Previously, I questioned the common perception of a modern college degree as a visa to smartland. Let me be clear once again: it isn’t. Today, a person can be forgiven for concluding that the more time a person spends passing through college classrooms, accumulating mounds of debt, the dumber one gets.
Look at all the PhD’s gushing over the vogueish “Anti-racism” crusade, and the legions of advance-degreed consultants lining up to descend on the schools to convert school boards, administrators, staff, and the kiddies into a facetious belief system that amounts to one huge logical fallacy. Imagine a hysteria fed by an unproven assumption that is used to lead to an unprovable conclusion, by people who should know better. It’s the latest edition of the carnival barker; it’s “diversity-inclusion-equity” (DEI), “critical race theory” (CRT), and “Anti-racism”. The quotation marks means that the words are slathered with so much junk thought that they’ve lost their original meaning.
Remember the old trick question, “When did you stop beating your wife?” The query assumes that you were flogging your wife without first proving it. Any answer unknowingly accepts the assumption. That’s the loaded question; that’s CRT; and that’s how you lose your life’s savings in a lawsuit.
The hours and hours of training – aka indoctrination – being foisted on the schools and workplaces is an escapade into drivel. The nonsense begins with unequal outcomes by race: incomes, incarcerations, traffic stops, educational attainment, etc. Then abstract theorizing substitutes for hard data to attach the inequalities to . . . racism. When hard data is attempted to make the connection, it’s relationship to the conclusion is speculative and highly tenuous. In the end, the unequal incomes, for instance, are attributed to hidden, and maybe not so hidden, racist thoughts of employers. The racism is declared to be mysteriously “systemic”. However, it apparently never occurred to the geniuses that unequal incomes may have something to do with lower graduation rates, higher rates of single parenthood, and/or spotty work histories. And those factors aren’t evenly distributed in the population.
If a person was to mention any of that, the PhD-clad indoctrinator tries to gaslight the person into an admission of unconscious racism. At this point, we’ve entered the world of Orwell’s “doublethink”. By mentioning those facts as contributing factors, you would be showing your racism and the need for the penance of public shaming. The denial of racism instantly becomes an act of racism. Back to Orwell’s Oceania, the “Anti-racism” consultant becomes the brainwasher O’Brien to the target’s Winston Smith. It’s doublethink in action.
Now they’ve rejiggered the original query to “When did you become a racist?” And to think that this stuff is making millionaires of degreed blockheads. If not stopped, we’ll be well on our way to social suicide.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced on June 24 that she will create a committee to investigate the January 6 attack on the Capitol. (photo: Kevin Dietsche)
The key features of a show trial, according to Wikipedia, are that guilt has been predetermined; it functions as preemption against political opposition; and it serves as propaganda in support of the ruling party’s oligarchy. These days, we’ve got a whole lot of show-trialing going on.
An example of the unwitting advancement of a bogus story for show trials can be found in Hugh Hewitt’s ongoing characterization (June 29) of some of the Jan. 6 capitol rioters as “insurrectionists”. Some may be, but neither he nor has anyone presented proof of “insurrection” and a justification for endless pretrial detention (no bail). Today, to prove his point, Hewitt went to the Justice Department’s website (see here: https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/capitol-breach-cases).
Identities and charges are listed for the defendants as well as their custody status on the website. Yet, the listed charges are just as likely to indicate a fevered desire to throw the book at Trump through his supporters and to lend a false credence to a campaign against “white supremacy”. If true, that’s a political motive and is contrary to the pursuit of justice. It could be the onset of a new Inquisition as much as legitimate prosecutions. The USDJ’s list isn’t dispositive of anything, much of the evidence is still under wraps or possibly nonexistent. Who can tell?
49-year-old grandma Anna Morgan-Lloyd — in the middle — was let off more lightly after recanting and being re-educated. Look like “white supremacists”?
The political aim, though, is up front and center. AG Garland, Biden, and the rest of his supporting cast have continually proclaimed a jihad against “white supremacy”. Jan. 6 is the crown jewel in their case against their political opponents who they’ve lumped together as “white supremacists”. It’s the event that they will milk it for all its worth. At the very least, this mental state of the donkey party casts a cloud on DOJ’s list and all that they do. Simply put, Hewitt doesn’t get it.
Another show trial is incubating in the House. Pelosi has announced a select committee to “investigate” Jan. 6. Have you taken a look at what she plans to create? The Dem/Rep breakdown will be 8-5 in a 220-212 House. She rules the House on the edge of five votes, but McCarthy will be relegated to five picks to her eight. The five that’ll be allocated to Republican leader McCarthy will only be “considered” by Her Excellency. Who appoints the staff, the folks who do most of the work? What are the respective rights of the minority? Sorry, I smell a rat! This will have all the makings of Soviet jurisprudence. Watch that space.
Welcome to the United States of America, the newest banana republic. Or more accurately, the latest edition of the Great Purge with an active and pliant politburo and a Chief Prosecutor Vyshinsky stand-in.
Stalin’s chief prosecutor in the 1930’s, Andrei VyshinskyBiden’s AG, Merrick GarlandThe USA, the latest member of the Banana Republic bloc
Memorial Day is a time to remember that we are mostly a decent people. No measure of decency can compete with this divine insight from the Gospel of John: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” We have patriot graves all over the world that are testament to the greatest love. Their headstones are a rebuke to today’s insidious malcontents who seem to have a grip on the cultural gateways of today. As they besmirch the nation and anybody older than them, these graves are the ultimate censure. They died so others might live, live in Lincoln’s “last best hope of earth”.
We should not forget that ours is a good nation, not a perfect one. Nothing touched by the hand and mind of man is without fault, including, and most poignantly, the fevered beliefs of those who would tear it all down in their profound ignorance. There are too many in graveyards scattered around the country and world who practiced that greater love. Today, we honor them and condemn the misguided who belittle them and the nation for which they died.
“The Mansions of the Lord” seems most appropriate in this troubled time.
Here are the lyrics:
To fallen soldiers let us sing
Where no rockets fly nor bullets wing
Our broken brothers let us bring
To the Mansions of the Lord
No more bleeding, no more fight
No prayers pleading through the night
Just divine embrace, eternal light
To the Mansions of the Lord.
Where no mothers cry and no children weep
We will stand and guard though the angels sleep
Through the ages safely keep
The Mansions of the Lord.
(Words by Randall Wallace and music by Nick Glennie-Smith)
Social psychosis: noun, a widely-spread mental disorder characterized by disconnection from reality which results in strange behavior in mass, often accompanied by a mass perception of stimuli (voices, images, sensations) and other hallucinations.
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Progressivism as a political movement is based on one overriding assumption: history is a long march toward a more sophisticated, rational, and all-round better existence. The problem is, it isn’t. There are fits and starts, technological improvements, yes, advances in science, yes, and well-meaning attempts, but not all “improvements” are improvements. Some are a product of hysteria and periods of intense social psychosis that represent a step backwards to our more atavistic side. Our bestial nature never went away, and four years in college classrooms won’t eradicate it. We are probably in another one of those spasms of flight from reality.
Don’t expect our recent crop of elected leaders to appeal to the better angels of our nature. They haven’t been especially good at filtering the nonsense. Indeed, some have stoked it. President Obama was famous for admonishing his opponents for being on the “wrong side of history”. It’s the same stilted form of thinking. What he shows is that he is fully marinated in the same “march of history” stuff that warped the minds of Karl Marx, Marcuse, and today’s Ta-Nehisi Coats, Ibram X. Kendi, and Robin DiAngelo of critical race theory fame. The last three took Marcuse, and by extension Marx, to give us another one of those iron laws of history that handcuffed their minds, as it did many of their 20th-century predecessors who constructed some of the worst tyrannies to the unremitting disgrace of humankind.
The current phase of frenzy was 30+ years in coming. From the child sex-abuse witchhunts of the late 1980’s to the mid 1990’s through the nexus of the election of Donald Trump and aftermath, the resurgence of a revised Marxism and its manifestation in street violence and indoctrination into nearly every corner of the culture, to our current COVID panic, we seem to have lost our marbles. Events can be a catalyst, but so can personalities. These episodes can be linked because they have so much in common: they are manifestations of a social psychosis.
One factor boosting this mental dysfunction is an unfortunate byproduct of the ubiquity of electronic media in the form of tv in an earlier era and today’s internet. Thoughts and paranoias move at light speed. Today, social media and our instantaneous interconnectedness intensify an already powerful stimulant. Thanks to the ever-present electronic social communion, the unease spreads like wildfire, taking form in loose theories, unquestioning faith in media-grabbing public personalities, radical activism, and government coercion.
What sparks these episodes? The angst can be rooted in a little-noticed alteration in family chemistry. The shift from the social ideal of a single breadwinner to two working parents may have elicited a broad anxiety about the care of children, a lingering discomfort waiting for a trigger. The trigger came in the 1983-4 McMartin Preschool case in Huntington Beach, Ca. Child-talk to public officials, and that common staple of our times, the degreed “expert”, took the banter of children to place seven adults in the dock. It took six years of litigation to exonerate the defendants, at the expense of ruined reputations, the lingering emotional scars of the innocent at the hands of public officials and their lackeys, and millions of dollars of public and private money.
The outcome of the McMartin Preschool case didn’t staunch the jihad. As it was working its way out, the crusade waited for an avatar in the person of Dade County DA Janet Reno (future AG for Bill Clinton) to concoct a formula to turn the child-talk into convictions. The Miami Method, as it was called, relied on university-trained child therapists to extract the stories, physical evidence that was spuriously associated with the tales, and multiple witnesses in the form of children who went through the child-therapist mill. Three people would be railroaded – the Fusters and Grant Snowden – until Reno ran into 16-year-old Bobby Finjnje. He refused to plea-bargain, went to trial, found others who could expose the Method’s gross errors, and was exonerated. The fever broke in Miami.
Bobby Finjnje at age 16Janet Reno and assistant as State’s Attorney for Dade County.
It still raged elsewhere. In such far-flung places as Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, Texas, Washington State, Martinsville in Saskatchewan, Canada, and New Zealand, the illicit holy war persisted. Then, like magic, the hysteria disappeared by the mid-1990’s. Odd thing: fantastic tales of satanic rituals of sodomy and bestiality have a date-certain shelf life. Poof, it’s gone.
But the emotional virus was mutating below the surface.
Sometimes, the frenzy can grow out of other emerging socio-economic circumstances. Many have noticed the current divide in our country between the winners and losers in the new society emanating from the rise of our time’s latest edition of the global free market. Mind you, the global free market isn’t necessarily composed of free market societies. It’s just that all countries, whether free or unfree, are to be treated alike, no matter the impact on any one nation.
The winners in this brave new world are concentrated by geography. Urban centers became the epicenter of a new transnational commercial elite. They are concentrated in certain zip codes for work and residence. Allied to them are the elite prep schools and universities who help create and perpetuate an incestuous petri dish of culturally homogeneous elite social pools in these nodes.
What of the losers? They’re everywhere else. They reside in flyover country. They are found in places that have been caricatured in city-centered media as overrun with uncouth and ignorant oafs. For the beautiful people, they are the flotsam to be ignored on the way to the ascendancy of the “better” people, meaning them.
BigTech’s oligarchs
The bifurcation seldom ends well. If it persists, and resentment simmers, it won’t take much for a media-savvy personage, speaking in the right tone and tenor, to lead a counter-revolution. In 2015, that person arrived in the form of Donald Trump. He was combative, seemingly spoiling for a fight at every turn. He spoke for the forgotten, for the people who bore the brunt of the new prejudices and bigotry of the narrow set of elites coalescing at the commanding heights of the culture.
Remarkably, he won in 2016 and spent 4 years at war. The nouveau culture’s self-anointed vanguard elite spent 4 years at war with him and everyone associated with him, including his supporters, which culminated in the 2020 election and Trump’s single-minded crusade to undermine the results at the expense of everyone else in his party. The January 6 capitol riot erupted as 800-1,000 of his enthusiasts stormed Congress.
Trump at his January 6 rally
What did the party get for all the tumult? It’s a mixed bag. The Republican Party managed to squeak by with some victories down ballot as well as the loss of two Senate seats in Georgia.
What makes people perform unspeakable acts, such as rampage into the capitol, based on the drumbeat of an influential figure? The well-spring is the anxiety from stressed lives that was evident in prior witchhunts. Sometimes the underappreciated rally to an avatar who stylistically gives voice to their resentments. It’s not his ideas so much as it is his demonstrative qualities, the pugnaciousness. He’s deeply admired for these personality traits, not his brain. At this point, the movement reflects rabid fandom more than an exaltation of possible statesmanship.
The zealotry of the fan is evident in Trump’s famous line from the 2016 campaign trail:
“The polls — they say I have the most loyal people … I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”
Judging by the shenanigans on January 6, maybe not going so far as to turn a blind eye to murder, still, his most rabid followers would become a mob for him.
Though, it’s not as if Trump supporters had nothing to complain about as election day unfolded. The election laws in many places were contorted by partisan activism arising out of the urban/academic petri dish of our progressive jet-set. Standards of accountability were set aside in such a way as to get their bête noire, Trump. Legal, yes, in that no court has overturned the count. Disreputable, yes, in that nobody knows what happened in many locales when ballots were scattered in the mail, mysteriously made their way to a multitude of unsupervised drop boxes, and then on to their unobserved processing in counting rooms. Ballot harvesting was rampant in many places; honest verification was non-existent; and the vote-counting saga continued for weeks. Who wouldn’t at least scratch their heads at this circus?
The pandemic was the crisis too good to waste in order to make a hash of the election. It was used not only to create an election monster but, as it turned out, to introduce all-encompassing state control to a frightened populace. The pandemic proved to the nouveau elite an excellent opportunity to conduct a grand socio-political experiment testing the popular limits to a great expansion of government power.
Our ideological and social sorting by geography showed a distinct difference in submission to this new regime. An entire segment of our population, the urban part, who are routinely dependent on government services, have a preternatural tendency to accept authority, especially if it comes from the much-ballyhooed “expert”, many with the same credentials in tow as the influential residents in uptown high-rises and the outlying well-to-do ‘burbs. In other words, these new potentates have the additional advantage of being respected for having the same social qualifications as a sizeable portion of the governing coalition. Social comradery goes a long way in instilling fealty to “experts”.
The chief commodities of the “expert” are safety and a shield from risk. The notion of trade-offs – something is given up to get something else – is an alien concept to people who have lived their lives in the protective womb of uniformed and credentialed experts. Insulated from realities, citified people become easy marks for hysteria. The zero-risk myopia of administrative agencies, taken as the voice of God, can be easily transmuted into instances of personal bullying in the public square.
The true-believers’ public threats and denunciations for not wearing a mask in outings to the grocery store are not unusual.
The obsessive penchant for outdoor mask-wearing, even while strenuously exercising, and alone, is common. Being absolutely petrified about sending their children to school in an unthinking response to a threat that is smaller for the kids than the flu pre-COVID is a prevalent reaction. Mask-wearing became a totem of God’s mark of saintliness. All crazy, all unhinged.
Wearing a mask while jogging.
The panic and hysteria show in polls. Rural areas are more hesitant in regards to COVID mitigations and more reluctant to get the vaccine. Urban areas, just the opposite. Yet, the vaccinated, the vast majority in municipalities, show a greater degree of fear about a return to normal and engagement in public activities than the unvaccinated. It’s not exactly a vote of confidence in the vaccine. Or, more importantly, is it evidence of something more troubling in the urban mind: a deeper, irrational dread of any risk not countenanced by the beloved “expert”? These people are naked on the barricades without their departments of public health, sanitation, public safety, transportation, urban planning, and water and power.
The strong sense of exposure in times of stress leads to anxiety and the anxiety leads to a population always on the brink of hysteria. It’s pure irrationality. COVID provides the latest example of a population pushed to the event horizon of public madness. Early on, prudence dictated strong measures till knowledge and treatments were discovered – not necessarily a vaccine. Within a few months, vulnerable populations were identified and treatments developed. While COVID isn’t the flu, it certainly is for a sizeable chunk of the population: the healthy and the young. Protective measures should have quickly focused on the aged and those suffering from chronic conditions. They should have been quarantined, not the whole of society in massive stay-at-home orders. It was a sledge hammer to fix a watch, and now we are paying the price.
For a people without a sympathy for risk, and in possession of an abject faith in the protective shield of the “expert” in government posts, they are extremely hesitant to leave the bubble of corseted “protections”. Their life will soon become as distorted as the late 19th-century female body after being bounded for hours by a corset. The mental and emotional capacities of self-reliance and confidence of urbanites will atrophy, like ladies’ abdominal muscles in a bygone era, after 18 months of universal mask-wearing, business closures, stay-at-home orders, social distancing, and distance-learning. The horror at the thought of cutting the apron string is palpable.
One of the unintended consequences of the smothering is that the isolation may have primed people on the emotional brink to fall headlong into fanaticism. Confined to Zoom and reluctant to venture outdoors, some were cramped in a prison of their own mind and pre-selected media preferences. In such a rarified and enclosed atmosphere, unacceptable ideas and actions may move into the realm of the acceptable. It’s a fused magazine of powder waiting for a spark. Enter George Floyd and Derek Chauvin.
The miscreants subsequently hitting the streets and passersby, and torching the downtowns, always a demographic speck, weren’t evidence of a popular uprising, but preposterous ideas, still preposterous, were starting to be taken seriously by our influential trend-setters. Big Everything – sports, media, Fortune 500 – began to sing a radical tune. Unable to prove actual racism, faculty-lounge extremists opted for mysticism. Amazingly, it caught on. The scientifically unprovable charges of systemic racism and the unscientific theorizing of critical race theory (CRT) were treated as physical realities on the order of the sun, wind, and earth. With their finger in the air of an artificial gale from a faculty-lounge wind machine, the culture’s hegemons repeated the chants of the new cult.
The normal check for sanity of broader social interactions in a normally functioning society were knee-capped. Normally, an ounce of good old-fashioned scientific skepticism would be enough to put the kibosh to the nonsense. In these times, not so fast.
Diangelo and Kendi, chief propagandists for CRT
CRT isn’t so much a real theory as it is a kind a Nicene Creed for race-hustlers. It starts with the conclusion – we’re a racist nation – and moves to condemnation – “systemic racism” and “white privilege”. It can’t be proven in any meaningful sense. The use of statistical disparities is “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” run amok. Racial statistical differences aren’t proof of much of anything, least of all a society who has it in for blacks. No tie can be made between the evidence – the variance in numbers – and the conclusion – systemic racism. The variances can be explained in many ways without “racism” ever rolling off your lips. It’s jump-to-conclusions time.
The hustler’s gambit of “equity” is simply a cover for vengeance. Those of lighter skin shades are expected to pony up with racially-based benefits till the numbers come up equal, in a statistically artificial state of “equity”. In a more rational time, this was good old-fashioned reverse racial discrimination, and patently and justly illegal. Not for today. Not in today’s climate of dysfunction-induced hyper-aggravation.
2020 riots in NYC
This isn’t progress. It’s a mania that happens so often that a person has to wonder if it is a built-in feature of the modern banality that we happen to call “progress”. Are we really that much better than the past’s socially psychotic behavior in the pogroms, witch trials, India’s anti-Muslim riots, the Ottoman’s second-class status for Christians, Rwanda’s Tutsi genocide, or today’s inner-city street thugs who routinely target Asians and anyone with a lighter complexion? There’s good reason to believe that the beast is always at the gates.
Jefferson’s faith in education as the cure-all is illusory. It can’t be if it is as corrupted as the malady it was meant to heal. Human failings are as persistent as is our willingness to believe in the unbelievable. They are everywhere, even in our “progress”.
The booking photos of, L to R, pf Rowan Dalbey, Kristen Aumoithe and Amber Lucas.
California gave to the nation mind-boggling aerospace, movies, the wonderful cornucopia of the Central Valley, and the high tech universe. Now, we must add half-literate loons to the list of exports. Weeks after the testimony of Barry Brodd, a former Santa Rosa police officer and current use-of-force expert, in support of Derek Chauvin’s defense, three women, maybe others, descended on a home in Santa Rosa thinking it was still occupied by Brodd. They vandalized the house in pig’s blood and left a pig’s head on the front porch. The only problem: the acts are felony vandalism and Brodd, like many of the retired California men and women in blue, no longer live in the state. The halfwits only ruined the sleep and property of quite innocent people.
The Santa Rosa home vandalized by the three “social justice warriors”.
The fact that Brodd no longer lives in the state says volumes. Not to say that he lives there but there is a reason for the existence of “blue Idaho”. In fact, huge colonies of Californian refugees are littered throughout the country, mostly west of the Mississippi. One reason for the exodus is the fact that the state is in the grip of people like Rowan Dalbey (20), Kristen Aumoithe (34), and Amber Lucas (34) – now charged felons. If you watch the video, you’ll get a brief backgrounder of at least one of the culprits, Lucas. She’s a “social justice warrior” and something of a wine connoisseur. The other two look like her sisters.
Take a look and you’ll get a glimpse into the mind of California’s ruling class.
House Democratic Party leaders: Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, and Jerry Nadler.
Today, we might be sensing the whiff of the kind of social decay that earlier laid open the ancient classical world to Christianity. A fatigued civilization, for whatever reason, can’t generate the resistance to something else filling the void. In the Greco-Roman world, the emptiness was filled with the beauty of Christianity. In our own time, it’s the onrush of the vile postmodernism and its depraved cousin, critical race theory, that is attempting to displace Christianity. The elites of all stations get caught up in the mania for this latest new thing, even if it is a moral and logical mess. We are entering a really dark place. Yet, hope lies in the fact that we’ve had trials before, and Christianity has proven to be remarkably resilient.
Sparse attendance at an United Methodist Church.
The current decline of Christianity in modern America is stunning. A Pew survey of American religiosity from 2019 shows the dire situation in just 10 years. In a nutshell, adherents of Catholicism and Protestantism are down (51% to 43%), and agnosticism, “nothing in particular”, and atheists are up . . . in just 10 years! Plowing the field deeper, the drops are most significant among those in the East, the college-educated, Democrats, and the young, with Millennials taking first place among the youthful disaffiliated. Nothing about his should be surprising if you’ve followed the culture.
The decline can be traced to the failure of our institutions. Marriage has been redefined into a near oblivion with easy no-fault divorce, thereby leaving behind a tranche of emotionally-scarred children. The schools, in an effort to maintain religious neutrality by bleaching any hint of God from the curriculum, are training grounds for materialism (the material world is all that there is). The family provides no corrective since it has been incubated in the singular quest for material pleasure. The state reinforces the materialism by the transformation of its core mission into the nation’s nanny. All it can do is affect a person’s material condition, not their spirit or soul, if you will. In the end, the ever-expansive state crowds out the church and its essential social mission. It’s more and more a world without God.
The experience of the 20th century shows that the displacement of God tends to lead to the emplacement of man in His place. God goes down the memory hole and man gets deified. The deification occurs in the sanctification of the words of certain trendy persons. Their words are worshipped like Moses receiving the Commandments from the burning bush. They require no proof for their validity. They are simply announced and off to the barricades the zealots go.
The new gospel is postmodernism. It rejects a single, overarching truth, and makes all claims of truth to be dependencies of who and what is in power. Truth isn’t objective; it’s relative to those in a position to impose it. The problem: it justifies a skepticism of all claims and ends in a belief in nothing. A person under its sway will be forever in a state of second-guessing themselves. They end up where G.K. Chesterton found them:
“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”
The “anything” could be modern “critical race theory”, “systemic racism”, or the neo-Marxism rampaging in the streets of Portland, anything put forward by anyone with a platform and power to push it. So, a philosophical movement meant to question power comes around to being a chief exponent of it: power in its most crass expression.
Herbert Marcuse
Enter Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse, an acolyte of the Frankfurt School (Institute of Social Research) in Germany, took the oppressor/oppressed dialectic of Marx and postmodernism’s chaining of truth to power to concoct the “critical theory” of today’s “critical race theory” (CRT). In Marcuse, the consciousness bit is hyped to present truth, and our awareness of the truth, to be a product of our power position in society. The powerful – the “privileged” in CRT – can be defined by race, gender, ethnicity, any one of a number of materially-based categories. Your consciousness – your values, intentions, beliefs, your head – is locked in place by your melanin count, et al. If you fall into the lighter side of the color spectrum, for example, you can say nothing to deny your “privilege” – code for power. You are as guilty as the darker pigments are founts of wisdom since they are deemed “oppressed”. Logic, reason, the scientific method, and any prior civilizational core tenet cannot be allowed to contravene the yapping of the race-hustlers on MSNBC, The View, the streets of Minneapolis, or the Democratic Party’s big cheeses. After all, their “truth” is covered by the claim that they give voice to the voiceless, a banality in common use in such circles.
If you haven’t noticed, their contradictory circular logic leads them back to a power grab to impose a “truth”. The whole thing is a hot mess, and a dangerous one at that.
LeBron James of the Los Angeles Lakers
What happens when the oppressors and oppressed switch roles: the oppressed become the oppressors? Of course, all of this is nonsense. Most single moms in a crime-ridden slum aren’t storming a Baltimore Target. The barking is coming from multi-millionaires and billionaires like Oprah or LeBron James, or a host of others of the oppressed-by-skin-color who have estates on Martha’s Vineyard and attended elite prep schools. The skin-color matrix breaks down as the new “privileged” take on the mantle of Lenin’s vanguard elite. In the end, we’ve got a new slate of “oppressors” as the consciousness bit is weaponized to crush opposition. The new “truth” that is not beholden to logic, law, the scientific method, math, or reason is set loose with no barrier to its realization. Are you sensing a whiff of totalitarianism?
Maxine Waters (D, Ca.)
Maxine Waters (D, Ca.) cavorts to Minneapolis to incite street extortion for her preferred verdict, and shouts “shut your mouth” to Rep. Jim Jordan (R, Oh.). Mazie Hirono (D, Ha.) goes before cameras to demand that men “Just shut up” if they attempt to prevent her from performing a career lynching of Brett Kavanaugh. Biden and Harris jump to cameras after the Chauvin verdict to announce a crusade against “systemic racism” without a shred of logic, reason, or evidence to justify the inquisition. Biden turns loose the powers of the federal authorities to indoctrinate the young in the contemptible “critical race theory” by reversing Trump’s order to stop the mental devastation in the federal government. Things are happening that should send chills down your spine, and all because some suburbanites had angst about Trump’s comportment.
Yep, elections have consequences, and many of them are hellish. The period between the present and the 2022 elections is a race, a race to see how much damage the New-Left-in-Democrat-clothes can inflict on the country before they are stopped in a vote of the people. The political charlatans currently running the show have a window of opportunity for them to unwittingly push the country into a major rupture. If they are successful in DC in ramming through their revolution, there’s too much of the rest of the country that won’t abide by it.
Ironically, states and cities under the sway of the New Left showed the way for red states who wish not to join their revolution. Leftists in power declared their jurisdictions to be sanctuary cities and states for illegal immigrants. As per blue states, red states are forming an expanding list of Second Amendment sanctuary states. Disunion, if it does happen, began with the Left’s flaunting of the clear Constitutional federal authority over immigration and may end with the two-thirds of the other states whose citizens don’t wish to be remain in a union with states who are striving to relegate them to second-class political status.
Gabrielle Clark, mother of the 12th-grader, who is suing her school and district for the imposition of critical race theory curriculum.
More pushback is germinating. Critical race theory’s totalitarian indoctrination is being challenged in court and before school boards. Examples are many. A father publicly pulled his daughter out of Brearley, an elite $54,000 per year New York private school for propaganda acts such as a school-sponsored student “Anti-racism pledge”. He says the school’s antiracism actions were “misguided, divisive, counterproductive and cancerous”. Gabrielle Clark, mother of a twelfth-grader in a Nevada charter school, filed suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada in December 2020. In her complaint, her son’s school “inserted consciousness raising and conditioning exercises under the banner of ‘Intersectionality’ and ‘Critical Race Theory.’” Further, “The lesson categorized certain racial and religious identities as inherently ‘oppressive,’ . . . and instructed pupils including [her son] who fell into these categories to accept the label ‘oppressor.’” This is Khmer Rouge stuff, and happening all over the country, and likely to intensify as the full resources of the federal government are brought to bear in service of the jihad.
How much more can the union endure? These are tumultuous times. May cooler heads prevail.
A possibility?
RogerG *Thanks for the informational contributions and insights of Peter J. Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute, Bari Weiss, former New York Times editor, and Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay in their book, Cynical Theories.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Calif., speaks as Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, listens on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, April 20, 2021, after the jury returned guilty verdicts on all three charges in the murder trial of former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin in the death of George Floyd. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Good public leaders don’t attempt to ride a wave of falsehoods. Right now, our mediocre leadership does! Take today’s enthusiasm for race-hustling among many of our elected leaders at the top of our political establishment. The whole edifice of “critical race theory” and its companion charge of “systemic racism” rides on a blatant mangling of facts, inventing them in many instances. The George Floyd case has turned into another example in the sorry saga.
Universal connectivity now makes it possible for cat videos, daily cop interactions with the public, and acts of rank stupidity to spread like the 1906 San Francisco Fire in the immediate wake of the 7.9 earthquake. Back then, fire-storms rampaged almost unimpeded, like the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Today, fire-storms are limited to wildlands; however, another kind is let loose on the public. Under conditions of instant connectivity, everyone gets to see what somebody else has taken with their cellphone, and frequently, before it has a chance to go virile, someone will have cropped it to fit a crazed political fetish. Sadly, not unexpectedly, it happened again regarding the arrest of George Floyd.
Watch the video below of the prologue to the famous 9-minute Chauvin segment that was hyped by our race-hustling halfwits in elected positions. I’ve said it before: resisting arrest increases the risk of an encounter ending in a bad place. Add the facts of the suspect being high as a kite, universal cell-phone cinematography, and near-illiterate revolutionary fervor of a narrow clique running at a fever pitch, and we get to see our cities explode.
Does anyone do real risk assessment anymore? Many of our leaders go overboard into authoritarianism to pursue zero risk because of a virus, but find excuses for resisting arrest as if the risk of refusing to follow officer requests is negligible in the haste to brand cops as covert KKK members. Little risk is permissible in one while high-risk behavior is ignored in the other. How does that work?
Do we produce good leaders anymore who can sensibly navigate the nonsense? If we don’t find some soon, get prepared for a major rupture in our national cohesion. Red-state locales won’t countenance the craziness that appears to ride at the top of our society.
Biden and Harris after the Chauvin verdict was announced.
It seems that we go through periods of poor public leadership like the spate of presidents prior to the Civil War (Pres. James Buchanan?). Great leaders don’t get caught up in momentary public manias, nor are they demagogues grasping for approval and feeding the passions of extremists who they mistake for a fount of wisdom. Dead ends and discord are the results, which is horribly and amply displayed in our history.
The quality of our leadership of late came to mind after surveying the campaigns of the 2020 election season and its aftermath down to the present. Of particular note is the reaction of Congressional leadership and Biden and Harris to the inflammatory Chauvin case. Either through ignorance or demagoguery, after the verdict, they paraded before cameras and went from the abuse of a single police officer right to “systemic racism”. It’s a leap without a scintilla of evidence. It wasn’t even an argument made by prosecutors, nor was any evidence presented that implied that Chauvin was a racist. So how do these public luminaries get from “A” to “Z”? Easy, just say it!
The whole edifice of “systemic racism” is similarly constructed. The ideology’s enthusiasts go from statistical disparities right to racism. They can’t imagine any other explanation for the inequalities in the numbers across demographic groups. They childishly paste “systemic” to “racism” so they don’t have to prove it. In the Chauvin matter, the scandal doesn’t only lay in the abuse by a single cop but in the ritual abuse of good sense by an increasingly radicalized wing of our political establishment. Where’s the leadership to reign in the foolishness?
One of the chief propagandists for “critical race theory” and “systemic racism”, Ibram X. Kendi, at his lectern at Boston U.
A review of the trial record makes clear the reality of the Chauvin case.
First, George Floyd died from asphyxiation from Chauvin’s persistent and excessive pressure to Floyd’s neck and back. Chauvin was responsible for his death.
Second, the cops weren’t on a hunt for black people to harm. They had a legitimate reason for attending to George Floyd. Cops were responding to a call of a criminal act: the use of a counterfeit $20 bill. On prompting from the store clerk, cops – not Chauvin – approached Floyd, who was obviously under the influence, possessed a second phony bill in the car, along with drugs and pills with Floyd’s saliva on them.
Third, Floyd resisted the initial officers’ attempts to bring him into custody, with Chauvin and his partner arriving later, and for Chauvin to make matters worse. Throughout this early phase of the arrest, before Chauvin, it is interesting to note that Floyd made claims of “I can’t breathe” with no one having him in a stranglehold or knee on his back.
Fourth, no evidence was presented by the prosecution of Chauvin’s, or anyone else’s, alleged racism. Not a hint, inference, or otherwise. Possibly, one could argue, this was due to the need to keep the trial focused on Chauvin’s actions. Still, if Chauvin was a raging bigot, something would come light that would lead a person to believe it. Nada.
Fifth, so how do we go from bad cop to racist America? The answer lies in pure demagoguery. A virile video clip of the actions of a bad cop, combined with a mania to find authority figures, preferably white, to publicly humiliate, breeds the ill-starred crusade of our crazies in elective office. It brings out the worst in our current crop of abysmal leaders.
However, it must be admitted that these people were elected. If there is a broader guilt to be assessed, we must bear some of the blame. Enough of us chose them. Could it be that we get the leadership that we deserve, or could it be that some of us just made a poor guess? I think the latter.
Have you noticed the pervasive use of “systemic racism” and “equity” in public utterances by eminences in our society? The two are key elements of “critical race theory”, an idea akin to Marx’s Scientific Socialism.
Honestly, the terms are a real head-scratcher to most sensible people. The former (systemic racism) is assumed to be real and bad, and the latter (equity) carries a vague aura of something good, being phonetically similar to “equality”. The reality is that both are warmed-over Marxisms, Marxisms for the obsessive identity-mongering of our time. It’s the oppressed/oppressor schtick of Marxism with the ranks of the “oppressed” filled with “people of color”, women (however defined), and that catch-all, the “other”. The “oppressors” are those of a pale shade and male. Notice that personal actions have nothing to do with the assignation.
You are judged by melanin count and genitalia. Sounds like good old fashioned racism and sexism to me, just practiced by different people.
Anyway, all of this is nonsense since racial intermingling has a made a hash of “people of color”. Soon, the only people reasonably without color are those at room temperature.
“Equity” began in English common law as the means to fill in the gaps, address loopholes, and to realize the goals of the common law: fairness and justice. The spirit-of-the-law stuff, as opposed to the letter.
That ain’t true today! It has the rancid odor of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge and Mao’s Cultural Revolution. It’s the century-plus bid to force equality in the strictest terms possible among the preferred categories (above).
Acts of public shaming during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Virtual reality training in a business conference room to identify and correct for “systemic racism”. (Photo: Forbes)
What does this mean to the common American as this noxious ideology embeds itself into everything from the Fortune 500 to the schools, especially the schools? Munchkins in elementary schools are asked to demean themselves in rankings of racial “power and privilege” (Cupertino, Ca.). During a middle school teacher in-service (i.e., training), a shaming session is conducted for Christian white males to confess their “privilege” – aka, “sin” – and admit their oppression of the “other” (Springfield, Mo.). Fifth-graders are compelled to celebrate “Black communism” and engage in a protest to free 1960’s radical Angela Davis who was, by the way, charged with murder (Philadelphia). In Seattle, the school district administration issued a memo that described white teachers as guilty of “spirit murder” of black children. Think, this totalitarian indoctrination is happening to your children and the people teaching them.
This isn’t education; it’s child abuse!
Ibram X. Kendi, formerly known as Ibram Henry Rogers, the warlock of critical race theory mysticism, demands a federal Antiracism Department, independent of the elective branches. No homage to popular sovereignty for this guy.
It’s just the tip of the iceberg. The abuse to logic and decency is evident everywhere from the military academies, the Pentagon, the labyrinth of state, local, and federal governments, corporate HR departments, et al. Just like the prior Marxisms, this one will end up in another pathetic existence for the people forced to live under it.
And you were worried about Trump’s comportment in 2020? Waiting in the wings is something far more horrifying, whether you realized it or not.
In 1917, many Russians didn’t like the czar. Then, they helped overthrow him and eventually got Lenin, Stalin, and communist totalitarianism for about 80 years. 10-12 million deaths later (due to civil war, famine, mass executions, and state-sanctioned murder) Russians got what few wanted at the onset.
Be careful for what you ask for. You are about to live the consequences. Here’s a photo gallery of one of the consequences, using the example of Minneapolis:
Onlookers watch as smoke smolders from a destroyed fast food restaurant near the Minneapolis Police Third Precinct, Thursday, May 28, 2020, after a night of rioting and looting as protests continue over the death of George Floyd. (Photo: AP Photo/Jim Mone) People stand on a burned up car as fires burn near a Target Store after a night of unrest and protests in the death of George Floyd early Thursday, May 28, 2020 in downtown Minneapolis. (Photo: David Joles/Star Tribune via AP)A man poses for a photo in the parking lot of an AutoZone store in flames, while protesters hold a rally for George Floyd in Minneapolis on Wednesday, May 27, 2020. (Photo: Carlos Gonzalez/Star Tribune via AP)A man poses for photos in front of a fire at an AutoZone store, while protesters hold a rally for George Floyd in Minneapolis on Wednesday, May 27, 2020. (Photo: Carlos Gonzalez/Star Tribune via AP)People break into a Target store, while protesters hold a rally for George Floyd in Minneapolis on Wednesday, May 27, 2020. (Photo: Aaron Lavinsky/Star Tribune via AP)People get out of a Target store with merchandise, while protesters hold a rally for George Floyd in Minneapolis on Wednesday, May 27, 2020. (Photo: Aaron Lavinsky/Star Tribune via AP)A man, center, sorts for items left in grocery carts strewn in the Target parking lot near the Minneapolis Police Third Precinct, Thursday, May 28, 2020, following a night of rioting and looting as protests continue over the arrest of George Floyd who died in police custody. (Photo: AP Photo/Jim Mone)
Seen from Hiawatha Avenue, a large fire burns Thursday, May 28, 2020, in Minneapolis during a third night of unrest following the death of George Floyd while in Minneapolis police custody. (David Joles/Star Tribune via AP)
It happens to civilizations: the episodic spasms of chaos, conflict, and self-annihilation. The Greco-Roman world was beset by invasions, civil war, mob bedlam, warring political factions, among other things. In spite of it, it still lasted about a combined 10 centuries. Other refined ways of life weren’t so lucky; they collapsed, sometimes in quick order. Today, we are in the midst of another one of our perilous times. The big question is, is what we’re experiencing today a portent of our imminent demise? I don’t know, since we’ve survived earlier catastrophes, but the pessimism is understandable when you’re living through the furor. This one could be the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.
This strife is different in that it is based on a broad self-loathing. We hate ourselves and each other because many of us think that stealthy conspiracies exist to ruin us. Infantile notions of conspiratorial cabals of all stripes are feeding the discord. On the right, we have QAnon and the cry that a host of plotters are seeking to destroy America, in secret of course. Many of them fomented the capitol riot and lurk in the background of some scattered protests. On the left, we have the ill-defined “systemic racism” and its kindred threat of “white privilege”. Add to the left’s paranoia, the devout belief in capitalism’s plot to destroy the planet in the fervently-held dogma of apocalyptic climate change.
San Francisco rally led by Sunrise Movement in 2019. (Photo: Peg Hunter)
Right now, the left’s lunacies are manning the cockpit of our society. They have the upper hand, with the unhinged on the right relegated to microscopic niches. The left’s manias are ascendant in corporate suites, our schools, government, Big Entertainment, Big Sports, throughout the cultural commanding heights. There’s nowhere for a person of a conservative bent to go to avoid the inanities. Who would have thought that simply buying a soft drink, or a Dodgers’ jersey, or going to Disneyland was a quiet endorsement of the Democratic Party’s revolutionary jihad? Now, small, formerly innocent pleasures feed the revolution. Everything is politicized.
The Chauvin verdict will be exploited by those in the cultural and political catbird seat to advance the left’s holy war. Biden’s AG is set to lead an inquisition to ferret out the witches who are fomenting persistent “systemic racism” in the Minneapolis PD, the first of many future inquisitions. The two-word banality slithered off the wagging tongues of Biden and his zealous lieutenant Harris shortly after the verdict was announced. The judge barely had time to take a breath after reading the verdict before the radicalized demigods at the head of the Article II branch ran to the cameras. They’re hardly a reassuring presence when they announced that half the electorate and the thin blue line have bulls’-eyes tattooed to their backs. For all of us, whether we realize it or not, their words are threats to public tranquility, public safety, and our Constitution.
Pres. Biden and VP Harris at the podium after the Chauvin verdict.
A false impetus will be ginned up for pushing DC and Puerto Rico into statehood, and four more senators to make it easier to advance the revolution. That’s not all. They have on their agenda the desire to castrate the Electoral College and make flyover country, and two-thirds of the states, politically irrelevant. I can’t think of any other single act that could do more to provoke Civil War II. They’re not done. They won’t be happy till they make a shambles of election integrity by the elimination of the secret ballot and voter ID through the unconstitutional vacuuming of power over elections to their grubby little DC hands. Don’t expect the courts to stand in the way. Let’s not forget their rank bullying of the Supreme Court with the cudgel of court-packing to frighten the robes into slinking into the background. When they’re done, America will be a hellish, unrecognizable place.
Expect the exodus from the political bastions of the lunacy to intensify. The geographical centers of the left, however, hope to counter the losses with an open border for the world’s poor. The more, the merrier . . . for them. But it will do nothing but escalate the divisions that’ll make Civil War II inevitable; though, I sincerely hope not.
And you thought that jailing Chauvin would be the end of it. No, it isn’t as simple as that because the ascendant left won’t let it be. We are in for an existential time of troubles.
