Charles Malik (l) and today’s “student” protesters
Who was Charles Malik (1906-1987)? A devout Christian, he’s a man of public service with a distinguished academic pedigree at a time when the academy wasn’t so overwhelmingly sullied in doctrinaire neo-Marxism. Of Lebanese nationality, an escapee from Nazi Germany and move to the US to complete his PhD in Philosophy at Harvard, he taught at the school and other American universities. He returned to his native Lebanon to serve as the country’s ambassador to the US after WWII and helped author the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And he proved to be a prophet of things to come at our colleges.
In 1980, he delivered an address at Wheaton College warning of the moral chaos of the current reign of philosophical materialism and nihilism (rejection of objective standards, the basic guideposts for human flourishing) that he saw conquering the campuses 40 years ago (see #1 and #2 below). He put part of the blame at the feet of intellectual Christians, and Christian leaders in general, who abandoned the academy to the philosophical barbarians. Much of evangelical Christianity embraced political activism – the Moral Majority, et al – but at the same time scurried off into their own social silos, leaving the intellectual training grounds for future generations to be swamped by militant secular collectivists of all stripes. As he put it, “The enormity of what is happening is beyond words.”
The Humanities (literature, philosophy, languages, theology, art, etc.) were mangled beyond recognition. While declining in funding and enrollment, even in their tortured form, they still proved to be influential in shaping the minds of the next couple of generations down to the present day. There is no alternative to the rule of materialism’s atheism from K to grad school. It’s what happens when you abandon the field.
In response, a kind of anti-intellectualism took root in many Christian circles. Honestly, who can blame them after what they’re seeing in posts and broadcasts today from campuses around the country? Charles Malik warned us, though. It’s a consequence of a sin of omission of the Christian community: a surrender of the field to the brutes.
By the faithful’s flight from the campuses, we allowed a takeover that would breed future generations of pillagers of our civilization. It isn’t pretty as the next crop of young people will be robbed of the benefit of a more robust learning experience that more fully enriches our sense of ourselves. Instead, we have encampments that extoll savagery.
Indeed, “The enormity of what is happening is beyond words.”
RogerG
Sources:
1. “The Two Tasks”, an address delivered by Dr. Charles Malik at Wheaton College, 1980, The Charles Malik Institute, at https://charlesmalikinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/The-Two-Tasks-green.pdf
2. Thanks to Joseph Loconte, scholar in residence at New College of Florida, for bringing the subject to my attention in “A Christian Prophet’s Unheeded Warning to the Academy”, National Review, 5/4/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/a-christian-prophets-unheeded-warning-to-the-academy/
A man in a Hamas terrorist costume this week at Stanford University (photo from Daniel Gordis’s post)
Irving Kristol once wrote, “[A neoconservative is] a liberal who has been mugged by reality. A neoliberal is a liberal who got mugged by reality but has not pressed charges.”
Below (Sources #1) is a link to a liberal Israeli PhD student at Stanford who was “mugged by reality”. His account is enlightening because it comes from the ground at one of America’s “elite” universities (the word “elite” is in quotes because they are tarnishing the title).
A key takeaway from his piece is his sudden realization of the popularity of Donald Trump, from a person who would never vote for him if he could.
“This year I finally got it [Trump’s popularity in America]. No, if I were an American I still wouldn’t vote for Trump. But I now understand those who vote for him. Donald Trump is some Americans’ answer to the madness on the other side, a madness I didn’t notice until it turned its face in my direction. A madness no less terrible than Trumps’s madness. No, if I had the right to vote, I would not vote for Donald Trump. But America deserves him.”
The madness isn’t only epidemic on college campuses. High schoolers are seeking to join the madness (see #2 below). Chicago area high schools are a hotbed of pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas activism, many of them “elite” prep schools. Add Seattle schools to the educational sink hole. How did we get to a place where 16 and 17-year-olds rush to join the madness in higher ed? The answer lies in the curricular rot from teacher training and their undergrad coursework to the textbooks. When you drop your kid off at school or the bus stop, your kid is getting a steady diet of the oppressor/oppressed Marxist schtick.
And you thought your kid was learning the three R’s. Let me clue you, they’re getting much more than Algebra.
It’s everywhere. It’s on YouTube. For example, recently I watched a Gen X or Millennial academic who was commenting on something as innocuous as British castles and couldn’t resist continual references to the oppression of the lower classes. It’s a highly distorted portrayal of a period that lasted half a millennium or more. No concession was made to the possible benefits of socio-political hierarchy, let alone a moral hierarchy (some things are objectively good or bad). It was a simple message repeated ad nauseum: the rich and powerful bad, poor folk good. 16-year-old kiddies sitting in their desks, imbibing this blinkered view of the world, have their minds prepped for tramping on over to DePaul or University of Chicago in the “Chicago Youth For Justice” to link arms with an “abolitionist, anti-imperialist network of students”. You know the banter.
This Israeli PHD student noticed the mental rot right away. Most fundamentally, these firebrands are attacking more than Israel but lurking underneath is an assault on logic and reason itself. For these young people, everything is subjective, there being no objective truth, no facts, only feelings. Quoting him:
“I’m not referring here to those who express the opinion that it is difficult to get to the truth, or who think that the courts do not always succeed in finding out what the facts are, or who hold that different ideas are perceived differently through different eyes. I’m speaking about those who say unequivocally that there is no such thing as truth. They are not interested in presenting facts to support their arguments because they do not believe there is such a thing as facts, and they say so explicitly. They think that it is forbidden to use the term “jihadist” in front of jihadists, or to call supporters of terrorism by their names, because feelings are more important than facts (although, of course, first and foremost their feelings).”
Parents, sit down with your kids and query them about whether they believe in objective truth. You might be surprised at the answer.
There’s nothing like being mugged by reality to focus the mind. The sad reality is that this foreign student was mugged by American college students who, in turn, were mugged by their schooling in the good ol’ USA.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “I saw the American progressive movement … as an ally. That was a mistake.”, by Yotam Berger, in Daniel Gordis’s Israel from the Inside, at https://danielgordis.substack.com/p/i-saw-the-american-progressive-movement
2. “Pro-Hamas Craze Starts in K–12”, Haley Strack, National Review Online, 5/2/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/pro-hamas-craze-starts-in-k-12/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first
Students spray paint pro-Palestinian messages at a protest encampment at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., April 28, 2024. (David Ryder/Reuters)
Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings in a song admonished mothers to not “… let your babies grow up to be cowboys”. As the saying goes, that was then, this is now. It’s not cowboys that we ought to be worried about. It’s college students. College is in the process of demolishing itself. Look no further than the Ivy League. From there, a degradation has taken root that has spread like a cerebral small pox epidemic, infecting the vast majority of campuses. They’re proving themselves to be embarrassments. The rot extends right through the administrations to the faculty and passes into the students. Beware, parents, your kids may leave the house leaning right but may return with a criminal record for defacing veterans’ cemeteries.
To be fair, not all of higher ed is an intellectual cesspool, but the problem is so pervasive that it has begun to besmirch nearly anyone with a degree on their resumé. Add Sociology or Humanities or English Lit or any of the “soft sciences” and their paper bio could be well on its way to the circular file.
The recent antisemitic pro-Palestinian encampments and protests are telling us the time of day. The fixation with the “marginalized” now includes a sanction for the genocidal butchery of 10/7. So warped is the thinking that the charge of “genocidal butchery” has become monopolized by those who committed actual “genocidal butchery” – the kind that you saw with your own eyes on 10/7 – and daily perform war crimes using civilian human shields, not shirking from hiding their military caches and facilities in and under schools, hospitals, orphanages, and housing complexes. Thus, savagery is excused. The natural apprehension about civilian casualties is distorted to pardon unspeakable barbarism in practice. What a warped universe.
sraeli soldiers carry the body of a victim of an attack at Kibbutz Kfar Aza, in southern Israel, on October 10. (Violeta Santos Moura/Reuters)Hamas body cam photo of terrorist shooting indiscriminately into a house in Israeli kibbutz near Gaza border. (Israel Defense Forces via AP)
Don’t expect many of today’s college students to get it, having been raised on a steady diet of the oppressor/oppressed falderol throughout K-grad school, from public and elite prep schools all the way to the identity-mongering college curriculums. The curriculum of entire college academic departments, many of them mandatory for graduation, are based on this narrow little looking glass. The kids’ minds are forced shut, unable to exercise any kind of self-examination.
Anti-Israel tent encampment at Columbia UniversityPro-Palestinian student protesters continue demonstrations on the eighth day of the ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’ at Columbia University in New York on April 24. (Fatih Aktas/Anadolu/Getty Images)
For instance, a radicalized Columbia faculty senate in a 62-14 vote on Friday (4/26/24) approved a resolution to investigate the administration of an already weak and vacillating college president for finally taking action against an illegal campus encampment and student-led pogrom targeting Jewish students. Aleksander Solzhenitsyn wrote of a strikingly similar situation in his three-volume The Red Wheel, a novelized account of the socio-political setting leading up to the Bolshevik Revolution. He’s got the same mix of characters of academic adults and youths who’ve been radicalized. There’s something about the violent potential in socialism.
Not that all socialists are militant fanatics, mind you. It’s just that socialism is a systematic critique of a society, and there’s few things more thrilling for those immersed in a bubble divorced from realities, for four years or in a life of tenure, than the exciting prospect of overthrowing everything. Bulls in china shops are electrifying things to be for such young and stilted minds. The narrow-minded don’t know that they’re blinkered because they don’t know or understand or appreciate any alternatives. These are the reincarnated “comrade children” of the Khmer Rouge, alongside their adult abettors. Welcome to Columbia’s faculty senate and a chunk of the student body. The best and brightest or the worst and barbaric?
Not surprisingly, the faculty is as extreme as the youths given the fact that they curated this mess. It doesn’t take much to uncover the concomitant antisemitic student rage. Take, for instance, Khymani James, leader of the Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) cell who announced (see #1 below), “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” Such bombast would be treated as isolated anecdote until one notices that the school’s Jewish students were advised to stay home due to rampant Jew-hatred on campus (see #2 below).
Khymani James, shown in this photo from 2021
Ya think? This neo-Marxist antisemitism is in the academic ether, and in more than faculty offices and campus greens. George Washington University exploded and since the Jacobins also control the Washington, D.C., city government, the city won’t help the school enforce its rules. It declined the school’s request for police assistance. In the worst governed cities, we find the worst behavior. Get out of DC if you can and move the college to more civilized environs. The nation’s capital is a hot mess, and has been for quite some time.
As usual, Texas is showing how to handle the miscreants. The Austin chapter of the Palestine Solidarity Committee called for another one of these campus intifadas and were promptly arrested and carted off. UT’s Office of the Dean of Students declared to the group, “The University of Texas at Austin will not allow this campus to be ‘taken’ and protesters to derail our mission in ways that groups affiliated with your national organization have accomplished elsewhere.” Enough said. Call momma for the bail money.
Pro-Palestinian protesters on the campus of UT, Austin
Yale and Princeton followed suit in showing more backbone than Columbia. As soon as the tents went up on Princeton, the school authorities ordered them down “now”. Down they went and the waifs then resorted to their usual standby, a sit-in. Yale’s campus police did the work of clearing the foolishness by arresting around 45 (see #4 below). Mom, expect a call.
Los Angeles’s USC constructed a pickle for itself. It’s got the usual intifada circus on campus but it is happening at graduation time. They really stepped into it when they chose a self-styled pro-Palestinian activist to be the valedictorian, Asna Tabassum. This one is a real winner. Her Instagram profile links to a pro-Palestinian website that proclaims,
“Zionism is a racist settler-colonialist ideology. One Palestinian state would mean Palestinian liberation and the complete abolishment of the state of Israel.”
USC student Asna Tabassum speaks to ABC News, April 16, 2024 (Video screenshot)
The choice of speaker amid the broader call for intifada ignited a real hornet’s nest. The school canceled the school-wide graduation (see #4 below).
How did this person get into a position to be valedictorian? Good grades, high GPA? Well, today, given rampant grade hyper-inflation, they have as much value as the Turkish lira (54.8% inflation). Watch her tying herself in knots in an attempt to avoid the charge of Jew-hatred. Like many of her fellow protesters, she is a contortionist in concocting a hypothetical distinction between venom for Zionism and antisemitism. It’s a difference without a difference.
An overly inflated GPA must be the culprit since one need not be a genius to see that a one-state “river to the sea”, with the obvious right of return, would lead to another wholesale slaughter of the Jews. Just take today’s Iran and graft it onto the narrow trip between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Combine the Sharia viciousness of Hamas and gross misgovernance of the PLO and see what you get. Get the idea?
Living cheek by jowl with people who’ve been raised on a steady diet of characterizations of you as evil incarnate isn’t a recipe for kumbaya (see #5 below). Sorry, Miss Tabassum. Ditto for the munchkins in our classrooms. Parents, another four years in a neo-Marxist bubble isn’t necessarily a pathway to betterment for your offspring. As the song goes, mommas don’t let your babies grow up to be . . . college students. Beware, oh, beware.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “‘Zionists Don’t Deserve To Live’: Meet The Leader Of Columbia University’s Anti-Israel Encampment”, Kassy Akiva, The Daily Wire, 4/25/24, at https://www.dailywire.com/news/zionists-dont-deserve-to-live-meet-the-leader-of-columbia-universitys-anti-israel-encampment
2. “Columbia rabbi warns Jewish students to go home, don’t come back to campus because of ‘extreme antisemitism’”, Doree Lewak and Isabel Keane, New York Post, 4/21/24, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/columbia-rabbi-warns-jewish-students-to-go-home-don-t-come-back-to-campus-because-of-extreme-antisemitism/ar-AA1nouyc
3. “George Washington University Suspends Students for Organizing Anti-Israel Encampment”, James Lynch, National Review Online, 4/27/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/george-washington-university-suspends-students-for-organizing-anti-israel-encampment/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=second
4. “USC Cancels Graduation Ceremony over Anti-Israel Protests”, Brittany Bernstein, National Review Online, 4/25/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/usc-cancels-graduation-ceremony-over-anti-israel-protests/
5. An accurate window into what Israel is facing can be found at the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) at https://www.memri.org/
They are coming for more than your family sedan. They are going to upend, disrupt the entire system that brings everything to your home, grocery store, et al. You’re going to be hit big time in your pocketbook and in every facet of your life. Get prepared for it is coming, if not stopped.
Is Biden determined to turn me into a Trump voter? Trump, no doubt, is the ugly face of my party, but Biden and his donkey party are trying to construct a totalitarian state on a preposterous green agenda. Animating the whole venture, as is true with all totalitarian crusades, is a belief system on how best to organize and control people. To gain popular traction, it’s best for all such crusades to contain a strong apocalyptic element, one powerful enough to justify stampeding the people into acceptance of its dictates and regimentation. It’s happening before our eyes, right now! Say goodbye to the republic and hello to the Soviet.
The EPA is the chief engine of the transformation from citizen republic to rule by all-powerful commissars. Under the guise of “climate change”, we are being ordered to scrap our already immense sunk costs in affordable and reliable transportation for the mirage of something that doesn’t exist, and if it does, it’s a catastrophe as a replacement. Prepare for a calamity, one that’ll conspicuously fall more seriously upon our children and generations to come. Your kids will be the real victims.
March is turning into a deadly month for the health of our constitutional republic. The EPA earlier in the month announced its intention to follow the template of California, one of a few states famous for turning many of its residents into refugees. Like the authoritarian clown car in Sacramento, tighter emissions for “light duty” vehicles (cars, trucks, many SUV’s) will be imposed from 2027 through 2032, eventually sealing the death warrant for the production of nearly anything with an internal combustion engine (see #1 below). Say goodbye to more than the citizen republic. Say goodbye to that thing in your garage that allows you to get the kids to school, or you to work, or pay a visit to grandma for Thanksgiving, for its life will be wrung out of it by regulating and taxing it to death in escalating licensing fees and costs for upkeep, parts, and fuel. Manufacturers will be forced to eliminate their production. The comrades in power plan to leave you with no way out but into their approved and glorified golf cart. This is nothing but totalitarianism “for your own good”. And, of course, they know better about what’s good for you. Right?
On the heels of that monstrosity, the commissars proclaimed a similar rule for the fleet of big vehicles that bring everything from produce to your grocery store to all things from an Amazon distribution center, everything that fills a shelf (see #3 below). It’ll be much worse for those people who choose to live outside the controllable and tight confines of an urban area. Think about it, all that stuff that was affordably made available at your fingertips will be crammed onto battery-powered big rigs (fuel cells create their own immense problems, see #2 below) of limited capacity, range, and tremendous recharging difficulties.
The mammoth costs of so-called “innovating” our way out of these imposed problems will only short-circuit the necessary wealth to satisfy other necessities of life. These blinkered potentates have no understanding of the gargantuan trade-offs that they are inflicting on us. Either that or they don’t care.
My bet is that they don’t care. Why? They possess a religious fervor for an ideology that justifies, in their mind, taking over more and more of your life. For them, they are busy saving the planet, even if it means destroying your standard of living. You see, their religio-ideology is founded upon a robust, promethean definition of “social cost” and “externalities”. Like a canon law in the church, their “church”, the two doctrines give overriding weight to real or imagined costs for all of society for everything that you do. Where’s the limits? Practically, there aren’t any. Thus, the creeds become the supreme, open-ended excuses for the EPA, or any commissariat for that matter, to do anything that they want.
In the past, it was national socialist race justice to prevent defilement of the “race”, or the dictatorship of the proletariat to cram equality of condition on all of humanity to prevent exploitation. Today, it’s saving the climate, leaving aside the lack of any credible, peer reviewed evidence that anything that they’re doing will positively affect a global atmosphere under which billions of people are acting independently and beyond the reach of the EPA. Pardon me for concluding that this is nothing but pure stupidity.
In the end, the Biden claque and his Democratic Party are seemingly intent on destroying our way of life and replacing our citizen republic with rule by totalitarian zealots. It’s Petrograd 1917, Berlin 1933, or Beijing 1949. Keeping this crowd in power would have us see the end of much that we cherish. So, if the choice is between the abominable Trump or this gang of totalitarian fanatics, one can be forgiven for preferring boorishness to Big Brother.
RogerG
Sources:
1. In Orwellian language, the EPA announcement: “Biden-Harris Administration finalizes strongest-ever pollution standards for cars that position U.S. companies and workers to lead the clean vehicle future, protect public health, address the climate crisis, save drivers money”, March 20, 2024, at https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-finalizes-strongest-ever-pollution-standards-cars-position
2. A survey of the literature on the shortcomings of fuel cells:
* “Hydrogen Fuel-Cell Vehicles: Everything You Need to Know”, Car and Driver, 9/26/2022, at https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a41103863/hydrogen-cars-fcev/
* “A review of PEM hydrogen fuel cell contamination: Impacts, mechanisms, and mitigation”, ScienceDirect, 3/20/2007, at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378775306025304
* “Fuel Cells”, University of Illinois, at https://publish.illinois.edu/fuel-cells/benefits-and-disadvantages/
* “How Fuel Cells Work”, How Stuff Works, at https://auto.howstuffworks.com/fuel-efficiency/alternative-fuels/fuel-cell.htm
3. The same Orwellian language for heavy-duty vehicles: “Biden-Harris Administration Finalizes Strongest Ever Greenhouse Gas Standards for Heavy-Duty Vehicles to Protect Public Health and Address the Climate Crisis While Keeping the American Economy Moving”, EPA, 3/29/2024, at https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-finalizes-strongest-ever-greenhouse-gas-standards-heavy
4. National Review articles that provide excellent overviews of the issues:
* “Biden’s Vehicle-Emissions Gaslighting”, Luther Ray Abel, 3/20/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bidens-vehicle-emissions-gaslighting/
* “Electric Vehicles: The EPA’s Fast Track to Fiasco”, Andrew Stuttaford, 3/25/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/electric-vehicles-the-epas-fast-track-to-fiasco/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=capital-matters&utm_term=second
* “Biden Admin Imposes Strict Pollution Standards for Buses and Heavy-Duty Vehicles”, Caroline Downey, 3/29/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-admin-imposes-strict-pollution-standards-for-buses-and-heavy-duty-vehicles/
Demonstrators march down Pennsylvania Avenue during a protest against police brutality and racism on June 6, 2020 in Washington, DC. This one end of the voter spectrum. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)Trump supporters, the other end of the voter spectrum
Debt. Debt. Debt. Government at all levels is awash in it. Mountains of bonds and treasuries, unfunded mandates, and government spending galore is bankrupting the country. The numbers are in the trillions for Washington, D.C., and beyond millions and into the billions in some state and local hives. California stands out, and is leading the way to massive, harebrained fiscal imbecility, and a dismal future for anyone too young or unborn to vote.
And to think that nobody really cares. The public doesn’t, just try and do something about it. What animates the Trump crowd is rhetorical red meat, sticking it to the libs, and other acts of political theater. No talk of debt, addressing it, or facing the runaway train of our entitlements.
Donald Trump waves to the crowd at one of his rallies in Florida, 2024.
Nothing in Trump’s past or in his recent four years at the Resolute desk is promising. The guy is a real estate magnate who fumbled around in debt and bankruptcy most of his adult life. As president, he just wanted to spend and spend and spend, even chastising Senate Republicans for balking at another spewing of checks across the fruited plain to grease his reelection campaign. The only problem with his personality kink is the absence of the discipline of a bottom line in a federal government that can issue more debt and dollars at will. No state has a Federal Reserve Board. Trump is a child in a candy store, and so are his followers. Enough of this inane talk of having a businessman in the White House, especially this businessman.
The other choice on the political landscape is a band of neo-Marxist central planners who never met a tax, new bottomless social engineering gambit, and outright giveaway that they didn’t like. The central planning is bad enough, but the vacuuming of more taxpayer dollars from potentially productive endeavors in the private sector into the hands of politicians and their special pleading lackeys is a recipe to repeat 1920s Weimar Germany, or maybe 1920 Bolshevik Russia.
President Biden delivers remarks regarding student loan debt forgiveness in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in 2022. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images / Getty Images)
Where are the adults? Do we really want adults in decision-making posts? Apparently not. Adults aren’t popular. Never have we been more in need of someone who will speak truth to power, and that power means the American public who keep electing these clowns. We, the American voter, are the real “establishment”. As before, watch demagoguery short-circuit any come-to-Jesus talk.
The numbers are staggering. The national debt of $34.5 trillion is not far from the country’s total productive output, increasing $1 trillion every 100 days (see #1 and #3 below). Meaning, we are close to the land of no return. Compound the nightmare with rising interest rates adding fatter interest payments to the astronomical total and the magnitude of our fiscal immaturity resembles the black hole at the center of the galaxy. Democrats and Trump only know how to spend, with the Democrats performing a lethal injection of tax hikes into our bloodstream as we drown in the sea of debt.
If there’s one thing both sides agree on, besides the profligate spending, it is, “Don’t touch Social Security and Medicare!” As entitlements, both are on spending autopilot. The spending flies on, but the funding source is deteriorating; the revenue fuel tank of the contraption is shrinking in real time. The program is set up as pay-as-you-go, so the elderly need to stop saying that they are only getting their contributions back. Balderdash. Current retirees are receiving the contributions of current workers. That’s the truth behind the lies. When the amount of inflow stagnates or declines due to demography or deteriorating prospects for the young contributors, and the outflow prances forever upward, the fiscal tipsiness is guaranteed to add more huge infusions of red ink.
How much of an infusion? Don’t let the banality of these colossal numbers (trillions) habituate you into accepting them as tolerable. They aren’t. Euphemistically referred to as “unfunded obligations” among official bean counters, Social Security is scheduled to pour $19.8 trillion into the master “unfunded obligation” of the national debt through 2095. Medicare promises another $68.1 trillion. If we take the trend line into the great beyond, in perpetuity, as far as it can be calculated, Social Security raises the ignominy to $59.8 trillion and Medicare $163.2 trillion (see #2 below). If this was a drunk, the victim would have long ago expired from alcohol poisoning.
California is paving the way to this sordid future, but in their muddled thinking, in their clichéd mind, it’s a compliment – all the talk about “California is the future”. Well, they got this one right. California is likely to be the country’s future. They went right from a state that could conceive and build the California Water Project to inmates running the asylum. It’s a playground of the insane. There’s your future.
California governor Gavin Newsom speaks at a press conference in Beijing, China, October 25, 2023. (Tingshu Wang/Reuters)
The state’s popularly elected governor and legislature discovered, like kids coming downstairs to the Christmas tree, an eye-popping $100 billion pot of gold, or “surplus”, in the summer of 2022. Chief inmate, Governor Gavin Newsom, gushed, “No other state in American history has ever experienced a surplus as large as this.” And then he and his fellow adolescents went around showering the largesse in a splurge of incontinence. 23 million of its residents received checks worth as much as $1,050 at a price tag of $9.5 billion. It then would seem only natural for a self-proclaimed sanctuary state for immigration law violators to bankroll $5 billion for the health care of the same immigration law violators (see #4 below). Foreign nationals in our country in violation of our laws now get bennies. Got that?
In their unthinking habit of seeing bigger budgets as success in any social venture – not kids reading better or the number of homeless declining – the Sacramento clown car shoveled $20 billion into the pockets of the professionalized homeless “advocates” in their opulent NGOs, with no positive impact on public defecation, open-air drug dealing and use, crime, or the number of filthy encampments littering city streets. The state’s potentates could go a long way in curing the problem just by being a little more energetic, as they demonstrated recently in sprucing up grimy San Fransisco for the ruling thug of Red China, Xi. Instead, you’re likely to see an increase in real estate investments by those professionals in their NGOs. They don’t have an interest in curing the problem for that would only make them get a real job (see #4 below).
The state’s deficit stands at $78 billion, and rising. Add the state’s massive overspending to local wantonness and the total debt picture throughout the state approaches $1.6 trillion (see #4 below). I’m not sure if a cliff or wall is the most appropriate metaphor, but the car is more than driven by the mandarins in city hall or Sacramento. These nincompoops are popularly elected. The people of the state have their foot on the pedal. The people want fiscal insanity.
So, let’s stop blaming some abstract others for this dire situation. The people voted for it, and continue to do so. I’m reminded of Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror”.
As one stanza puts it:
“I’m starting with the man in the mirror
I’m asking him to change his ways
And no message could’ve been any clearer
If they wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and then make a change”
Leave it to the King of Pop to issue a come-to-Jesus moment. It’s astounding to think that a deeply flawed man, who died of a deadly cocktail of drugs, made more sense than the people do in their elections. Stew on that for a while.
RogerG
Sources:
1. US Debt Clock at https://www.usdebtclock.org/. You can watch it climb in real time.
2. “The Real Federal Deficit: Social Security And Medicare”, John C. Goodman, Forbes, 2/25/2024, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/johngoodman/2023/02/25/the-real-federal-deficit-social-security-and-medicare/?sh=25189f695679
3. “The U.S. national debt is rising by $1 trillion about every 100 days”, Michelle Fox, CNBC, 3/1/2024, at https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/01/the-us-national-debt-is-rising-by-1-trillion-about-every-100-days.html
4. “California’s Deficit: Bring Your Alibis”, Will Swaim, National Review, 3/18/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/californias-deficit-bring-your-alibis/
The Feudal Future Podcast, two Chapman University professors warning of California’s slide into feudalism, or, more accurately, manorialism.
Most historians of the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West would admit of centuries of misrule and foreign pressures leading to its disappearance. The Fall was incremental with most people adjusting to the slowly deteriorating conditions. Then, on the heels of persistent and growing disorder, the Visigoths sack Rome in 410 AD. The evidence of decline was visible on the ground in the depopulation of many urban centers – Rome’s population in the 5th century had fallen to 50,000 – and in overgrown and decaying infrastructure. A healthy middle class faded with the weakening of commerce and the spreading lawlessness, and people began to cluster around powerful land barons. Western Europe became feudal. And so is California.
Feudal California has been a consistent theme of mine for a number of years. I’m not alone in this assessment. Two Chapman University professors (Orange, Ca.), Marshall Toplansky and Joel Kotkin, have been sounding the alarm in their “The Feudal Future” podcast at https://www.feudalfuturepodcast.com/home51396438. Check it out.
Professor Marshall Toplansky recently sat down for an interview with Siyamak Khorrami (see below) to explain what is happening to the socio-economic profile of California as it is sliding into feudalism. In sum, California is losing its middle class. A thriving middle class is a product of a vibrant commerce. Commerce is fading in the state’s broad system collapse. Sound familiar? As the middle class flees for opportunity elsewhere, the leftover population begins to take on the character of the wealthy in their walled manors and a growing mass of the poor to service their needs. How long will it be before we start calling California’s poor “peasants” or “serfs” and the state’s hyper-rich “Lord”?
This state of affairs wasn’t an accident. It is a willful consequence of elected choices. Decline and decay are popularly elected. It’s a one-party state with policy excesses never held to account. A chief target of the excess is commerce – or more simply, the economy. Doing business in California is like descending into Dante’s Inferno. A reputation for hostility is cemented; businesses leave for more welcoming states; air quality improves because the economy is systematically depressed; and the young in their peak family-formation and income years take flight. “Going green” (ev’s, solar panels, windmills, recycling galore, a war on fossil fuels, etc.) is going-going-gone for the middle class.
Please take time to watch the Toplansky interview. It should be enlightening for anyone in California or seeking to avoid its fate.
Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis speaks at a press conference next to prosecutor Nathan Wade after a Grand Jury brought back indictments against former president Donald Trump in Atlanta, Ga., August 14, 2023. (photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Reuters)
* Populism, a common definition: a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.
***********
Other definitions exist, the term being so fuzzy and susceptible to gross generalization. Today, it’s all the talk among devotees of Donald Trump. Realistically, though, it also can be applied to deep blue jurisdictions who would like nothing better than to hang the aforementioned Donald Trump. In Georgia, and pertaining to Atlanta, DA’s and judges are elected, not appointed. Fani Willis and the judge ruling on a defense motion for her to be removed from the case must face an electorate in a far-left fever swamp. You can’t get any more populist than that, can you? Fever swamps and populism go together.
And we’ve got a circus going on. It’s what happens when popularly-elected demagoguery is confused with justice. Willis, and her love interest, Nathan Wade, her chosen special prosecutor targeting Donald Trump, may have committed perjury regarding their ongoing tryst. The judge, facing the same electorate, ruled on a defense disqualification motion to keep Willis but send Wade packing. As a layman who didn’t sleep at a Holiday Inn, the ruling seems puzzling. They both stink of graft. But, then again, that’s populism. Not much is bound to make sense.
Atlanta Judge McAfee
Trump’s populism is his particular form of political theater that appeals to a certain crowd. Fani Willis and the judge have to face voters – the ones that can be cajoled to the polls, that is – who prefer legal buffoonery and corruption to good governance. Both Trump and Atlanta’s crowd favorites in power have their “populisms”.
All the talk of RINO, establishment, elites from Trump fellow-travelers is their lingua franca for anyone who opposes their demigod, Trump. Atlanta’s carnival barkers in power know how to gin up their base in monotonous cries of “white racism” or “white privilege”, etc. Go for the rich white guy and you’re well on your way to a lucrative book deal, fame and fortune, elevation up the political greasy pole, maybe becoming the next Stacey Abrams and unlimited appearances on MSNBC. It’s all populism.
Let’s plow through the muck of Willis’s case against Trump – populism meets the legal system. Well, let’s not scour too deeply that septic tank. See #1 below if you have the sensory fortitude. Suffice it to say that a broad, ill-defined RICO case without an alleged major crime is reminiscent of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, or Beria’s fawning retort to Stalin, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” Atlanta’s brand of populism is showing the way to banana republic, just add a jury that is drawn from the city’s mob to a DA and judge appealing and having to face the same mob.
Trump and Willis, with the judge playing along, deserve each other. Populism is a political rats’ nest. The less we see of it, the better off we’ll be.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Thanks to Andrew C. McCarthy for his stellar work on Fani Willis’s case against Donald Trump. His columns on the subject can be found at:
* https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/trump-and-georgia-defendants-be-careful-what-you-wish-for/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=hero&utm_content=related&utm_term=first
* https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/09/11/the-trump-indictment-of-democrats-dreams/
* https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/08/why-the-fani-willis-case-is-ill-conceived/
* https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/08/fani-williss-flawed-rico-charge-against-trump/
* https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/09/fani-williss-monstrous-trump-case/
Cillian Murphy wins the Oscar for Best Actor for Oppenheimer at the 96th Academy Awards in Hollywood, Calif., March 10, 2024. (photo: Mike Blake/Reuters)
Not the history of Hollywood, but Hollywood’s version of history, a type of history which is staggeringly distilled from the lefty leanings of pop culture. Well, to no surprise, “Oppenheimer” won the Oscar for best picture. Good movie, bad history, especially if you want your history without the hackneyed left-wing bromides. It’s a history for today’s credentialed, degreed, but functional illiterates. It’s proof that today’s education is not educating, and thus Hollywood can get away with distorting history to an ill-informed public.
The film is filled with the now familiar leftist clichés. Cliché #1: Oppenheimer was persecuted. The pertinent question is, however, was he a significant security risk? A “security risk” does not require him to be a communist. As for the “risk” at America’s most top-secret war project, and one for which he is running, a simple examination of Oppenheimer’s background, activities, and associations should raise eye brows above the hair line. Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” obviously raises the subject – for it cannot be ignored, and is central to his plot – but paints the picture in gauzy hues of sympathy for him.
Oppenheimer can legitimately be an object of sympathy, like many people, but sympathy and ascertaining the danger to the country for having him at that post are different subjects. The latter is clearly more significant for us than the former. In this respect, context provides an important back story for events that would involve Robert Oppenheimer, and should have been part of Nolan’s story but are conspicuously absent.
At the time that the Manhattan Project was being organized, the U.S. Army’s Signal Intelligence Service at its operations center outside Washington, D.C., Arlington Hall, was ordered to begin collecting coded messages between Soviet operatives to their colleagues in the U.S. and superiors in Moscow. Stalin was an ally but many in our government were prudently dubious about his motives, intentions, and actions. Would he abandon us and/or undermine our efforts? After all, his connivance with Hitler in 1939 – the Nazi-Soviet Pact – helped trigger World War II. The activities of the Soviet Comintern (Communist Internationale) destabilized many countries in Europe throughout the 1920s and 30s. The Soviet takeover of the so-called Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, in tandem with Fascist support for Franco’s Nationalists, helped turn Spain into a bloodbath.
U.S. Army Signals Intelligence codebreakers, Arlington Hall, VA, 1943.
Simultaneously, the collection of the messages necessitated an intense effort to break the code which did not bear fruit till the end of the war and into the 1950s due to the complexity of the Soviet code. The program to collect and break the Soviet code was given the cover name, Venona.
Furthermore, step back to the 1930s and the preeminent trends of thought in college faculty lounges. If there was an observable sympathy in the U.S. during the 1930s, it was the warmth of our intellectual chattering classes for collectivism ranging from milder socialisms to communism, which is just an impatient socialism. For a good portion of the professoriate, the Great Depression condemned capitalism. The Soviet Union benefitted from much of that warmth and it showed in intellectual discussion groups, social affiliations and activities, which extended beyond the classrooms and laboratories. It’s into this milieu that people like Oppenheimer swam.
Many were attracted to FDR and the New Deal as only the beginning of the crusade to make the world right. Many would eventually fill FDR’s agencies and programs and brought their ideological affections with them. The extent of some of this cognitive kinship was uncovered in decrypted Soviet messages from 1946 on. The affection sometimes translated into espionage.
The effort gained new urgency in 1949 when the USSR successfully tested their first atomic bomb many years earlier than expected, which, as it turned out, was a carbon copy of our very first plutonium bomb, the one of the famous Trinity test at Los Alamos. What’s up? How’d they get it? Venona uncovered two moles at Los Alamos (Manhattan Project): nuclear physicist Klaus Fuchs and mathematician Ted Hall. Confirmation was additionally provided from Soviet archives that were thrown open in 1991. From the evidence gleaned, others at the time would be suspected, including Oppenheimer.
Clockwise from top left: Los Alamos spies Klaus Fuchs, Theodore Hall, Oscar Seborer, and David Greenglass. In 2019, Seborer’s story was unearthed by Harvey Klehr, a retired professor from Emory University, and John Earl Haynes, former historian for the Library of Congress.
As it turned out, the espionage reached deep into FDR’s administration. Adviser Laughlin Currie, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White, the State Department’s Alger Hiss, and a host of Justice Department and other personnel were fingered in Venona.
Around Oppenheimer personally, his wife, brother, and mistress were known to be communists. Moving about educated and influential circles at the time could have, understandably, oriented a person to the lefty side of the spectrum, leaving aside the natural social self-selection process that normally occurs. All of these factors and facts were not part of Nolan’s script, and should have been if he was truly interested in a faithful rendition of the times and the man. Instead, we got historical schlock that distorted and hid much under the rug, and an Oscar-winning movie.
Once a subject enters movie mode, it falls into the drama of protagonist/antagonist, good/bad. There’s the incessant movieland trope of creating villains who in real life may not have been. Always lurking in the background is Hollywood’s deeply embedded anti-anti-communism. The aura of McCarthy and McCarthyism overshadows their modern brain. So, they invent McCarthy-like characters.
One such maligned person was Gordon Gray, portrayed in the movie as a conniving lawyer of sinister motives. He actually was a distinguished graduate of Yale University, award-winning newspaper publisher, president of the University of North Carolina, and widely respected at the time as secretary of the army and presidential national security adviser. He headed the panel reviewing Oppenheimer’s security clearance that voted two to one to revoke it. Now, Gray will be forever reverse black-listed by Hollywood.
Gordon Gray
The rescinding of it was actually a “dah” moment. There was enough on Oppenheimer to determine that he was too great a risk to our national security, given all that we know from Venona and subsequent FBI investigations. It’s fair to conclude that the FBI’s investigation of Oppenheimer was inconclusive, but being inconclusive could be enough to keep him away from critical research, the risk being too great. He will take a downstream hit to his employability prospects but those are pale when compared to the danger to everyone else’s safety and security.
The movie doesn’t stop there in maligning people. Another object of concocted derision in the movie was Lewis Straus, but he was hardly Robert Downey Jr.’s dark and malevolent denizen of DC. An esteemed Jewish American and president of New York’s Emanu-El congregation, he rose from the bottom to the rank of Rear Admiral, headed Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies, and was Eisenhower’s chief of staff and secretary of state. All this was washed away by Nolan to make Straus a demon to Oppenheimer’s saint. Let’s call it what it is: the Hollywood treatment for anybody of prominence on the right.
President Eisenhower receives a report from Lewis L. Strauss, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, on the hydrogen bomb tests (Operation Castle) in the Pacific, March 30, 1954.
Hollywood history becomes real history to people who don’t know history. There’s enough out there to know better. You just have to go from the theater to the library, or wherever honest, in-depth sources are available. They’re out there. But, best of all, be abundantly skeptical of what Hollywood is stylishly placing on the big screen. It’s nearly as much fantasy as Disney’s “Snow White”.
RogerG
Sources:
1. An excellent backgrounder on the times is Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, available on Amazon
2. Another excellent backgrounder is Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government by M. Stanton Evans, available on Amazon
3. Thanks to Neal Freeman’s piece in National Review, “Oppenheimer Provides Great Entertainment, Disfigured History”, 7/30/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/oppenheimer-provides-great-entertainment-disfigured-history/
4. Thanks to Armond White’s review of “Oppenheimer” at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/oppenheimer-the-first-nihilist-oscar-winner/
The House GOP clown car: Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene
It seems that treating the American people like adults is not in vogue, on the right or left. The Right is quickly shedding its classical liberal credentials, the ideas that animated our founding fathers, Coolidge and Reagan, and are embedded in our founding documents. The Left is on a march to establish government as the Promethean social engineer par excellence. Either outlook has us mired in a hell of a mess.
Take this interview with Kari Lake, Arizona Republican Senate candidate, as she panders to the mental adolescents in the Republican primary. Two issues stand out in this foreplay of mental immaturity: Ukraine and the debt/deficit.
Kari Lake at Turning Point Conference, July 24, 2021
The debt/deficit is something that, when prompted, people express deep concern, but to be honest, nobody seems willing to do anything about it. Republicans, led by Trump and others like Lake, are frightened away from doing anything to reform the biggest component of the federal budget, Social Security and Medicare, which by all measures is pushing the federal budget over the fiscal cliff. Surely, Democrats salivate at the prospect of demagoguing the issue. A reporter recently asked whether Lake agreed with Trump in opposing changes to the monster entitlements (see #1 below). Lake answered, “I do not think we should touch them.” Then, she goes on a hackneyed recitation of why we ought not do anything. The “Thema and Louise” scene of the two women driving their car off the cliff keeps coming to mind.
Thelma and Louise drive off the cliff
She proposes thinking “creative” (?) and meanders on over to onshoring manufacturing jobs in the U.S. without showing much cognizance of the reasons for the flight of businesses in the first place. Manufacturers, or anybody with a payroll for that matter, face the maw of our unions’ and politicians’ class war machine. They’ll encounter crushing taxation, with the promise of more to come (“wealth taxes”), regulations and mandates galore, and a greenie pummeling. What’s there not to like, eh?
We’re left mystified by the connection between a careening debt and this pandering to the AFL-CIO. Similar befuddlement will arise when she, like much of the Trump right, dumps Ukraine into the mixing bowl with the border crisis. What are we left to conclude? Let Putin have Ukraine as we grapple, or fail to grapple, with our southern border? Apparently, the world’s premiere superpower can’t simultaneously walk and chew gum, or rebuild our defense industrial base, while supporting a small country under a Putin invasion.
Okay, here’s a question for Kari Lake and her ilk: what are the consequences of a Putin conquest of Ukraine? Wargame it, think about it beyond the half-witted musings of Candace Owens. Don’t complain about Biden’s Kabul catastrophe when the Right is prepared to imitate him on the continent of Europe. The previous four-century history of European autocrats, dictators, and totalitarians rampaging across the continent is not encouraging. Of course, we could revert back to the 18th century and let the world go to hell in a handbasket, us locked away behind our oceans, and watch a chunk of our prosperity and security go down the drain as we do it. The logic is stuck in the age of sailing ships and far removed from this era of hypersonics.
This is an age of demagogues and panderers for we are treated as children. It is assumed that we can’t handle hard truths. One of the most fundamental and irritating truths is, as the philosopher Richard Weaver put it, “ideas have consequences”. He wrote an entire philosophical work on it (see #2 below). The upshot is that we are limited by realities; there can be no “year zero”, and remake ourselves into whatever we want to be. Misery is the result. Adults must know this to be true, or they’re not adults, despite the age on their driver’s license.
We actually believe that we can afford something we can’t (Social Security and Medicare as currently constructed for instance). Much of the nonsense frequently begins in the bubble of academia, or the broader chattering classes, and infects the downstream culture. A rationale is concocted that works to keep us in our childlike status.
Right now, a move is afoot to treat pregnancy as a disease (see #3 below) so young people can remain enslaved to their youthful desires with no consequences. Aldous Huxley wrote about it decades ago in Brave New World. No need for responsibilities or meeting social expectations in this agenda. The authors of a piece in the Journal of Medical Ethics lay out the suicidal logic:
“We can compare pregnancy with measles. Measles is uncontroversially regarded as a disease and treated as such by public health authorities and health professionals. Measles is harmful to nearly all of those who catch it. However, most patients will survive. Very few will die, and only a small proportion will go on to experience longer term impacts on their health. [Like pregnancy.]”
Does she have a disease?
Pregnancy – or ironically how the authors and everybody else got here to bag on it – is a parallel experience to measles, and should be treated like it. How does that work, unless you’re a complete nincompoop? All of us were a product of the “disease”. Nothing about the biological cycle of life to see here. It’s lunacy on stilts.
Personally, I think that the writers are retroactively justifying our current efforts to birth-control ourselves to death. No doubt about it, marriage and fertility rates are cratering (see #5 below). Fewer people are filling the pews at the same time as fewer are heading to the altar to take their vows. Religious observance appears to have a direct relationship with marriage and childbearing. They follow each other in tandem.
That’s no problem to a population reared on the doctrines of the Malthusian death cult (as in Thomas Malthus, the foolish late 19th century cleric and amateur futurist). It’s the chant of too many people, too many people, . . .. It only makes sense at an adolescent level. The great innovative productivity of our farms, factories, investments, and our dynamic brains, is beyond most people’s stunted comprehension, let alone a kid’s. We are what we’ve been told over and over again, the spiel of the Malthusian death cult. Underneath it all, though, is the blandishment to believe that marriage and children impinge on our desire to have more fun and stuff.
It’s no surprise that marriage is on the rocks; we’ve bastardized it so. Marriage has been turned into something as binding as a handshake, or the Boy Scout oath. What was once, by definition, a special institution for heterosexual couplings, the only kind capable of procreation, was elasticized to encompass pairings that can never, by definition, accomplish that feat. This is different from heterosexual infertility. Sorry, sodomy and oral sex can’t produce a child. Do we really need to be told that?
Instead, we shift from merely the impossible to the grotesque, and H.G. Wells’s Island of Dr. Moreau. People with medical degrees can inject us with chemicals and mutilate our sexual organs in order to contradict the chromosomes throughout our body. Think about it: an ex-man – actually a man due to chromosomes – with an artificial womb. I’m back to Weaver’s thesis. Are there any limiting principles to our desires? Can reality be endlessly and radically bent with no adverse consequences?
Transgender girl allows cameras to document her/his sex reassignment surgery
What of the kids? What kids? Marriage is certainly no longer about the kids. It’s about the adults. Marriage of the kind that procreates is no longer a preferred component in life’s journey. It’s an option like color in an Amazon order. Those kids that managed to survive the gauntlet of the abortionist’s suction tube and made it to adulthood won the lottery of unending teenage wish fulfillment. They don’t have kids either.
It shows in the numbers. The current U.S. fertility rate hovers between 1.6 to 1.7, below the estimated 2.1 replacement rate. The birth rate measured per thousand collapsed from 51.8 in 2007 to 37.8 last year (see #5 below). All such numbers point in the same direction – down. It’s a calamity in waiting. Who’s going to be around to be taxed to bankroll the safety net? Who’s going to be around to change the bed pans and feeding tubes? Don’t expect the global poor to be your nursery. Importing them imports other problems. Chief among them, the taxation of the low wages of the imported global poor is a net negative when compared to the forgone potential of higher incomes of the homegrown, leaving aside the rising costs of subsidizing the imported poor. You just piled a fiscal problem onto a demographic one.
Reversing the trend is like stopping a descending 100-railcar freight train. It can be done but it’s going to take a long while. Government interventions in the realm of demography are not encouraging. Centrally planned demography doesn’t work any better than centrally planned economics. China’s CCP commanded a one-child policy in the late 1970s and 80s and set in motion the unintended: a lopsided population pyramid of males. Now, as China demands to be recognized among the ranks of the international big boys, it has fewer girls to be the mothers of the next generation. They’re in a demographic death spiral. It’s baked into the population cake unless they jump into the oven to rejigger the batter. Good luck with that, as they try to do it.
The CCP’s answer is more centrally-planned demography to replace the now failing centrally-planned demography. They’ve cashiered the population commissariat and abortion goon squads in every village and city and are wildly bribing the remaining female population into fertility. In the meantime, they’re stuck with a declining population, fewer workers, and too few mothers. How long will it be before China reverts back to its status of a failed state?
Europe is experiencing a similar demographic death spiral. Government policies in the form of goodies and subsidies (bribes) produce lackluster results at best. France for decades has tried through policies to reverse its death spiral (see #6 below). Still, its birthrates hover below replacement at between 1.7 to 1.9. The country’s fertility is better than most of Europe but they have yet to break the 2.1 threshold. Hungary has taken the same approach and only arrested its fall.
This is not a problem conducive to remediation by government ministries. Once attitudes and lifestyles become entrenched, the problem lies in the culture and is amazingly resistant to more spending in a few budgetary line items. Adults have to become adults, and come to find fulfillment in a marital union of sexual compatibility (heterosexual) and family. Today, it’s “he who dies with the most stuff wins”.
Of all people, Elon Musk may have set the record straight. At a Wall Street Journal event he said (see #8 below), “There are not enough people. I can’t emphasize this enough, there are not enough people.” He further added, “If people don’t have more children, civilization is going to crumble. Mark my words.”
Elon Musk with one of his children
Could a broad immaturity, now culturally rooted, be at the core of much of what ails us? Turning around the situation begins with the realization that there is no “something for nothing”, and that there are limits and consequences to our actions. At one time, we were helped along the way by the traditional institutions of church, family and marriage, and free markets. Until they are returned to their time-honored place, we are doomed to an endless cycle of failure and mediocrity, and Musk’s warning.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Kari Lake Talks ‘Difficult’ Deficit Math”, Audrey Fahlberg, National Review, 3/7/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/kari-lake-talks-difficult-deficit-math/
2. Ideas Have Consequences, Richard M. Weaver, 1948 edition, Expanded edition, Kindle edition, can be acquired on Amazon, et al.
3. “Is pregnancy a disease? A normative approach”, Anna Smajdor and Joona Rasanen, Journal of Medical Ethics, at https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2024/01/28/jme-2023-109651
4. Thanks to Wesley J. Smith for bringing the issue of pregnancy as a disease to my attention: “Bioethics Journal Article: Pregnancy Equivalent to Catching the Measles”, National Review, 2/3/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bioethics-journal-article-pregnancy-equivalent-to-catching-the-measles/
5. “Natalism Is Not Enough”, Partick T. Brown, Ethics and Public Policy Center, in National Review Magazine, 1/25/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/03/natalism-is-not-enough/
6. “Fertility and Family Policies in France”, Marie-Thérèse Letablier, Journal of Population and Social Security (Population), Supplement to Volume 1, at https://www.ipss.go.jp/webj-ad/WebJournal.files/population/2003_6/9.Letablier.pdf
7. “Number of children born per woman in France from 2005 to 2020”, statista, at https://www.statista.com/statistics/746549/fertility-rate-france/#:~:text=The%20fertility%20rate%20is%20the%20average%20number%20of,children.%20This%20value%20was%20the%20lowest%20since%202005.
8. “Elon Musk says ‘civilization is going to crumble’ if people don’t have more children”, Sam Shead, CNBC, 12/7/2021, at https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/07/elon-musk-civilization-will-crumble-if-we-dont-have-more-children.html
We’re living in a nutty time. Alongside the Loch Ness monster, the second gunman on the grassy knoll, free healthcare, Elvis in the land of the living, people believe in the darndest things. Modern iterations of the same phenomena include a “two-state solution” in Palestine, a wildly popular Trump, “undocumented” immigrants, a successful Marxism, etc. How can this be? Do adults actually believe in the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus?
In an aside, attaching “undocumented” to immigrant hides the reality. This person – “undocumented” – is a citizen of another nation who trespassed our border and our laws to plant themselves in our country. This person is illegally present in the country, period. “Undocumented” is synonymous with “illegal”. “Illegal immigrant” clears the air. The people who patronize us with “undocumented” are deceptive or they actually believe the unbelievable.
One guy, Robert Malone, MD, on Joe Rogan’s podcast, deposited his pet theory of “mass formation psychosis” (mfp) as an explanation for a broad belief in the unbelievable (see #1 below). I don’t know whether I accept the idea, but it certainly is intriguing. Malone used it to explain much of the mania during the pandemic. It could convincingly be applied beyond Covid and right into 2024 and our roiling election-year controversies.
So, what is it? Mfp is a psychotic condition on a mass scale in a time of deep divisions when events seem monumental yet poorly understood. Someone or some explanation arises, goes viral, and the impressionable group runs the danger of being detached from reality. The resulting behavior is often delusional to the point of derangement, or a state of mass hypnosis. As Malone says to Rogan,
“When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other and has free-floating anxiety in a sense that things don’t make sense, we can’t understand it, and then their attention gets focused by a leader or series of events on one small point just like hypnosis, they literally become hypnotized and can be led anywhere.” (see #1 below)
Welcome to 2024. Are Republican primary voters in the grip of mfp? How else to explain the popularity of Donald Trump in the party, in spite of the clear evidence of his toxicity? He romped to a 20-point win in South Carolina after his other big wins in Iowa and New Hampshire. Nothing holds promise of derailing his rush to the nomination. It’s odd given the fact that, post-2016, Republicans appear lining up for a four-peat of the miserable performances in 2018, 2020, and 2022. A very powerful constant in the previous three election cycles is Donald Trump as the face of the party. No one scares suburban voters and women more than the prospect of Trump in the White House. Yet here we go again.
How did the party get to this juncture? Nothing provides more proof of the presence of mass psychosis formation in Republican ranks than an enduring faith in Trump’s electability. The previous losses didn’t penetrate the rational faculties of their brains, or the fact that a semi-functional nursing home patient is competitive with Trump. Clinging to the unreal, South Carolina GOP voters in exit polls believe Trump is more electable than Nikki Haley (87% to 57%), in spite of national polling showing Haley slaughtering Biden by double digits (see #2 below). Trump’s advantage over the senescent Biden is within the margin of error.
Trump needs but frightens suburban women
A record of repeated failures won’t shock these people into reality, and neither will foul behavior diminish their fervor, even among people who profess the need for moral rectitude. Trump recently went before religious broadcasters (Christian), laced his talk with the promiscuous use of “hell” before many pastors, and was met with laughs and cheers (see #4 below). No admonitions, not a lick.
His responses to rivals are not arguments but insults. We were reminded of his chronic incivility when he referred to Nikki Haley as “birdbrain” and tried to be derisive by ridiculing her ethnic name. This is par for the course for Trump.
At a rally in South Carolina, Trump mocked Haley’s husband for not being around to support his wife. He scoffed, “What happened to her husband? Where is he?”, and added, “He’s gone.” In fact, he’s deployed in service to his country. This isn’t the only time that he’s reached for the use of invective in an effort to be humorous, with the target being people in uniform, and a loved one of his opponent.
There’s more. John Kelly, Trump’s former chief staff, confirmed earlier reports of Trump bad-mouthing those who suffered in war defending our country (see #5 below). In the inner sanctum of the oval office according to Kelly, Trump referred to John McCain and H.W. Bush as “losers”. John Kelly again: “A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’” More incidents will remain on the cutting room floor for lack of confirmation.
Before you dismiss Kelly, remember that he was a widely respected commander prior to his association with Trump. Suddenly, he’s on the outs with Trump and the object of abuse by Trumpkins, who just yesterday held their hats at their hearts when a soldier was laid to rest. Trumpkins are required to sacrifice their personal integrity in an allegiance to a lout. It’s another example of believing in the unbelievable, in the righteousness of a man who exploited five deferments to avoid military service in time of war.
The coarse disrespect from his mouth is a green light to churlishness in his supporters. It’s a pattern now common in all his campaigns from the beginning in 2016. For instance, during a 2016 New Hampshire rally, he was lambasting Ted Cruz, a rival for the nomination, when a woman in the audience yelled, “He’s [Cruz] a pussy”. Trump feigned a criticism and then happily repeated it to laughter and applause. This is unthinkingly dismissed as “Trump being Trump”, and the behavior rubs off on his followers.
Achieving laughter through invective is a recurring Trumpism of those seeking the brass ring in his wake, like Kerry Lake who has the ambition to be one of Arizona’s senators. Trump bashes McCain – “[McCain is] not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured” – so Lake piles on with, “Boy, Arizona has delivered some losers [McCain], haven’t they?” She prefaced that doozy with, “We don’t have any McCain Republicans in here, do we?” She answered, “Well, get the hell out!” Out Trumping Trump is considered an asset in this twisted little eco-system. (see #6 below)
Believing that it is endearing and won’t cost you elections, by someone who’s already lost one, is an amazing feat of delusion. She’s the reason for an uptalking lefty occupying the governor’s mansion – in a state where the previous Republican governor won reelection by double digits – along with the Trump fealty claque in the party primary who put her on the general election ballot in the first place.
No wonder the party is plagued with over-the-top Trump worshippers in office in the likes of Lauren Boebert, Majorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, J.D. Vance, and others. They embrace flamboyance as a substitute for civility, good judgment, and seriousness. Clowns now rule the roost in the party.
The previous losses don’t seem to penetrate the fogged-up part of the logical brain. Cults of personality don’t have coattails; it’s in their nature. The down-ballot for Trump has been a disaster. He may win in a squeaker in November but expect a Democrat Congress to quickly impeach him. I don’t relish the sight of the bloody aftermath of that imbroglio. And to think that it is all due to people believing in that which ought not to be believed. The Democrats believe in a successful Marxism. Republicans believe in a popular Trumpism.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “What Is Mass Formation Psychosis? Robert Malone Makes Unfounded Covid-19 Vaccine Claims On Joe Rogan Show”, Bruce Y. Lee, Forbes, 1/2/2022, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2022/01/02/what-is-mass-formation-psychosis-robert-malone-makes-covid-19-vaccine-claims-on-joe-rogan-show/?sh=4077085d1d4c
2. “Exit Polls: Exit Poll Results for 2024 Presidential Primaries and Caucuses”, CNN, at https://www.cnn.com/election/2024/primaries-and-caucuses/exit-polls/south-carolina/republican-primary/0
3. Thanks to Philip Klein for his analysis regarding the electability question in “South Carolina Results Show Why It’s Hard to Run on Electability”, National Review, 2/24/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/south-carolina-results-show-why-its-hard-to-run-on-electability/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=fifth
4. Trump’s speech at the convention of the National Religious Broadcasters can be viewed at https://youtu.be/x1xKn6LR5gY?si=8bAv8muBXKRwXpjI
5. “Exclusive: John Kelly goes on the record to confirm several disturbing stories about Trump”, Jake Tapper, CNN, 10/3/2023, at https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/02/politics/john-kelly-donald-trump-us-service-members-veterans/index.html4
6. “‘No Peace, B****,’ Meghan McCain Tells Kari Lake”, Haley Stack, National Review, 2/21/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/no-peace-b-meghan-mccain-tells-kari-lake/
