” once famously said, “A date is an experience you have with another person that makes you appreciate being alone.” The disillusionment may have had something to do with his on-air divorce (and real off-air one) as his art imitates his life.
Larry David in “Curb Your Enthusiasm”.
For me, my great love affair with athletics is going through a serious estrangement, and no imitation of life. The drama of athletic competition is increasingly sullied by political sermonizing. That’s just what I want to see: ill-informed millionaires and soon-to-be millionaires (billionaires?), and their managing corporate suits, who know little beyond the playing courts and fields, giving us their chic ruminations on today’s issues-of-the-moment. It’s disgusting when each big event is turned into an opportunity for agitprop. I’ve joined the legions who’ve abandoned Big Sports, Inc., for the pleasures of other diversions – – with the occasional sneak peek, to be honest.
Big Sports, Inc., is in trouble. The problem for them is more long-term than short-term. In the near term, though, their losing older viewers like myself (a baby boomer), whose habits and loyalties are hard-wired. Sports-viewing and sports-playing are in our blood; yet, radical left political demonstrations that were thought to be relegated to college-campus romper rooms were brought into our homes just as we settled into watching the championship run of the Golden State Warriors or SF 49ers or SF Giants. Our sports stars began spouting slogans of the Marxist BLM and besmirching our flag and anthem with open displays of their radicalism. Provocative effrontery will illicit provocative reactions. It’s like they are courting resentment toward their product when they ought to be selling it. Shameful acts started piling up each year after 2016.
San Francisco Giants players and coaches kneel during the national anthem in an exhibition game with the Oakland Athletics, July 20230.
Older fans were taking many punches to the gut of their enthusiasm. The 2016-2017 kneeling protests ignited a fan protest of the player protest. Rasmussen at the time found 32% of adult respondents “are less likely to watch an NFL game because of the growing number of Black Lives Matter protests by players on the field.” Some undoubtedly returned, but many didn’t. Another slice of the fan base gone.
Then George Floyd hit the air waves. The tendentious sermonizing became less ad hoc and more systematized with the full participation of corporate headquarters. It swept across the world of Big Sports, Inc. My beloved SF Giants behaved like college snowflakes down to the coaches at the start of last season. I cancelled my MLB streaming contract. The rest of the oligopoly were equally as giddy about sliming us and our views, taking their cues from the worst of the demagogues in our academic and political worlds. Remember Obama’s “bitter clingers” and Hillary’s “deplorables” and Biden and company’s “white racism, white racism, white racism everywhere”?
According to Forbes in December 2020, in the 2020 sports year, the NBA Finals saw viewership collapse by 49%; the Stanley Cup saw an astounding 71% fee fall; and the NFL’s week 14 ratings dipped another 7%. Surveys at the time pointed much of the finger of blame at player politicization of the athletic field. A Harris poll in the fall of 2020 found 32% of sports fans chose “The league has become too political” among the ten options for their disenchantment. Does LeBron James sense something damaging is afoot when he took to microphones and cameras to condemn the Houston Rockets’ owner for daring to come to defense of the beleaguered citizens of Hong Kong? James, one of the most outspoken of the NBA’s player mandarins, saw evaporating dollars in Red China’s expanding market as he and others of the politicized left in the league ironically worked assiduously to shrink the domestic one. What other plausible explanation can there be for running interference for one of history’s most brutal totalitarian regimes?
Players of the Los Angeles Lakers and the LA Clippers took a knee during the national anthem in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, July 2020.
Certainly, another political act – the authoritarian shutdowns in panic response to the virus – has taken its toll. People commanded to conduct life without much of a schedule, zooming at leisure, are more willing to be more impulsive in their viewing habits. Cutting the chord is rampant; Netflix memberships lift off. Combined with the younger generations unaccustomed to games without a hand-controller, Big Sports’ long-term prospects look grim. The leagues are challenged by broad and threatening currents, and their stars go on a jihad to smear a chunk of the fan base. Go figure.
The behavior has tarred March Madness, and this just at the time when the PAC-12 had its best showing in years. Four of the five entrants made it to the Sweet Sixteen. But the coaches’ incessant fiddling with their masks, the gym not much more populated with live human beings than an ancient Roman catacomb, and endless ads based on the juvenile theme of “diversity is our strength” would drive away anyone but the die-hards. Just anticipating that this stuff is coming is enough to dampen the desire to see more. So, I no longer whip myself for missing a game. Que sara sara.
Coming this weekend is the NCAA tournament’s Final Four. I am planning to watch it, but, then again, I won’t seek counseling if I miss it. Que sara sara.
Ole Miss basketball players kneel during national anthem, Feb. 2019.Members of the Georgetown basketball team stand for the National Anthem wearing “I Can’t Breathe” t-shirts before an NCAA college basketball game against Kansas, Wednesday, Dec. 10, 2014, in Washington. (AP Photo/Nick Wass)
A postscript: As I write, MLB is facing tremendous pressure from lefty CEO’s and our doddering lefty president to join them in punishing Georgia for voter ID, more secure absentee ballot drop-boxes, early voting even on weekends (something absent in Biden’s Delaware), broadening access to voting in a myriad of other ways, and a ban on shot-gunning ballots to all. And they have the moxie to call this Jim Crow? I didn’t know that a Bull Connor lurked in the heart of every legal voter who worries about their elections becoming a Woodstock bacchanalia. If MLB caves, I’ll put myself in the same place in regards to MLB, and its well-heeled collaborators, when dealing with a nasty relative: in a location far away from them.
Dr. Robert Redfield on CNNWuhan virology lab, China.
The origins COVID-19 are still a mystery. Many questions about the virus have been distorted into political ones. One source of the politicization is the desire to gain power and use it to fulfill a certain vision of society. When a person’s opinions and conclusions run counter to the contrived story, they are silenced, mocked, and ruined. This is politics at its most heinous. This is happening to anyone associated with Trump, defending tradition, and protective of what’s good about the country’s history and values. The truth is the first casualty.
As a result, many questions go unanswered, particularly if the answers don’t fit the erroneous but useful narrative. No better example can be found than the persistent unknowns about the coronavirus and the related pandemic. If “xenophobia” is the cry-of-the-moment, anything is grabbed to deflect attention away from China, especially if the barkers are working hard to make Asians believe that they are an oppressed minority, oppressed by the cultural elites’ favorite bogeyman: white supremacy. Thus the overheated attempt to blame nature or anyone and anything but China – a bat for instance.
MINNEAPOLIS, MN – AUGUST 14: A woman raises her fist at the front of a march down Washington Avenue to protest racism. (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
Stats are squashed that might threaten the hand-picked story line of the virus’s magnified lethality, a threat that proved advantageous in allowing them to flex the muscles of their all-powerful administrative state. One such number is the date of origin. If it leaked out of a Wuhan lab earlier than previously thought, let’s say, the number of infected grows and that number may work to reduce the morbidity rate of the virus. A key part of the plot will have been undermined, something to be resisted at all costs.
Therefore, serious and honest research into origins can present a dual hazard for them: truth wrecks the xenophobia plot thread and might show the administrative state’s suffocation of life to be a colossal waste. Thus, the Left has two good reasons to rally their troops in the media and academic circles to sully any semblance of free thought and real science.
Colin Kaepernick’s “systemic racism” career is monetized by corporate America in this case by Nike.
Dr. Robert Redfield, below, has a few strikes against him in the eyes of the reigning Left: he’s an accomplished virologist, worked under Trump as head of the CDC, and dares to think that the virus might have escaped the Wuhan lab as early as September. So, In the fall of 2019, it’s possible that the virus was seeded in China and, from there, to the rest of the world. Many people got it, survived it, mistook it for the flu, some succumbed, and the rest of the world waited till February and March 2020 to hit the panic button.
Once panic was lit, parents became paranoid to send their kids to school; businesses and livelihoods were decimated; romantic life was suppressed as we hid ourselves behind our modified burqa; scenes of public rage at dissenters became commonplace; the surreal scene of watching drivers alone in a car and masked was not unusual; and good and bad came to be defined by how comprehensively a public official clamped down on their society. Timothy Leary in one of his LSD-induced fits couldn’t have produced a weirder script.
Watch the courage of Dr. Robert Redfield, Trump’s CDC Director, who bravely refuses to be cowed in a CNN interview. And you know what? CNN, the most Democrat-friendly operation this side of MSNBC and the Democratic Socialists of America, didn’t go into full mob-rage, as is their practice. His contention that the virus emanated out of the Wuhan lab around September or October couldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Watch the clip.
Yesterday, my family and I went to Kalispell, Mt., (gateway city to Glacier National Park) to do our monthly shopping. While on the way, Jared (my son) was driving and all of us were listening to XM Radio’s “80’s-on-8” and, lo-and-behold, Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” blasted through the speakers (see link below). The song is a good rocker, but who listens to the lyrics? Right? I paid closer attention to the words and gleaned their meaning. It struck me as a Trumpian anthem: the struggles of a young couple in tough times regardless of identity.
Life sometimes is a “fight”, or perseverance in the face of challenges. America has been beset by decades of neglect, permissiveness, maladministration, and the reemergence of evil ideas that should have stayed dead. Today, the worst of all of it was exposed by the pandemic, and, I suspect, more is to come. Still, we fight on, as we should.
Who can’t identify with that? What young couple, starting fresh in life together, hasn’t struggled to get a foothold into a better life? Some times are more demanding than others, but as the song title says, all of us were “Livin’ on a Prayer”.
The NFL’s building at 345 Park Avenue, New York.NCAA’s corporate headquarters, 700 W Washington St, Indianapolis, IN.
We are on the cusp of permitting them to impose a permanent disfigurement of organized athletics. The entrance of the highly contentious ideology of transgenderism is about to destroy girls’ sports. Big Sports, Inc., won’t allow dissent. If you’re a believer in transgenderism, the full monopoly power of the organization will indulge your beliefs. If not, and you and your daughter aren’t warm to the idea of “gender identity” being used to hand trophies to people who weren’t born female, tough luck.
Terry Miller of Bloomfield, Conn., wins the 200 meter dash with a time of 24.47 in the CIAC State Championship Track and Field Meet in New Britain, Conn., during the 2019 outdoor track and field season. (Mark Mirko / Hartford Courant)
MLB, NBA, NFL, MLS, NCAA – Big Sports, Inc – are clear partisans in the turbulent debates of our time. They ought not be. They tip the scales in support of one side in these contests. This isn’t about the ethical ending of Jim Crow or giving women an equal place at the table of organized athletics. No, Big Sports’ special status as sanctioned monopolies gives them power to impose their favored side. For the sake of our civil order, they should be stopped and their special status revoked till their charters are reformed to prevent the harmful meddling.
They take one side on issues that should be left to the people in their debates and elections. Contradictory standards may result but that just means that Congress must step in and do its duty, not to allow others to usurp that responsibility.
Gov. Kristi Noem, South Dakota.
Gov. Kristie Noem of South Dakota was caught in the vice. She was intimidated from signing a bill to protect girls in girls’ sports. She’s right to see this as a political fight. I agree, and until a broad revolt gains steam, Congress should revoke and revamp Big Sports, Inc.’s permissive charters.
These are matters for the people’s elected representatives to decide and not the province of corporate administrative offices functioning as partisan zealots. The people are quite capable of settling these matters without threats for holding the “wrong” views from those of corporate desk-jockeys.
The California Department of Education building in Sacramento.
In case you missed my post below, in the “comment” section, I posted this in light of the California State Board of Education’s recent approval of pure left wing indoctrination in the curriculum:
“Oh, and one more thing, and I thought that I’d never have to say this: Parents, get your kids out of the government-controlled schools, for the sanctity of their own mental state. Use part of Pelosi’s $2-trillion bailout – the kid and personal money in the monstrosity – and head to a good private school with classical curriculum and instruction. Go to acescholarships.org if you need further assistance.
The government schools are fully immersed in the Left’s revolution. As a public school teacher for 30 years, I’m loath to advise parents to get their kids out the public schools. There used to be individual schools and districts who avoided the worst of it. Not today. There’s nowhere to hide.
Get your kids out them. Now! Use the part of the Pelosi bailout money that comes to you and your kids and if necessary turn to Ace Scholarships, above, or other sources like them.
Coach John Mosley of the East Los Angeles Community College basketball team, and a focus of Netflix’s “Last Chance U: Basketball” (highly recommended), stated, “Rules without relationships are rebellion.” When you think about it, he’s onto something. Rules in the absence of an interpersonal connection can easily be received as a cold and blind force, and frequently are. In a related fashion, I remember counseling young teachers against angling a troubled kid into a corner with no escape because he or she might violently lash out. When rules box people into corners without escape, expect rebellion.
Coach John Mosley of East Los Angeles Community College’s basketball team
The makings of a serious national rupture are happening as I write. The near complete monopoly by the Left in our society’s centers of power and influence is forcing an unpalatable choice upon the many dissenters. Right now, the safety valves of free speech and thought are being closed by the Big Tech oligarchy as the Democratic Party pursues a redesign of elections to keep themselves in power for generations, emasculation of our borders to chronically expand the critical mass of their supporters, redesign of our schools into their indoctrination centers, and removal of the last symbol of citizen self-reliance in the neutering of the Second Amendment. What will the loyal opposition do if this new Borg leaves the people with no recourse? My guess is that it’ll no longer be loyal. Don’t box people into corners.
In a relatively brief span of time, the hegemony of a narrow set of beliefs has descended upon us. For some, the deplatforming of Trump “for life” by the tech oligarchs was the omen of a new Dark Age of absolutist control of thought and conscience. The contradictions are glaring and instructive. Twitter bumps Trump but must be forced by a to Department of Homeland Security to take down a video of her son’s sexual assault. Amazing.
Hardly does Trump deserve much of a defense for some of his actions. I’m not in the Hannity world of Trump-worship. But neither am I in the habit of blinding myself to the first real exercise of raw power to erase a prominent figure from the world stage; though, it’s been happening for quite some time to the less notable. It’s raw power and used in a brazen manner.
Mark Zuckerberg famously stated before Congress that Silicon Valley is an “extremely left-leaning place”. He’s got that right. “Left-leaning” means a techno-utopian ideal of gauzy socialist-egalitarian, libertine, and greenie bliss brought into existence by universal techno-connectivity. It’s certainly a way for them to feel good about themselves by the self-elevation of the importance of their work. For the people who aren’t caught up in this romper room of the mind, they get cancelled.
Brandon Eich
It’s unapologetic censorship, like what happened to Brandon Eich, the brief (for 11 days in 2014) CEO of Mozilla. He was “forced” out by something loosely called the “Mozilla community” – a more accurate term would be “mob” – for daring to support traditional marriage (2008’s Prop 8 in California). Key to any mob’s “cancellation” is the recognition that there aren’t other legitimate points of view to be tolerated.
An excursion into the functioning of tech central’s totalitarian mind was provided by Forbes magazine in 2014 when it republished a Quora piece by Ian McCullough, “consumer tech”, of San Francisco, on the forced resignation of Eich. McCullough’s defense of the disposal of Eich pivoted on two claims: Eich’s opinion is beyond the pale and an extremely odd notion of freedom of speech.
Unbeknownst to McCullough, the unpopularity of opinions frequently depends on location. Eich’s opinions on marriage aren’t fashionable in Zuckerberg’s “left-leaning place”, and in McCullough’s San Francisco – thus, beyond the pale – but neither are McCullough’s and those of Zuckerberg’s left-leaning place as popular in the vast stretches of flyover country. There is a difference, though: McCullough’s support for gay marriage won’t by itself result in his forced resignation if he stated his views in Arkansas, at least as far as I can determine. If it does happen, there’d be a groundswell of opposition for making a person’s employment status contingent on rectitude with an area’s popular slant on a contentious issue. No, that kind of thing is routinely reserved for Zuckerberg’s “left-leaning place”.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, testifying before the Senate on April 10, 2018.
In that “left-leaning place”, fundamental rights such as freedom of speech is contorted out of all recognition. In McCullough’s twisted mind, the freedom of speech of a mass can be used to intimidate a single person’s exercise of free speech. In a way, ironically, he’s right. Every single person in the mob has freedom of speech individually, but the bigger question involves self-control. Ought we to practice it in that manner? Arkansas is much more into “ought” and Zuckerberg’s “left-leaning place” is all into gang-style suppression; that’s the difference.
And even more importantly, does the First Amendment have any practical relevance if an opinion is more popular in other locales but is unpopular in the little node where we find the oligarchic power of Big Tech to blot it out everywhere? By what legitimate right should one locale and their nest of opinions have the power to censor the opinions about traditional institutions in the communities that hold these traditions dear? McCullough, no one should have that power. No one, not you nor anyone like you, or me for that matter.
Today, Big Tech has the power and they use it. It does so by banning information that doesn’t comport with their socio-political prejudices. Look at what happened to The New York Post’s Biden family corruption story just before the election. In an informal, or formal (?), alliance of interest, Big Media and Big Tech shut out the story. No such forbearance was granted Trump regarding the grand smear that went by the name of “Russia collusion”. The fiction had a 3-year lease on life despite the fact that it was predicated on a demonstrably proven pack of Democrat-funded lies.
Another alliance member – the upper echelons of DC’s permanent Fed Administrative State – were giddy at the possibility of dragging Trump through the mud and only ended up with a two-year $40 million probe that was led by a doddering Robert Mueller and his band of partisan hacks who produced . . . nothing.
What did we get for $40 million? We got 3 years of hair-on-fire, a perpetuation of the smear, unsuccessful impeachments, and conservative websites hidden on page 5 of a Google search. Like the Biden corruption story, uncooperative sites go down the memory hole. Of course, initially, Google feigns that it’s due to their software “protocols” or “algorythms”. Then they dropped all pretense by calling it “misinformation”. It’s still a crock.
Big Tech’s “misinformation” campaign targeted the pesky Breitbart media operation. Breitbart News noticed clicks on Google dropped 99% from 2016 to 2020. Their entire website was given the NYPost treatment.
And if that’s not enough, complete platforms were deplatformed. Parler, the social media competitor to Twitter, was destroyed by Big Tech’s near-Gang of Eight. Like Trump and Breitbart, it was steamrolled by the big wheels of Big Tech. Read this quackery of a write-up on Wikipedia:
“Parler is an American alt-tech microblogging and social networking service. It has a significant user base of Donald Trump supporters, conservatives, conspiracy theorists, and right-wing extremists. Posts on the service often contain far-right content, antisemitism, and conspiracy theories such as QAnon.”
Not a word about the charlatanism of the Green New Deal and the buffoonery of its eco-apocalypse and the 30-something adolescent mind from New York’s 14th congressional district behind much of it. Not a word about the potential for descent into Venezuela-land from socialism’s new found popularity. Not a word about the buffoonery of “settled science” since real science means a real scientific method that is operative all the time. Not a word about the provable unsustainability of “sustainable energy”. Not a word about the scientific backlash to the “settled science” of Fauci and World Health Organization. The paradox is that the most frequent purveyors of “misinformation” are the people combatting “misinformation”. Franz Kafka looking at our time would see abundant evidence of life imitating art, his art.
What will people do if they come to conclude that there is no recourse to submission? If the Democrats have their way, elections will have the legitimacy of loan sharking and only keep the Socialist Revolutionary Party (Democratic Party) cemented in power for the foreseeable future, thereby proving the Marxist revolutionary’s maxim: one man, one vote, one time. Voices are to be silenced by a formal unity of purpose among entrenched elites at the commanding heights of our society. The kids are to receive no respite in the assault on their minds from every quarter in entertainment and the schools. Traditional institutions and the morality of self-defense are systematically upended. For those standing aghast at this turn of events, some may sadly seek redress in more violent means, no other option having been left open to them. Boxing people into corners has dangerous consequences.
Friedrich Hayek had many reasons for the failure of socialism, but one was the “knowledge problem”. Big government’s attempt to manage the many affairs of its people requires a level of knowledge that no one person or small group of individuals can possess. Crap happens and human existence enters a dark place.
Coach Mosley and his team experienced the consequences in the state whose governing elites are infatuated with government’s top-down management of its residents, but aren’t, and can’t be, as knowledgeable and wise as they think themselves to be. After completing a 29-1 season and surviving the first round of the state championship tournament, and after loading on the bus to travel to West Hills College in Lemoore for the Final Four championship round, Coach Mosley received a phone call to announce the cancellation of the tournament due to COVID. It was part of a state of California lockdown that proved to be no more efficacious than states who left their residents free to live a more normal life. A season of hard work, trials, and tribulations was ended just as the prize for going through all the trouble was near at hand. And it was all for naught.
The spirit of resistance in California, April 2020. Protesters to the lockdown blocked traffic around the state’s capitol in Sacramento.
Coach Mosley properly acceded to the state’s decision. What else could he do? But what’ll happen when the one-party state of California is transferred to DC and the one party blocks all avenues of civil opposition to the ruling ideology? The Democrats are playing with fire.
CULVER CITY, CALIFORNIA – MARCH 15: A man walks with a stroller as people stand in line outside the Martin B. Retting, Inc. guns store on March 15, 2020 in Culver City, California. The spread of Coronavirus (COVID-19) has prompted some Americans to line up for supplies in a variety of stores. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
In case you haven’t heard, Uzuegbunam v. Preczewski was just decided at the Supreme Court. Wow, in a 8-1 decision, with Justice Clarence Thomas writing for the majority, the college woke universe was dealt a blow! In a nutshell, as a result of this decision, these bastions of the left’s ministry of truth are skating on thin ice when they attempt to muzzle free speech. It’s about time!
It all started at Georgia Gwinnett College. The College, a new addition (2006) to the Georgia public university system, is modern in more than its buildings. It’s thoroughly modern in its wokeness.
An evangelical student, Chike Uzuegbunam, tried to disseminate literature and engage with fellow students but was smacked down by the school’s Politburo. Check this out: He was told that he must submit an application for a permit three days in advance and then he is to be penned in one of two “free-speech zones”. These so-called zones have a calendar and geographic dimension. The pens are only open 18 hours a week. On a Friday, the clock starts ticking at 11 a.m. and stops at 1 p.m.
Chike Uzuegbunam before the US Supreme Court
That’s not all. After he got his permit and went to the appointed spot at the appointed time, he was stopped by campus cops. They were enforcing the school’s ban on “disturb[ing] the peace and/or comfort of person(s)”. It seems that hearing about the resurrected Christ is harmful to the school’s Wicca followers and anyone else in full rebellion mode against the most prevalent faith in the country, like the majority in the faculty lounge.
He sued, and the Alliance Defending Freedom took up his cause. Here’s an organization worth contributing to. You can donate here.
My only question at this point concerns the campus cops. How can they in good conscience enforce these obviously horrendous administrative decrees? I’m reminded of the defense at the Nuremberg Tribunals in 1946: We were following orders. Are these uniformed personnel willing to commit disgusting acts for a secure job with good pay and benefits? At least for some, it must have dawned on them that this is wrong, clearly, unmistakably wrong. Yet they still carried it out. Shame on them. Shame on them.
Illustration courtesy of Roman Genn, National Review.
Will we have a disunion? Yes, maybe, or somewhere in-between, with plenty of caveats. Sounds indefinite, as most sober projections of this nature should be.
Well, I’ll have to admit that some sort of disunion is taking place. All the evidence is pointing that way. Will it be a hard or soft disunion? A “hard” one would be some kind of constitutional restructure, or a complete break like the old Czechoslovakia into the Czech and Slovak Republics. The “soft” variety entails some kind of unofficial consensual agreement to live and let live. I’m of a mind to reject the former, but the latter raises some interesting possibilities.
Even more, is the talk of disunion part of a passing phase? All of this could be meaningless chatter. That’s an even more interesting possibility.
Evidence of disunion is all about, though. Some saw it coming at the dawn of the new millennium. Terry Teachout and Gertrude Himmelfarb back then wrote of it as “Republican Nation, Democratic Nation” (Teachout) or “one nation, two cultures” (Himmelfarb). Then, Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing crowned the idea four years later in their book, The Big Sort. Bishop and Cushing noticed that in-migration data showed like-minded people seek to live around other like-minded people. Are you paying attention New York and California?
The hard left turn of the Democratic Party is driving the talk. No, it’s not because the right has suddenly resuscitated Mussolini’s Black Shirts. Policies, laws, and actions in deep blue urban areas and states are forcing many people to make a choice between the comfort of their place of birth and desire to escape the one-party cultural revolution of the chic cliques that dominate their state or municipality.
At root in these havens of the ruling revolutionary thought is a set of prejudices about others not so willing to adopt the hedonism and its concomitant authoritarian rule, people who are loosely defined as traditionally inclined. The libertinism shows as a rejection of standards: traditional morality, the physical determinants of nature (DNA, chromosomes, biological limits, etc.), the elements of merit, etc. Oxymoronically, lying next to this idea of the free-floating individual is the ready submission to the aristocracy of sheepskin-wielding “experts”. Not all “experts”, mind you, just those who feed the libertines’ prejudices. It’s a terribly selective cadre of gurus.
It’s not as if the cool exponents of the philosophy actually live what they preach. The urban professional types, and the uber-rich that rose from their ranks, that dominate the ruling pack, get married and instill self-discipline in their young as Charles Murray so clearly observed in his research. They carry on like Horatio Alger even as they denounce the guy, which proves that consistency is not a readily observable human quality.
When they’re spouting “It’s good for thee but not for me”, they may be onto something. That something is the intuition that at least they and their children can’t prosper under anything goes. The public schools must keep their monopoly at all costs, as their votes and campaign donations proclaim, as long as elite prep schools are open for their young scions. The result is a descent into chaos for many inner-city schools, which matches the chaos in the surrounding neighborhoods that was engineered by bountiful entitlements and a pervasive ridicule of law and order.
It’s starting to ooze out: neither they, nor can anyone live this way. Yet, their indulged offspring fill the ranks of BLM and Antifa to make everyone else’s life a living hell. Their political activism produces permissive DA’s who won’t enforce quality-of-life crimes so the quality-of-life rots. Simple things like roads and the electrical grid crumble as their leaders pursue crusades against the chimerical “systemic racism” and for a greenie utopia. Urban landscapes each day look more like something out of Mad Max or John Carpenter’s “Escape from New York”. Indeed, many New Yorkers have already joined Snake Plissken (Russell) in the flight from hell. Florida, here we come! Life imitates art.
Where are they heading? It’s to more than Florida. The refugees are going to places where gun ownership isn’t treated as a mental illness, where churches have tendency to be full on Sunday, and where taxes are low, housing is cheap, and jobs aplenty. Sure, some may regret not having a beach nearby, but those boardwalks are beginning to take on the look of the rest of the dystopia anyway. The escapees won’t be missing much.
Some commentators have devoted much ink on extremists at the fringe of both sides. In their reading of the political landscape, the left has its Antifa/BLM to go along with the dynamic duo of Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi with their critical-race-theory/systemic racism sermonizing. The right has the ill-defined QAnon and Arian Nation look-alikes. But the two fringes aren’t anywhere near equivalent; the right deserves a 10-handicap. The DiAngelo/Kendi crowd and their Antifa and BLM militias are much more deeply entrenched in our critical institutions than the QAnon devotees and Proud Boys ever were. The lefty militias are perfumed into respectability, DiAngleo and Kendi get rich, and nearly every other large and powerful organization has their own offshoot of the ministry of propaganda. It’s an egregious false equivalence and an affront to sound reason to pretend otherwise.
No other words describe our current divide than revolution (left) and counterrevolution (right), a classic civil war. The two stances are deeply divided into mutually exclusive sets of values. A commissariat-driven holy war to impose equality of result for fashionable identities versus a legal regime of equal opportunity is only part of the story. Another angle is the vague spirituality of my “personal truth” versus the certainties of altar and hearth. Still another one is the exaltation of two n’s – narcissism and nihilism – versus self-restraint and our heritage of compassion. Still another one is the impulse to tear it all down and build anew according to someone’s fanciful conception of heaven on earth versus the inclination to build upon the glories of the past. These approaches are mutually exclusive. Where is there room for compromise if one side, the Left, is hell-bent on forcibly foisting their worldview on the other?
Don’t take solace in the natural live-and-let-live of federalism. The Left from its perch on the cultural commanding heights is feverishly trying to centralize power in DC. Centralization will bury subsidiarity. The principle of subsidiarity embraces the value of local and regional control as the most efficacious form of governance. It holds that on most matters the more local, the better. Well, that’s on the chopping block in a host of ways.
The US capitol and surrounding buildings in DC.
Will sufficient numbers of people push back? That’ll be hard to achieve once the Left’s dream of legitimizing vote fraud is rigidly imposed on the entire country. At this point, elections as the corrective will be effectively neutered. Opposition will be forced into submission or the various lanes of disobedience, civil or violent. When elections seem to have no meaning, eruptions of less palatable methods of opposition will be more frequent. History is littered with examples.
Watch that space on HR1, the Left’s grab bag of “reforms” making its way through Congress to remove vote fraud from the category of a crime and reconfigure it as a legitimate get-out-the-vote strategy. If it passes, those storm clouds from Mordor will have reached your home.
