It’s election season so the truth goes into hiding. Want Proof? Watch the latest edition of the Democratic National Convention. Earlier, the GOP took their stab at forcing truth into exile at their confab, but they have the advantage of being out of power and not responsible for the donkey party’s forced death march of America to societal collapse. It accords the GOP a target rich environment, thanks to Democrat buffoonery. Yet, as it was said of the PLO’s Yassir Arafat, the elephant party will never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
Want proof? Look at their mad dash to nominate their weakest candidate to head the ticket, but even he has a decent shot at the brass ring given the hash that the Dems have made of the country. Making America look like California isn’t a good look. So, what do the Dems do? They distract our gaze to some shiny object – “bad Trump” – dress up misery as glory, and tar good sense as the return of Sauron. Case in point is the bombast directed at Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.
The Dems’ ideological soul mates in newsrooms are quick to paste “right-wing” all over it in dark, sinister overtones (see #2 below). But what is it? It isn’t a resurrection of the Spanish Inquisition, the return of Jim Crow or Dickensian workhouses as they would have you believe. A product of the Heritage Foundation, it’s what the group has been doing since their founding in 1973 as a counterpoint to the big-government consensus among elites from the New Deal to Nixon’s surrender to the progressive Leviathan-philosophy of government (wage/price controls, founding of the EPA, etc.). As such, they produced policy proposals with intellectual heft for a burgeoning conservatism that arose around William F. Buckley that ultimately led to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Think of them as one of a constellation of think tanks (CATO at times, American Enterprise Institute) making up the loyal opposition to the center-left’s Brookings Institution or the more stridently left-wing Center for American Progress.
Project 2025 has the same philosophical roots as the ideas dating back to Reagan’s ascendancy: tax cuts; deregulation; a return of deterrence; a rollback of Soviet expansionism; missile defense; real education, entitlement, and labor reform; etc. The same outlook is evident in Project 2025, but this time its suddenly and menacingly right-wing to the young babes in the newsrooms and on The View. Has Heritage moved further right, or our chattering classes further left? It’s the latter.
Project 2025 has much in common with the same outlook advanced by Heritage’s first president in 1973, Paul Weyrich. Today’s Left, however, are neo-Marxists. For them, FDR’s Keynesianism is passé. They have revolution in their sights by sanctioning a seizure of power to eradicate the evils of heteronormativity, white and male privilege, the traditional family, global warming, the rich, capitalism, and opposition to gender ideology, alongside their compulsion to shower benefits and favoritism on an ever-growing list of the “oppressed” (“To be an antiracist, you have to be a racist”, a paraphrase of Ibram X. Kendi of CRT fame).
Roosevelt’s New Dealers would be shocked to learn of the prevalent worldview among reporters occupying cubicles at places like the New York Times. The battles over pronouns and bathrooms and the smothering and now-habitual thought-smog of the Frankfurt School’s neo-Marxism – of the Marcuse/Foucault/Gramsci zeitgeist – would seem dismaying to the likes of Woodrow Wilson or New Dealers such as Harold Ickes, Cordell Hull, Adolph Berle, Jr., Harry Hopkins. No wonder that the consistency of Heritage appears so frightening to young cadres who’ve unknowingly jettisoned their liberal forebearers and are fully immersed in a revolution for which they have little understanding. They don’t realize how radical they’ve become.
Go read Project 2025 (see #1 below). It reads like much of the 1980 GOP platform, and that’s because it adheres to a set of universal and well-understood principles: keeping the federal government in the box of its critical and Constitutional responsibilities (protection and fostering comity among its citizens) and ensuring national safety and security abroad.
The Project’s first section is a call for elected officials to once again gain control of a sprawling and increasingly unaccountable bureaucracy. The thousands of federal civil service employees in DC, just below the appointed level, can act as a disloyal opposition thwarting an electorate’s control of their own government. Think of it, cozy relationships between reporters and civil servants result in leaks to obstruct policy initiatives. Just recently, anonymous worker bees signed an open letter opposing aid to Israel in the aftermath of a rabid, barbarically gruesome killing of 1,200 innocent Jews at the hands of a duly elected terrorist group in Gaza. The administrate state is partisan and all the efforts to insulate it from politics have only protected it from facing consequences for their partisan meddling.
The Wikipedia writer(s) castigate Project 2025 for pushing a “highly controversial” view of the unitary executive. No, it is they who have a “highly controversial” view. The mammoth Leviathan that is our modern administrative state is the unmentioned aspect of our Constitutional structure since the federal government took on powers absent from the Constitution (in Article I, Section 8, Cl. 1-18). This humungous entity is a power unto itself. The Wikipedia article is shameful.
The unitary executive isn’t some novel invention. It goes back to the founding (see #3 below). The 19th century’s civil service reforms (Pendleton Act, etc.) were meant to remove the corrupting influence of patronage, the approach to governance represented by Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall in New York City. Today, the threat comes not only from pay-to-play but from a partisan, activist base in the civil service, mostly in DC. The reformers never envisioned public employees becoming a political constituency, a voting bloc with an ability to supplant the wishes of voters across the nation in an election. If you want to “save our democracy”, how about making elections matter once more?
The rest of Heritage’s proposals range from rebuilding deterrence to ending the politicization of education, our health care, to a return to a free market/sound money economy. Vintage Reagan. Of course, the Left doesn’t like it. They never have. If implemented, Project 2025 would set the country up for a second Reaganite resurgence. The Left could be out of power till future generations forget what they did to the country in the second decade of the 21st century.
The only problem is, Republicans also show signs of forgetfulness and the corresponding need to obfuscate and lie about it. Trump is fond of saying, “I made China pay billions [in tariffs]”. No, he didn’t. His new taxes on imports were paid by American manufacturers and consumers.
Trump has a blinkered focus on the “trade deficit”. He, and most Dems, believe that they can politically engineer more American manufacturing and bring the “trade deficit” into balance or positive. For one, the “trade deficit” is only one computation in ascertaining the state of the economy. If you think about it, if a positive trade balance was such a great thing, all nations should pursue it. But if so, it’s an impossibility. Some have to be negative, but that doesn’t necessitate economic despair. That’s because the trade deficit is only one part of the account balance, which includes capital flows. Deficits in one lead to surpluses in the other. Trump and the Dems don’t think that deeply.
So, Trump sends the truth into exile, and that’s where people seem to like it. But if you want to know why manufacturing isn’t the big economic draw that it once was, we elected people for over a century who taxed and regulated the people who make physical goods nearly to death. The industries that subsequently ballooned were the ones that didn’t require them to run into the EPA, the Endangered Species Act(s), the plethora of land-use and environmental regulatory bodies at all levels that have sprouted across the fruited plain. Tech/financial services/communications firms are less likely to run into NIMBYs and greenie activists with activist attorneys to block and delay at every step of the way. Coding and an app can take place on a teenager’s laptop or a garage. Taxes advantage human capital (example: coders, analysts) and punish physical (example: machinery, factories). Manufacturers face adversarial unions who are protected by labor law. The mandates – paid leave, childcare, benefits, exotic interpretations of equity rules and laws – have pounded the dynamism out manufacturing (see #4 below).
Not a word out of Trump about any of this. He only wants to slap tariffs on foreigners. Without correcting any of the above, he’s just jacking up prices and subsidizing economic sloth. Lives don’t get better on the whole, opportunities for generations to come languish, and once again we get reintroduced to TINSTAFL: there is no such thing as a free lunch.
Right now, Americans love the lie, and our political mavens are happy to give it to us good and hard. Yep, it’s election season. The Great Bamboozle is in full swing.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Project 2025: “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise 2025” as a pdf at https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf
2. Wikipedia encapsulates the left’s reaction under their title “Project 2025”. No doubt, the article came from left-wing contributors. The rhetoric is jarringly of the left.
3. The notion of a unitary executive was explained by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 70. A summary of it can be found at the Bill of Rights Institute, “Federalist 70 Explained | Why Does the U.S. Have a Unitary Executive?”, at https://billofrightsinstitute.org/videos/federalist-70-explained-why-does-the-u-s-have-a-unitary-executive.
4. An explication of the disadvantages of manufacturing in America are presented in “What Washington Should Learn from Tech Companies”, Dominic Pino, National Review, August issue, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/08/what-washington-should-learn-from-tech-companies/.
(Schmuck: a foolish or contemptable person; origin in the Yiddish schmok, i.e. penis)
NIMBYs, schmucks
The chant “Save our democracy”, it’s flung like so many shotgun pellets at anyone viewed as an opponent. What about the people, the people doing the flinging? The reality is that we have more “democracy” than ever before, and the dissatisfaction with our plight has never been greater. How does that compute: more democracy equals more discontent? Can the collective, also known as “the people”, act in the manner of schmucks, harming themselves? Democracy, schmuckocracy?
The level of discontent is palpable in polls. Here’s one: Gallup’s recent survey of public confidence in major institutions ranging from the governmental to the social and economic, public and private (see #1 and #2 below). 11 of the 16 measured entities experienced declines; not one turned in a sterling performance. Much of the public’s lackluster assessment of our institutions can be attributed to their current conduct. Biden’s infirmity, an engineered chaos at the border, the embarrassing bugout from Kabul, the highly destructive endeavor to shut down nearly all human activity during a viral episode, inflation, the unaffordability of shelter, the unaffordability of energy, crime, nothing seems to work, boys in girls’ locker rooms and bathrooms, etc., goes a long way to heaping scorn on government, on “our democracy”, on any of our institutions that had a hand in the degeneracy.
eople running alongside a U.S. Air Force C-17 transport plane as it moved down a runway of the international airport, in Kabul, Afghanistan, in August, in 2021. (photo: Associated Press)An alleged transgender boxer consoles Italian boxer who quit after 46 seconds in Olympic female boxing match.
It doesn’t end there. Many private ones – “big business”, big tech, the media – get slammed, and maybe deservedly so.
The Supreme Court takes a hit as well. That might be due to another feature of a democracy: the people’s tendency to be acclimated to bunk. Since 1973 when the Court imperiously invented a provision in the Constitution that established a national right to take unborn life, “the people” grew accustomed to it. A 51-year odyssey ensued to do it. So, by today, people crave their newly minted national license to end the life of people who haven’t exited the womb. The Court’s Dobbs decision just struck the word “national” from the license, not the license itself. But don’t expect “the people” to understand such subtlety.
Combine this with the habit of the public to be persuaded by jargon, such as “assault rifle”, and therefore unwittingly consign the Second Amendment to the mercy of demagogues, and we have another journey down Alice’s rabbit hole. The Constitution stands in the way of the passion of the moment so “the people” turn on it and the Court in demanding a shortcut around the cumbersome task of properly amending it. Understanding isn’t a feature of the mob, which sadly is another trait of democracy.
We’ve injected so much unrestrained democracy into our system that our founders’ original design seems strange to anyone born after the Great Depression. Reading the Constitution must seem like a bizarre experience for a population raised on a steady diet of democracy this and democracy that. An example would be the abuse heaped on the Electoral College. Once a powerful faction loses the presidency by it, but wins the popular vote, they agitate to dismantle it and make the head of the executive branch conform to the wishes of the crowds on the two coasts and every urban center with a college campus. It’s not enough that a form of direct democracy is the operative principle of the lower house of Congress in the Constitution. The will of the mob must be made to dominate throughout.
Lest we forget, checking democracy and its mobs was an important goal of the founders. Here’s a sampling of their views:
“Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death.” – James Madison
“It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.” – Alexander Hamilton
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” – John Adams
“It is one of the evils of democratical governments, that the people, not always seeing and frequently misled, must often feel before they can act.” – George Washington
There was never a more searing indictment of democracy than that of Ambrose Bierce when he wrote toward the end of the 19th century, “Democracy is four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.”
“The people” aren’t cognizant of our already mammoth strides away from the founders’ restraints on the lustful will of “the people”. Even for the House of Representatives, that bastion of the popular will in the original framing, a state’s representation became determined by single-district direct elections and not by the state legislatures by the late 19th to early 20th centuries. That was only the beginning of the state legislatures’ attempt to neuter themselves in a mad dash away the founders’ wisdom.
The state legislatures were further taken out of the picture with the 17th Amendment: the direct election of senators. They would no longer have any say in the selection of the state’s two senators. Then came the initiative, referendum, and recall – “the people” make law, reject law, and reverse elections. These ideas were championed by 19th century progressives who were more intent on removing the obstacles to their rise to power. Smoke-filled back rooms were replaced by the big-government, neo-Marxist lunatics of the faculty lounge, the so-called “experts”, the constituency of our modern progressive gang, the people mostly responsible for our discontents when you think about it.
In the irony of all ironies, like the state legislatures, “the people” chose people who then took strides to remove “the people” from self-government, and thus enunciated the rise of the massive and unaccountable administrative state. This new Leviathan can make law (regulations), execute their law, and adjudicate on their law without much input of an electorate. Where’s the democracy? It’s here: “the people” elect progressives, and continue to elect progressives particularly in the populous blue jurisdictions, who then heap more layers on the mountainous administrative state like the many bands piling upward in a mature stratovolcano.
No wonder we’re in a hell of a mess. Pressure will build, and it’ll blow like a proverbial Vesuvius, but make sure that you’re not in the path of the political pyroclastic flow that follows. In 2020, a cop-beating video clip went viral and progressives seized the opportunity to dismantle law enforcement, elect DAs who won’t prosecute, decriminalize criminality, riots erupted, people and property were torched, and many cities descend into the dysfunction and lawlessness where they lie today. The only real export of LA and New York City are people as they flee the pyroclastic flow.
Seattle police at scene of riots in 2020 (photo: KOMO News, Seattle)Seattle the day after the occupation by so-called anarchists and Antifa, 2020 (photo: KTTH 770, Seattle)
One word describes the hidden potential of the “our democracy” chant: California. The taxes, the crime, the sordidness, the inner-city dysfunction, and the pervading sense of overall decay envelop the state and its “democracy”. “The people” in the state chose it, and continue to choose it. California’s “our democracy” is a Democratic one-party state.
Unfortunately, the state’s Democratic Party dominates the national Democratic Party. The socialism of the state’s ruling Dems is the guiding philosophy of the national Dems. The state’s Dems wreck the state’s economy and the national Dems work to imitate the wreckage everywhere else. Quite a tag-team duo.
The state’s Dems lay waste to social life in making a mockery of nature’s male and female. Boys rhetorically become girls and the next thing we see is that they’re in the girls’ locker rooms, bathrooms, and on their swim, track, volleyball teams, etc. The state’s public schools are required to disseminate the gender confusion in the curriculum. Taking his cues from California, Biden announces changes to Title IX of the Civil Rights Act to include the transgendered as a protected class thereby codifying rhetorical girls and boys into everywhere (see #3 below).
The not-so-golden state’s administrative state is imperial thanks to the ruling party’s zeal for upending an entire way of life in a senseless and manic effort to modulate the earth’s atmosphere. That’s right, one state of 39 million people (and declining) is gung-ho about sacrificing its people’s standard of living on the altar of climate-change ideology, acting like they hold the thermostat to the global atmosphere. They’d like to take the suicide attempt national, and Biden is accommodating. In May of this year, the EPA issued new power plant regulations that’ll function as a death warrant to reliable, affordable electricity by mandating expensive efforts (carbon capture, etc.) to reduce emissions in fossil fuel plants (see #4-6 below). It’s death by regulation, parroting California’s lunacy, and Europe’s. However, Europe backed away, not so for the zealots in California and D.C.
Do “the people’s” government in America care? Do “the people” even have enough of a pulse to care? As for the first question, no, they don’t care a lick about your plight. As for the second, no sé. These activists in power are true-believers, with all the heart of a Bergen-Belsen commandant. They are coming to get more than your sedan. They sneer at your air conditioner, which is a lifesaver for anyone not living in Malibu (see #7 below). This is totalitarianism pure and simple. Like a rabid Marxist, their ultimate goal is to reengineer humanity, making the new man, woman, whatever. You’ll be forced to live in the world that they have created for you. And, like previous crusades for heaven on earth, it’ll be the opposite.
Watch as we relive the travel from hubris to nemesis in Greek tragedy. The hubris hides ignorance and arrogance which leads to the disaster of nemesis. Welcome to the base of the Democratic Party and the EPA.
We are living the nemesis that arose out of the hubristic arrogance and ignorance of a clan of firebrands, firebrands that we elected. Don’t like Trump, voted for Biden, maybe vote for Harris in 2024? Reality sets in: you avoid the ogre but get the greenie neo-Marxists and ruination.
Both sides decry the escalating cost of housing, the loss of the “American dream”. The problem can’t be laid at the feet of high interest rates or inflation since it predated Biden’s spiking of the money supply in trillions of new spending. No, speaking of supply, it’s a supply problem. It’s been building for decades. Look around you and you’ll hear hostility to housing construction: “The new people crowd my streets and schools”; “I’ve lost my small town”; “The new developments spoiled the scenery; they’re ugly”; “It’s destroying my property values”; “My property taxes have jumped to pay for their infrastructure and public services.” Who’s there to speak for the young’s access to the “American dream”? Nobody. The only ones filling the hearing rooms and filing the lawsuits are NIMBYs galore and eco-revolutionaries.
This method of governance was pioneered by California. Growth control incubated in northern California (Petaluma, 1961). In that instance, “the people” elected county and city officials to freeze in amber the “character” of the place. What do you think happened to the housing supply? Regulations and delays only added to the cost of whatever survives the local gauntlet.
In fact, the brutal gauntlet was extended. “The people” of California gave to the world the California Coastal Commission (CCC) in approving Prop 20 in 1972, providing more avenues to block, impede, and knock out new housing, or make it so expensive that nobody in their right mind would want to pour a foundation in the “coastal zone”, which is another one of those politically fungible concepts that prove useful to all eco-utopians and would-be social engineers statewide.
The CCC is one of many regulatory behemoths that “the people” of the state have created with their own hand in propositions or through their elected representatives to make it difficult to get the nod to nail two studs together. Eco-obsessions reign supreme. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) is the mother of all hoops to jump. It empowers the California Department of Fish and Game, the various Air Quality Management Districts, anything conservation oriented, anything eco-utopian, who can only be pacified by project defeat, endless delays, and burdensome costs. It’s a veritable goat rope.
In a microcosm of the state’s protracted assault on housing, a small 4-lot housing development in Los Osos, San Louis Obispo County, was approved as per the state and the CCC-ratified Local Coastal Program (LCP) of the county. Later, the CCC discovered a sand dune on the property, declared it to be in an Environmentally Sensitive Habitat Area (ESHA), and repealed the permits (see #8 below). The developers are fighting back in the California Supreme Court. I’m pessimistic because the state’s courts reflect the longstanding and overweening one-party state.
Gauntlets bedevil the entire state. It’s so prevalent, according to the California Association of Realtor’s (C.A.R.) Housing Affordability Index, only one in five home buyers can afford a median-priced house in the state (see #9 below). According to Zillow, of those prospective home buyers, 70% are married and 44% have children (see #10 below). Where do the underhoused with kids go instead of just another rental in a cramped apartment complex? Good question. Possibly, a U-Haul barreling east on Interstate 10 might be their best option.
But do the powerful really care? Do they understand supply and demand or possess even a rudimentary grasp of trade-offs? Eco-purity is expensive, very expensive. So-called saving the coastal zone or preserving the habitat of the blunt-nosed leopard lizard, the gnat catcher, kangaroo rat, mountain lion, or whatever happens to dance across the screen of the hawkers of biodiversity, comes at the price of more than a house or rent. The price tag shows as lost opportunities for the young and generations to come. Their “American dream” will be stillborn. But who shows up at the hearings or has an army of “public interest” law firms ready to file suit in court? It’s the current homeowner who already has their slice of the dream and the eco-zealot who doesn’t care about the dream and would be quite happy with a repeal of the Industrial Revolution and upward mobility. They’d be overjoyed with the return of the Middle Ages.
All of this can be traced back to “the people”, to “our democracy”, to the four wolves deciding the fate of the lamb. The people chose societal collapse. It didn’t magically appear out of the ether. And it shows in the names on the ballot. The parties gave them to us, or, more accurately, the party bases. The political parties are more democratic than ever before, and their choices are miserable for anyone outside the “bases”. For that is what democracy led to: the rise of the “base”. Think of the “base” as a mob, an assemblage animated by jive. For the Democrats, they’re enraptured by Marx and his ideological cousins in the Frankfurt School and faculty lounges everywhere. All of this is unstated, mostly unknown to them since their beliefs never came with source footnotes. They deny it while implementing it. Anybody reaching the top of their slimy pole must sacrifice their good sense at the altar of the base’s groupthink.
Prominent Marxists – “critical theorists” (CRT, being woke) – of the Frankfurt School, who would be influential in the West. From top-left; Oskar Negt, Jurgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Claus Offe
The Republicans have discovered their own inner mob, or “base”. It’s a cult around Donald J. Trump. People were right to admire his policy successes but they were a product of Reaganism and not anything that might be construed as Trumpism. Social conservatives and free marketeers populated his administration giving the country border control, tax cuts, deterrence, a burgeoning economy, and a Supreme Court that acts like a court and not a legislature – the very essence of Reaganism.
The socialist Bernie Sanders in 2020AOC and powerful Dems announcing their Green New DealMAGA from 2023 (?)
What would a second Trump term bring? I suspect that it’ll be more like Trump and less like Reagan. In economic policy, he’ll pursue his own form of central planning which is called industrial policy with a flurry of tariffs and taxpayer-funded benefits to his own favorites. Right-to-work – freedom from coerced unionization – may take a back seat in a bid for the union vote. Trade protectionism will be combined with a new isolationism, which is nothing more than America alone. We might even see an abandonment of Ukraine. Would any of this be popular among the general public? It’s hard to say, but it sells with the “base”.
How did we get saddled with an inevitable neo-Marxist and Donald Trump when both are detested? Trump in a good week never rises above the upper 40’s in his favorability. The popularity of the Dems’ neo-Marxism is hard to gauge since it’s never exposed as such. People probably wouldn’t embrace the public pronouncements of Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party platform if saw the line-by-line plagiarism from the writings of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School or the eugenics of Margaret Sanger.
As of today (8/3/2024), Trump’s favorability stands at 43.3% and is viewed unfavorably by a whopping 51.7% (according to FiveThirtyEight, see #10 below). He’s a consistent stinker. In the same poll aggregation, Kamala Harris’s standing isn’t much better with 42.4 favorable and 49.1% unfavorable. She’s about the same in the pungency factor, even with a honeymoon of media praise, near worship, after her rise to donkey-party heir apparent.
The Dems’ neo-Marxism and its espousal by its candidates is joined by the GOP’s transformation into a personality cult. For both parties, it’s the culmination of a century and a half of the democratization of their operations, and like the injection of direct democracy into more of our politics, dissatisfaction increases with the results.
Political extremists love the democracy rhetoric, aiming to recreate the Paris mob of the French Revolution. Late 19th century progressives – many of whom were socialists (ex.: John Dewey) – pushed for the direct primary to replace party caucuses. Primaries to choose delegates became routine starting in the 1970s for the Democrats and 1980s for the GOP. It resulted in mass fealty to a person or to a groupthink among the base, thus the rise of the Dems’ Bernie Bros and the woke and the Republicans’ MAGA (see #11 below), with a corresponding rise in public disillusionment.
Democratization means rule by the base, not by the franchise. Interparty rivalries get stamped out by a normally radical groupthink that captures the imagination of the party’s activist base. For Dems, the groupthink is an enthusiasm for a campaign to ferret out white/heteronormative/male privilege, to expand the unacknowledged footprint of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School’s principal creed. They’ll hide it because they have to. The stench of the “socialist” label still pervades.
It’s so widespread that party big wheels – long-in-the-tooth politicos and big donors – had to step into the breech in 2020 to sidestep the frenzy for the Bernie Bros by resurrecting the doddering Biden, and later to swap the infirmed Biden for the younger-but-babbling Kamala Harris. At least the Democrats have some adult guardrails which is a backhanded admission that too much democracy can get you into trouble.
Guardrails don’t seem evident in the GOP. Trump romped from primary to primary despite the fact that he’s the weakest candidate in a general election matchup. Trump is popular with the base, unpopular to the those outside of it. An infirm Biden managed to keep it close with Trump, and now the dullard Kamala Harris has drawn even with the man from Mar-a-Lago. Ironically, with Trump in the picture, execrable socialism is still in play, thanks to mob rule in both parties and a broad apathy compounded by ignorance.
It must be hard to admit that schmucks exist in more places than among elites. Look around you, maybe take a long hard look in the mirror. Me too! More direct democracy exposed the likelihood that schmucks have a broader presence than we’ve been willing to admit. Party bases can be full of them. The general public too. “The people” can desire things that they ought not get. The demands of half-witted utopians and adults who’ve already got theirs trample the prospects of the young and those yet to be born. The adults of today confiscate the opportunities of those too young to vote and future generations.
It’s disgusting, and brought to you by . . . democracy. Democracy, schmuckocracy.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Historically Low Faith in U.S. Institutions Continues”, Lydia Saad, Gallup, 7/6/2024, at https://news.gallup.com/poll/508169/historically-low-faith-institutions-continues.aspx
2. “Confidence in U.S. Institutions Down; Average at New Low”, Jeffrey M. Jones, Gallup, 7/5/2024, at https://news.gallup.com/poll/394283/confidence-institutions-down-average-new-low.aspx
3. “Biden Administration: Title IX Protections Extend to Transgender Students”, Lauren Camera, US News and World Report, 6/16/2021, at https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2021-06-16/biden-administration-title-ix-protections-extend-to-transgender-students
4. “Greenhouse Gas Standards and Guidelines for Fossil Fuel-Fired Power Plants”, EPA, at https://www.epa.gov/stationary-sources-air-pollution/greenhouse-gas-standards-and-guidelines-fossil-fuel-fired-power
5. “4 Things to Know About US EPA’s New Power Plant Rules”, Dan Lashof, Lori Bird, and Jennifer Rennicks, World Resources Institute, 5/3/2024, at https://www.wri.org/insights/epa-power-plant-rules-explained
6. Much thanks to Gordon Hughes of the National Center for Energy Analytics in “The EPA’s Proposals for Power Plants Satisfy the Definition of Insanity”, National Review, 5/13/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/the-epas-proposals-for-power-plants-satisfy-the-definition-of-insanity/
7. “It’s time to rethink air conditioning”, Rebecca Leber, Vox, 8/26/2021, at https://www.vox.com/22638093/air-conditioning-worsens-climate-change-ac
8. “California Coastal Commission unlawfully blocks home construction”, Pacific Legal Foundation, describing their lawsuit against the CCC in Shear Development Co., LLC v. California Coastal Commission, at https://pacificlegal.org/case/shear-california-coastal-commission/
9. “2nd Quarter California housing affordability”, California Association of Realtors, 8/11/2023, at https://www.car.org/en/aboutus/mediacenter/newsreleases/2023-News-Releases/2qtr2023hai#:~:text=Fewer%20than%20one%20in%20five%20%2816%20percent%29%20home,according%20to%20C.A.R.%E2%80%99s%20Traditional%20Housing%20Affordability%20Index%20%28HAI%29.
10. FiveThirtyEight’s Aug. 3, 2024 poll aggregation at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump/
11. “10.1 History of American Political Parties”, Open Library, at https://open.lib.umn.edu/americangovernment/chapter/10-1-history-of-american-political-parties/
California Governor Gavin NewsomA big crowd was on hand when the Murrieta Valley Unified School District board voted last August to mandate that parents be told if their child shows any indication at school of being transgender. (photo: Mallika Seshadri / EdSource)
*Please tune into the recent Radio Free California podcast, “Least Mode” (available on Spotify), particularly the second half which is a discussion between Lance Christensen of the California Policy Center (CPC), and past candidate for Superintendent of Public Instruction, and Julie Hamill, CPC attorney and parent. It should scare your socks off. It should be required listening for anyone with children or grandchildren in the state’s schools.
*************
The popularly elected governor, Gavin Newsome, and the popularly elected Democrat super majority in the state legislature passed and the governor signed AB 1955, maliciously misnamed the “The Safety Act” (see #1 below). It would require student “privacy” protections against their parents. The law requires school officials and teachers to hide gender identity issues from parents at the behest of minors. Call it a right to lie to parents. Combined with the curricular California Healthy Youth Act (CHYA), which inducts your kids into gender ideology (see #2 below), you will be in for a hell of a ride. And after indoctrination, you will know nothing about it if it produces the likely effect of gender confusion in tweens and teens already going through the tumult of puberty.
These kids are the most vulnerable, and the state of California is the chief abettor, or maybe chief molester is more appropriate. The ruling party will cast the issue in a number of humanitarian ways, but the result is the same. You are frozen out when you drop your kid off at the bus stop or school. A U-Haul may be your only way out of the grip of the public employee unions, LGBTQ+ brigades, and the popular infatuation with lefty ideology which actually runs the state. A spine to stand up to these miscreants is in short supply in the state.
Get out, get out now! Voting is inconsequential. Your only hope is to escape your popularly elected officials by appealing to someone with greater sense, someone beyond the state’s electorate – say, the federal courts. Good luck with that, with the Biden claque running interference for the state-sponsored mutilators. So much for the beauties of democracy.
What beauty is there in scarred chests and genitalia?
If you care about your kids, if you don’t relish a lifetime of surgeries, pharmaceuticals, and medical interventions for your kids, get out, get out now! I don’t know what else to say.
Please watch the report below.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Newsom signs bill banning schools from notifying parents about student gender identity”, Mackenzie Mays, LA Times, 7/15/2024, at https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-07-15/newsom-bans-schools-from-requiring-that-parents-are-notified-about-student-gender-identity
2. “Comprehensive Sexual Health & HIV/AIDS Instruction: California Healthy Youth Act”, California Department of Education, at https://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/he/se/
Homeschoolers be warned that a politicized science in politicized journals like Scientific American is gunning for you.
If you believe that science hasn’t been corrupted by a political ideology, that it is value-neutral, you are naïve and grossly ill-informed. I invite anyone to go over to the Scientific American website (www.scientificamerican.com) and peruse their links to “Pressroom” for editor bios and “The Editors” for their stories (see #1 and #2 below). The bios read like missionaries of the progressive blob. The editors’ stories aren’t pure science but a monotonous drumbeat for greater central government power, the poker tell of progressivism. These are people who are impertinent enough to claim to represent science in America. Whew, what a mess.
Managing editor Jeanne Bryner encapsulates progressivism’s pretensions in her bio which includes the line “. . . just about everything can be viewed through the lens of science.” “Just about everything” might be the escape hatch from her half-witted flight of fancy. It should be clear to anyone with an ounce of adult-level awareness that moral judgments frequently evade the calculus of the lab. Science could devise an effective means to terminate unborn life, and has (for instance, the abortion pill of mifepristone and misoprostol), but it can’t say squat about whether we ought to. These people hitch “science” to their ideological commitments, such as the charge that we have too many people, and even add numbers, but that’s just quantifying an unquantifiable belief and calling it science.
Politicized science in Scientific American, June 2022 issue
The editors of Scientific American exude progressive conceit. Read their backgrounds; it’s something that they’ve been imbibing since their formative years, whose lifestyle reinforces. Degrees in fields that are hotbeds of left-wing activism are common. Environmentalism appears to be a substitute religion. Many have degreed specialties in journalism. Typical of ideological zealots, no serious consideration of trade-offs plays a prominent role in their thinking. How much of their production is real science, and how much of their “science” is curated through experiences in certain ideologically infected college disciplines, lifestyle preferences, and the prevalent proclivities of their demography (female, college, many single, urban white collar)? Mull over that for awhile.
Editor in Chief Laura Helmuth is straight from liberal-left central casting. Rummaging through her background discloses a propensity for hijacking “the science” for progressive, left-wing causes. The magazine endorsed Joe Biden in 2020 in a decision that was “both unanimous and quick”, citing the sins of the Trump administration to her brand of “science”.
Laura Helmuth, Editor in Chief
Her “science” is the science of the progressive zealot. Her mind is as closed as a steel trap. I doubt that the writings of researchers in design theory (evidence of a Designer in the cosmos and nature), like the work of the Discovery Institute, would ever be allowed to grace the pages of the magazine. If you’re cool to climate-change jeremiads, don’t expect a call to be a contributor. Under her leadership, Scientific American is in competition with Mother Jones for the same audience. See Helmuth’s Wikipedia page.
Progressivism lies at the foundation of editorial decisions. So, what is it? Progressivism is a ticket to power for people like Helmuth. Going back to the late 19th century, progressives fell in love with “experts”, people like them, people of the appropriate cultural accoutrements like years spent inside classrooms. They worship at the altar of credentials, degrees, and what not. And these college matriculants are said to be deserving of power to lead the population to the promised land. Little things like the Constitution, separation of powers, federalism, the subsidiary principle (localism), rule of law, and popular sovereignty shouldn’t be allowed to spoil the march to the rule of the administrative state.
That’s where we find the editors of Scientific American in their progressive jihad against homeschooling (see #3 below). They complain about the absence of uniform standards for such independent practitioners (parents) and their charges (their children), who are the rebels to their leadership. Of course, the “expert’s” uniform standards will be those that emanate out of the left-infected schools of education and the vile teachers’ unions and into the commissariat of the federal Department of Education and its policies and regulations. Once announced, they become the excuse for a power grab away from parents.
Nothing is worse for the progressive than a bunch of parents making their own choices independent of the “expert’s” set of coercible rules. They treat the population as cattle to be herded.
For example, these “experts” in the editors’ piece lamented the “pushback” of parents in Michigan against the experts’ much-loved registry of homeschooling parents and their children. Sounds like the registry of Jews of a bygone era. Their contempt for the “pushback” is actually a disdain for citizen involvement, something de Tocqueville praised but upsetting to the gurus of Scientific American. They stooped so low as to resort to child abuse to rationalize a diminishment of parental rights. It’s disgusting. If abuse occurred in one home, it is assumed to be characteristic of all parents who teach their own children, or why else bring it up?
Jews in Nazi concentration camps were tattooed with serial numbers for registration.
Here we have “experts” wallowing in the logical fallacy of composition – “if something is true for the part then that is true for the whole or the group too” (see #7 below). An abusing parent who isolates their kid is transformed into being a defining characteristic of homeschooling. This isn’t “science”. It’s something out of the Joseph Goebbels playbook.
The same stance of this we-know-what’s-best-for-your-kids crowd is the pretext for sidelining parents regarding “Transgender and Gender-Nonconforming” children as soon as the kids are dropped into the clutches of school employees. California is the Valhalla of this political sect masquerading behind a mask of “science”.
A huge leap in deplatforming California parents in the upbringing of their own children was promulgated in 2017 in the California Department of Education’s notorious Administrative Regulation 5145.3 (see #5 below). Under the guise of “Nondiscrimination/Harassment”, the young “gender-nonconforming” are accorded unique privacy rights not granted to any other student. The policy puts the child in the parental seat. If the child wishes it so, school employees are obligated to lie or withhold information from parents on their child’s condition. The kid may be transitioning with the assistance of school employees and the parents are kept in the dark. Needless to say, some locally elected school boards are resisting (Chino and Rocklin for instance) while the jackbooted California AG, Rob Bonta, responds with lawsuits to compel compliance.
Up to now, Bonta has succeeded. He even managed to sideline a parent initiative to codify the right of parents to be informed by using his power to title and summarize the proposition as “anti-gay” (all described in a prior post). A California judge bowed to Bonta when the parents sued. That put a stop to signature gathering. Parents of California, this, combined with the strangulation of other educational avenues in the state (charters, private and religious schools, homeschooling) may leave you with no other option but to leave the state to save your kids from permanent mental and physical scarring.
Detransitioner. Charlie Evans has set-up a charity to help people in the transgender community who want to stop or reverse their decision (photo: Stuart Nicol)Helena Kerschner before detransitioning and after
The only child abuse may be choosing to remain in the state.
It is heartening to know that the Supreme Court is putting a break on this stampede to the rule of the unelected “expert” – the kind of person utterly adored by the editors of Scientific American. At the federal level, the decision of the Court majority in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo put to rest the power grab of administrative agencies in areas not supported by law. See, such agencies can only operate within the clear parameters of an underwriting law, if one still considers the Constitution operative. If the law is silent or vague, they can’t freewheel it. Congress must clarify or not. If not, regulators aren’t free to legislate. They’re stuck, not us.
Since the 1920s, the Court has upheld parental rights under the 14th Amendment (with a muddled modification in Troxel v. Granville of 2000, see #6 below). Loper Bright drew a bold line for federal authorities, but has little impact on states whose electorates are infatuated with regulators, even if it means making the kids the sovereigns of their own upbringing under the guidance of empowered “experts”, even if it results in a compelled recognition of your daughter as now your son.
The people running Scientific American are typical of the educated “idle hands” class (in the words of philosopher Roger Scruton). In other words, people imprisoned in the Disneyland of their own mind. Don’t trouble them with reality. They have idled away their time in fantasizing about the many ways to be ludicrous.
As with children, so it is true with many of the college educated: idle hands are the devil’s playthings (Benjamin Franklin). The devil is playing around in the “science” of Scientific American.
RogerG
Sources:
1. The Editors of Scientific American in “Pressroom” at https://www.scientificamerican.com/pressroom/
2. Scientific American editors’ stories in “Stories of the Editors” at https://www.scientificamerican.com/author/the-editors/
3. “Children Deserve Uniform Standards in Homeschooling”, The Editors, Scientific American, 5/14/2024, at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/children-deserve-uniform-standards-in-homeschooling/
4. Thanks to James Mason of the Home School Legal Defense Association in “Why Is Scientific American Going After Homeschooling?”, National Review, 7/5/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/07/why-is-scientific-american-going-after-homeschooling/
5. California AR 5145.3, imposed on all school districts in the state, can be read at https://simivalley.granicus.com/MetaViewer.php?view_id=7&clip_id=1953&meta_id=123825. This is Simi Valley USD’s version of it. Scroll down to page 8 and the section “Transgender and Gender-Nonconforming”.
6. “The Supreme Court’s Parental Rights Doctrine”, parentalrigts.org, at https://parentalrights.org/understand_the_issue/supreme-court/
7. “Fallacy of Composition – Definition and Examples” in Logical Fallacy at https://www.logical-fallacy.com/articles/fallacy-of-composition/
Illustration from Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes”
Biden’s decline is part of a massive swindle, at once intentional and in other ways stupefyingly unintentional, and involves much more than a single person’s descent into senility. We are constantly confronted with demands to believe in the unbelievable. Many of us do. It’s as if we want to be swindled. It’s become routine, and we are shocked when the list of unbelievabilities turns out to be, just that, falsehoods and fiascos.
Of course, the story begins with the revelation of the not-so-revelatory story of Biden’s mental deterioration. It should have been clear to anyone observing Biden’s 2020 “basement” campaign. It succeeded. We elected a basement president. In that protracted war room of the left, which is composed of the natural alliance of the legacy media and the Democratic Party, all of a sudden it’s now safe to say that the president is a cognitive mess.
President Biden from the 6/27 debateMore of our president
They even admit that they buried the story and knew for quite some time. The leader of Biden’s praetorian guard, Ron Klain, only feeds the news in the President’s Daily Briefing that won’t trigger explosions of anger in the president. According to Politico, dealing with Biden is like coping with an unstable mental patient (see #1 and #2 below):
“It’s like, ‘You can’t include that, that will set him off,’ or ‘Put that in, he likes that,’” said one senior administration official. “It’s a Rorschach test, not a briefing. Because he is not a pleasant person to be around when he’s being briefed. It’s very difficult, and people are scared s***less of him.”
The dean of the left’s war room, the Washington Post’s Carl Bernstein, spilled the beans. On CNN he divulged (see #3 below),
“[Thursday’s debate] is not a one off, that there have been 15, 20 occasions in the last year and a half when the president has appeared somewhat as he did in that horror show that we witnessed [the debate].”
Those around Biden knew and the media’s co-conspirators knew. They gaslighted us, till 50 million people tuned in last Thursday night (6/27) and saw the glaring reality. Shame on them, and shame on many of us for our willingness to keep Biden in the game. Actually, get real, they’re torturing the poor guy.
It doesn’t end there. There’s a popular belief in the government’s ability to rescue us from all of life’s travails. Speaking of the belief in the unbelievable. Why is it that no one will mention the looming catastrophes of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid? Not Trump, not anybody. If you do, the left’s war room will descend on you like a flock of buzzards. The programs were built with a design flaw: demographics. Increasing numbers of old folks will clash with proportionally fewer working young folks. Taxes going in don’t cover benefits going out, and the national debt continues to balloon. This won’t end well. It never does. The root of it is our preference for the unbelievable.
Let’s move on to the pandemic and our misplaced faith in government employees in the administrative state. Doctors all, and, as it turned out, not to be trusted.
Look at what they gave us. You’ll still see people masking themselves in public when before the triumvirate of Fauci/Collins/Birx rose to prominence, they wouldn’t dream of it. The new paralyzing fear of the simplest public engagement is combined with children still trying to cognitively and developmentally recover from the isolation of Zoomed screens and closed playgrounds. The rush to forcibly vaccinate all of humanity came with a suffocation of the production of therapeutics even as the virus mutated and continued to spread. They even tried to blot out the ingrained human tendency to produce for oneself and family. It was an assault on our very nature. The waterboarding of society lasted longer in blue states, those places with a particularly gripping faith in government “experts”. We’re still living with the consequences in endemic inflation and a stubbornly low labor participation rate.
Who would have thought that they could destroy what makes us human? They tried really hard.
Our stunted nature is evident in a whole line of other unbelievabilities. How did we ever get to the point of assassinating our standard of living in the eco-fantasies of “sustainability” in the span of a decade? Somehow, energy density no longer mattered. Physics no longer matters. Extensive forests of windmills and floodplains of solar panels wrecking the landscape are billed as the salvation from the left’s wet dream of an apocalypse. Suddenly, our finely honed sedan is to be junked in favor of an obese array of batteries, or something else that doesn’t even exist. The already strained grid is to be burdened further. All the while, we’re chained to a chronological escalator to a new world order that resembles something conjured from the imagination of Salvador Dali or Hieronymus Bosch.
XY-people get to pretend that they are XX-people, and vice versa, and the rest of us are ordered to play along. The insecurities of tween and teen girls and boys are used as proof to herd them into the same pretend world.
It’s astounding, our willingness to believe in the unbelievable. Hans Christian Andersen meant more than he intended in his story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” (see #4 below). In the tale, two shyster weavers convince the emperor that they will produce raiment that only a fool cannot see. Fearful of being thought stupid, the emperor and his ministers see nothing but go along and pays them for their services. Then, with his new “clothes”, the emperor parades out in public to greet his subjects. No one in the crowd wants to be thought a fool till a child blurts out the obvious. See the parallel?
Fear of being thought a fool makes dunces of us all. People of the left believed in Biden’s sharpness so as not to be called MAGA. A challenge to Fauci/Collins/Birx was said to be proof of the existence of neanderthals among us. Ibram X. Kendi and the rest of the CRT cabal were made into geniuses to avoid the epithet of being called a closet racist. Fear of being labeled an implicit bigot in the c-suite has led to a rush call for the “marginalized” and quasi-obese in advertising campaigns. Anything less is a demand for more shaming sessions in the corporate world. Having an EV in the garage is proof that you’re not a denier, that you’re “smart”, despite the fact that you are afraid to venture 40 miles from your home charger. You’ll have to hide the essential internal combustion engine vehicle parked next to your four-wheeled symbol of virtue. We’re made to pretend that we’re not fools, as we prove that we are.
From Biden to California’s eco-nuttery, we are encouraged to pretend that we’re not making fools of ourselves. Ironically, our enemies are the child in the crowd who isn’t afraid to laugh.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Thanks to Jim Geraghty of National Review for the analysis and sources in “So Now It’s Okay to Talk about Biden’s ‘Cognitive Decline’”, 7/2/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/so-now-its-okay-to-talk-about-bidens-cognitive-decline/
2. “‘We’ve all enabled the situation’: Dems turn on Biden’s inner sanctum post debate”, Eli Stokols, et al, Politico, 7/2/2024, at https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/02/biden-campaign-debate-inner-circle-00166160
3. “‘Not a one-off’: Bernstein’s sources say concerns about Biden have been growing for a year”, Anderson Cooper interview of Carl Bernstein, CNN, video on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhFmaAMC1_Q
4. “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, complete story by Hans Christian Andersen, at https://americanliterature.com/author/hans-christian-andersen/short-story/the-emperors-new-clothes/
Gibberish has penetrated the doctor’s office and operating room. In a field exclusively reliant on science – in other words, on accurate depictions of what is – medical administrators turned their backs on it and instead became practitioners of voodoo, sorcery. If you’re a doctor and find yourself now in the equivalent of a coven, you might get fired for publicly expressing your amazement. It happened to Dr. Kendall Conger of Duke University Health.
Dr. Kendall Conger
Here’s the upshot. Duke University Health president Dr. Barbara Griffith sits atop an organization that magically discovered a “public health crisis” of racism in 2021, a racism so prevalent that we must drop common sense, reason, logic, and verifiable evidence to jump onboard the frenzy. Dr. Conger in the hospital’s emergency room noticed it, said so, and was fired.
Dr. Barbara Griffith, Duke University Health president
Duke’s “antiracism pledge” was purported to be “guided by science”. Dr. Conger asked, what science? In fact, they couldn’t produce any, just more gibberish. The zealots’ sensory response when caught off-guard is to wondrously make the racism “implicit racism”. Make it shadowy, vague, and thus unscientific, that’s how. When responding to Dr. Conger’s query, one Duke official admitted, “I concede that I cannot find a [clinical] trial that proves implicit bias is the cause of worse health outcomes for African Americans. Believe me. I have looked.”
It’s more than that. The “implicit bias” is unprovable by nature; it’s “implicit”. You must resort to racial bean counting of providers and patients and then leap to worse health outcomes, skipping over a vast ocean of other variables. Gibberish, absolute gibberish, and by people who might have to remove your infected spleen. What’s next, scapulimancy (divination from an examination of an animal’s shoulder blades)? Jump off the gurney and run for the exits if you view the slitting of a cow’s throat in an adjacent room. What’s the difference?
Dr. Conger was fired for publicly drawing into question a partisan pledge of dubious validity. A taxpayer subsidized organization takes a partisan position in a contentious public debate and suddenly all its employees must clamp their mouths shut? All this proves that bureaucracies are more sensitive to public embarrassment than in their commitment to science. Dr. Barbara Griffith and her coterie stepped on a rake, but you could get fired for warning them.
Oh, the times that we live.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Thanks to Mike Markham at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal in “Duke Health Fires Conservative Doctor”, 7/1/2024, at https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2024/07/duke-health-fires-conservative-doctor/
2. Thanks to George Leef of National Review for drawing my attention to Markham’s piece in “Doctors Must Not Dissent”, 7/1/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/doctors-must-not-dissent/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=second
L-R) Harvard President Claudine Gay, former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, American University professor Pamela Nadell and MIT President Sally Kornbluth testify before the House Education and Workforce Committee on Dec 5. (Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
* “The Beast” is taken from Naomi Wolf’s latest book “Facing the Beast”.
You’ve all seen it or at least heard of it: the congressional testimony of the presidents of Harvard, UPenn, and MIT, particularly under the questioning of Elise Stefanik (R-NY). In monotone answers, as if coached by lawyers or PR experts, these people refused to declare that antisemitic speech calling for genocide of Jews by staff and students violates their schools’ official code of conduct (see video below). Their cagey responses say much about them and more so about the educational rot on their campuses and in their heads. It’s as if a malign beast has descended upon these places. Parents, beware.
What “beast”? The thing is more than a personification of evil. It’s the influence of ideas that can inspire people to do evil things. Some ideas are inherently evil. Some ideas are “beasts”, mostly because they contradict our nature. They bring out the worst in us and cause our demise. How do we know them? A biblical warning: “Ye shall know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16).
Today’s “beast” is the Marxist oppressor/oppressed claptrap. It’s everywhere in the quasi-mystical jargon in DEI, ESG, CRT, the politics of identity, etc., and throughout K to grad school. There aren’t many institutions not infected by it. Your kids are getting a steady dose of it whenever they step into a classroom, watch TV, go to a movie, and cruise the internet on their cellphone.
The “beast” has a family tree. The 60’s counterculture was a hip version of an older belief system, the same one that is now bombarding your kids from age 5 to 26. German Marxist agitator Rudi Dutschke in 1967 preached a “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” strategy, the so-called Long March through the institutions. In other words, he proposed that the zealots conquer the system from within rather than tear it down – co-opt it through infiltration. He rejiggered one of his Marxist inspirations’ (Antonio Gramsci) revolutionary “war of position” language from a few decades before. And, boy, did he and they succeed as evidenced by the prevarications on display in last week’s congressional testimony. The college presidents can’t bring themselves to condemn the now common Dutschke/Gramsci/Marcuse grotesqueries replete in their lecture halls and on their grounds.
Parents, are you sure that you are not bankrolling the ruination of your child’s mind in a leftist finishing school? And all this so your kids can have the prestige in possessing something that is quickly losing its prestige? How does that compute?
The degree and campus experience are rapidly losing their value. The indoctrination and subsequent lack of rigor cannot be hidden for long. Dunces and extremists with degrees cannot interminably escape the withering eye of reality. Every employer will come to realize the truth in “Ye shall know them by their fruits”. Statue-topplers aren’t likely to keep the sewer system in operation.
Send your kids and money elsewhere. Please watch the short clip.
Some people believe in things that are completely nuts. Look at “gender-affirming care” and the adults in positions of authority who have bought into it. Think about it: the self-diagnosis of a toddler or tween is sufficient to invoke a permanent life-altering trajectory as the result of a medical intervention that screams malpractice. Despite the indoctrination that is mislabeled as counseling, the kid will never be the same, either emotionally or physically, and can’t return to their former self.
After the victims’ exposure to the counseling/indoctrination, Lupron (AbbVie’s chemical castration drug and puberty blocker), cross-sex hormones, and surgeries, we’re starting to see regret in the form of the word “detransitioner”. Later comes the realization, after all of the changes to the body and mind, that the tween’s rash self-diagnosis for sex-transition can’t be fully undone. Cutting to the chase, this whole thing is c-r-a-z-y!
Of course, the response of the adult enthusiasts in the transition Borg when confronted with any reluctance to the treatment is a resort to the rhetorical equivalent of Defcon 1 (nuclear war is imminent or has already begun) – “Do you want a dead daughter or an alive son?” Heck, the affected are still committing suicide . . . after the transition.
I give you three cases of regret: one ends in suicide; the other is ending in a lawsuit; and still another concerns a whistleblower at a gender clinic.
The situation involving David Reimer (the full account below) will turn out to be a refutation of the behaviorist’s chief insight, that social conditions overwhelmingly define a person’s development. It was believed by some that the influences of biology can be replaced by the social engineering of “expert” interventions. Reimer was thrust into the trap of a psychologist’s effort – John Money, a Johns Hopkins University psychologist – to reengineer David from a boy to girl. It didn’t work. David committed suicide at age 38.
David Reimer as Brenda (l) and the Reimer familyJohn Money, Johns Hopkins University psychologist
The story begins 8 months after David’s birth in 1965 when his penis was accidentally removed during a surgical procedure. After consultation with John Money, his parents agreed to interventions to turn David into Brenda. 14 months later, David’s remaining male genitals were removed, artificial and rudimentary female genitals installed, and he started a regular regimen of estrogen injections. His upbringing as Brenda ensued.
An uneasiness would plague him for the rest of his life. And then he learned what happened to him. He would “detransition” back to David and replace his artificial female genitalia with artificial male genitalia. He got married, adopted 3 children, but continued to be consumed by depression up to the moment of his fateful decision to take his life.
He was misdiagnosed as an adult with “gender dysphoria” because he wasn’t “in the wrong body” so to speak – or maybe he was, put there by an “expert” whose ideological inclinations would prevent him from realizing the obvious truth that XY chromosomes signal the release of male hormones to the body and brain. The potential for harm is as great for the modern version of the John Money approach, “gender-affirming care”.
That brings me to the case filing of Chloe Cole v. Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, Inc, in early 2023. At age 13, Chloe fell into the arms of Kaiser’s gender team. According to her filing (see below), “a team of doctors (i.e., the Defendants) . . . decided to perform a mutilating, mimicry sex change experiment on Chloe.” Even more damning is the treating practitioners single-minded commitment to one approach – gender-affirming care – without adequately divulging the controversial nature of the treatment, risks, and the shortcomings of much of the research into it. How could anyone, let alone a 13-year-old, exercise informed consent under the pressure of doctrinaire activists in white smocks? Chloe’s formal complaint reads,
“Defendants [i.e., Kaiser] obscured and concealed important information such as the following: the conflicting studies in this area; the high quality evidence demonstrating poor mental health outcomes; the existence of only low to very low-quality studies purportedly supporting this treatment; the significant likelihood that desired outcomes would not be attained; the significant possibility of desistence, detransition and regret; and the lack of accurate models for predicting desistence and detransition.”
Chloe Cole
Chloe detransitioned at age 17 and is now seeking legal redress for what can only be described as mental and physical mutilation by a branch of the medical industry that is more beholden to an ideology than real medical science. It’s nearly as horrific as anything that came out of the German SS Race and Settlement Main Office or the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics of the 1930’s with its fixation on other forms of malevolent flights of fancy under cover of “science”.
Now, other clinics and hospitals have earned suspicion and scrutiny for engaging in practices that can only be described as licensed mutilation. Jamie Reed, a former pediatric gender clinician at Washington University Transgender Center, St. Louis Children’s Hospital, blew the whistle on the hasty and obsessive herding of minors into gender-affirming care.
Jamie Reed
Even the New York Times, frequently dismissive of such charges, has confirmed much of Reed’s story. They validated many instances of the facility’s staff jumping to transition counseling and testosterone before any underlying emotional issues were addressed. It became commonplace at the clinic, facing a social contagion of gender dysphoria among adolescents, particularly young girls, to reach for short cuts in processing the horde with a reliance on highly dubious outside examiners and the snap push into cross-sex hormones and the indoctrination of the patient into accepting that they’re the opposite of their chromosomes.
Manias based on dubious “truths” aren’t unusual in history. Astrology, phrenology (skull shape is determinative of a person’s nature), and bleeding (opening a vein, leeches) were integral elements of medical training and practice. Pre-Civil War, some races were said to be best suited for subjugation (slavery for instance, John C. Calhoun). It carried over into Jim Crow. An incomplete and rudimentary understanding of heredity led to the horrors of eugenics which fed into the Supreme Court’s Oliver Wendell Holmes’ stupefying opinion in Buck v. Bell (1927) – “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” – and Auschwitz, et al. Karl Marx was intent on uncovering a “science” of history which, when put into practice in the 20th century, led to over 110 million deaths. Far from enlightening, some “scientific truths” have been the harbinger of much misery.
Who knows, climate change in its current ideological form may join history’s many delusional offramps from real science.
Meanwhile, the self-diagnosis of tweens as a proper basis for life-altering treatment is farcical. Euphemisms like “gender-affirming care” can’t hide the ugly reality. Which leads to another profound question: Why does it seem that the vulnerable – the mentally limited, those powerless in slavery, the subjugated by military conquest, the people stripped of their power of self-defense, children – are chosen to be the guinea pigs? Harvard grads don’t usually show up in the casualty lists.
RogerG
Read more here:
* The story of the David Reimer and Dr. John Money can be read at “John Money Gender Experiment: Reimer Twins”, Julia Simkus, Research Assistant at Princeton University, review by Saul McCleod, PhD, in Simply Psychology, June 23, 2023, https://www.simplypsychology.org/david-reimer.html#:~:text=The%20John%20Money%20Experiment%20involved%20David%20Reimer%2C%20a,identity%20and%20transitioned%20back%20to%20male%20in%20adolescence.
* An excellent introduction to the Cole v. Kaiser can can be accessed here: “Cole claims that Kaiser Hospital physicians encouraged her to undergo irreversible, gender-affirming procedures without exploring alternate options, such as psychotherapy”, Ryan J. Farrick, Legal Reader, Feb. 23. 2023, at https://www.legalreader.com/detransitioner-chloe-cole-lawsuit-kaiser-hospitals/. Also here: “Chloe Cole v. Kaiser Permanente”, Dhillon Law Group (representing Chloe), at https://www.dhillonlaw.com/lawsuits/chloe-cole-v-kaiser-permanente/.
* The story of Jamie Reed’s allegations can be read at “How a Small Gender Clinic Landed in a Political Storm”, NYT, August 23, 2023, at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/23/health/transgender-youth-st-louis-jamie-reed.html
* More on Jamie Reed’s allegations can be read at “I Thought I Was Saving Trans Kids. Now I’m Blowing the Whistle”, Jamie Reed, The Free Press, Feb. 9, 2023, at https://www.thefp.com/p/i-thought-i-was-saving-trans-kids
* Excellent reportage on the troubles with gender-affirming care can be read at National Review Online. For example, “New York Times Confirms St. Louis Gender Clinic Whistleblower’s Claim That Adolescents Were Rushed into ‘Affirming’ Care”, Ari Blaff, NR, Aug. 23, 2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/new-york-times-confirms-st-louis-gender-clinic-whistleblowers-claim-that-adolescents-were-rushed-into-affirming-care/. Also in “Chloe Cole v. Kaiser Permanente”, Madeleine Kearns, NR, March 14, 2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/chloe-cole-v-kaiser-permanente/.
38-year-old Vivek Ramaswamy running for the Republican presidential nominationInside Pride Month 2023 at TargetDylan Mulvaney and Bud Light
Two things are on today’s docket: Vivek Ramaswamy’s star is rising and Bud Light and Target are still crashing. Regarding the former, Ramaswamy is pandering to the Trumpkins in the GOP. He’s trying to be a 38-year-old Trump but without the ugliness. He’s risen to second place in some state polls. Astonishingly, Bud Light and Target have jumped onto the gender-confusion/teenage-genital-mutilation bandwagon, as if their customers want to hear from them on the culture war. In both cases, what foolishness. Who in their right mind would think that any of this would pass the smell test?
Trump’s powerful presence in the GOP is making the party a reflection of his unlikeable persona for a functioning majority of the national electorate. By that, I mean disliked by those not siloed behind the increasingly constricted walls of MAGA world. As many Trumpers cling ever so tightly to him with each indictment, other and far more numerous GOP-leaning demographics fly the coop, no matter the imbecilities of the Biden clan on the other side of the political ledger. Democrats win by making the other guy more detested than them.
Vivek wants the nomination and will say anything to get it. For him, as an investment guru, everything, including politics, is transactional – i.e., you get something (the nomination) by paying something (pandering to the Trump crowd). What comes out is pure, unadulterated poppycock.
Have you heard Hugh Hewitt’s interview of Vivek from August 14, 2023 (transcript and audio below)? Vivek announced to the world a green light for Red Cina to invade Taiwan after 2028. You heard me right. Imitating his mentor (DJT) in the use of blunt and stark terms, no matter how asinine, he declared,
“I’m being very clear: Xi Jinping should not mess with Taiwan until we have achieved semiconductor independence, until the end of my first term when I will lead us there. And after that, our commitments to Taiwan, our commitments to be willing to go to military conflict, will change after that, because that’s rationally in our self-interest.”
There you have it in Ramaswamy’s words: Don’t mess with us until after my term ends and we have transplanted Taiwan Semiconductor and/or a good portion of the world’s semiconductor industry to our shores within reach of our IRS, EPA, and our ascendant neo-Marxists. After that, Taiwan, my friend, you’re on your own. Done.
MAGA is thrilled because no more “forever wars”. A President Ramaswamy looks tough in announcing a four-year delayed abandonment in “Trumpian” words. Well, for Taiwan, starting in 2029, enjoy the Taipei May Day parades of the People’s Liberation Army.
When pressed by Hewitt about the astounding repercussions, Vivek began repeated non-clarifications with “Let me make myself perfectly clear.” Making oneself “perfectly clear” is a poker-tell that you’re not going to be clear. He continued to insist on sending a huge naval force to the area but backed away from the will to use it. What’s the point? Thugs need to face real threats, not an armada that would blithely move out of the way for the PLA’s amphibious and aerial assault. The will to use it must be conveyed along with the deployment of the Pacific Fleet. Without the will, it’s an empty bluff.
Vivek, try to be something more than talking like Trump while acting like Jimmy Carter, Obama, or Joe Biden. It isn’t a good look for you, nor is it good for the country.
I would say, “Thank God, this guy isn’t president”, but then I have to glance over at the current occupant. Whew, what a mess, what a choice. Sadly, for this investment exec, transactional thinking doesn’t necessarily incorporate strategic calculus, such as the loss of Taiwan producing a gaping hole in the first island chain for the burgeoning PLA Navy to flood the Pacific. Vivek will do nothing but reinforce among our allies our habit of abandonment when things get messy. Remember Vietnam, Bill Clinton’s 1990s dithering with Al-Qaeda, Obama’s Iraq pullout and red line in Syria, and Biden’s Afghanistan bugout? And now Taiwan?
Our potential and current friends and allies will certainly remember. A lack of steadfastness and reliability won’t bode well for alliance-making. Who’d want to be our friend?
At that point, it will be America alone as the export part of our economy dries up in the face of a cordon of CCP satraps. If you think that Biden and company is making a hash of our way of life, wait for a President Ramaswamy and his 20-30% hit (value of our exports) to US GDP after his forced retreat to fortress America. We would be in Great Depression territory. Speaking of transactional thinking, Vivek’s pandering to the no-more-forever-wars constituency will have real world costs. We’ll quickly learn the value of alliances as we get crushed under a depression-ignited, debt-fueled, and bulging safety net.
Vivek’s foolishness can be chalked up to youthful rashness. What’s the excuse for the seasoned big wheels at Anheuser-Busch and Target? Or, are they “seasoned”, by whom, where? Who thought that a man (Dylan Mulvaney) trying to compete and look like a bulk of their customers’ wives and girlfriends would be a nice way to expand the Bud Light brand? Who thought that the family-friendly Target, with many a mother with children in tow, would be an excellent venue to advocate gender confusion and same-sex amory? It’s unfathomable.
At this time, Bud Light’s sales continue to plummet. They can’t give away the stuff. Whereas, at the beginning of the year, it ranked #1.
Alissa Heinerscheid, the Bud Light advertising exec behind the Dylan Mulvaney endorsement
The person most responsible for the debacle was Bug Light’s 39-year-old advertising exec Alissa Heinerscheid. Her classroom pedigree is impressive: Groton, Harvard, Wharton. But is such a distinguished pedigree a marker for success for the company and its products? We’re at a stage in our history when people need to question the idea that business acumen is a product of overhyped degrees from institutions who have been diminishing in excellence for years.
It probably never occurred to Alissa that expanding the brand in one direction could lead to lead to a dramatic contraction in another. This is a person who was marinated in a cocoon far removed from the lives of the people who buy the goods. She may know of the average Americans’ way of life, but it’s a kind of knowing absent the intimacy of actually having lived it. For her, “beer” meant European or craft. In her rarified social atmosphere, sex rebels are a cute social appurtenance; they’re kind of cool.
However, for the bulk of Bug Light’s consumers, it’s a movement to revolutionize their lives and expose their kids to emotional harm in their crucial developmental years. They want a beer to drink at the bar-be-cue not one that is curated to advance a disturbing cause. Who would have thought that in a week someone like Heinerscheid could turn a popular product into an icon of a left-wing cultural revolution? Bud Light’s sales have dropped for 17 straight weeks. “Expanding the brand” turned into subtracting the core, and out goes Alissa, and down goes Bud Light.
It’s a similar pattern with Target. Pride Month 2023 in June heralded a drop in sales which continues into the third quarter after the geniuses in the c-suite thought that it was a good idea to plaster the kids’ department in pride flags, introduce a line of “tuck friendly” girls’ swimsuits, and carry children’s products from Abprallen, famous for their Satanist line. What accounts for what can only be described as bizarre decisions? Like Bud Light and its determination to link with a TikTok “influencer” for transgenderism, these decisions arise out of people who were acculturated in a peculiar environment at odds to the life lived by most people who’ll never experience the Groton-to-Wharton social pipeline. The c-suite is simply out of touch, and grossly so. It’s as if they came from a different planet, and don’t realize it.
A Pride Month display at a Target store in Dickson City, Pa. (photo: Ted Shaffrey/AP)Idealized Target board meeting from its website. They’ve certainly got the look of the ignorant and naive.
Both cases are abject lessons in how to clog the bankruptcy courts by making yourself detested. The quality and affordability of the good or service is made irrelevant. Simply seen walking from the parking lot into the store, or being seen with the blue can in your fridge, now could brand you as an endorser of extremist causes.
It’s more complicated than “go woke, go broke”. The turn-off won’t come from the Groton-to-Wharton crowd. Anyway, their Maserati won’t be seen in the parking lot or with a 12-pack in the passenger seat. More accurately, it’s “go woke and half the country will be suspicious of what you’re selling”.
Meanwhile, from the right comes the youngish business savant, anxious to be president, who is completely out of his league regarding foreign relations and national security, adding greater urgency to the possible uses of the phrase “idiot savant”. Along with much of the c-suite, their self-confidence is so grand that they will court disaster for all of us.
Michael Ramirez is great for a comical portrayal of our current condition. Could fear of being “cancelled” drive the corporate brain trust to endorse left-wing cultural causes?
RogerG
Read more here:
* Transcript and audio of High Hewitt’s complete 8/14/23 interview of Vivek Ramaswamy: “Vivek Ramaswamy On All Things National Security” at https://hughhewitt.com/vivek-ramaswamy-on-all-things-national-security?highlight=vivek%20ramaswamy
* “Who Will Heed the Lessons of Target and Bud Light?”, Jim Geraghty, National Review Online, 8/17/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/who-will-heed-the-lessons-of-target-and-bud-light/
Creating the New Soviet Man (and woman, and whatever) necessitates control of the social mechanisms that transmit culture. The German leftist of the 1960’s, Rudi Dutschke, coined the slogan “der lange Marsch durch die Institutionen” – the long march through the institutions – and thus compacted the strategy to a neat little quip.
Let’s face it, a radical leftist is a Marxist who has adopted the rhetorical flair of a claque of history’s Marxists – Antonio Gramsci, The Frankfurt School (Institute for Social Research and Herbert Marcuse, et al) – in expanding the list of the oppressed to include the “nots”: not white; not white and male; not white, male, hetero – you get the picture. The doctrine then begins to overwhelm the culture once the revolutionaries shed their shaggy hair, jeans, and sandals and don tweed, professorial beards, pant suits, and gain tenure. After that, their nonsensical ideological peccadillos permeate everything from Supreme Court opinions to PBS’s “American Experience” films.
The crux of the strategy involves conjuring a statistical disparity between a hypothetical gender/race overclass and the radicals’ favored “minorities” – aka the “oppressed” – and then a jump to one of the many “isms” and “phobias” (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia) as the cause. The numbers are connected to a preconceived cause – a predetermined ism/phobia – by only tenuous threads of logic and fact, at best. Once you hear or read the shambolic reasoning, if you haven’t been previously indoctrinated and still retain your wits, you will be left scratching your head at the flight of fancy’s chutzpah.
That titan of pure reason, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who refused to define woman in her confirmation hearing, injected an extension of the tactic (statistical disparity and leap to predetermined cause) in her dissenting opinion in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and UNC. According to her, without the racial favoritism of “diversity” gamesmanship in college admissions, black babies will die. Citing a study in one of those prestigious but newly radicalized science journals in the “long march through the institutions” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), she expounded with all the confidence of an excessively opinionated sophomore, “. . . for high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live, and not die.” So, in her ill-reasoned reasoning, a B-average student from a poorly performing school should have precedence over a straight-A one who faced a more demanding curriculum, with race being the deciding factor. Got that? We’re back to racism.
The problem: Jackson’s study is bogus. Even the study cites a miniscule five one-hundredths of a percent (99.96% v. 99.91%) difference in the survival rate of black newborns between black and white doctors. Diving into the flotsam of this shipwreck, the number of infants is too small to support such a tiny difference and the study’s conclusions. The study’s methodology screams “high margin of error”.
Not only that, it relied on generalized Census data which meant that in many cases the race of the attending physician couldn’t be determined, or whether the treatment was from a nurse, physician’s assistant, midwife, or a doctor. Other relevant factors were left on the cutting room floor, such as the plethora of social factors that aren’t evenly distributed through the population under any circumstances. To conclude that these social disparities are further proof of systemic racism merely nestles one more logic-leap into the general logic-leap. Welcome to the mental miasma of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Our intertwined schools and media prepare the ground for this buffoonery. Many teachers incorporate PBS documentaries into their curriculum (I did). Today’s “American Experience” (AE), though, isn’t the AE of a decade ago. It’s gone woke. Two episodes – “American Oz” and “Flood in the Desert” – illustrate the corruption. Many of the contributing “experts” clearly worship at the altar of the groupthink. If you wanted to learn a little about L. Frank Baum and his Oz creations, you would, along with a heavy dose of racism, sexism, and genocide against “indigenous peoples”, adding at least another 30 minutes to the program. The collapse of St. Francis Dam north of Los Angeles in the 1920’s can’t proceed without cis-gender white male racism, sexism, and the overall patriarchal contemptuousness for Gaia.
The productions are littered with interesting facts . . . and a heavy dose of generational sneering. It’s as if the production staff see themselves as a class of pure, enlightened deities passing judgment on those in the past who didn’t have the opportunity to be civilized at the feet of the great master, Marcuse.
The films are dripping with hubris, but what have these Marcuse acolytes wrought? Inspired by the same mindset – maybe without the Molotov cocktails, riots, killings, and arson of their Antifa military wing – many of our cities, at the mercy of this governing philosophy, are in a doom-loop. Go ahead, spend time travelling the surface streets of the doom-loop corridor from Seattle to San Diego, or Chicago (hire a protective private army), or the Bos-Wash corridor on the east coast. If you avoid hepatitis or HIV, or cholera, from the litter of hypodermic needles and the open-air poop on the sidewalks, you may not survive the mugging. The only thing in abundance, besides the filth, is the desire of residents to flee. Marcuse-thought is a boon to U-Haul.
Who should be sneering, today’s half-witted who think themselves Olympian in their wisdom, or our ancestors? Let Mark Twain cut to the quick:
“What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”
And our modern nincompoops know a whole lot that “ain’t so”. . . to our peril.
The New Man (or woman, or whatever) is a new man, woman, or whatever, mired in a hellscape. San Francisco is the canary in the coal mine. The bird is passed out on the floor of the cage. Go ahead, YouTube search “San Francisco doom loop”. Watch the video clip below, and this is what our post-modernist, neo-Marxist big wheels are proud of? It’s shameful, absolutely shameful.
Here’s another one from a slightly different angle with the same conclusions:
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Dissent Repeats Debunked Claim About Black Doctors”, Sarah Weaver, The Daily Caller, July 2023, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/justice-ketanji-brown-jacksons-dissent-repeats-debunked-claim-about-black-doctors/ar-AA1dgRln
* The study that Jackson cites: “Physician–patient racial concordance and disparities in birthing mortality for newborns”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, August 17, 2020, at https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1913405117
* Both “American Oz” and “Flood in the Desert” can be view on YouTube.
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