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Riots and a World Without Reason

Sen. Tom Cotton (R, Arkansas) and the New York Times.
An NYPD police car burns as protesters clash with police during a march against the death of George Floyd in Brooklyn, N.Y., May 30, 2020. (photo: Jeenah Moon/Reuters)

Tom Cotton, Arkansas senator, recently ignited the younger scribblers in the New York Times’s newsroom into paroxysms of rage for daring to present a view that counters their settled and stunted worldview. What’s so outrageous in offering up the option of using troops to quell insurrection-style riots across the country? Then again, the young journos emanated from college, today’s colleges.

A sizeable portion of the populace is expected to go to college, but these places of “higher” (maybe “lower” or “lesser” are more accurate adjectives) learning have been petri dishes for years for the nurturing of skin color, genitalia, sex-changing, bedroom-mate, colonization hyper-sensitivities. Huge blocks of the college catalogue are more than just the inculcation of oppression, oppression everywhere. The newly minted oppression departments and their courses are considered by many a college dean to be replacements for the classics. The traditional academic core, for what remains of it, is no refuge since it is riddled with the oppression-palooza. There’s no escape once you step foot on the campus. The stuff seeps down to K-12.

As a 30-year veteran of the classroom, I can testify to the looniness of it all. Long ago, rigor was removed from the curriculum as race, sex, gender, class consciousness filled the void. Think of it as Marxism for hipsters.

I’m reminded of Hitler’s PR guy, Joseph Goebbels, and his big lie theory.

Undated photo of Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of propaganda, delivering a speech. (Bengt von zur Muehlen/Yad Vashem Photo Archive)

The idea has two parts: the often-repeated big lie itself and the necessity of suppressing dissenting views to preserve the lie. Here is the full Goebbels quote:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

So, the first part of the task is accomplished with the 80-year-long marination of the population in the fable of the unceasing oppression of workers, the poor, racial and ethnic minorities, women, and the whole host of the nondescript “other” – everyone LGBTQ and interracial and intersexual and intersectional and everywhere the twain shall meet – from age 5 to death. The second part of the Goebbels program is actively underway, and has been for quite some time. Try and present a word of caution and you’ll be inundated with the charge of racism. There will be no place left for you in polite company.

The smothering of free thought isn’t limited to the schools. Mandatory sheltering-in-place has made your home no refuge from the mental miasma. Speaking of a captured audience. You need not go to college to get the balderdash. Bazos and his Amazon Prime caliphate will bring to you Black Lives Matter dogmas with race-conscious banner offerings at the top of Amazon’s Prime’s home page under a title emblazoned with “Black Lives Matter”.

Big tech and its gazillions in cash and omnipresent reach are fully onboard as they penetrate into every hand and home. Lenin’s quip about rope-sellers (the rich will sell us the rope to hang them) comes to mind. Colleges go up in flames, and so do urban streets; the Fortune 500 is aiding and abetting; our media are the revolution’s propaganda arm; and law enforcement are dirty words.

What’s up with this? Well, we need to look no further than the prevalence of a fashionable philosophy. It’s a view of life with tentacles in a sea of demonstrable falsehoods, akin to Goebbels’s manufactured truth. The shoddy myth story surrounding Michael Brown and race-stats contorted into pseudo-scientific proof are invoked to make the unreal look real. Need everything boil down to the imaginings of identity-based oppression, oppression everywhere? Our world has gone insane as we are beset by a real virus and a pervasive, virus-like twisting of the mind. The old aphorism of education being the key to success is made into gibberish as education is no longer education, as commonly understood.

It’s interesting to speculate on the possible relationship between turning the population into 3-month shut-ins and the outbursts of violence in our cities. The tie is more complex than the easy task of disproving the nonsense coming out of the mouths of those running the show in the newest third world state – the Capital Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) – smack dab in the middle of Seattle. Heather McDonald’s myth-busting work on the subject has been stellar.

The Black Lives Matter/Antifa gang is predicated on a simple assumption: Blacks as a class are as oppressed today as they were in the days of slavery and Jim Crow. Trotted out as proof are numbers in relation to the target group’s proportion of the overall population. The media repeat the inanities over and over again. However, actual social conditions and behavior don’t correspond to the Census Bureau’s percentages for race and ethnicity. 13% of the population shouldn’t be expected to mean 13% of murders, 13% of robberies, 13% of dropouts, 13% of out-of-wedlock births, 13% of drug use, 13% of gang activity, 13% of single-parent families, 13% of …. According to the woke directorate coming out of our colleges and into our institutions, any upward deviation away from the norm is due to racism … or one of many other of the “isms” bouncing around.

Speaking of jumping to conclusions, this rivals Evel Knieval’s (stuntman extraordinaire, 1938-2007) anticipated-but-never-performed leap across the Grand Canyon.

Evel Knievel’s plan for his jump (unsuccessful) across the Snake River Canyon in Idaho, 1974.

It’s a fallacy bordering on self-delusion, a politically convenient self-delusion.

It’s like they put their heads in a box and prevent anything else from interfering with their tunnel vision. Take for example something as simple as traffic stops, leading to the banality of “driving while black”. No attempt is made to correlate stops with racial breakdowns of driving behavior and time of day on the road. Plus, at night when the charge of systemic police racism is mostly made, how can an officer determine race from behind and through tainted windows at 30 feet? The accusation won’t survive a sufficient degree of adult analysis.

And, for sure, those other social conditions aren’t hitched to the racial distributions either. Could those other social conditions – chaotic homes in the grip of out-of-wedlock births (75% of black births), single-parenthood, substance abuse, unstable and frequent romantic relationships in front of the kids, etc. – have greater explanatory power for inordinate black run-ins with the police than the charge of Klansmen in uniform? Race is not a determinant of behavior, but upbringing is. And upbringing stats don’t align with population proportionality.

These are hard truths than cannot be easily explained away. Nonetheless, we are expected by our so-called “enlightened betters” to function as a society on this mountain of deceit. Sadly, the real victims of this crusade into absurdity are the many upstanding black citizens who unfairly wear the stain of the underlying reality. They get lumped into the same category by seasoned cabbies of all races, and maybe too many cops of all races. The War on Poverty came to help but left in its wake the devastation of some of our most vulnerable: people who were chained into slavery, suffered under Jim Crow, endured the lynching epidemic, locked into perpetual serfdom, and then were enticed by the glitter of government mammon. To be fair, the allure has afflicted all groups. But the most impacted were the most historically victimized, and victimized in ways not emanating from the bullhorns of those manning the barricades of CHAZ.

A gathering on Wednesday in the Seattle neighborhood of Capitol Hill, where protesters have established an “autonomous zone.” (photo: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times)

Indeed, we have created for ourselves a world without reason and are living the consequences.

RogerG

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The Return of the Red Guards

Red Guards — high school and university students — wave copies of Chairman Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book during a parade in June 1966 in Beijing’s streets at the beginning of China’s Cultural Revolution. (photo: Jean Vincent/AFP)
Scenes from a Black Lives Matter rally and march in Falls Church, Va., June 4, 2020. (Staff Photo by Jay Westcott, Tyson’s Reporter)

Prologue

Many things in the present resemble the past. They are not exact replicas for sure, but they have enough in common to make us aware of the existence of human nature. Yes, recurring instances prove our commonness since our creation and/or evolution. The scenes on the streets of our cities circa 2020 strikingly approximate the blind fury of the young that was ignited by Mao in China from 1966-76, something called the Cultural Revolution. The mob personality, the participants’ ages, the modes of behavior, all fitted to a revolutionary cause, transcends group titles and the calendar.

Mao’s Red Guards and Black Lives Matter/Antifa occupy the same category in group genus.

The Return of the Red Guards, Episode 1

We are in a very critical moment in our country’s history. The unthinkable is gaining currency. Namely, the sources of stability, legitimacy, security, and decency are coming under assault. Mobs and protest movements are spreading throughout the country to destroy some of our most critical institutions as they ride on a current of provable falsehoods. Right now, the target are police departments. Violent lunatics are in charge of the streets with chants of “Abolish the police” and “Defund the police”. History provides examples of the horror. From 1966 to 1976 – for ten years – Mao unleashed the zealous young to rid the country of any vestiges, real or imagined, overwhelmingly imaginary, of the fuzzy sin of counter-revolution. Defacing the country’s history was all the rage. Assaults and public humiliations were common.

Sound familiar? Look to your tv screen. We have our own Red Guards rampaging through downtowns and neighborhoods as they destroy any symbol of “oppression”. Public humiliations proliferate like the one inflicted on Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey. Mitt Romney disgraced himself by lending legitimacy to the lie with his presence in a Black Lives Matter (BLM) march. They have captured an entire political party, the Democratic Party. It’s shameful and a harbinger of more evils to come.

The video below will introduce you to the reality of Mao’s Red Guards. As you watch, notice the similarities between what racked Red China for a decade and American cities of 2020. More videos will follow, including the public humiliation of Mayor Jacob Frey.

The Return of the Red Guards, Episode 2

Here are more people who participated in Mao’s monstrosity. Notice the Red Guards’s attempt to expunge elements of the past. Notice the fervor and public humiliations. We are replaying a tumult that set China back for decades. The same could be in store for us.

The Return of the Red Guards, Episode 3

After humiliating himself at the alter of the god of “systemic racism” with a confession of his own “privilege”, Mayor Jacob Frey ended up not earning any street cred with the Red Guards 2.0. When he couldn’t, and shouldn’t, commit to abolishing the city’s police department, he was demeaned out of the horde with shouts, cursing, and boos.

To placate the radical left in their party, the Dem leadership in Congress promises “reform” of the police. It won’t matter if their efforts are just tinkering around the edges. Even minor moves to satisfy the Red Guards will send the signal of reward. To borrow a phrase, what gets rewarded gets repeated. Brace yourself for more havoc in our cities, if not now, in the not-too-distant future.

Epilogue

Many things become possible – and horrifying – in a setting of intense, excitable crowds with animated and demagogic firebrands. The goal of this social swarm is the all too common “burn it all down”. The only problem is, the eradication of the old is replaced by systemic thuggery. Systemic thuggery is real, as folks in Russia, Germany, Italy, China, North Korea, Cuba, Cambodia, et al, can attest. In contrast, systemic racism is a ghost for ideological gangsters to continually resurrect to generate disorder. And make no mistake about it, for these malcontents, disorder is their path to power.

RogerG

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“The Purge” Relocates to Minneapolis

Oscar Wilde was famous for having written, “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life”. Come to think of it, I agree. A super-majority on the Minneapolis City Council – 9 of 13 – are in favor of bringing the plot of the “The Purge” to their fair city by abolishing the police department. More than that, they are anxious to become the next Detroit. When did ruin become so fashionable?

If you’ll recall, the story of the “The Purge” centers on a legal holiday for criminal pandemonium once a year. Kudos to creator/screenwriter James DeMonaco for being so prescient.

The predicate for our current sanctioned anarchy was the sin of commission by one Minneapolis cop as three others performed a sin of omission for not interceding in the killing of George Floyd. All four are charged, but legal action against the four is left in the dust as the video goes viral and the ever-present hair-trigger mob gets another opportunity to display their militant bonafides. The issue has been nationalized and internationalized. It’s no longer the misbehavior of four people but the purported misbehavior of nearly everyone not black – and black too if they don’t hold the prescribed views – and all cops everywhere, no matter the skin hue. It’s a singular incident to feed the “woke” mill.

The officers charged in the killing of George Floyd.

Activists disguised as elected officials, fully marinated in the secular doctrine of perpetual victimhood, have announced their push for nihilism. If you thought that Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland couldn’t be placed in the nonfiction section, read this encounter between CNN’s Alisyn Camerota and Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender.

Alisyn Camerota (l) and Lisa Bender.


Camerota (I paraphrase): Are you saying that you want to dismantle the police department, that you want a “police-free” future?
Bender: “Yeah, and you know a lot of us were asked if can you imagine a future without police back in 2017 when we were running for office. And I answered ‘yes’ to that question. To me that future is a long way away and it would take an enormous amount of investment in things that we know work to keep people safe.”
Camerota pressed (I paraphrase): What if my home was broken into in the middle of the night? Who would I call?
Bender: “Yes, I hear that loud and clear from a lot of my neighbors. And I know — and myself, too, and I know that that comes from a place of privilege.”

Besides the wallowing in the mental maturity of a 6-year-old, Bender escapes into cloudy abstractions. These are abstractions without clear definition and therefore not provable, but they don’t have to be in order to be useful in the crusade. One is “systemic racism” (or “institutional”) and the other is “privilege”. The words are thrown about like magical incantations. Just using the words, they believe, will unveil a hidden gnosis to “woke” initiates. And it’s on this basis that public policy is concocted. Amazing.

So, Bender and eight of her comrades on the Minneapolis City Council are in a rush to ape Detroit. Chronic disorder and violence aren’t a selling point to any city’s chamber of commerce. Bender’s recipe of things that “we know work” – the free stuff and counseling galore pumped into the inner city – won’t stem the chaos and won’t stem the desire of anyone (black, white, or otherwise) with even the most meager means to skedaddle. Bender and her colleagues are Jim Joneses dispensing Kool-Aid.

Their model is Detroit, whether they realize it or not. The 1960’s riots were amphetamines for the huge exodus of whites and blacks. Detroit, like many other cities experiencing riots and high crime, violated the diversity god by becoming more monochromatic – overwhelmingly black and poor. From 1950 to 2010 (the last census), the white cohort in the city plummeted from 1.5 million to 75,000. As others have written, median incomes of black families tanked in the city because the middle-class ones fled. Sure, the self-immolation of the Big Three didn’t help, and there’s always a symbiosis between social and economic conditions, but you can’t call barbarity on the streets a harbinger of growth. It matters little whether you are white or black or a millennial or hipster if your kids were forced into a gang initiation or if one of your roommates was beat to a pulp for his wallet. Graffiti and crack houses don’t make for good neighborhood cohesion.

Abandoned home in a neighborhood of abandoned homes in Dertoit.

The scene was repeated in Watts, Chicago, Washington, DC, Baltimore, Newark, Atlanta, the South Bronx, etc. Bender and company are a clan of Dorothies prancing down the yellow brick road, the road to a bombed-out city.

*Demonstrators push against a police car after rioting erupted in a crowd of 1,500 in the Los Angeles area of Watts in this file photo taken August 12, 1965. (AP Photo/File)

In an earlier post, I suggested, “Get out of the cities”. If history is any indication, you will. More than that, get a gun and hold it dear. Call it your Bender gun.

RogerG

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College and the Ubiquity of the Cultural and Political Left

Protesters gather around after setting fire to the entrance of a police station as demonstrations continue after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minn., May 28, 2020. (Carlos Barria/Reuters)

It’s everywhere. The story of America is reduced to “systemic racism” to such an extent that the chants of Black Lives Matter are made mainstream. Logging onto my Facebook page confronted me with “Act Against Racial Injustice: We stand with the Black community and against racism. Together we can support causes working towards racial justice and equality.” Going to the Bing search engine brought out the announcement, “We stand in solidarity with the Black community and all those working toward racial equality. A message from our CEO.” At least the techies are all in for a campaign against the alleged pervasiveness of racism.

The headliner for an email from CEO Satya Nadella to Microsoft employees.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

And then we have the New York Times weighing in with “The 1619 Project”. It’s an unadulterated attempt to boil the story of America down to racism. The tale is directed at the kiddies in K-12 curricula from the screed’s website. So, the kids get a bald-faced version ladled on top of what they receive daily from intellectually corrupted teachers, textbooks, and supplemental materials. The story is the same: Racism persists everywhere in an overt/covert and individual/institutional manner. To keep the story rolling, it’s better for the cause that the supposed threat be imprecise, vague, hidden, and forever true no matter what.

Sen. Tom Cotton penned an op-ed to the New York Times on the entirely reasonable option to use federal troops to quell our current wave of riots. The Constitution, The Insurrection Act, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Little Rock during Eisenhower’s White House residency are testament to its feasibility and legality. It’s an entirely different question to ask whether this is the time for it. In my view, we are getting there. Still, the reaction in the Times’s newsroom was open rebellion. The woke crowd in their work stalls had their sensitivities enflamed and threatened mass resignation.

But is the story of endemic racism true? Color me skeptical. Maybe you too.

Andrew C. McCarthy’s article in National Review Online, “The ‘Institutional Racism’ Canard”, puts lie to the charge. His case is strong. Quoting Heather McDonald, “a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.”

Andrew C. McCarthy

There’s more. A quarter of unarmed suspects killed by police are black, even though blacks make up 13% of the population. An argument for the Left? No. The lawlessness of many of our urban neighborhoods is illustrative of the fact that blacks compose 53% of murders and 60% of robberies. They have many more run-ins with the cops and a much higher potential to fall into the killed-by-police category. And the victims are overwhelmingly black and so are the ones reporting the crimes. It’s amazing that the number is “only” – but still sad – 9 unarmed blacks killed in contrast to 19 whites in 2019. The whole story that the marchers and rioters are bull-horning is manufactured.

Why does the story have resonance? In military parlance, the ground has been prepared. Decades of K-18 victimhood is extracting a price in combustible cities and hijacked minds. The matriculants filter into Fortune 500 boardrooms, cultural institutions, journalism, the arts, and everywhere people occupy positions of influence.

Undeniably, most impactful factor is the philosophical bias in the schools.

One person (David Bahnsen) even speculated on the role of colleges and universities in making California left wing from top to bottom and in and out. The more pervasive the campuses, the more pervasive the ideology. This circumstance might partially explain the uncompromising leftward tilt of the state.

Other blue states may periodically vote a split ballot: an occasional Republican for governor or mayor and Dems down-ballot (Mass., N.Y., N.J., Maryland for instance). Colleges are present in these states but not so wall-to-wall as in the Golden State. 115 community colleges exist in the state with 1 out of 4 community college pupils in the U.S. attending one in California. 119 4-year colleges and universities of a variety of shapes and sizes exist in the state, including the massive 33 public ones of over 670,000 full-time enrollees. No state has the capacity to disseminate leftist thinking as does California. There’s no corner of the state to escape the culture-smog. It penetrates everywhere and a super-majority of the electorate.

Students of UC Berkeley.

All kinds of nonsense and maliciousness sprouts in the pervasive academically-influenced soil of California. New and novel ways to repeal the Second Amendment in the state; outlawing separate boy/girl toy isles in a store; attempts to ban any alternative to the government schools; ham-handed efforts to force abortion and the LGBTQ agenda onto religious organizations and their social mission; environmental central planning; declaring war on preexisting and longstanding industries in favor of a destructive utopia; the nullification of federal immigration law; and the scare story of racism, racism everywhere, are taken seriously in this peculiar hothouse.

Do we need any more proof of the damage caused by the deformation of learning in our schools? Build more colleges in your state in this day and age and watch your politics go to hell. Real reform that moves us away from the precipice of perpetual victimhood, riots, falsehoods, and malignant crusades begins with the real reform of our schools. An unchallenged and malicious ideology shouldn’t be allowed to take root and then undermine the state and nation. This is no demand for the rule of another monolithic ideology, but rather a call for balance. Now that’s real reform.

The cry of “throw the bums out” begins with a focus on those in critical public agencies in education and the teacher-training colleges. Stop the madness by going to the source.

RogerG

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Get Out of the Cities

A man poses for a photo in the parking lot of a AutoZone store in Minneapolis in May of 2020. (photo: Carlos Gonzalez/AP)

And, I might add, get out of any deep blue state.

In an earlier post, I mentioned the odd reality of the government requiring everyone to be masked. Now we have it! Rioters in cities across the country are masked as they pillage, burn, loot, maul bystanders, and hunt down cops. It’s doubly difficult now to do any facial recognition to bring to justice any of the miscreants.

Masked or unmasked, if you live in any of the liberally governed American cities, and if those cities reside in a deep blue state, get out and get out now. The governing classes in these places are moving to cripple the thin blue line. Once the line has been reduced to a wispy strand, you can’t even get a gun to defend yourself, family, and property. A ten-day waiting period awaits you in California … and the purchase could very well be rejected by Commissar Becerra (California AG) anyway. New York City dictates a city permit to own a handgun, and if you have the patience of Job and get one, don’t dare take it out of the safe. If you happen to defend yourself with it, you’ll experience the full force of the law, something not to be applied to a mauler and pillager of the innocent public.

38-year police veteran, police captain, and police chief, David Dorn, was murdered helping to defend a friend’s business from rioters.
A Las Vegas police officer was shot and critically injured late Monday as police attempted to take protesters into custody. He was identified Tuesday afternoon as 29-year-old Shay Mikalonis.

This comes at a time when the activist base of the Democratic Party cries for the defunding of the police. They say, “If you want an AR-15, join the police.” Well, there won’t be much of a police force to seek employment, and you still won’t have anything to defend yourself. Absent a cop and gun, prepare to prostate yourself before the mob. If that is an unappealing prospect, move!

LA mayor Garcetti announced today a $150 million cut in the LAPD’s budget. His message for the residents of LA is simple: you had better wear a mask as you get pummeled by the mob.

I don’t know what else to tell you. In other similarly governed nations, people risk dangerous deserts and the Florida Straits to escape the chaos of the drug cartels, MS-13, and the workers’ paradises. You have ample company.

Cuban refugees fleeing to Florida in a raft, August 24, 1994.

RogerG

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Riots Hurt the Left

A protester runs past burning cars and buildings on Chicago Avenue, Saturday, May 30, 2020, in St. Paul, Minn. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Ross Douthat, no admirer of Donald Trump, has penned an op-ed for the New York Times that is a clear warning to left/progressives to watch out (see below). If they soft pedal the violence, they may face a similar backlash as in 1968 when Nixon won a close election on a wave of the “silent majority”. Then, in my view, Douthat goes off the rails when he predicts Biden is better positioned than Trump to win in 2020.

Ross Douthat

Anyway, the crime spike in Obama’s last years in office, the riots in Ferguson and Baltimore, the current conflagrations in our cities, and the screeches coming out of a much more radical Democratic Party should be dire warnings to any Democrat of longstanding.

Demonstrators stand in the middle of West Florissant as they react to tear gas fired by police during ongoing protests in reaction to the shooting of teenager Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, August 18, 2014. (REUTERS/Lucas Jackson)

Sure, as others have noticed, Trump’s mouth is his own worst enemy. He grates against the sensibilities of the vast middle of the electorate. His rhetorical mannerisms can frequently upset an otherwise judicious message. Thus, he makes his reelection tougher by the day.

But, no matter Trump’s faults, they don’t take place in a vacuum. The center of today’s Democratic Party has moved ever closer to the SDS’s Port Huron Statement of 1962. It’s a radical party that is morphing into a revolutionary one.

A little backgrounder is necessary. For those who’ve either forgotten or were never taught, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) is a direct descendant of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society of 1905. Here’s the genealogy: Intercollegiate Socialist Society > League for Industrial Democracy > Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID) > Students for a Democratic Society.

The SDS national council meeting, 1963; Tom Hayden at far left. (Photograph: C Clark Kissinger)

No red-baiting here. People who would be comfortable in the SDS – Bernie and his bros, and the dominating activist base in deep blue states – are in the driver’s seat of the party. The Port Huron Statement – the constitution of the 60’s radical left – could very well be the party’s 2020 platform, with concessions to the lunacy of identity politics. How repellent would that be to middle class voters just wanting to get back to work and their kids in school? Do I have to answer?

Biden can’t run from that. Biden can be made into a comforting figure for the general election but he can’t run from the party who chose him. The duty of the Republican Party in the fall campaign would be to make Biden and the Democrats more indefensible than Trump’s tweets. The radical and preening Squad is one thing, but burning cities threatening to spread to the suburbs, and the spawning of a crime wave from no-bail and non-prosecution policies may do to the Dem Party what happened to them from 1968 onward. When a party cements a reputation as a threat to civil order, they’re in trouble … big trouble.

California Democratic Party Chairman John Burton leads a “F***k Donald Trump” chant at the California Democratic Party Convention in May of 2017.

Trump’s greatest ally is his opponents. Douthat underestimates the moral corruption of the Democrat side of the political equation.

RogerG

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There’s No Cure for Stupid

Laurence Fox and Rachel Boyle in the dust-up on the BBC’s The Question.

How do people make themselves, for want of a better word, stupid?  People are normally rational beings (maybe I’m too optimistic), so how do they end up … stupid?  One possible answer is that they believe in fictions.  Turning an untruth into truth is quite a feat, and the source of much misery when it is pronounced by people with a media bullhorn.  One fount of “stupid”with a patina of academic glamour is identity politics and its conferring of “wokeness” on its adherents.

I define “identity politics” as  the attempt to assign virtue and vice to people according to immutable qualities such as melanin count and genitalia.   A subsidiary precept is the dualism of oppressor/oppressed for which all people must descend, as based on the aforementioned unchangeable personal characteristics – something any dyed-in-the-wool Marxist would find familiar.  The result is a profusion of baloney.  But woe be to those caught in the snares of the woke cadres, as Laurence Fox soon discovered.

Rachel C. Boyle

An example of a dolt on parade was broadcast to the world in the BBC’s Question Time when a supposed “academic”, Rachel Boyle, leveled the banality of “racism” at Laurence Fox for his skepticism about sending all criticism of the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle,  into the “racism” black hole (“black” being no attempt at cultural appropriation).

Take a look.

Boyle has all the academic credentials of wokeness, she being a lecturer and researcher in race and ethnicity at Edge Hill University in Lancashire.  The amazing thing about her is the seriousness and self-confidence in her batty denunciations of Fox.  She strings together pejorative epithets like a latter-day Muhammed Ali at one of his prefight weighing-ins.  Or more accurately, she spouts the nonsense with all the gravity of a lab-coated functionary in the NSDAP Racial Policy Office with calipers measuring the width of noses to peg a person into the official racial hierarchy.  Completely absent is any sense of humility.  You know, the lack of any self-awareness that she could be wrong.

One of the ramifications for believing in the unbelievable is the potential for human slaughter.  People lose their individuality as they are subsumed into artificially differentiated groups.  It’s easy to condemn thousands in a single stroke.

I came across the phenomena of genocidal females – to go along with their more numerous alternatively gendered soul-mates – while reading Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s second volume of his The Red Wheel.  In exile in Switzerland with Lenin were Rosalia Zemlyachka and Yevgenia Bosch, both having key posts in the Bolsheviks’ Red Terror from 1917 to 1921.

Rosalia Zemlyachka

Zemlyachka, a Marxist of longstanding, was instrumental with Bela Kun of bringing the Bolshevik butchery to the Crimea in 1920-21.  Bosch similarly has blood all over her hands.

Yevgenia Bosch

She became the head of the Ministry of the Interior in the Ukraine when the Bolshevik Red Army seized control of the country.  Say “Ministry of the Interior” and you may as well be saying “secret police”, “more blood of the bourgeoisie”, and “Red Terror”.  Her body count came to around 400,000-600,000 murdered Cossacks, Jews, and assorted “enemies of the people”.

How can normally decent people become mass killers?  It’s highly unlikely without some animating belief system overwhelming all considerations, ideas like those of our would-be totalitarian interlocutor from the woke departments of Edge Hill University, Rachel Boyle.  Reducing human beings to categories of goodness and badness as based on biological traits is dangerous business, very dangerous business.

RogerG

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Barron Trump and the Stanford Law School Bubble

Prof. Karla testifies before House Judiciary Committee, and Barron Trump (inset).

Most Americans don’t live their lives glued to talk radio and opinionated cable news channels.  They’ve got kids and work to deal with.  Every now and then, though, they get exposed to the deep blue bubble that would like to rule over them.

Recently, a curtain was pulled back showing the type of people inhabiting the dark blue abbeys of academia when 3 left-liberal profs traipsed before the Nadler impeachment tribunal to bellow their disgust for Trump.  One of them, Pamela Karla of Stanford Law, punctuated her talk with a well-rehearsed quip dragging Trump’s 13-year-old son into her allegation of Trump’s so-called monarchical tendencies (see below).

Obnoxious, for making Trump’s young son a tag line?  Yes, to anyone outside the blue bubble; not so for people who spend their lives thinking and living within one.

The gag would be cute before the captured audiences of her classroom and faculty lounges.  It’s tone deaf to normal people.  Once again, we get another example of the strange people who are nurtured in the narrow confines of the academic Versailles (a more accurate monarchical allusion) that dot our landscape.

RogerG

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Swamp Creatures

Go Astros! I had no dog in the hunt that is called the 2019 World Series. Sunday’s rude crowd at Nationals Park changed that.  If you can’t find a good reason to root for someone, rooting against someone may just fit the bill, particularly when they behave like vulgar buffoons.  The boos and the oral flatulence of “Lock him up” were glaringly repulsive.  Go Astros!

It was fitting justice that the Astros pummeled the swamp things 7-1 on boo day.

Conversely, the chant at Trump rallies, “Drain the swamp”, has gained new relevance.  The “swamp” in this case is DC’s polyglot population of government workers, government influencers, partisan operatives, and the net of white-collared professional handlers and manipulators.  The city’s only industry is politics, or the many ways to finagle something for somebody at somebody else’s expense.  The controlling party is, of course, the Democratic Party – the party of big, and ever bigger, government.

The crowd in the stadium is a microcosm of this swamp: the assemblage of over-paid schemers who can afford the $1,000 tickets.  These folks aren’t the peanuts-and-beer bleacher bums at Wrigley or Dodger Stadium.  The Series at Nationals Park is reserved for these well-heeled destroyers of American wealth.

Now the swamp denizens have a professional baseball team to shower their affections upon.  Why the new team to replace the caput Senators in 1960?  It’s simple: the market got bigger.  DC grew into the obese metroplex that busted its lap belt of boundaries, most recently thanks to Obama.

2016 election results by county in Virginia. Note the blue counties across the Potomac from Washington DC.

Its girth flooded into the Maryland and northern Virginia ‘burbs producing one-party Democrat enclaves who’d support Nicolás Maduro if he was the nominee.  The consequence is a deeper-blue-approaching-charcoal Maryland and a Virginia about ready to take the plunge into California governance.

What’s my chant?  Shrink DC!  A depression in DC is a renaissance everywhere else.  Go Astros!

RogerG

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The Order of the Day: Lies, Lies, Lies

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren in a May interview in Iowa Falls. (Daniel Acker/For The Washington Post)

I remember a conversation with a friend and colleague who appeared to be apoplectic about Donald Trump’s lies during the campaign and up to the aftermath of the inauguration (when the exchange ended). Wow, looking back on it, over-stating crowd sizes seems awfully pale when compared to the whoppers coming out of the mouths of Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Lena Dunham, Jussie Smollett, and the adolescent Amari Allen at Immanuel Christian School. They have in common a desire to exploit ritual identity-victimhood, the central tenet of being “woke”.

Whew, let’s take ’em one at a time. Warren’s angle is to peddle a Native American heritage that doesn’t exist for professional advancement. She compounds the error by spreading a tale of losing a job for being pregnant, also fully debunked. At least the second tall tale takes advantage of something that she quite clearly is: a woman.

Former Vice President Joe Biden campaigns for president in Davenport, Iowa, on June 11, 2019. (Photo: Joshua Lott/Getty Images)

After Warren, we have Biden. This guy is famous for his whoppers. The one that should be most irritating is his rendition of the traffic accident that killed his wife and daughter. He bellows that they died at the hands of drunk driver. Sorry, Joe, not true. The authorities at the time said alcohol wasn’t involved and even more interestingly concluded that Mrs. Biden was the cause of the collision when she strayed into the truck’s path. What’s more galling is Biden’s sliming of the other driver as one who “drinks his lunch”. The man’s family demands a retraction. This is more than a mistake on Biden’s part; it’s evidence of a Biden character flaw.

If that’s not enough, along comes the mouth of the lefty celebrity community, Lena Dunham. She claims in her book that she was raped in college by, what else, a white College Republican. The only problem: it ain’t true. In fact, her publisher had to shell out a settlement to the innocent accused. Is there a congenital connection between being woke and lying? One wonders.

The fictions continue with the little Amari Allen at Immanuel Christian. It just so happens to be the place of part-time employment for Karen Pence, and, of course, being a place of traditional Christianity – the LGBTQ agenda is an awkward fit there.

Karen Pence at Immanuel Christian School. (Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press)

Well, anyway, the little girl came home with a story of abuse and physical assault by, what else, some white boys. The only problem – you guessed it – it ain’t true. At the time, for our woke press, it was a two-fer: racism, racism everywhere, and the VP’s wife is a functionary of the white racist machine.

Do you see a pattern here? I do. The woke folks are so enthusiastic about their lefty social engineering that they’ll defame anyone and anything to get there.

I can’t stop here. Does the slander of the Duke lacrosse team remind you of anything? How about the alleged rape culture at U. of Virginia, courtesy of Rolling Stone, and subsequently and fully discredited? The despicable and wild tales of Kavanaugh’s youth? Come on, let’s call them what they are: lies. Don’t be a bit surprised that more deceits lay in store after the completion of the investigation of the investigators of Russia-gate and whistleblower-gate.

I’ll ask once again: Is there something congenital between being woke and lying? One wonders.

RogerG

* You can read about many of these episodes in Kevin Williamson’s recent piece in National Review.