Our National Decomposition Continues Apace

Union organizer and Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson speaks after being projected winner as mayor on April 4, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois. (Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)
Teacher union organizer and Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson speaks after being projected winner as mayor on April 4, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois. (Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)
Supreme Court candidate Janet Protasiewicz reacts while speaking at her election night watch party in Milwaukee, Wis., on Tuesday, April 4, 2023. Protasiewicz, 60, defeated former Justice Dan Kelly, who previously worked for Republicans and had support from the state's leading anti-abortion groups. (Mike De Sisti /Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel via AP)
Janet Protasiewicz speaks at her election night party in Milwaukee after she defeated former Justice Dan Kelly for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat. (Mike De Sisti / Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel)

 

Our national decomposition shows little sign of abating.  Elections in Wisconsin and Chicago indicate that there remains an appetite for decay.

Another word for decline or decomposition of a culture, civilization, or nation is degringolade.  Whichever word is used, however, we are experiencing it.  Nature isn’t doing it to us.  We are doing it to ourselves.  The precipitating factor is what is bouncing between our ears.  A sizeable chunk of the electorate, without even knowing it in many cases, is sold on toxic neo-Marxism in the guise of modern progressivism.  Today, progressivism and this updated Marxism are synonymous.  I’m beginning to sound like a broken record since I’ve certainly mentioned it often enough but can’t get away from it.  It’s constantly resurfacing in many places around the country.

This isn’t the progressivism of Woodrow Wilson.  As a refresher, this current edition is a relatively modern refashioning of Karl Marx’s paradigm: the systemic oppression of the oppressed who are defined by an ever-fungible list of outgroups covering everything from XY girls to the poor to anyone with high melanin counts.  To the rescue in this blinkered ideological schematic is a complete, top to bottom, inside and out, overhaul of all societal arrangements from the family to property, a thoroughgoing Marxist revolution.  Sound familiar?  Read BLM’s mission statement before it was scrubbed clean of too much revelatory information (see below).  We’ve proven to be quite creative in defining the “oppressed”, or victim groups.  For greenies, you might add the mother goddess Gaia (earth) to the list.  Anyway, this latest edition fairs no better than the kind that lurked behind the Iron Curtain or Mao’s China or is lurking in North Korea and Cuba.  It is a sacking of our heritage and thrusting the country into despair.

The canary passing out in the coal mine in this moment of our evisceration is urban America.  Our cities are crumbling, and so are the states dominated by them. The story has been acted out before.  We are historically rhyming with 4th and 5th-century AD Rome.  The Roman Empire didn’t go out in a boom but a whimper.  The cities became unlivable, mired in high taxes, crumbling infrastructure, a deterioration of services, lack of security, and overburdening controls.  Who’d want to live there?  Apparently, many didn’t by the 5th century.  The population of the city nearly emptied from over a million in the 1st century AD to 30,000 by the 5th.  Other similarly weakened urban places suffered.  People flocked to fortified estates, monasteries, and towns with natural defenses.  It’s the beginning of feudalism.

visigoths+%281%29.jpg 1,405×1,005 pixels | Vikings | Pinterest | Roman empire and Roman legion

Feudalism is returning.  Today, in the good ‘ol USA, people are rushing to states and places where 3-strikes laws mean something, where taxes and bureaucracies aren’t bleeding producers white, where parking your car on the street in front of your house isn’t an invitation to vandalism.  In other words, where neo-Marxism/progressivism is held in disrepute.

Where boys’ and girls’ bathrooms are separated by a wall.  Where nature’s chromosomal distinction hasn’t been buried by the linguistic manipulations of pronouns and “birthing person” for “woman”.  It’s just the opposite in our urban neo-Marxist silos.  Entirely mired in the mindset, many of our cities and urbanized states are busy advancing the revolution by eliminating other distinctions such as the one between criminal and law-abiding.  Judges and local potentates treat criminals as victims and their real victims as . . . well . . . .

As if we need any more evidence, Whole Foods announced yesterday (4/10/2023) that it was “temporarily closing” its 65,000 square foot San Francisco outlet at Eighth and Market, the Trinity section, that it just opened last year.  According to a company spokesman, “If we feel we can ensure the safety of our team members in the store, we will evaluate a reopening of our Trinity location.”  The area has been plagued by brutal beatings, stabbings, killings, and accidents in recent weeks.  Too few cops and law-unenforcement is making San Francisco look like 5th-century Rome (see below).

These arbiters of revolutionary justice in places like San Francisco have their own vocabulary to push this cultural revolution. “Decarceration” is the go-to for releasing offenders to reoffend, just call it “low-level crime”, which is another word for “inconsequential” to Soros-backed DA’s – inconsequential to everyone but the person left battered, bruised, and bleeding in the subway.  Barbarian invasions aren’t doing it to us, unless barbarian refers to the urban powerful who have drunk the neo-Marxist Kool-Aid. Your progressive DA, judges, city council, mayor, governor, and state legislature are performing the role of the Visigoths and their King Alaric in laying waste to Rome in 410 AD.

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Visigoths sack Rome in 410 AD.
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Minneapolis in the 2020 summer of riots.

The only recourse for those not too fond of the mayhem is to vote with their feet.  Get out!  But these are democracies – surprise!  The corruption is democratic.  People are voting for mayhem. How’s that possible?  It might have something to do with a little cost/benefit analysis on the run: the rewards of group largesse from the public treasury are greater than the costs of possibly losing your little girl in a drive-by.  I know, it’s hard to believe.  But, on the other hand, it could just be stupid people being stupid, something not unheard of in the annals of democracy.

Or it could be due to the overall social decomposition extending to our schools.  People aren’t taught any better; they don’t know any better; and are easily led into believing nonsense.  Yet, policy-nonsense still behaves, as it always has, whether popularly chosen or not, like a drunk behind the wheel.  It’s a disaster careening down our thoroughfares.  And like most drunks, all-too-often they don’t get sober till they hit bottom.  Apparently, our urban electorates haven’t hit bottom.  Or it could be that the voter pool has been reduced to the drunks, the sober having fled to safer climes (red states).

A sizeable majority – by ten points – of Wisconsin voters recently failed the field sobriety test but still grabbed the car keys.  Some attribute the recent election of the Visigothic Janet Protasiewicz to the State Supreme Court to the abortion issue.  Probably true, but Wisconsinites have now let the Visigoths through the gates with a new Visigothic majority on the Court and, as a result, will get much more than carte blanche abortion.  Protasiewicz promised during the campaign to rewrite the state’s redistricting maps to the advantage of the neo-Marxists who promise more sacking into the foreseeable future.  In addition, expect more teacher-union power to dictate your child’s education, backdoor racism in diversity-equity-inclusion, and higher taxes to finance the revolution.  The whole litany of policies to promote the revolution against hypothetical systemic “oppressors” are about to be unleashed.  And so will a run on exiting U-Hauls, proving once again that the only thing efficiently produced by Marxism is refugees.

Money is the mother’s milk of politics . . . and revolution.  The donkey party neo-Marxists, in spite of their dismal record, are well-funded from a network of similarly intoxicated donors.  The precedent was established by Lenin in 1917.  The Bolsheviks were bankrolled by Imperial Germany. A revolution rides on more than fulminations.

Money and an election system reshaped to the advantage of their base put Protasiewicz in office, and gave Chicago another Alaric-style mayor, Brandon Johnson, to replace the Visigothic Lori Lightfoot.  The guy is marinated in neo-Marxism, like his predecessor.  San Francisco, Wisconsin, and Chicago are pointing the way to the future, the same future viewed by 5th-century Romans and early 20th-century Petrograd residents.

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If not arrested, our condition will continue to deteriorate . . . until riveting calamities shock us back to our senses.  Hopefully, by then, it won’t be too late.  Hopefully, we won’t wake up to news of two aircraft carriers sunk in the western Pacific, and our response is crippled by an economy unable to meet the demands of the moment, or a population unwilling to fight after years of anti-western indoctrination in our media and schools.  A pool of recruits rattled by gender dysphoria and accusations of white privilege can’t instill much confidence.

The signs of decay aren’t limited to the popularity of chic neo-Marxism among urban sophisticates.  Another passed-out canary is plummeting birth rates and closing maternity wards.  It’s hard to have a robust generational talent pool to face the threat with a population befuddled by pronouns and fungible sex-identity, all as the population shrinks.  We’ve got a lot to worry about.  And all the while, neo-Marxism, acting like the Visigoths, is busy hollowing out the nation and its civilization.  At this late hour, the odor of national decomposition is beginning to overwhelm the olfactory glands.

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RogerG

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* BLM’s mission statement included the following:
“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.” It’s straight out of the writings of Karl Marx, nothing unusual for the self-professed Marxism of BLM’s founders of Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi.

From the Wayback Machine Archive, Black Lives Matter: “What We Believe”, at https://web.archive.org/web/20200408020723/https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/

* “Whole Foods closes San Francisco flagship store after one year, citing crime”, Jordan Valinsky, CNN, 4/11/2023, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/whole-foods-closes-san-francisco-flagship-store-after-one-year-citing-crime/ar-AA19IDPH

* If you’re interested, here’s a local San Francisco newscast about people getting out during the Covid shutdown: “On The Move: San Francisco residents on the move during the COVID-19 economic downturn” at

Real Institutional Racism in the Boardroom

The admissions building at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A trial widely perceived to be a referendum on affirmative action is scheduled to begin Monday. (HADLEY GREEN / The New York Times, file)
The admissions building at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (HADLEY GREEN / The New York Times, file)

Benjamin Disraeli (19th century British politician, Prime Minister, and writer/philosopher) in his book “Sybil, Or the Two Nations” wrote of the deep split of a people into two camps, almost nations, each completely estranged from the other:

“Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws . . . .  THE RICH AND THE POOR.”

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Benjamin Disraeli

For him, the divide was between the rich and the poor, an artifact of a time of much greater hardship.  For us, it is between the blue silos of a radical Left cultural ethos and the red hinterlands of the traditions of standards, faith, the rule of law, equality before the law, and popular sovereignty under constitutional checks.  The former wishes to overthrow the latter.

In these isolated little blue enclaves, overwhelmingly inner cities and college campuses, the hyper-wealthy and academics can entertain ideological fancies far afield from the lives of the vast majority of people living outside, people who are actually struggling with the daily realities of living and not secure from them by walls, money, and tenured academic freedom.

How could the corporate boardroom – in the past immune – become so enthralled by this revolutionary ethos?  The answer lies in the social realities of living in a narrowly confined space of limited interactions.  A homogeneous mind incubates in a scene of intermarriage, secluded social engagements in a protective cocoon, and an upbringing that transmits the same campus cultural revolution in these secluded social petri dishes.

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Security gate at a Beverly Hills estate

Adapting Mao’s Long March mythology, Rudy Dutschke, a leader of the German radical Left of the 1960s, advocated a long march through institutions in that 1967 time of troubles of strikes, riots, and massive protests in the West.  Rather than tear the institution down, take them over, he said. Well, it happened.  Yesteryear’s student radical is today’s tenured college faculty with matriculated mental offspring littered throughout the Fortune 500.

What brings this to mind?  Eighty-two American companies expressed their official support for race-based college admissions, loosely referred to as affirmative action, in two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court involving the University of North Carolina and Harvard (see their briefs below).  Big corporate players such as Google, Apple, JetBlue, and General Electric produced briefs utilizing the same old neo-Marxist rhetoric of group-conscious oppression.  Rhetorically, the table is set for the talisman of “diversity”.  Merit is redefined as being a member of the proper race or possessing the proper genitalia and calling it “diversity”.  No, this isn’t diversity of opinion.  It’s the diversity of immutable characteristics.  Competence and a special gnosis, it is assumed, emanates from melanin count and genitalia, not from observable qualifications.  It’s preposterous.

The pretzel logic required to make this scheme marketable boggles the mind.  In Monday’s hearing before the Supreme Court, defense counsel emphasized the gambit of race as one among many factors but couldn’t escape withering cross examination from Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito and Barrett.  The inescapable fact is that at least some admissions will be based on race, and thusly a violation of statute and the Constitutional guarantees of equal protection.  Trying to hide race among the weeds doesn’t eliminate the fact that race will be determinative to award advantages to some to the detriment of others not so privileged with the right skin color and genital comportment.

How could they get away with this after a Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment, Brown v. Board of Education, and the various Civil Rights Acts in the long campaign to end the award of benefits and/or disabilities based on race or other immutable factors?  The whole enterprise relies on rhetorical legerdemain and a mountain of verbiage in bastardized “studies” to the point that “studies have shown” has gained the reputation as a tipoff for ideological skullduggery.  It’s a new Jim Crow favoring the radical Left’s “oppressed”.

And an afront to most people’s practical sense of fairness.  There’s a reason why lady justice wears a blindfold.

May be a cartoon of text that says 'PERSONNEL DEPARTMENT NO WHITE MEN NEED APPLY. Belu ©2012 BALOOCARTOONS. "We got tired of explaining to everybody what affirmative action' means."'

Not surprisingly given their backgrounds, corporate titans have bought into it.  Read the briefs and you’ll find the ritual abuse of “diversity” and “qualified”, as in “Classroom diversity is crucial to producing employable, productive, value-adding citizens in business.”  Or, how about the claim that the favoritism produces “a pipeline of highly qualified future workers and business leaders”?  “Highly qualified” just became an oxymoron.  “Qualification” now means the right melanin count and genitalia.

The whole thing is a legal, moral, and rational trainwreck.  To borrow a movie line, “Yes, Virginia, there is institutional racism”, but it’s coming from the folks who brought you The 1619 Project, CRT, the 2020 summer of BLM riots, home appliances, and annual college admission letters.  Amazing, the campaign against institution racism was always about furthering institutional racism.

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RogerG

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* The corporate briefs in Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, and Harvard, can be found at https://www.naacpldf.org/wp-content/uploads/Brief-for-Major-American-Business-Enterprises-Supporting-Respondents-FINAL.pdf .

* An excellent synopsis of the case by Brittany Bernstein can be found at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/dozens-of-major-u-s-companies-urge-supreme-court-to-uphold-race-based-college-admissions/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=next-article&utm_term=first

Are We Getting Stupider?

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Students taking the ACT

Could be, I don’t know.  We fellow Boomers weren’t so smart.  We rebelled against self-restraint and got a world without self-restraint.  Now, a pleasant afternoon stroll in Denver or New York City will be through a smokey haze of people lighting up blunts amid the staccato bursts of drive-bys.

You can’t say that the times are the best for kids.  If we aren’t pummeling their future prospects with eco-nuttery and $31 trillion of debt, we are destroying their mental capacities under a barrage of toxic neo-Marxism and a campaign to turn teenage emotional instability into gender dysphoric mutilations.  Not only that, with all the cultural poison at their I-phone fingertips, we suffocate their leaning behind masks, plexiglass, social distancing and an end to in-person instruction under the threat of teacher union die-hards.  The results?  This is the most anti-child era in living memory, if not all time, and I haven’t got to the zealous push to abort them from conception to just before the slap on the back side after exiting the birth canal. Maybe after that too.  A few data points are illustrative.

Item #1: ACT Scores dropped to their lowest level in 30 years.  The ACT is a snapshot of the mental astuteness of this year’s incoming college freshman class.  The shamings, lockdowns, school closures, and kids living their lives in the glow of flat video screens have produced one of the most ill-prepared incoming classes of matriculants.  We did it to them under the pseudo-claims of “follow the science” and “experts”.  Progressivism’s blind faith in a professional-but-politicized class of bureaucrats led us straight into a dark hole, and an even darker and deeper one for our kids.

And once they get to the ivy-covered walls of state U, more stupidity awaits them.  Look at what our isolated hyper-wealthy in the isolation of their hyper-wealthy foundations consider “genius”, a “genius” that will flush through the lecture halls.  Item #2: the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation released this year’s 25 winners of their no-strings-attached “genius” cash awards ($800,000).  They’re left-wing activists.  They’re “geniuses” because of it.  Really.  I don’t know of any veterans of the Young Americans for Freedom or Federalist Society getting the phone call.

The winners check all the preferred boxes of today’s race/gender neurotics.  Two-thirds are women and 19 of the 25 were recruited from the so-called “marginalized”, all of the approved biases.  No Candice Owens or Winsome Sears (Virginia lt. gov.) types were obviously considered.  Somewhere, among the sanctified, you might find someone of the wrong genitalia and melanin count but still certainly, along with the rest, of the right ideological orientation.

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Patrisse Colours, Black Lives Matter co-founder and the picture of “intersectionality”, Black/female/Gay.

Patronizing mediocre artists (Amanda Williams) and a chattering class of whiners (Kiese Laymon, etc.) with the title of “genius” will degrade it like “real estate agent” after the collapse and serial fraud in the Florida Land boom in 1926.  “Genius” was applied to Reuben Jonathan Miller, U. of Chicago prof and peddler of the “mass incarceration” nonsense.  The crusade against “mass incarceration” means “mass decarceration” and is turning many of our neighborhoods into war zones.  Thanks “genius”.  How many more vapid treatments of anything “indigenous” do we need?  Robin Kimmerer serves up another one in “Braiding Sweetgrass”.  The more-in-tune-with-nature schtick is an attack on air conditioning, the family mini-van, and the single-family home.  This stuff is as old as the hippie commune and is as equally bankrupt.  And this makes her a “genius”?  The WaPo reporter tried to buck up Kimmerer’s status by writing that her book “has gone from surprise hit to juggernaut bestseller”.  No, only if “juggernaut” is 4,474 in Amazon’s rankings (paperback, 1,504 in Kindle, 3,313 in hardcover).

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Robin Kimmerer

Are these our educational influencers?  These are only geniuses among people who are gullible enough to believe it.  As a teacher of 30 years and annually exposed to the blatherings of credentialed activists telling us how to teach, I’ve watched them wilt under even mild cross examination.  The phrase “empty suit” was tailored for this type.  Yes, they’re empty suits but now they’re also rich “geniuses”.  As for the kids, they’re languishing.

Watch Kmele Foster’s excellent observations on the decline in ACT scores, but don’t expect an $800,000 “genius” award for him coming from the MacArthurs.  Use the link below.

https://www.foxnews.com/video/6313699523112

RogerG

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* “ACT Test Scores Drop to Lowest in 30 Years Following School Closures”, Cheyanne Mumphrey, RealClear Politics, 10/13/2022, at https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/10/13/act_test_scores_drop_to_lowest_in_30_years_following_school_closures_148318.html .

* “Meet the new MacArthur ‘genius grant’ winners”, Karen Heller, Washington Post, 10/12/2022, at https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/12/macarthur-genius-grant-fellows/ .

RogerG

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* “ACT Test Scores Drop to Lowest in 30 Years Following School Closures”, Cheyanne Mumphrey, RealClear Politics, 10/13/2022, at https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/10/13/act_test_scores_drop_to_lowest_in_30_years_following_school_closures_148318.html .

* “Meet the new MacArthur ‘genius grant’ winners”, Karen Heller, Washington Post, 10/12/2022, at https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/12/macarthur-genius-grant-fellows/ .

The Danger of a Radical Overclass Running Our Schools

Parents protest the teaching of Critical Race Theory during a Placentia Yorba Linda School Board meeting in Yorba Linda, Calif., November 16, 2021. (Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Our public and many private schools are a mess, but the vast majority of the blame shouldn’t be directed at the teachers.  The onus should be shouldered by an intellectually bankrupted overclass that sits atop a sprawling education industry from coast to coast, much like the Janissaries of the old Ottoman Empire or the self-indulgent and self-serving aristocracy in 18th-century Versailles.  Unexamined and unaware, its members reside in a world apart from the rest of society.  It’s an isolated existence with its own values and assumptions about the workings of the world.  Born of 19th century progressivism and its administrative state, their zeal for “reform” has bred a missionary class of consultants, hyped in the latest fads of thought driven by a near uniform set of ideological sympathies.  Duly papered in now-devalued credentials and degrees, they descend upon the schools and make a real hash of things.

Parents might be waking up. Zooming to their children during the pandemic by means of the family computer, right in front of them, was the chic radicalism from a world apart where lefty radicalism is assumed to be a virtue.  The veil of secrecy was blown off.  The fashionable neo-Marxist theory of systemic group oppression and guilt flashed before their eyes.  Racism was mangled into a public good as a means to fight purely hypothetical but politically useful villains.  They saw how adolescent feelings of gender confusion became the rigid theory of transgender ideology.  Now, their daughters are no longer safe in the bathroom or locker room.

Other fancies were exposed such as the religion of environmentalism, a mystical faith masquerading as a not-to-be-challenged scientific fact.  The crooked timber of humanity was somehow, magically straightened depending on your self-professed identity.  Bankers bad, workers always and forever angelic.  Whenever a woman or racial, sexual, or ethnic minority graces the page, it’s always in the context of exploitation.  Tradition is lambasted and morality is fashioned to serve the interests of the latest chic reform.  America is evil and in need of a revolution.  That’s what they’re attempting to groom: little revolutionaries.

As a teacher in the public schools for almost 30 years, I’ve witnessed it firsthand.  Teachers are forced through “professional growth” mandates to be constantly exposed to the latest in stylish radicalism emanating from the academic bubble.  School districts regularly take their teachers away from their students for multiple days of the school year – sometimes called “inservice days” – to get steady doses of the latest in leftist dogma.  Students lose a few days of learning so their teachers can be indoctrinated.  The result is almost always a few steps backward for both the students and teachers.

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Teacher training

To boot, many of the presenters don’t know the radical philosophical roots of what they’re presenting.  It says volumes about the academic preparation and forethought of those pretending to be Zeus on Mt. Olympus.  Two incidents stand out in my long career.  In one, a richly paid consultant was brought in to instruct us on his favorite pedological pet, “cooperative learning”.  Midway through the presentation I got the drift of where this was heading.  I politely asked him if the basis for his approach was “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.”  If you’re wondering, it’s straight out of Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto”.  He said, “Yes”, apparently unaware, or maybe quite aware, of his idea’s ideological parentage.  Shortly after that, I quietly slipped away to my classroom to grade papers and prepare instruction for the week, a much better use of the time.

Another example came about as a result of administrative pressure to attend a paid training session on a Saturday, which I was reluctantly to do for certain reasons.  Well, this session just so happened to be founded on the theory of multiple intelligences, a highly contestable notion for which the presenter was unfamiliar with the debate.  Common sense tells us that kids can have excellences in different skill and knowledge areas.  But these aren’t “intelligences”.  They are talents.  In contrast, intelligence is a unique measure of cognitive ability that is innate to a person for various biological and social reasons.  The interplay of the two is open to much debate.

All of this is glossed over to get to the hidden purpose of this questionable idea: everyone gets a trophy, which is born of Marx’s obsession with equality of result.  For people following in the footsteps of Karl Marx, a society of goodness and light can only be achieved if everyone is equal in everything from intelligence to possessions, just institutionally redefine intelligence in a multitude of ways for instance.  Without saying it, but following the logic, unequal performances among students in the form of grades or scores is automatically and morally suspect.  So, classrooms and instruction must be refashioned to make them more equal.  How?  Design and implement multifarious instructional approaches to access the hard to determine but assumed to be numerous “intelligences” in the classroom.  If the task is too cumbersome or inequalities persist, the burden is on the teacher to make things equal.  Marx blames the social system, the educrats blame classroom teaching, i.e., the teacher.  Thus, the schools engage in the perpetual search to weed out systemic oppression in the form of inequalities through incessant “training”.  No time here for placing responsibility on the student or home life.

The Marxian equality of result permeates everywhere in the school.  Merit – a sense of deserving through hard work – is disparaged and replaced with racial, gender, and sexual orientational reparatory contrivances in discipline, instruction, management, and grading (or no grades).  As a teacher scrambles to devise an ever-increasing number of pedagogies for an ever-increasing number of “intelligences” in the classroom, if hell busts loose, punishment is made to adhere to the god of equality of result like everything else.  If someone tallies the expulsions and discovers a “protected-class” excess beyond its demographic proportion, the school is turned upside down by conforming to the newest euphemism to downgrade the effectiveness of a school: restorative justice.  Watch the ratio of non-teachers to teachers explode.  The biggest building in the school will no longer be the one for Language Arts but the sprawling one housing the army of functionaries of the social services for the multitude of interventions required to create the illusion of identity-group equality.

If you think it’s such a great idea, this thing called “restorative justice”, then move to LA, SF, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Chicago, New York City, or any place suffering under permissive Soros-backed DA’s.  They’re all into “restorative justice” and all that goes with it.  You’ve just endorsed the transplanting of the chaos of San Francisco streets to your kids’ classrooms.

Nothing escapes the Marxist obsession with equality of result.  It’s embedded in your teacher’s training in college, and it’s constantly dragged before staffs every school year by an army of consultants.  It’s a very lucrative flim-flam as CRT evangelists like Ibram X. Kendi can attest.  He got $20,000 from Fairfax County taxpayers for a 45-minute virtual training video for the Virginia county’s public schools.  His fellow grifter, Robin DeAngelo, author of “White Fragility”, rakes in $14,000 per event earning a lusty $700,000 a year.  It’s a sweet gig if you can get it.  (See the column below by the American Enterprise Institute’s Frederick M. Hess.)

What do they really have to offer?   Nothing good, and everything deeply troublesome.  If you think that statue-toppling or joining the ranks of the militant wings of the Democratic Party is not an appropriate career path for your children, it is incumbent on parents to help bring to heel this wayward mass of detached educrats by electing state and local public officials who’ll clean house at the governing boards and make our colleges accountable for the undermining of our way of life.

There, we have our task.

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RogerG

Sources:

* “Defund the Teacher-Trainers”, Frederick M. Hess, Aug. 11, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/08/29/defund-the-teacher-trainers/?fbclid=IwAR10uTGkoMNTRebq74lRN6aC2638Z8-Mhw_rhuuJpzbnVSysv8ciOB6LHHg

Students Flee the Public Schools and the Dems’ Polls Improve. Go Figure.

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Randy Weingarten, AFT president, and empty classroom
Rally for John Fetterman with Bernie Sanders at Philadelphia City Hall
Rally for John Fetterman with Bernie Sanders at Philadelphia City Hall in 2018 (photo:Jared Guenwald)

What seems to be happening in the dog days of summer 2022?  On the one hand, 1.5 million students went kapoof in national public-school enrollment from 2020 to 2021.  And more recently, opinion polls show an improvement in Democrat fortunes.  After all that has happened in the past two years, what gives?  The former is not surprising.  The latter is downright insane given the riots, the overall urban breakdown of civil order, the schools being turned into revolutionary propaganda mills, the mandatory masking and school closures, the inflation and shortages, the “transition” of energy from affordable and available to extortionate and unreliable, and the full-throated attack on the family sedan to, by hook or by crook, force people into the lifestyle preferences of the DNC donor class.  The economy is in a shambles.

The Greeks and Romans of antiquity saw the Mediterranean heat of mid-to-late summer changing people into mad dogs, thus the “dog days of summer”.  Are parents mad for leaving the public schools in droves?  Hardly.  A clue can be found in the places with the greatest defection numbers.  Big city districts are quickly losing the warm bodies to fill the desks.  NYC Mayor Eric Adams put it succinctly when he called it a “massive hemorrhaging of students.”  The city’s public schools, the largest school district in the nation, lost 4 percent at the start of the 2020-2021 school year, and nearly another 2 percent in 2021-2022, a total of 64,000 youngsters.  Over the last five years, the total runs to 120,000.  Democrat bastions are experiencing the greatest disaffection.

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Flipping over to the west coast, Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest, has fallen from 737,00 to 430,000 over the last 21 years, and the picture gets even bleaker with the district projecting a further 30 precent erosion to 309,000 into the next ten years.  It’s a dismal picture for other big cities such as Detroit and Chicago.

The losses in places like Los Angeles can only be partially explained by the very real Great California Exodus.  New York State, in one year alone, 2020-1, in the midst of its own exodus, lost over 319,000 residents, the largest decline of any state.  Yes, Democrat-governed states dominate the flight statistics.  The classroom overcrowding problem of a few decades ago has shifted to states like Texas and Florida.

Another facet of the trend has little to do with loading a U-Haul.  Increasingly, parents are developing a love affair with options that free their kids from the grip of Randy Weingarten’s (AFT) and Becky Pringle’s (NEA) teachers’ unions.

Fifth-grade teacher Madeline Schmitt directs her students at St. Patrick School in Huntington, N.Y., on Sept. 9, 2020. Most Catholic schools returned to in-person learning earlier than public schools during the Covid-19 pandemic. (CNS photo/Gregory A. Shemitz)
Fifth-grade teacher Madeline Schmitt directs her students at St. Patrick School in Huntington, N.Y., on Sept. 9, 2020. Most Catholic schools returned to in-person learning earlier than public schools during the Covid-19 pandemic. (CNS photo/Gregory A. Shemitz)

Private, sectarian, charter, micro (private with 15 students or less), and home schools are some choices rising in popularity.  Maybe the pandemic exposed to parents who’s running their kids’ classrooms.  The racism-against-racism CRT claptrap and sex-change ideology, with the attendant display and glorification of sex-addiction behavior to adolescents, and the thought of their daughter sharing bathrooms and locker rooms with penis-girls, have shocked parents out of their lethargy.  Many are coming to the conclusion that the trillions of “investment” in government schools is a monumental loser, more of a jobs program for special-interest clients of the DNC.  It isn’t about the kids.  That’s just empty rhetoric for the plebes.

Simultaneously, as school boards are reintroduced to the socio-political phenomena of people voting with their feet due to a growing revulsion of Democrat-led schooling, the political prospects of Democrats have brightened a bit, amazingly.  Opinion polls show a tightening in the generic ballot.  In key Senate races, Dem neo-socialists hold leads.  In North Carolina and Ohio, it’s a dead heat.  Oz is down double digits in Pennsylvania to a stroke-addled Bernie Sanders acolyte.  How is it possible given the complete Dem-inspired unraveling of civilization from the summer of 2020 to summer 2022?

My best guess is a trifecta: it’s still the “dog days”; the Dem’s Trump campaign strategy; and inherent Republican political disabilities.  Oh, the polls are junk, so it’s actually a quadra-fecta.  Taken together, this is a bad time to gauge the state of play.

The “dog days” don’t have to mean madness.  Sometimes, the dog of public opinion sleeps or is distracted during these hazy, lazy days of summer.  Assessing what the public thinks at a time when people are vacationing and cramming bar-b-ques, ball games, concerts, yard work, and activities, activities, and activities, and expecting it to be authoritative, is absurd.  Unless you are Antifa and BLM and have the convenience of a viral video to exploit and bountiful free time to indulge in recreational rioting, most people have other things on their minds.

The public is generally distracted and the Democrats want to keep diverting their eyes away from the disorder and decay all around them.  Look, over there, it’s Trump, they say.  In the 2018 midterms, they made it all about Trump and swept the near octogenarian, now octogenarian, Nancy Pelosi into the speakership.  In 2020, they did same thing to such an extent that they got away with another near octogenarian, Joe Biden, campaigning from a basement computer.  Governor Gavin Newsom in the recall election hung Trump around the neck of Larry Elder and the effort to remove him from office.  They’re at it again.

Though, it’s hard for the shopper who just experienced sticker shock after a look at the supermarket cash register receipt.  At the pump, at the utility meter, at the hardware store, you name it, the sense of dystopia surrounds us.  The Dem’s best strategy, a proven winner, at a time when they have soiled themselves and us so badly, is to somehow make the election about Trump.  Could that be behind the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago?

All of a sudden, it’s all about Trump again.  Trump squeezes other GOP hopefuls out of prime-time news coverage.  Trump sops up media attention and fundraising cash that might have gone to down-ballot races.  At least for a short while, the raid jumbled the complexion of the federal midterm races.

Former President Donald Trump speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Fla., February 26, 2022. (Octavio Jones/Reuters)

It – the raid – may have worked in a perverse way.  Trump’s personal approvals tick up and the GOP’s tick down.  Trump gets to play the part of victim, which he could very well be, and the rest of the GOP gets momentarily lost in the news cycle.  For the Democrats, the strategy is to avert the public’s attention from the representative and senator who defended rioters, defund the police, the DA’s who unilaterally ignore most of the criminal code to the detriment of us and our property, voted for more inflation through trillions of new spending, and have assisted in dismantling what it means to be woman.  For those potentially in the gravitational pull of the Democratic Party, the prospect of an imminent Trump reappearance trumps everything.  The strategy worked in 2018 and to a great extent in 2020.  Why not this time around?

We’ll see how long the Democrat hall-of-mirrors campaign obscures the horrifying facts of life for most Americans under Democrat rule.  We’ll also see how GOP command central responds.  They’re lack of aggression and the Trump anchor may militate against a powerful counter.  Working against them is . . . Trump.  Just think, if that $100 million in Trump’s war chest had gone to Oz or to the National Republican Senate Committee (NRSC), the current donkey party bump would have been compressed to a micro-second blip.  Trump in his semi-retirement has all the time in the world, two years away from the next presidential election, and is frenetic in his fundraising far earlier than any other braggart in history.  The rest of the GOP is left to be the dog licking the crumbs falling from the table.

Trump is a mega-magnet due to his ego-run-amok.  His overbearing brashness is a cheap imitation of what Alice Roosevelt Longworth said of her father, Theodore Roosevelt: “My father always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding and the baby at every christening.”  I reckon that Trump prefers to see a lot of TR in himself.  He sucks media attention out of a room, and fundraising cash out of the pool of GOP donors.

Maybe he’ll shovel some of his cash to his preferred candidates, making them even more beholden to him.  Some of those selections in Senate primaries were . . . bizarre.  In some cases, the weakest general election candidate was endorsed.  But Oz, only recently a convert to the GOP and with no previous political footprint, and a man with carpetbagger and national loyalty liabilities?  The same consternation in Ohio (J.D. Vance).  The same in Arizona (Blake Edwards).  But Eric Greitens in Missouri, wife beater and abuser of his children?

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Dr. Oz in recent campaign ad

What explains the choices?  The most controversial endorsements reflect what Trump sees in himself: “anti-establishment” and “outsider”, meaningless words that frequently grace the lips of Fox News’s Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham.  The “establishment”?  Well, after a process of elimination, it must mean anyone in the party opposed to Trump.  It’s that simple.  Anyone finding Trump abhorrent is automatically assumed to be a country clubber.  It’s an outdated cliché since the millionaire and billionaire class is just as likely, if not more likely, to be a Democrat booster than a Republican one.  As for “outsider”, history is littered with them from Paul Marat (Parisian mob rabble rouser of the French Revolution) to Lenin’s Bolsheviks to Jane’s Revenge.  “Outsider” isn’t limited to being a moniker for someone with a fresh perspective.  It could, and mostly does, mean a person so revolting to broad sensibilities to cause people to cringe and keep them at arm’s length.

Still, these are the Trump chosen in Senate races that he has fobbed off on us, and a large tranche of Republican voters have foisted on us in their primaries.  In the general election, important races will pit a campus-socialist Democrat against a Republican with both feet immersed in the narrow habitat of the Trump cult.  I fail to see why this shouldn’t be a red-tsunami year, given all the carnage that the Democrats have gifted to Republicans.  Instead, much of the Republican base, enchanted by Trump’s self-serving verbiage, have turned sure-winners and easier gets into toss-ups and double-digit holes.  Indeed, at this juncture, Biden may have a radical-Left Senate majority in January 2023 to rubber stamp us into an inflationary spiral and the centrally planned existence of the Green New Deal by executive edict.

Democracy is not synonymous with wisdom.  The crooked timber of humanity is evident at the micro and macro levels.  In 1964, Goldwater was pasted by LBJ in what many observers described as a sympathy vote in the wake of the Kennedy assassination.  A popular mania gave us a bloody, miasmic morass in Vietnam and a morally bankrupting War on Poverty.  Guns and butter profligacy would wreck our country for the next decade and a half.  Then came the 1980’s and the beginning of a turnaround.  2022 could be the beginning of our turnaround, but will we seize the opportunity?

It would be lot easier if Trump stopped being so self-absorbed and divisive in the ranks of those trying to right the ship.  Meanwhile, parents are taking matters into their hands by taking their kids away from the influence of Democrat client groups.  I daily thank God that Trump hasn’t made any endorsements in school board races.

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RogerG

 

Sources:

* “New Federal Data Confirms Pandemic’s Blow to K-12 Enrollment, With Drop of 1.5 Million Students; Pre-K Experiences 22 Percent Decline” at https://www.the74million.org/article/public-school-enrollment-down-3-percent-worst-century/#:~:text=A%25203%2520percent%2520decline%252C%2520measured,of%2520roughly%25201.5%2520million%2520pupils.
* “With Plunging Enrollments, A Seismic Hit to Public Schools”, New York Times, at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/us/public-schools-falling-enrollment.html
* “Census Bureau: N.Y. population loss greatest in nation”, The Daily Gazette, Dec. 23, 2021, at https://dailygazette.com/2021/12/23/census-bureau-n-y-population-loss-greatest-in-nation/.
* “Latest Polls”, FiveThrtyEight, Aug. 19, 20222, at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/.
* “Poll Finds Increase in Number of Republicans Who Support Trump over GOP”, Brittany Bernstein, National Review, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/poll-finds-increase-in-number-of-republicans-who-support-trump-over-gop/.

A Much-Deserved College Market Correction

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College students in Seattle protest Trump’s victory in the 2016 election.

We are suffocating in air saturated in government money like the leaves blasted off the hardwood forests of the Blue Ridge by a hurricane in fall (which I saw in 2018).  Waste, oh the waste!  Much of it fire-hosed to the colleges in the form of profligate student loans, grants, subsidies, etc. – which is contributing to a national debt of $30.6 trillion and counting.  The aftermath is a college bubble like a market one, or the housing bubble of 2008-9.

Over the last ten years, total college enrollment has dropped by 4 million.  Why?  College was oversold.  The realization began to sink in that $120,000 spent (the average price tag) on four years of lefty bromides and degree fields that neither advanced the students’ understanding nor added to their skills is a winning proposition for their future.  We are in for a much-deserved market correction.

NBC is alarmed when they reported on the fall off recently (see below).  It’s as if a civilizational collapse is imminent because we don’t have enough gender studies majors and people who still can’t put a decent sentence together.  The network reports the findings of the left-leaning Hechinger Report which declares that the decline will “diminish people’s quality of life and the nation’s economic competitiveness”, as if all those graduates were chemistry majors and not the more likely situation of people who sat through interminable hours of woke claptrap and eroding rigor.

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Don’t blame changing demographics for the slump.  Within the same demographic, from 2016 to 2020, the percentage of high school graduates going to college dropped 7% from 70% to 63%. In many states, it’s worse, much worse.  Blame the colleges for cementing the view that they’re a nest of radical vipers, incompetents, and pointless, if not harmful, instruction.  NBC must have been flabbergasted to learn that fewer than 1 in 3 adults thought that college was worth the cost.  A mortgage-sized debt is hardly a come-on for a public watching statue-topplers, Antifa, BLM, and campus censorship and intimidation on abundant display.

College has given itself a black eye.  And, boy, what a shiner it is.

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RogerG

Sources:
* “Why Americans are increasingly dubious about going to college”, NBC News, Aug. 10, 2022, at https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/americans-are-increasingly-dubious-going-college-rcna40935
*The Hechinger Report in “How higher education lost its shine” at https://hechingerreport.org/how-higher-education-lost-its-shine/

The Error of Following a Person and Not What They Say: A Lesson that the Right Needs to Relearn

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Jordan Peterson, an icon of the Right

We are in an age of personality cults.  Maybe we always have been to one extent or another.  Regardless, we are in one, big time.

The decline in religiosity could be a partial explanation for people who need something to look up to after they have relegated heaven to myth.  It’s easier to replace God with a human being.  It’s evident across the political spectrum.  The Left has theirs in the many academic offshoots of Karl Marx.  On the Right, icons have arisen in the person of people from Jordan Peterson to Donald Trump.  They may be correct in much that they say, but being human, they occasionally step on a rake.  Then, the followers parrot the mistake while jettisoning their brain, the same brain that God gave them, that they don’t recognize that it was God who gave it to them.

Today’s brain is ill-informed of history.  The schools have failed. We study history for what it says about human nature.  And, yes, there is such a thing as human nature.  Many won’t recognize the errors of the present because they are unaware that we’ve committed the blunders many times before.  For instance, some of what today’s Right seems to be saying about the Ukraine War is an imitation of the rhetoric of the 60’s radical Left.  Jean Kirkpatrick, a longtime Democrat and a defector from the looming socialistic, neo-Marxist takeover of her party, spoke to the 1984 Republican Convention nominating Ronald Reagan for a second term (see below).  Her speech was a bold rejection of the “San Francisco Democrats” (Sound familiar?) and the Left’s “blame America First”.

Today, you’ll hear echoes of the same condemnable language of the 60’s radical Left coming from the likes of Donald Trump, Jordan Peterson, and their media apologists.

Trump introduced the Left’s oratory to the Right when he morphed the Left’s “blame America First” into “American First”.  His 2015-2016 bombast against the Bushes led to a harangue about “endless wars”, i.e., the War on Terror, almost identical to the Left’s complaint about the Vietnam War.  Trump made the chant of “America First” and its cousin “MAGA” into a reflex for isolationism, something ever-present in the GOP going back to 1940 and Lindbergh’s America First.  Don’t’ forget, implicit in “Make America Great Again” is the claim that we aren’t great, which for the Right is due to our decadence.  For the Left, we are censured as “exploiters”.  As decadent or “exploiters”, the Right has made common cause with Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda.

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Seemingly taking their cue from Trump in his odd admiration for Putin, some on the Right chide our support for Ukraine.  The culture war is used as the excuse to criticize support for Ukraine.  Tucker Carlson is scornful of the Zelenskyy government for its alleged autocratic tendencies; Laura Ingraham complains of our aid lost in purported Ukrainian corruption; and Jordan Peterson provides an alibi for Putin’s invasion as Putin fending of western decadence, a decadence resplendent in transgenderism.  He comes close to aligning with Putin and when confronted backs off.  The quote that got him into trouble was as follows:

“The culture war is now truly part of why we have a war [in Ukraine]. It is certainly the case that we do not therefore have all the moral high ground….  In fact, how much of it we have at all is something rightly subject to the most serious debate.”

In my view, transgenderism is a civilizational catastrophe, but to mingle it with Ukraine is sophistry.  That puts Putin as a defender of goodness and light.  If so, where does that put the CCP’s Xi?  After all, Xi is leading a campaign to stop the feminization of men.  Have you seen those PLA recruitment ads?  They’re nothing like those gushing rainbow LGBTQ+ ads by our Marine Corps.  Carlson, Ingraham, and Peterson would find themselves boxed into the corner of opposing US support for Taiwan against a Red Chinese invasion just to remain consistent.  What kind of world would we have if our decadence or any other domestic policy failing is a straitjacket on our ability to stop this generation’s fascist and communist aggressors?  Look to history for the answer.

Jean Kirkpatrick in 1984 outlines the stakes of a Trump/Carlson/Ingraham/Peterson foreign policy.  It’s the same one advanced by the “San Francisco Democrats”.  If you have 21 minutes, please listen to her riveting speech.  It’s the antidote to the bile in this new era of personality cults.

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Jean Kirkpatrick

RogerG

Sources:

*”Jordan Peterson claims Russia attacked Ukraine to stop the spread of ‘degenerate’ US culture wars. . .”, Daily Mail, July 12, 2022, at https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11005863/Jordan-Peterson-says-Russia-attacked-Ukraine-culture-wars-left-degenerate.html
*Transcripts of Jean Kirkpatrick’s speech to the 1984 Republican Convention at https://speakola.com/political/jeane-kirkpatrick-blame-america-first-gop-1984

We Are Stuck with the Democracy that We Have. The Result of Kansas Amendment 2 is Proof.

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Yard signs in Kansas regarding the upcoming vote on Amendment 2, August 2, 2022.

I’m reminded of the truism in military strategy of knowing your enemy.  In the arena of great policy debates, it takes the form of knowing and being able to summarize your opponent’s arguments.  Don’t expect such awareness among the general public.  They have neither the time nor inclination to do the homework.  More commonly, they have vague analogies and precepts in their heads to help them make sense of the world.  The origins of these ideas are unknown, just blindly accepted as fact, and for which they have adapted their lives around.  Thus, not knowing that these fuzzy ideas have a birthdate, it’s very hard to get the electorate to reverse a notion maybe born in their childhood but one that they have grown accustomed to.

We are simply stuck with the democracy that we have.

Yesterday, Kansas voters soundly rejected Amendment 2, an attempt to remove an earlier exercise of raw judicial power when the state’s high court wrote into the Kansas constitution something that isn’t there, namely the right to abortion.  “Raw judicial power”, yes!

That gets to the crux of the matter.  The general public is mostly unaware that the Kansas high court was egregiously out of their lane, actually to the point of deserving impeachment and removal from office.  They legislated from the bench, a habit taught to them by the Warren Court and its federal progeny.

Formerly, new rights, powers, and privileges were in the wheelhouse of our elected representatives, our legislators.  If you can’t get an idea past our elected representatives, well, that’s called a democratic republic.  Don’t run to black-robed jurists trained in the application of laws to make the laws for you on the fly.  That’s called autocracy.  Distinctions in the basic functions of government aren’t taught and, therefore, most people only have the experience of their limited experience to guide them.  Our instructional and informational organs have fallen flat on their face.

As a result, relatively new ideas – new in the sense of a lifespan of only a generation or two – have an extended grip for an understandably oblivious public. They do their duty, go to the polls, and express a discomfort in reversing something whose origin and basis is mostly unknown to them.

No, don’t mistake this for popular “wisdom”.  It’s always “wisdom” if your side wins.  It’s “racism” or some other scapegoat if your side loses.  Welcome to the airheads of The Squad and fans of Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Who is to blame?  Not the general public, for how can we expect them to exhibit a mental acuity that large groups have never shown before?  If you have a desire to point fingers, aim them in the direction of the media and schools, or maybe the proponents for not doing the necessary groundwork.

The media and schools have been particularly derelict.  Don’t expect your teacher or mediagenic news personality to patiently explain “raw judicial power”.  That would require knowing the existence of the first three articles of the US Constitution.  They establish three branches with their own lanes of competence: to legislate, to carry out the law, and to apply the law.  Today, the appliers now legislate, ergo “raw judicial power”.  How?  The propagandists of the imperial courts claim the law says something that it doesn’t.  Well, it doesn’t say it in clear words, they say, but the words that do exist can be stretched to cover what it doesn’t say.  Got it?

For those 17-year-olds taking US History, it’s called “The Living Constitution”, and in the high school where I did the bulk of my teaching, the textbook has an entire chapter devoted to it.  The “grooming” starts early.

No wonder people get attached to The Living Constitution.  Yet, opinion polls consistently show disapproval of its consequences.  How else can one get to racism as anti-racism from equal protection in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments?  How else can one get to defund the police, no-cash bail, non-prosecution of crimes, blanket early releases from prison, and filthy, homeless, dangerous, and drug-addled streets and parks?  How else can one codify in court opinions the newly minted wall of separation between gender and chromosomes?  And as a result, get masturbation, new ideas for playtime, and drag queens in elementary school and public libraries?  How else can sports designed for one set of chromosomes be destroyed by the forced acceptance of those with a different set?  How else can we get to Obama and Biden Justice Department letters threatening Title IX actions against schools who insist on keeping distinct bathrooms for each set of chromosomes?  Want your ten-year-old daughter to share a bathroom with a twelve-year-old XY “girl”?  The Living Constitution folks do.  The malformation of the Constitution knows no bounds.

It doesn’t stop there. Try to announce the obvious and you’ll face condemnation, maybe prosecution, disciplinary action, termination of employment, ostracism, and a life under the chronic threat of Twitter-hell.  There are dire consequences for speaking truth to . . . .

If we are ever to get back to law being law, and not just an utterance of the zeitgeist, people who are cognizant of the nonsense must stand up and work to correct the miseducation coming from our educrats and telegenic poseurs.  Strap on your waiters for this is going to be a long hard slog.

RogerG

Source:

Kansas rejects Amendment 2, which would have eliminated a right to abortion from the state constitution (msn.com)

The Yuck Factor in Modern Higher Education

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Ideology: noun; a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic, social, or political theory and policy.

Women’s studies, gender studies, and feminist anything are ideologies and not fields of learning, of scholarship.  If they were the subject of real academic inquiry, their premises would be critically examined and not accepted as preordained truths.  Dissemination of an ideology is propaganda and, if successful, indoctrination.  Welcome to the modern university . . . and the yuck factor.

Years ago, the writer Robert Caro produced a multi-part book series on the life of the 36th president, Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ).  I remember one literary critic after reviewing the book summing up the character of LBJ in one word, “Yuck!”

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This is my reaction to modern higher education as described in Princeton undergraduate Abigail Anthony’s account in National Review Online of the smothering prevalence of sexual ideologies on our college campuses, particularly the Ivy League.  As a high school teacher and Social Science Department chair, counselors and staff were beaming with pride when one of our seniors was accepted to one of the Ivy League schools.  After reading Anthony’s exposé, no one should be beaming.  Not only is “yuck” an appropriate descriptor for some important parts of the campus curriculum and intellectual climate but the acceptance letter should come with a warning label, “Parents Beware!”

And don’t think for a moment that warning should be limited to the Ivy league.  Notre Dame, the most famous Catholic college in America, has a Gender Studies Program to propagate the many ways to subvert Catholic doctrine.  The creed of the program is summarized on the school’s website: “Integrating learning and research with social change, Gender Studies identifies, examines, and challenges injustice, while imagining and creating better futures that serve the common good.”  See those words “social change” and “challenges injustice”?  They’re code for political activism, which means that the program’s central purpose is to create political followers of a particular political ideology, one whose premises are unexamined and accepted as truth, much like a new religion expunging an old one.  Go figure, an anti-Catholic Catholic University.

The Baptists have their own problem.  Baylor University, the largest Baptist institution in the world, not surprisingly has a Women’s and Gender Studies Program (WGS).  The camel’s nose of physical and self-professed identity being central to the search for truth and wisdom is clearly visible through the college’s tent flap.  The usual rhetorical markers of the ideology are littered throughout the program’s web page. On the program’s “About Us” page is this juicy tidbit: “The WGS program emphasizes the intellectual, artistic, political, social, economic, and spiritual contributions of women, which traditional scholarship long overlooked or denigrated.”  In addition, “WGS uses the lens of gender to extend this analysis to a broader range of issues, including the social and cultural meanings of masculinity, femininity, and identity construction.”  “The difference between gender and sex” and “The social construction of gender” are representative samples of “What you will learn”.  One prof is described as an expert in “feminist theology”.  Another colleague is presented as an expert in “feminist philosophy”.  Still another proudly proclaims her membership in Christians for Biblical Equality (CBE), a group with the Squad-simpatico mission statement that reads, “CBE’s mission is to eliminate the power imbalance between men and women resulting from theological patriarchy.”  This is the old Marxist oppressed/oppressor schtick under the guise of a “Christian” resumé.

Dr. Lisa Shaver opens the program by introducing the audience to Baylor University’s new minor in Women’s and Gender Studies. (Photo: Baylee VerSteeg | Multimedia Journalist)

If it is possible in places thought to be resistant to the fad thought, sectarian schools, what do you think is happening at your run-of-the-mill State U?  These college operatives don’t have to face the skeptical gazes of a hidebound board of regents, people who are more likely to believe that the Word of God is actually the Word of God.  The people running the show at your public colleges and universities are usually of the sort fully marinated in the junk thought.  Go to any public university website and look up “Women’s Studies” and “Gender Studies”.  Google it.  It’s more in your face and a cause célèbre (arousing widespread controversy, outside campaigning, and heated public debate).

At the Ivies, Anthony recounts the septic tank of the mind.  In alphabetical order, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, and Yale are littered with the usual litany of visiting lectures by drag queen (and Tufts University prof) LaWhore Vagistan;  the ubiquitous Centers for Women and Gender “to engage the campus community through a feminist praxis of activism and academics”; a variety of pornography courses with the usual hands-on (pun intended) applications; some version of Columbia’s student-led BDSM group, Conversio Virium; courses like Cornell’s Nightlife to understand “queer communities of color” and “interrogate the ways in which nightlife demonstrates the queer world-making potential that exists beyond the normative 9-5 capitalist model of production”; and Dartmouth’s religion department sponsoring “Dragmouth”, a drag show.  Get the picture?

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University of Oregon students in Pride parade on campus, 2018.

Parents, do you understand what your daughters and sons are about to get into?  A co-ed dorm filled with students immersed in pornography and BDSM?  How about a catalogue of offerings that confuse ideological indoctrination for scholarship?  They certainly will not be wiser after accruing $60,000 in student debt.  It might be better for them to forego the superficial prestige of a degree, avoid the debt anchor, pick up practical skills in the real world, and maybe later attend a real college with a real classical curriculum.  As one observer put it, Hillsdale can’t take everyone.

Young people, parents, steer clear of the yuck factor.

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RogerG

Sources:

*Abigail Anthony’s piece in National Review Online, https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/the-sexual-experiment-at-the-ivy-leagues/
*Notre Dame’s Gender Studies Program, https://genderstudies.nd.edu/
*Baylor University’s Women’s and Gender Studies Program, https://genderstudies.artsandsciences.baylor.edu/

America’s Ya’nan Rectification Campaign

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1986 became the pivotal year when American universities began the process of turning American’s young people into illiterates of their own national and cultural inheritance.  It was the year when political entrepreneurs like Jesse Jackson arrived on the Stanford University campus to chant “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture’s got to go.”  Their target was instruction in the western way of life, the cultural legacy of advanced science, personal liberty, intellectual enlightenment, Judeo-Christian spirituality, economic prosperity, and popular sovereignty.  Jackson and his student audience demanded to chuck it all.

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Jesse Jackson in 1980.
Jesse Jackson at Stanford University in 1986 joining in a protest against a western civilization curricular core at the school, famous for the chant, “Hey Hey, ho ho, western culture has to go”.

The 1980’s core requirement of a multi-quarter Western Culture curriculum for all students had replaced Western Civilization after the uproar against western civilization by 1960’s left radicals.  Shortly after Jackson’s appearance on campus, anything exclusively western would be expunged as a universal core requirement.  Eventually, the Stanford faculty senate replaced Western Culture with the nebulous Cultures, Ideas, and Values.  The signal for the ostracization of western civilization has since permeated everywhere down to the instruction given to the kindergartners of today.  Don’t dare place a mic before a college senior on spring break to describe the Constitution’s three branches of government.  You’ll get jibberish.

And look at what replaced it, for something did.  Nature hates a vacuum and so does the mind.  In crept a neo-Marxist self-loathing.  On the heels of the incessant assault on western culture and history came the full-throated “Rectification” program of the 2000’s that mirrors what Mao did in China, which started in Moa’s remote base of Ya’nan, Shaanxi province, in the 1940’s, and was called the Ya’ana Rectification Campaign.  It was a ghastly campaign that slaughtered an estimated 10,000 people before Mao was done.  It was Moa’s megalomania on parade.  Of interest here isn’t the bloodthirsty escapades, even though that’s bad enough.  It’s his methods of inculcating the incipient Marxist/Maoist mush.

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Mao in Ya’nan in 1939
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One of many public denunciations and humiliations during Mao’s Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. An example Mao’s earlier “rectification campaign”, only this one lasted 10 years and stretched across the whole country.

The isolation of groups by identity, the “struggle sessions”, the bizarre confessions, the identification of abstract enemies, the pounding indoctrination, and the denunciations goes beyond thought control and right into emotion control.  It’s sickening, and it’s replicated today.  Mao’s target at the time was the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), but for today’s revolutionaries, the entire society is the target.  Don’t worry, Mao got there quick enough.

Under the labels of “CRT”, “Critical Theory”, “Anti-racism Training”, “Understanding White Privilege”, etc., our modern revolutionary theorists are treating the minds of Americans up and down the social pyramid from classrooms to corporate boardrooms as clay.  Employees are subjected to Anti-racism training, essentially the works of revolutionary theorists such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin Deangelo.  The kiddies in their classrooms go through lessons that heap shame on them for their “whiteness”, and doubly so if they happen to be male.  The shaming of “heteronormativity” knows no bounds.  The victimology is relentless.  Watch as your kids know more about Belgian colonialism in the Congo than they do about the American founding or the Protestant Reformation.  How can young minds withstand the withering assault?

I say that they don’t.  They are befuddled as they are made ignorant of the West’s great gift of the probing mind that has ballooned the food supply, pulled millions out of living in the dirt, expanded the frontiers of medicine, pushed back disease, spread freedom of conscience, etc.  Software engineers’ “rectified” minds are as toxic to that legacy as anything described in Orwell’s “1984” or Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon”.

They have succeeded in importing Mao into America.  We are having our own Cultural Revolution and it will end in the same place: stunted minds and stunted lives.

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A crowd of protesters walk from the Capitol building to the White House during a protest against police brutality and racism in Washington, DC., June of 2020

Sources:
*The 1980’s abandonment of Western Civ at Stanford University: https://stanfordreview.org/the-case-for-a-western-civilization-requirement-at-stanford/
*The debate between Donald Kennedy, president of Stanford University, and William Bennett, Secretary of Education in 1988: https://archives.stanforddaily.com/1988/04/20?page=1