The Death of the Personal

See the source image

Ask yourself a couple of simple questions.  How could a governor coldly announce the end of the internal combustion in 15 years without any recognition of the upheaval – i.e., human cost – that it’ll create?  In September of 2020, Governor Newson of California did:

“In the next 15 years we will eliminate in the state of California the sales of internal combustion engines.  We will move forward to green and decarbonize our vehicle fleet … substantially reducing greenhouse gas emissions as well as oxide nitrogen, in so doing, we’ll improve air quality and improve the economic climate here in the state of California.”

See the source image
Governor Gavin Newsom announces an end to the sale of the cars with internal combustion engines.

How could Black Lives Matter declare economic war on white-owned businesses?  Oh, but they did on Twitter in December 2021:

“Time to: #BuildBlack – Support Black-led-Black-serving organizations.  #BuyBlack – Skip the Black Friday sales and buy exclusively from Black-owned businesses.  #BankBlack – Move your money out of white-corporate banks that finance our oppression and open accounts with Black-owned banks. . . .  White-supremacist-capitalism uses policing to protect profits and steal Black life. . . .  Let’s use every tool in our toolbox…including our dollars…to end white-supremacist-capitalism.”

When not announcing an end to the traditional family, calling for the death of cops (“fry ‘em like bacon”), or excusing riots and murder in our cities, they applied the same old tired rhetoric in declaring their own version of apartheid nirvana.

Businesses torched in downtown Minneapolis during the George Floyd riots of 2020.

What’s happening?  Well, it’s what happens when a person becomes incapable of examining their own assumptions.  They blindly accept a set of propositions and then act upon them.

Something is missing from their mental comportment.  The thing that is absent is the life of the personal. The life of the personal – also referred to as interiority – involves reflection, comprehension, and the private space to do it.  For these avatars of a new world order, no time for that.  That private space is to be treated as suspicious pods of conspiracy to stop them.  The personal life is branded “counterrevolutionary”.  For them, it’s time to light up the Molotov cocktails and torch the entire civilization and end the life of the personal.

However, it’s out of the life of the personal that arises all those things that we call private.  You know, the private sector, private property, civil society, church.  The life of the personal is more than emotions and the arts, even though it certainly encompasses them.  It incorporates our tendency to gravitate to form family, a deeper form of intimacy than mere eroticism can satisfy.  It includes our personal choices to make a living, whether to follow in the footsteps of mom and dad or not.  It encompasses the natural inclination to acquire things unto ourselves – private property, private enterprise.  It embraces the grappling to understand the nature of things, which includes the spiritual.  Thus, churches arise.

All these things lie outside the revolution, because revolution is what these people are all about.  They’re not into deep private reflection.  They are consumed by ends (a complete revolution) sanctioning means (unbridled callousness).  They desire to let loose an eruption to overturn nearly everything to make life conform to their unexamined vision.

No better illustration can be found than in a clip from director David Lean’s film from 1965, “Dr. Zhivago”, based on Boris Pasternak’s novel.  In the scene, Dr. Yuri Zhivago is brought before the revolutionary commander Strelnikov in the heady days of the Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War (Whites vs. Reds).  They met earlier before the Revolution but only briefly.  The exchange is enlightening.  Please watch the clip.

RogerG

Are Bowl Games Another Canary in the Coal Mine?

USC safeties coach Craig Naivar, center, runs players through drills during spring 2020 practice at USC. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

Like a homeowner noticing termite shavings on the floor at the bottom of a wall, the urban folk of the metropolitan west coast might be awakening to the manufactured decay that is beginning to overtake them. The rot is “manufactured” (man-created) because of the bewildering decisions by public officials of their own choosing. Schools aren’t preparing the young for adulthood but are fermenting as radical indoctrination centers. The urban public square is littered with the homeless, the psychotic, needles and feces, roving gangs of thieves and extremist goons, boarded up store fronts, and no one in office seems to care, at least care enough to do anything about it, other than make it worse.

Homeless encampment in Portland in 2016.

The dégringolade (decline) ranges up and down the coastal plain. Nearly 60% of United Van Lines’s California hauls in 2021 were outbound, and it’s a poor metric due to its high cost. The more affordable U-Haul has become less affordable – 4 times the price for inboud – when trying to load up and skedaddle the Bear Flag Republic. Portlanders have acquired an affection for Boise, Idaho, according to UVL and Business Insider. The situation is summed up quite nicely by Greg Goodman, the co-president of the Portland Downtown Development Group: “If you know a retail or office broker, give them a call and ask them how many clients they have are trying to leave.” The exodus is palpable wherever progressivism reigns.

The east coast fares even worse by United’s numbers. New Jersey (69.5%) and New York (67%) rank #1 and #2 for the Great Migration out.

Is the decline and flight observable in organized athletic prowess? Is this trait a new canary in the coal mine alongside UVL and U-Haul numbers? As of now, in 2021/22, the PAC-12 is winless in bowl games for the second straight year. The last best hope for the conference, Utah, went down to Ohio State in the Rose Bowl on a last second field goal. Even the fact that Utah came close could be an additional sign of the new dynamism of people fleeing the coastal blight. The PAC-12 might have to switch its status ranking with the Mid-Atlantic Conference. It’s the “Conference of Champions” for volleyball or softball, but apparently not for anything exuding testosterone, which ironically is then forced to subsidize the former two.

UCLA lost its chance to break the losing streak by cancelling its appearance in the Sun Bowl after an outbreak of COVID on the team. COVID still raked the team after some of the most heavy-handed, authoritarian edicts by California’s recall-surviving governor and some of the most fear-paralyzed school administrations in the country. Remember “bend the curve” and “stop the spread”? The only thing “bent” or “stopped” was the hopes and dreams of the young men in shoulder pads. Try that as a recruitment angle.

Last year’s performance, the notorious year of COVID, was explained away, like the election laws, as a byproduct of the pandemic. Once again, nothing the prelates of the conference did changed a thing in regards to the rampage of the disease. It mutated and the crisis-too-good-to-waste registered as a wild-eyed panic to end athletic futures. Such overwrought reactions have a home in the same places that sanction violence and filth.

Another little-noticed and unremarked factoid is the appearance of four-star recruits from California showing up on the team rosters in the real power conferences. I tuned into the Georgia/Michigan game in time to watch Georgia’s tight end, Bowers, from northern California, receive a touchdown pass. Bryce Young, Alabama’s QB, and alumni of Mater Dei in Los Angeles, earned a 106 quarterback rating against Cincinnati. Ohio State/Utah was a battle between two California quarterbacks: Stroud and Rising. Are these mere anecdotes or a trend that has many similarities to prior demographic shifts in the country’s history?

Alabama’s Bryce Young (Photo by Ron Jenkins/Getty Images)
Utah’s Cameron Rising
Ohio State’s C.J. Stroud
Georgia’s Brock Bowers

California’s loss of one congressional seat after the last census understates the seriousness of its self-immolation. The state made strenuous efforts to hide the flight of its middle class and businesses with campaigns to count every soul, living and non-living and legal and illegal. But everyone knows what is happening, and it’s now appearing on the playing fields.

Think about it.

RogerG

How’s That EQUITY Working Out for You?

May be an image of 3 people and outdoors
Darrell Brooks’ SUV racing through the Waukesha Christmas parade.
May be an image of 7 people and outdoors
Victims on the ground in the wake of his passage.

Why the 2020 summer of riots, the chronic indulgence of violence and behavioral ugliness in our cities, the Rittenhouse trial, Waukesha, et al? Equity, baby, Equity.

Ibram X. Kendi (Ibram Henry Rogers), a godfather of Equity lingo: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination”.

See the source image
Ibram X. Kendi
Alabama Gov. George Wallace standing in the doorway of the University of Alabama defying a federal court order in 1963.

Is Kendi’s governing principle that much different from George Wallace’s in 1963 when Wallace said, “. . . segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever”? Segregation, discrimination, they both draw distinctions based on melanin count, genitalia, bed partner, and many combinations thereof. And put an end to equality before the law. Think of Kendi as a black John C. Calhoun, the figurehead of a new discrimination.

Kendi (born in 1982) is proof that the caricature of the muddle-headed millennial is more than a caricature, and an embarrassment to the generational many who aren’t. Kendi’s goof-thought is hidden behind the façade of Equity. It’s wordplay. To this guy and his fellow delusionals, Equity is code for anger over things not turning out equal across the demography. The Equity word is cover for forced equality of outcome through blatant discrimination.

Calhoun, an unacknowledged Kendi mentor, has his mental fingerprints all over Equity. It found its way into the bloodstream of the past and present Democratic Party, back to LBJ, and the Biden administration in the form of militant affirmative action executive orders and banal press briefings. Remember “affirmative action”? In case you forgot, it conferred advantages to a gaggle of new honorees, the hackneyed “historically oppressed”. The camel’s nose poked under the tent.

It remained somewhat innocuous so long as it was restricted to government employment, contracting, and college admissions. Certainly, it was grossly unfair for anyone falling on the wrong side of the genital/color divide, but the ill-effects didn’t end up threatening your life. Not true now.

The forced leveling spread to criminal justice. Since crime stats aren’t equal across the color spectrum, they must be made to be equal, like the effort in admissions and employment. So, gambits such as refusals to prosecute, passage of no-cash bail laws, approval of propositions to lower a plethora of crimes to misdemeanors (California’s Prop 47), etc., sent a green light to miscreants everywhere. Equity suddenly became dangerous.

See the source image
Kyle Rittenhouse brought into court for his trial in 2021.

These Equity enthusiasts are really into profiles. Kyle Rittenhouse was tossed into the Equity meat grinder because he clicked the bigoted bullet-pointed traits reserved for the vile by the ladies on The View: he’s white, male, and carried an “assault” rifle. Equity demanded that the immense resources of the state of Wisconsin be thrown at a 17-year-old because he fit the Equity industry’s enemy sketch. Self-defense be damned, the industry’s brain trust will rebrand it racist. The goal isn’t justice; it’s Equity in the form of a conviction and hard time. Think of this new age of lynching as a morality play for the self-anointed with a white guy in the noose this time. Everyone is expected to feel better, except, of course, the white guy in the dock.

If Equity requires that we must get a white guy no matter what, it also demands that we rebrand riots as “mostly peaceful protests” to herd all of society kicking and screaming to Equity. Tell that to David Dorn in St. Louis who was murdered by “mostly peaceful protesters”. Public authorities ordered police to withdraw and stand down; bail funds were established for looters and arsonists; DA’s refused to prosecute the hoodlums; and governors rejected requests for national guardsmen to restore order.

See the source image
The murderer of David Dorn during the St. Louis riots.
Retired St. Louis police captain David Dorn.

Once more, riots and mayhem – er, “peaceful protests” – are rebranded as noble endeavors to instill Equity. Tell that to a local businessperson – many are of the “other” – who must now stand before their life’s work in smoldering ruins.

People flee, and not just from California, as Equity’s disorder reigns. Corporate retail giants such as Walgreens and Target – and other paragons of the corporate woke – suddenly realized that “woke” looting, boarded up doors and windows, and smash-and-grab mobs aren’t healthy for the bottom line. That model of Equity rule, San Francisco, and playground for mob-shoplifting, has seen Walgreens close 22 stores. Target and Safeway cut hours to limit their exposure to Equity’s rampant revenge. Need I mention the recent mob assaults on Nordstrom and Louis Vuitton? Equity carries costs way beyond the price tag for gauzy corporate rainbow ads.

The real-world effects of Equity cause capital to look for the exits. For goons and lowlifes, Equity also supplements a widened exit door with a revolving one in the criminal justice system. The Equity logic (or illogic) demands that we can’t have too many convictions of one color. Turn ‘em loose, but bloody incidents inconveniently arise. Prime example: Darrell Brooks of Waukesha Christmas parade fame. After plowing through the Dancing Grannies, bands, and spectators, it came to light that this guy made “career” a functioning modifier attached to “criminal”.

The Brooks rap sheet extends back to 1999 and through a variety of violent interactions with others. It includes a lust for underaged girls and an outstanding warrant for his arrest. His savage history and penchant for jumping bail didn’t stop the Milwaukee DA, John Chisholm, from lowering his bail to $1,000 for using his weapon of choice, his SUV, on his girlfriend. A couple of weeks later, he showed up at the Christmas parade.

See the source image
John Chisholm, Milwaukee DA, reduced bail to $1,000 for Darrell Brooks (r) before Brooks drove his vehicle into the Waukesha Christmas parade.

Chisholm (D) is a unique piece of work. He’s the DA who went after Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) and his staff in 2010 for rumors of illegal campaign coordination between Walker’s campaign and supportive PAC’s. Ironically, the insinuation is equally at home with Democrats. The fishing expedition uncovered nothing and was only closed this year. (Read about the case here)

Apparently, not a word was raised about the cozy relationship between Chisholm and his teachers’ union activist wife. In the heady days of 2010, Walker was trying to bring to heel the uncontrollable teachers’ unions and succeeded – a necessity that should be on the front burner of parents in California and Loudon County. The whole affair stinks of politics and shows Chisholm to be a swimmer in the currents of fashionable Democratic Party belief. Brooks’ easy release fits neatly into the Party’s Equity zealotry. Anyway, Brooks was out in the public to commit a mass casualty event thanks to the indulgence of Chisholm’s office.

See, Equity is an amorphous concept that can cover everything from race-conscious hiring and admissions to giving multiple opportunities for thugs to destroy our livelihoods and kill us. Equity should join communism on the ash heap of history but, alas, it is thriving in blue America. If Equity comes to your state and locality, move!

May be an image of car

RogerG

Revolutionary Justice

Kyle Rittenhouse at trial

Have you been paying attention to the Rittenhouse trial? A frightening prospect is presenting itself. “Justice” is quickly becoming a handmaiden to a radical cause. Justice doesn’t look like justice. It looks like political vengeance. That’s because it’s Revolutionary Justice and not anything like the kind that you or I would recognize as justice.

The die was cast in summer 2020. Riots flared in American cities without a word of condemnation from one of America’s major political institutions, the Democratic Party. The party’s power elite sided with goons and mobs as businesses were torched, a dozen people or more were murdered on the streets, and entire downtowns resembled Richmond in 1865.

Richmond, 1865

Some of the party’s shrillest voices sounded like cheerleaders for the violence and cut checks to the bail funds for the arrested hooligans. One happens to be our sitting Vice President.

Kamala Harris, then presidential candidate, contributed to “Minnesota Freedom Fund” that bailed out arrested rioters in Minneapolis during the George Floyd riots.

In juxtaposition, the sword of something officially titled as justice is enthusiastically unsheathed against the politically unfashionable. The uncouth is defined by a cloistered cultural elite isolated in blue bubbles. Throw the book at Sitting Bull and his Capitol trespassers on January 6th and seek murder convictions against a 17-year-old defending himself from the kind of thugs who turned Kenosha, Portland, Seattle, and Minneapolis into hellholes. Furthermore, if parents are unwilling to surrender their kids to the propaganda ministry’s commissars, the DOJ and its armed wing, the FBI, stand ready to force compliance.

May be an image of 1 person and standing
Loudon County parents protesting before their school board

A counter-revolution is brewing. The National School Board Association’s letter to the DOJ alienated a good portion of their state affiliates. The group portrayed the protests of incensed parents to be the “the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes” in a letter to AG Garland. In coordination with the NSBA, Garland dutifully responded with an order to the FBI to coordinate a Parent Scare to rival A. Mitchell Palmer’s Red Scare of 1919-1920. That’s right, justice now means an enforced conformity to the party line.

AG Garland in testimony before Congress in October

*Update: The Garland memo to the FBI to investigate parent activities at local school board meetings was more than a response to the NSBA letter. Newly obtained documents indicate some level of coordination between the NSBA and the Biden White House in mid-September which was before the Garland/FBI memo in October. Read about it here.

It’s a bridge too far for many state school boards. 20 state associations have ended the relationship, suspended their dues payments, or in various ways are distancing themselves from the NSBA. The national group is taking on the same partisan branding as MLB, the NBA, the NFL, Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, and Big Tech’s lunchrooms in this period of radical political fervor. Buying a ticket or soft drink, and showing up at a school board meeting, is either a political act or will draw the gaze of the ever-watchful eyes of the commissars of state security.

Yesterday, the judge in the Rittenhouse trial was clearly fuming about prosecutorial misconduct. Prosecution witnesses sounded like defense witnesses. Wisconsin is an open-carry state; even the restrictions on minors is nebulous to say the least. Sum it up: regardless of the jury’s verdict under mob threat, obvious conditions of self-defense exonerate the kid under our time-honored rules of justice.

Astonishingly, knowing the shoddy nature of their case, prosecutors may be trying to incite the judge into ordering a mistrial without prejudice; meaning a retrial to torture the kid more. It’s scandalous.

We’ve had much experience with “revolutionary” justice. It came in the form of the Reign of Terror’s tribunals in the France of 1793-4. The guillotine was made a popular totem. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and lesser miscreants holding to the same creed left mounds of dead and archipelagos of gulags in service to it. One group of French scholars put the death toll at around 100 million in the 20th century’s long-running flirtation with Marx-inspired “justice”. Following their lead, the woke universe’s hitching of justice to their political crusade is leading us to a repetition of the nightmare.

Lavoisier’s trial. Historical artwork of the French chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794) being tried during the French Revolution by a radical, revolutionary tribunal. Lavoisier (standing, at left) was one of the leading French scientists and the father of modern chemistry. He was prosecuted because he had been a tax official, even though he had tried to introduce reforms. The president of the tribunal claimed that ‘the Republic has no need of scientists’. Lavoisier was guillotined on 8 May 1794.

Veterans, on this Veterans Day, is this what you were fighting for?

RogerG

The “Critical” of Today’s Marxism

Antifa mob in Portland, 2020

If you want to win a major public debate, first and foremost, mischaracterize the issue. This is actively being done by our self-anointed and overweening media custodians who don’t bother to explain critical race theory (CRT) in any meaningful way, especially its ideological heredity. The absence of a usable description is combined with an erroneous depiction of its opponents. Those standing athwart its injection into their children’s classrooms are portrayed as hostile to the teaching of slavery and racial discrimination in our history. So, we get a befuddled population with no understanding of what it is and the impression that the opposition must be a bunch of rubes, Bull Connors, and Klan sympathizers.

Frederick M. Hess, resident education scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, correctly states (read here), “… news accounts seem to suggest that the argument is really about whether ‘schools should teach slavery.’” As Hess poignantly presents, the argument over CRT has nothing to do with the teaching of slavery and Jim Crow. The contest is about whether the schools should be training grounds for Marxist revolutionaries. CRT is revolutionary indoctrination.

As I’ve written many times before, CRT is rooted in Marxist political theory. It traces nearly all disparities to racism, or any of the other filling-in-the-prefix phobias, and ultimately to a systematic oppression of the “outs” by the “ins”. Out of this percolates rhetoric like “systemic racism”, “white rage”, to the host of other theoretical oppressions in feminist theory, queer theory, postcolonial theory, postmodern theory, etc. It’s classic post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc lunacy – one thing (racism) is assumed to be the cause of what follows (modern disparities) without ever having made the evidentiary connection – but the illogic of it hasn’t stopped these over-paid consultants from spewing the nonsense, and scurrying down to the bank to deposit the fees. Scurrilous nonsense pays very well.

Two hucksters of critical race theory, Robin Diangelo (l) and Ibram X. Kendi at a seminar at Roger Williams University.

“Critical” is the key word. CRT is an offshoot of critical theory which blossomed into critical legal theory and critical pedagogy. See, there’s lots of “crits” out there, but they all owe their existence to Marx’s battle of groups (the dialectic). For those ill-informed journalists, CRT is being taught in its various ideological pieces in the classroom, and is the latest craze in teacher training colleges.

Paulo Freire, a godfather of critical pedagogy

In schools of education, it’s called critical pedagogy. Paulo Freire is the Mao figure in this movement. In his “little red book” of writings, like his 1968 “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, the purpose of teaching is to produce a “critical consciousness” in students. What’s that mean? Make radicals to go out and burn things, get elected to construct the mega-state to dictate the solutions, and for all practical purposes be the militant wing of the Democratic Party.

“Critical” everything shows up in the local DA office, the school staffs that have your kids 6 hours for 5 days a week, their textbooks, and anyone with a degree is exposed to it from the civil engineer to the underemployed barista who got elected to Congress. It’s everywhere. Remember, “critical” is just a pseudonym for Marxist. If you want to avert your children from joining an American Viet Cong, stand up, call it out, and insist that it stop being presented as a “truth”. Don’t be cowed into submission.

RogerG

America’s Soul-Destroying Time

If you have 59 minutes to spare, please watch the attached video on Professor Victor Davis Hanson’s lecture before a gathering at Hillsdale College on September 8, 2021. In many ways, he captures the perils of our time. It’s a wakeup call.

One important takeaway was his dissection of the effort to remorselessly wreck America, its identity, history, institutions, founding principles, and spirit. Its a truly revolutionary endeavor, like all revolutions since at least the French Revolution.

These revolutions are top/down affairs. They are germinated by people from middle and upper backgrounds who have the wealth and time to be schooled, and therefore the luxury to conjure ruinous fantasies. They are the product of a radicalized and detached claque of demagogic public intellectuals who, once in power, recognize no restraint except the achievement of their extremist ends. They hide away in tenured faculty positions, in ngo’s, among the insulated hyper-rich and cultural elites. Before we knew it, it descended on us like a plague of locusts.

All of sudden, the prior terms of justice were replaced by revolutionary slogans like “equity”, a word made devoid of all meaning and recast to advance an assault on the foundation of the nation. Now, we’re really in for it.

Please watch the video.

RogerG

Our Marxist Zeitgeist

Scene from “Raya and the Last Dragon”

While reading Ross Douthat’s (NYT film critic) review of Disney’s “Raya and the Last Dragon”, I was struck by how art may be imitating life, or vice versa. Honestly, I haven’t seen the movie, and won’t. But his depiction of the movie sheds light on what is happening on our streets and in power circles of the Democratic Party.

We are in a peculiar zeitgeist. The word “zeitgeist” became popular among poets (Goethe) and philosophers (Hegel) in the 1800’s to refer to the spirit of a time. How did we get to the zeitgeist of official neo-Marxist indoctrination of the kids (CRT, campaigns against systemic racism, etc.) and Green New Deal socialism? This is much more ambitious than simply punishing an individual political actor, party, or business. This political endeavor is a much, much grander thing: a revolution.

Ross Douthat

Douthat’s film review brings to light certain aspects at play in the newly constructed modern mind, especially amongst the people who dwell in our cultural commanding heights. He cites the fact that older Disney animated movies held to a particular set of plot devices that have disappeared from their newer offerings. Snow White, for instance, depicted an older fairy tale with a protagonist prince or princess, a romance, and a villain. The plot was simple and endearing.

What does Disney offer us today? The protagonist is still there, but the villain turns out to be an abstract threat, “some impersonal force, some moral or spiritual disturbance”. The romance is replaced by a sibling or platonic bond. These two characteristics speak volumes about today’s ethos.

The romance of man and woman is either reduced to pure physicality or, as in the case of “Raya”, gone. Why gone? Fear of the adjective “heteronormative”. Someone in the audience might be offended by the prevalence of the only sexual attraction tied to procreation. Let’s face it, LGBTQ is the chic victim group of our time. So, the man/woman attraction is replaced by something more neutral. In that way the prominence of heteronormativity is suppressed in order to raise the status of the other sexual arrangements.

Next, the absence of personalized evil – like a Simon Legree in Uncle Tom’s Cabin – in popular media. Evil is nebulous, in the form of “some impersonal force, some moral or spiritual disturbance”. A constant inundation of this plot device gets us into thinking of our alleged problems as the product of abstract forces. This might go a long way in explaining the resort to the abstract “system” in the scurrilous writings of the Anti-Racism crusaders Robin DeAngelo or Ibram X. Kendi. It’s the justification for the “systematic” reordering of the economy, and the omnipresent life associated with it, in the Green New Deal, and all of society in CRT. This is not reform, but revolution.

We probably got to the destination of our current Marxist moment with the assistance of popular entertainment. It’s easy to pour blood on a cop’s home, or maybe shoot him or her, or topple statues, or ransack a downtown business district if such actions are instrumental in bringing down the hypothetical, abstracted evil. It’s easier to push the nihilism through organs of the state if the population has been softened by a warped version of reality.

Something to think about, don’t you think?

RogerG

The Loaded Question of “Antiracism” Drivel

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.

RogerG

Show Trial

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 Vyshinsky
Biden’s AG, Merrick Garland
The USA, the latest member of the Banana Republic bloc

RogerG

The Mansions of the Lord

Arlington National Cemetery

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)

RogerG