In Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Mr. Bumble, when informed that the law places him in charge of his wife, responded by saying, “If the law supposes that, the law is an ass–an idiot.”
While listening to yesterday’s Hugh Hewitt radio program on podcast, that thought came to mind. The whole show was rightfully focused on Wednesday’s mob assault on the capitol. Hewitt’s justified and unequivocal condemnation of the rioters is founded on a bedrock of our civilization: the rule of law. But what happens when the “’law is an ass”, like the recently contrived 2020 edicts governing our elections?
The fact is, law has not always been a bulwark against injustice. We are flawed – past and present and future – and it shows in our laws. In the 19th century, we had a Fugitive Slave Law. After federal troops withdrew from the former Confederacy in the 1870’s, we saw the imposition of other laws in the form of Jim Crow. Other laws are being proposed to advance abortion even after birth in some cases. We can have the “rule of law” and also have wholesale barbarity.
Incidentally, early 20th century Germany was fastidious about cloaking their actions in law. When their invasion of Belgium in 1914 faced scattered resistance among the Belgian population, the German general staff issued general orders to conduct reprisals. Almost 24,000 civilians were killed, many of them executed. Towns and cities were put to the torch such as the beautiful university town of Leuven. All were justified in German law. As long as there is a law, so they reasoned, all is excused as proper. It’s a concept that would reach full flower in the Holocaust.
The destruction of Leuven, Belgium, by the German army in late August 1914.A depiction of German atrocities in Belgium in 1914, also known as the “Rape of Belgium”.
See, the law can be used to hide great evil. But that’s not the end of it.
Not all law should be lumped with those monstrosities. Laws clearly tied to the protection of life and property are absolutely required to avoid Hobbes’s warning of life outside the law being “solitary, nasty, brutish, and short”. Wednesday’s rioters should be pursued for prosecution, as should the Antifa and BLM mobs of this past summer.
Though, we must realize that there is an important difference between Wednesday’s and this past summer’s crimes. Wednesday was a singular incident; Antifa and BLM are long-running insurrectionary movements. Broad cynicism develops when powerful voices condemn one and excuse the other. Cynicism is a corrosive element for any republic, as it was for the Roman Republic of antiquity.
Portland Antifa rioter with raised clenched fist next to a dumpster fire from this past summer.
Cynicism about our basic institutions appears to be running at a fever pitch. The excuse-making for the summer’s riots, the blatant hypocrisy about them and the pandemic decrees, the wholesale destruction of many people’s futures in the lockdowns and school closures, and the pandemic being used to construct a third world-style election system contributed to the enflamed passions. Such elections engender disrespect for the results when the bulk are mail-in votes (over 60%, even more in certain states). It’s enough for an impulsive president to cry “foul” and his followers to storm the capitol building.
The election processes were an “ass”, and the “rule of law” provides cover for it. We should be able to condemn Wednesday’s thugs and admit that massive mail-in voting was a huge mistake. I suspect that the Dems will accept the former but push the latter (mail-in voting) into federal law. It’s part of their well-established campaign to nearly eliminate vote verification and election integrity. Expect more of this anger, or apathy as people drop out of the system because of a lack of faith in it. Either way, we would be in danger of repeating the demise of the Roman Republic.
Many of our laws are “asses”, and so might be the people authoring them.
Friday, New Year’s Day, I broke down and watched a couple of College Football Playoff games, the Rose and Sugar Bowls. I soon realized that I was taken into the world of Winston Smith of Orwell’s 1984. The parallels between 1984 and the telecasts are glaring. Oceania was governed by The Party – Ingsoc (English Socialism) – with Big Brother’s visage and voice everywhere from every bathroom’s two-way monitor to the daily and public Two Minutes of Hate. The message is the same and omnipresent for the denizens of Oceania. Ditto in the broadcast and on the field of the bowl games. Oceania and today’s media big brothers are obsessed with making a common mind no matter how ludicrous.
The message from Friday’s broadcast was that African-Americans are always oppressed by an enemy every bit as nebulous as the “enemy” engineered by Ingsoc and reified with names such as Emmanuel Goldstein (Orwell), or today’s “systemic racism”. Murky, ill-defined threats are perfect for mind control. They can’t be easily refuted because you can’t get your head or hands around a cloud.
I put up with it for about two-thirds of the second game and at that point I reached saturation. I changed the channel. What were they doing? Why, pay attention. All of Ohio State’s helmets had “Equality” stenciled on the back. This isn’t “equality of opportunity”, for The Party’s acolytes believe it to be code for – you guessed it – “systemic racism”. “Equality” has a more aggressive meaning to the zealots: equality of outcome. The players were ignorantly endorsing a pernicious revolutionary and totalitarian slogan.
If you didn’t get the message from the helmets, the leagues’ infomercials (example below) were resplendent with calls for an assault on the unstated and unproven “systemic racism”, like the imaginary threat of Emmanuel Goldstein in Oceania. It’s amazing how even respectable people get caught up in our own time’s Two Minutes of Hate.
For The Party’s activists, “systemic racism” must exist because of the statistical mirage of “disparate impact”. That’s the sole basis for its “truth”. In other words, if bad stats are larger than a group’s proportionality, everything must be turned upside down to make it “right”. It never crossed these geniuses’ minds that the numbers don’t jive because the causes are far removed from their racism hang-up. Lower incomes are more likely due to lower graduation rates, for instance.
Not content with pushing The Party’s line on “systemic racism”, Big Business – in this case Ford – chimed in with advocacy of The Party’s strangulations of the economy and social life.
Many of the measures pushed by the visuals and words, such as universal mask-wearing, social isolation, and a rubber-stamping of lockdowns, were excuse-mongering for Newsom, Cuomo, and the rest of the blue-state potentates. The commercials made no mention of the fact that last March’s draconian edicts did nothing to prevent the second surge. Flattening the curve meant flattening our lives. What side of deranged do we have to look to find a rationale for this lunacy? Not a word from Ford on the palpable incongruency.
The NCAA and corporate America are carrying water for lefty theatrics. They are trying to make unassailable what they cannot prove. Sounds like good old-fashioned propaganda to me, the kind that oozed out of Oceania’s Ministry of Truth.
RogerG
**Also on my Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/rgraf0829/.
Mugshots of some of the arrested in the September 2020 BLM riots in Manhattan, NYC. (photo courtesy of the New York Post)
Now that we’ve gotten the Trump v. Biden dustup over with, we can focus on the stories that really resonated from that season of falderol. These overlooked stories should grab attention because they are profound signifiers of deeper and troubling trends in the country. Take a look at this story in the New York Post of September 9, 2020: “Inside the privileged lives of protesters busted for rioting in Manhattan”. Something has entered the brain function of the upper third of America’s wealth pyramid, and it isn’t healthy. I’m wondering if we are breeding our own downfall through the nurturing of a new kind of privileged degenerate.
One of the main points that was raised by Luke Thompson in his recent piece in National Review Online, “Why Democrats Are Winning the Suburbs“, was the demographic shifts in the composition of the ‘burbs. In his estimation, more “minorities” mean a more politically competitive environment for Democrats. He’s probably correct to some degree but I think that he’s missing something much weightier. The suburbs and other upscale districts are breeding Maos, Trotskys, Lenins, Marats, Robespierres, Pol Pots, and Che Guevaras. Our new crop of revolutionaries doesn’t comport to the movie myth of a radical radicalized by some past personal abuse. The newest editions lead a comfortable life, comfortable enough to be free to dabble in extremist matchstick politics without worry of consequence. Not surprisingly, they probably have much in common with many in the latter list.
Just look at the mugshots. All of them suffer from melanin deficiency, a surprising feature given their fanaticism for the oppressed people of color. One, Clara Kraebber from the wealthy Upper East Side of NYC, and daughter of an architect and child psychiatrist with a second home in Connecticut, fits the same mold as the others. Let’s do a deep dive into Clara.
Clara Kraebber at home from Rice University. Clara Kraebber planned to build a ‘BLM focused’ network for ‘wealth redistribution’ in notes seized by law enforcement last week.
She (if I’m allowed to use the “binary”) is quintessentially “privileged” by any of the approved measures of Ibram X. Kendi. Her mom is an accomplished New York City architect with many prestigious projects under her belt. Her dad is a child psychiatrist and professor at Columbia University. These Masters of the Universe were accomplished enough to buy a $1.8 million 16th-floor apartment on Manhattan’s East End Avenue in 2016.
Condo apartment buildings on Manhattan’s East End Avenue.
In addition, the well-heeled elders apparently went on a real estate shopping spree to buy a completely renovated historic home in tony Litchfield County, Conn. These folks aren’t the kind to share the dining room at Burger King with an unemployed steel worker in Ohio. Literally, the working stiffs of the Midwest must be an alien species seeing that the place isn’t visible from 30,000 feet or is nonexistent in a short east coast drive down the freeway to their chic rendezvous in Connecticut.
The Kraebber second home in Litchfield County, Connecticut.
This couple gave birth and raised Clara. Where’d she go to school? She was schooled with others like her, maybe not in skin tone or eye shape but more importantly in socio-economic background. In 2014 she was a freshman at Hunter College High School when she joined up with a crowd protesting the Michael Brown shooting. The school isn’t an American Graffiti high school. It’s an elite prep school at public expense with enrollment proudly proclaimed by the school to be the “top one-quarter of 1% of students in New York City, based on test scores”.
Hunter College High School in Manhattan.
Her lefty politics matriculated with her to Rice University in 2018 where she is an undergrad. She must have been home due to the crazy lockdowns in order to participate in September’s riotous fun in New York City’s Flatiron District where she earned her Bonnie-and-Clyde reputation.
It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the brawling munchkins are the Democrats’ youth brigades in action. Clara was an active member of Rice University’s Young Democrats. Maybe not in action but at least in thought or sympathy, Party leaders share a Vulcan mind melt (Star Trek lingo) with the chanters of “Every city, every town, burn the precinct to the ground!” I can only guess at the intimate conversation in the Kraebber home that helped give rise to this bile.
Clara Kraebber arrested.
The rest of the arrested clan have similar bios. You’ll read about their heartwarming (?) professions of idealism for the “oppressed people of color”, animals, or zealousness for environmentalism. Wokeness and the religion of environmentalism lays them open to socialism and other revolutionary tropes. These are not minds open to reverence for the permanent things, such as the faith of their fathers and mothers. These children are primed to tear it all down.
Shame on the schools and shame on the two-parent families of the comfortably prosperous. The single parent in the ghetto is overworked and frequently incapable of screening out the chaos. Those in the upper third of the wealth pyramid have no such excuse. Their permissiveness, indulgence, and subtle philosophical innuendos make it possible for there to be more people like Clara fulminating in the face of a $50,000-per-year police officer.
We’re going to have to reformulate our political lingo. Country club Republicans is an endangered species, to be overtaken by country club Democrats. We breed them faster today.
Men sit passed out in a park where heroin users gather to shoot up in the Bronx on May 4, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
America is being trashed from our institutions to our public squares. Look around, roving gangs of cultural and historical illiterates – the uneducated educated – are defacing monuments; downtowns are torched by the very same hordes; public spaces are turned into graffitied homeless encampments with feces and hypodermic needles in a sickening sphere of influence overlapping the places that used to be for rollicking kids and families; and the whole thing spills into our politics. Elections are a pandemonium filled with the hyperbole to remake or tear down America while the chief malefactors designed an election system that made it easy to game. In essence, the rules of the election game function as a game without rules since they are so elastic, confusing, and contradictory with early and earlier voting, voting after election day after the intervention of unconstitutional actors, shot gunning ballots through the mail like the confetti falling from the ceiling after a NCAA national championship game, many jurisdictions lacking the will or ability to verify the ballots, and local Democrat-dominated election boards acting like feudal lords over their fiefdoms and flaunting any rules that do exist. Sounds like the wholesale trashing of America to me.
Mail-in ballots on the floor at the Park East Terrace Apartments, Paterson, NJ, May, 5, 2020.Three mail-in ballots on the ground in the Park East Terrace complex, Paterson, NJ, May 5, 2020.
After the bill is totaled for this parade of the grotesque that we call an election season, we’ll have come to realize that big money was fully on board with the party of big government, the Democrats. Bloomberg was committed to spending $150 million to bring down Trump and his supporters. He ended up ladling $106,000,000. Is there any doubt about the stance of Silicon Valley and its tributaries? Zuckerberg himself answered that question in testimony to Congress – “extremely left-leaning”. Reid Hoffman (Microsoft, LinkedIn) spewed $7.6 million with $1 million each for Schumer’s slush fund and the Biden affiliate Unite the Country. His wife, Michelle Yee, pumped half a million into Biden’s coffers. Allen Blue (LinkedIn), Kevin Scott (Microsoft), Brad Smith (Microsoft), Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook), David Zapolsky (Amazon), Steven Kessel (Amazon), Douglas Vetter (Apple), Eric Schmidt (Alphabet), Reid Hastings and wife (Netflix), and a host of others opened the cash floodgates to the tune of six to seven figures to the left of the decimal point. Do you have any doubts about where K St. and big finance ended up?
Paul McCartney was right in singing “money can’t buy me love”, but it can buy a Mafia-like organization with its many “soldiers” to stretch the waist-line elastic of an election system that was refashioned for any size belly.
George Soros
The drumroll of tycoons backing (or banking) the Democrats includes the usual suspects such as Warren Buffett, George Soros, Tom Steyer, etc., etc., etc. What’s happening with the rich for them to be lining up behind a party whose political carnival barkers profess to hate them . . . or in reality bilk them? The quandary can’t be easily answered except as a commonality of values and worldview. The coed blathering about evils of George Washington as she affixes a rope around his statue’s neck, the corporate heads of Alphabet, and the rest of the Fortune 500 CEO’s have more beliefs in common than they do with the owner of a local hardware store.
The CEO and the miscreant came to the same ideological place because they arose from the same subcultural ether: the upper third of American life. Through their wealthy metropolitan suburbs, prep schools, and the Ivy League, they are of the mind to either bankroll the Democratic Party to the left or subsidize the pillaging of the country, as the Party’s media darlings – from the same subcultural soup, by the way – wobble around trying to justify the madness. For today’s left, some got rich and others hit the streets from their safe perch on campus.
Reid Hoffman, Eric Schmidt, Dustin Moskovitz, and Laurene Powell Jobs, Silicon Valley’s new power set, are instrumental to fulfilling Democrats’ four-year-long quest to oust Donald Trump. People take turns stomping the Christopher Columbus statue after it was toppled in front of the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul, Minn., on Wednesday, June 10, 2020. (photo: Leila Navidi/Star Tribune via Associated Press)
Today’s nouveau riche are accretions to yesterday’s. American has no official aristocracy, but we do have an unofficial one. It’s anyone with the critical mass of wealth. Millionaires alone don’t count any more. A family pedigree with trust-fund millions and multi-billionaires do. Possession of the equivalent of the GDP of a Central American country is the entry point into America’s nobility of today. No invitation from the queen (Michelle Obama?) is required. The newly arrived add to a polymorphous Patricii.
For the old gentry, someone somewhere down the family tree joined the ranks of the filthy rich and passed it to their scions. Do the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Kennedys, and Waltons remind you of anyone? Add to them the newly minted gazillionaires. John Adams writing in the 18th century extensively wrote on the troubling happenstance of a “natural aristocracy” in America. The Rockefellers, Kennedys, et al, would be the Boston Brahmins of the Bradlees, Brinleys, and Lowells to Adams. He saw their narrow-minded ambition and avariciousness as a threat to the republic. They were “always the most dangerous” class and if unrestrained they would be the “destruction of the commonwealth”. That’s the reason for his support for corralling them in their own house of the legislature, a senate. Once penned, they could be flanked by a chief executive and lower house.
Harvard University students in the 1870s. The “Boston Brahmins” and their progeny kept close ties to the most prestigious institutions. (Bettmann Archive via Getty Images)
Today, our Senate is in no position to perform that function after the passage of the 17th Amendment (1913). The hyper-rich with their newly acquired gazillions have nowhere to go but be like Caesar: buy the affections of the plebes with bread and circuses, or lavish campaign contributions. There’s nothing quite like having a mob on-call. Caesar could well understand. George Soros has much in common with Julius.
What has this agglomeration of our “betters” given us? Their influence, after all, is everywhere. Our public squares under this cultural miasma seemed to have been inspired by the spare, stern, and hard face of the “beast of Belsen”, Irma Greese (see below). Look at these spaces, and then at her.
Irma Ida Ilse Grese (7 October 1923 – 13 December 1945) was an SS guard at the Nazi concentration camps of Ravensbrück and Auschwitz, and served as warden of the women’s section of Bergen-Belsen.Boston’s City Hall Plaza
Whether they be an open space in a planned development or a courtyard in front of a high-rise, they resemble military parade grounds studded with an odd, out-of-place thing, a “sculpture”, that has more in common with the glacial eratics dotting the landscape of the Scablands of eastern Washington state. New York City’s Hudson Yards has the freak “Vessel”.
The VesselAn erratic in the Scablands of eastern Washington state. It was deposited here by late ice age glacial floods. Its geology is unrelated to the geology of its current location. It is an “erratic” for this reason.
New York City seems to be dotted with these sculptural eratics. Another one is the now-deceased “Tilted Arc” (by Richard Serra) in Manhattan’s Foley Federal Plaza. It proved to be a visible and physical contradiction, like all walls, to the very purpose for a plaza: social intercourse, interaction, and “inter- “anything involving human beings. Luckily, wiser heads prevailed and the thing was torn down and hauled off to the scrapyard in 1989.
The Tilted ArcA lesson in urban beauty and a counterpoint to our military parade grounds: the gardens of the Fontaine de Nîmes in France. The park had the advantage of incorporating preexisting Roman ruins, and they were with stunning effect. The French architects, Jacques-Philippe Mareschal and Pierre Dardailhon, at the behest of King Louis XV in the 1740’s, created an inviting outdoor experience for pedestrians of all ages. The Walt Disney Concern Hall, Los Angeles, Ca.
The buildings surrounding the parade grounds – aka “plazas” – could be jumbled eyesores like LA’s Disney Concert Hall or the structural boxes that were animated by Germany’s Bauhaus movement or Rommel’s Atlantic Wall. Long gone are the graceful lines of neo-classicism with its adornments. Long gone are the interplay of nature, terraces, columns, and balustrades in our green spaces. It seems that our urban landscapes were inspired by the Soviet Union . . . or worse. The setting for the Vessel would be just as fitting for a guillotine.
A fortification in Rommel’s Atlantic Wall.The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, Marcel Breuer architect.The new House Gropius, designed by Bruno Fioretti Marquez Architects, is built on the basement of the original, the only part to survive the bombings in WW2. (Photo: Christoph Rokitta / Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau)
The only applicable interplay in modern architecture is the one between ideology and design. Speaking of long gone, long gone are defined boundaries and the architectural axis. The limits to a public space are the imposing and ominous structures that resemble Mussolini’s Fascist Party headquarters in Rome, or busy traffic lanes. The spaces are boundless except for the grim and graceless stare of these giants.
Mussolini’s Fascist Party headquarters in Rome.The MetLIfe Building, New York City.The Seagram Building, New York City.
The formlessness comports well with the unquestioned obedience to the belief in the tabula rasa of the mind among our so-called cultural superiors. To many of them, there are no preordained limits, only those that we choose to plug and unplug into our self-identity. If we can’t see their function because our minds are too superficial, they are to be discarded like so much rubble in front of a bulldozer’s blade. Functionalism replaces order and standards.
Michael Lewis, architecture critic, The Wall Street Journal.
Michael Lewis writing in National Review Magazine makes the case: “… after World War I, modernists abolished the axis, as well as a good many thrones and altars, and replaced it with the idea of flowing space. Paths of movement were to be efficient and functional, without any ceremonial hierarchy, suggesting freedom of motion in any direction. Where the public square was once a kind of bounded outdoor room, it was now a mere incident along boundless space.” It’s now considered a social good for people to intellectually and morally emasculate themselves, just like their public spaces.
And, boy, are we emasculating ourselves. The moral and intellectual castration began in earnest when it started its march through our governmental institutions. Official sanction was given for our urban outdoors to be turned into an open sewer. San Francisco began its slide into the gutter when in 1961 it announced that it would no longer enforce its vagrancy laws. The idea went national when the Supreme Court in 1972 issued one of its decrees in Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville that abolished such laws. Contemporaneously, the doors of our mental asylums were flung wide open and the number of inmates plunged from 559,000 in 1955 to 72,000 in 1994. Adding insult to injury, in 1975, the Supreme Court once again piled on with its ruling in O’Connor v. Donaldson. After the Court jumped into the fray with O’Connor, we could no longer reinstitutionalize because another one of the Court’s infamous “tests” made confinement a Sisyphean task.
A woman walks toward friends at a homeless encampment where she lives next to the Interstates 101 and 280 in San Jose, California, on Saturday, February 3, 2018. (LiPo Ching/Bay Area News Group Archives)
Where would the released end up? You guessed it. They congregated in those open spaces meant for kids and families. And thus, our open spaces became informal convention centers for junkies, the mentally troubled, and the bachelor herds that we often call youth gangs. Who wants to go to the park, with or without COVID hysteria? It’s far safer to ride out the horrors beyond your home’s walls with your internet, smartphone, and video games. Hopefully, you’ll have a gun in case what’s outside makes its way inside . . . if your local sovereigns haven’t regulated the 2nd Amendment into oblivion, or, God forbid, defunded the local PD.
COVID became the go-to excuse to further malform our existence. We’re trashing our faces with masks for God’s sake. The masks, social distancing, and lockdowns have killed romance, our children’s schooling, and given us a scorched earth through our economy. Church, Thanksgiving, and Christmas are redubbed super-spreader events.
All of this has come to us not from scientists and medical practitioners, but from lawyers. For some reason, the strong scent of power is irresistible to those who passed the bar. Our governmental pyramid is filled with them. Only a handful have a PhD after their name.
Oh, they, the JD’s, claim that’s what the “science” says. But they don’t understand what the science says any more than my grocery store’s stocking clerk. If I had to bet on the one with the most knowledgeable of science, my money would be on the clerk. To borrow from James Carville, just like one could trawl through a mobile home park with $5 on a fishing line and hook many Paula Joneses, so I could wade my way through the halls of almost any professional building with that very same $5 and hook any number of lawyers.
Anthony Fauci all masked up.
And, also, you might snag a few politicized “experts” along the way. “Experts” are notorious for having the blinders of a racehorse. They frequently have little empathy for competing “experts” and look at the world through their narrow professional prism. If you want a sure path to hell, find yourself a narrow claque of “experts”, follow their advice to the last punctuation mark, and then scramble for excuses as things fall apart, for them and the rest of us.
These trashed times come to us courtesy of a certain political class with cramped cultural antecedents. With a few politicized “experts” in tow, they have left an inhospitable living space in their wake. We can’t go to work, school, church, see grandma, and experience Christmas cheer due to their singular approach to a science that the lawyers don’t understand, but their patronizing “experts” do, but to the exclusion of any other consideration. If we are ever again allowed to go outside, we’d be reacquainted with the marred urban surroundings that they knowingly and unknowingly left behind.
Trashed elections. Smothered public life. Venturing outside is a walk on the wild side. Our cityscapes are an affront to decency and good sense. The waterboarding of life through a return to lockdowns, school closures, mandatory masks, social distancing, and all along knowing it didn’t work the first time. Other than that, what’s there to complain about?
Joe Biden in the debate last Tuesday laughably tried to dismiss the threat of “Antifa” by defining the term as an abstraction, an idea only. Or as he might have said, “Nothing there, man.” Tell that to the local shop owners who watched a lifetime’s work go up in flames, or the police officers and other innocents who were maimed and killed by “Antifa” and their kissing cousins, BLM. The denial of reality by the higher-ups in the Dem establishment is astonishing.
Will you let them get away with it?
Antifascist organizers had a visible, and at times violent, presence in Berkeley on Aug. 27, 2017. (Photo: Emilie Raguso)“Mostly peaceful” arson in Minneapolis in May.
Their logic goes something like this: organized violence doesn’t exist because there isn’t a central command. Oh really? Radical Muslim extremism doesn’t exist either since it’s a shadowy underworld of shifting alliances and individuals. No central command there either. Violent jihadism is only an abstraction, using the Dems’ syntax, since individuals and groups come and go within a constantly-changing web of Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other ephemeral groupings among the Sunni and Shia. Again, tell that to the relatives of the occupants of graveyards scattered throughout the Middle East and beyond.
The logic is beyond astounding; it’s insane. When confronted by a bystander, House Judiciary Committee chairman, Jerry Nadler, called Antifa a “myth”. And off the Dems and their sympathizers go into their ritual denunciations of white supremacists. In fact, they go further in lumping anyone who dare confront the “myth” on the streets as “white supremacists”. Dems, you can’t have it both ways: organized Antifa doesn’t exist in spite of the charred buildings, new funerals and hospitalizations, but they magically reappear as an implicit counterpoint to their new all-encompassing menace, “white supremacy”. To borrow from Biden, “Come on, man.”
This affront to language and logic is a common staple of our current political discourse. For another example, there’s the “mostly peaceful” protests. By that logic, the Bolshevik Revolution and its Red Terror were “mostly peaceful”. The French Revolution and its Reign of Terror were also “mostly peaceful”. Mao was a “mostly peaceful” tyrant. Ditto for Stalin. Jack the Ripper was “moistly peaceful”. How much time in his life was devoted to murdering women?
Debris from the “mostly peaceful” desecration of churches during the “mostly peaceful” Bolshevik Red Terror.“Mostly peaceful” corpses from the “mostly peaceful” Bolshevik Red Terror.
Are we so rattled in our minds that some of us can seriously entertain this gibberish. The Dems and their fellow travelers trot out as proof FBI Director Christopher Wray’s recent reference to Antifa as a movement and not an organization. It proves nothing. Locally-organized, intense social media interaction with comrades, and funding sources showing up as plane tickets and rental trucks filled with supplies and munitions, indicate something far more systematized than sporadic “mostly peaceful” protesters incited by “white supremacists”, who just so happen to be protecting their neighborhoods and shops.
The rented box truck was spotted at 2pm on Wednesday in Louisville, as Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron was still speaking at a press conference about the grand jury findings in the Breonna Taylor case. (photo: Daily Mail)
Here’s a question for the gullible: Can something be organized without a formal national directorate? Antifa central doesn’t have to exist in the world of the internet. All that is necessary is fanatics with an internet connection. We have an abundance of both, so the know-how, inspiration, hooligans, and money will take care of themselves.
In case you haven’t seen it, here is the clip of the woman who was tasered and arrested for not wearing a mask at her son’s football game.
A couple of immediate observations are in order. (1) Is outdoor mask wearing under the condition of social distancing efficacious? I have very good reason to doubt it. If irrelevant, the rule is madness and its enforcement to the extent of tasering and cuffing is dastardly. (2) The mild reaction of bystanders is deeply disturbing. The mindless compliance with probable stupidity and meekness while viewing the manhandling of a person is astounding. Something deep has happened to us, our leaders and us. Troubling, very troubling.
Across the country, we are experiencing despotism from state executives on down – the federal component being more restrained. Mostly, these encounters occur in “blue” jurisdictions even though the municipality might be in a “red” state. This says volumes about a common political DNA between progressive (Left-leaning) governments and the smothering of popular common sense. We are into the 9th month of the pandemic and many nations and would-be despots in our country are threatening to reimpose their totalitarian edicts as if they have learned nothing since January.
Either science has stood still or our rulers are blockheads. My money is on the latter.
Lockdowns, or versions of them, are much talked about, despite the ineffectiveness of the first go-around as evidenced by the resurgence of the virus in various locales. Universal mask-wearing is commanded, even outdoors, in spite of the absence of evidence of the bug’s spread in the open air in dispersed situations. Incidentally, the fear spread to the almost 7,000-ft. Logan Pass trail in Glacier National Park (Aug. 2020). The sight of people masking-up is shocking to me to this day for what is says about us as a people.
Schools are shuttered in many districts – and the mass of 4th graders remaining 4th graders into their 5th-grade year – without any evidence after 9 months of the bug’s spread among children and to adults. Astounding.
Whoever said it was spot-on (and it probably wasn’t Einstein): “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Repeating ineffective earlier actions may reflect the quixotic and paralyzing belief in no-risk. Combined with progressivism’s despotism streak, we have a population willing to stand by as a person displays more common sense than the people who are tasering and cuffing her. Astounding, absolutely astounding.
David Mamet, author and playwright, writing in the Aug. 10 edition of National Review (“The Nazis Got Your Mom”) succinctly captures in a short paragraph the absolute absurdity of two pieces of politicized boilerplate of our farcical times: Systemic Racism and Social Justice. They are part of a repetitive political jihad that fails to learn from past experience.
During the California lockdown, Mamet is cruising the websites of one of his favorite book stores and notices the plethora of anti-Trump offerings along with the business’s promise to fight the scourge of Systemic Racism. He continues as follows:
“Now, I don’t know what Systemic Racism is, but neither does anyone else. Like Social Justice, any communicable meaning is destroyed by the adjective. Both terms are indictments of Human Evil; its perpetrators are easily identifiable: They are those who request a definition.”
So we have the prefect weapons for this generation of revolutionary busybodies to control our minds and behavior. This will end at the same place where earlier political crusades landed: misery. Why? He writes:
“… the greatest lesson of History is that we never learn from History. And that no great crime was ever committed save in the name of Progress, or its stablemates Historical Necessity and Redress of Past Wrongs.”
The crushing thing about this latest round of lunacy is that it has captured the imagination of almost the entirety of one of our two institutional parties, the Democratic Party. The idiocy is free to flow through the “D” side of the ballot and our branches of government at all levels.
The madness has left the asylum and is poised to enter policy in a big way. Some people see it … like Mamet.
Gov. Whitmer of Michigan (D) announced the status of the lockdown order in March 2020. Gov. Newsom (D) of California extended his lockdown order in June 2020.Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti gives his annual ‘State of the City’ speech at City Hall in Los Angeles, Calif., on April 19, 2020. ( photo: Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)Ibram X. KendiBlack Lives Matter organized protest in Washington DC on June 6, 2020.Black Lives Matter protest with the usual Marxits slogans.
The Totalitarian Temptation
In 1977, Jean-Francois Revel, a man of the French left at the time, came out with The Totalitarian Temptation. He was repulsed by the Euro-left’s unwillingness to shed their deeply embedded reflex for totalitarian control.
Jean-Francois Revel
In the vein of Rahm Immanuel’s (Pres. Obama’s Chief of Staff in 2010) famous maxim, “You never let a serious crisis go to waste”, “progressives” and powerful Democrats have exploited COVID, riots, fires, and blackouts to express their inner totalitarian. Revel would not be surprised if he were alive today. It appears that once you cradle the left’s belief system, you develop affectations for centralized control down to the intimate details of a population’s lives.
I put progressives in quotes because it is the moniker of choice for a wide range of control freaks from Mayor Garcetti of LA to Gov. Newsom of California to Ibram X. Kendi of Boston University – though I’m a bit tentative about Kendi for a number of reasons. I shouldn’t be. He is a man of the left and the possessor of a powerful drive for power. They all do. It’s in their political DNA.
Control Freaks in California
Gov. Newsom (D) of Califonria delivers report on the status of the state’s fires on August 24, 2020.Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. (Photo: Kevin Sanders)
Right now, California is burning up. Of course, for the state’s overlords, it can’t be the outgrowth of the decades of environmentalist policies that are the favorite of the ruling party. And the Democratic Party is THE ruling party of California. The state has become such a Democrat Malta among the states that it can swing the national popular vote by millions in a presidential election to the loser, thereby giving the Party a tiresome talking point for at least the next four years.
Indubitably, with the tedious boast comes the incessant demands to rig the system to allow Big Urban to run the country. How would Big Urban run the country? Look at California. Mayor Garcetti tweeted, “Time to turn off major appliances, set the thermostat to 78 degrees (or use a fan instead), turn off excess lights and unplug any appliances you’re not using. We need every Californian to help conserve energy. Please do your part.” The state’s energy system can’t deliver the goods – electricity that is – after Democrat politicos piloted the state to the “future”, the future of the Book of Eli (see the movie).
A map shows potential power outages by PG&E in California October 9, 2019.Scene from the The Book of Eli.
It turns out that greenie energy is expensive and unreliable energy. The decrees for solar panels on your roof, flim-flamming the rate structure to punish the dissenter from the Party line, the tomfoolery of net-metering, and Byzantine utility regulations that forcibly shift resources from the delivering of electricity to the construction of the greenie utopia have translated into blackouts, the grid becoming a force multiplier for firestorms, and rates running from 15₵ to 50₵ per kWh depending on a labyrinth of time-of-day, season, and “tiers”. Thus, a resident receives a bill that reads more like a grad school dissertation or one of those Big Tech privacy statements. They’re unreadable. So, just shut up and write the check.
Electricity is a classic copper-to-coffee commodity. It need not be priced by a Gordian knot of rules, unless your rulers are auditioning for the role of commissar. For example, my utility in northwest Montana charges a flat $30 monthly fee and 8.26₵ per kWh. What does that mean? It means, first, that I can calculate my bill by looking at my meter. Secondly, with air conditioning running full blast in the summer, I received a bill for $125 as opposed to $450 in California (as of 2015).
Okay, some Golden State residents might say, “That’s not my bill.” You are fooling yourself. It may not be your bill; but if it isn’t your bill, it certainly is a classic example of the beggar-thy-neighbor approach to life. You benefit because somebody else is forced to pay what you don’t. And if they don’t pay, the utilities turn to beggar-thy-neighbor in having maintenance be the beggar. Thus, Paradise, Ca., burns down.
An aerial view of destruction from the Camp fire in Paradise, Calif., off Clark Road in November 2018. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)
Democrat executives seem beset by all manner of catastrophes. Garcetti can’t keep the lights on and Newsom can’t either, plus keep the state from going up in flames. Blame-shifting is the usual response. The culprit is frequently some abstruse threat, a kind of politically useful bogeyman. Newsom’s favorite is “climate change”. He declared, “This [the fires] is a climate damn emergency.” To him, there’s nothing to debate, and he’ll brook no debate, dismissing those who disagree as “deniers”. It’s the typical attempt at public-shaming of people who won’t kowtow to the Party line.
There’s good reason not to bend a knee at the altar of the Sierra Club. Forest debris and dead trees have been piling up in the state’s forest for decades, as per the grand poohbahs of the greenie movement. If fires occur according to environmentalism’s vanguard elite, let ‘em burn because it is Gaia’s will. For those in the fire’s way, it’s their fault for being there. These powerful zealots are as calloused as the Bolshevik Grigori Zinoviev when he wrote in 1918 during the Red Terror:
“To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia’s population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.”
“In the basements of the Cheka” by Ivan Vladimirov (1919)
Newsom would probably prefer (I hope) that opponents not be lined up against the wall, just muzzled till they die out. Soon, the alternative voices will be replaced by the indoctrinated young when they reach the age of consent. Thus, the imperative to politicize the k-through-college curriculum, exactly like Soviet schools.
Then it’ll be a clear path to … more fires, third world power reliability, and an existence typified in The Book of Eli. The mounting difficulties will lead to more controls, not less. The powers-that-be will need more regulators and Party discipline to address the errors from the previous batch of edicts. 100 million dead trees exploding into massive conflagrations will mean a de-kulakization of the foothills and mountains (reminiscent of Stalin’s 1930’s war on the peasant) by herding the outlying residents into the tight urban cores (the state’s current and future war on the ‘burbs and “exurbia”).
A panorama of dead trees in the Sierra-Nevada.A fire as blow torch: The Big Creek fire consumes a home as it blows through the Sierra-Nevada and 1,000 acres in 30 seconds in CNN photo from Sept. 10, 2020.
The power disruptions won’t be addressed by greater investment in delivery and production. Instead, small-is-beautiful will be the mantra: smaller homes; fewer and smaller appliances; the reduction of personal conveyance to glorified golf carts and graffitied and filthy public transport; and an end to air conditioning. See, the environmentalist’s future is a self-anointed elites’ playground for directing everyone’s lifestyle, mind, and behavior. Their current penchant for semi-totalitarianism will blossom into the full-throated variety.
Will any of this address the alleged malefactor, climate change? It might, but only if we and California are impoverished. Then again, the warming might persist unabated. Our GDP is to be lowered, but the Sierra Club can’t control China’s CCP or India. It only seems to control California. Other countries are beginning to experience the joys of air conditioning and they won’t have any qualms about coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear power plants. Other states similarly won’t view the disaster that is California as being a wholesome path to follow. The end result is a mutilated California and a climate change that continues its inexorable march.
Coal-fired power generation in China.
Is the goal a diminishment of climate change – which won’t be – or just a naked power grab to control all behavior and minds? Bet on the latter. Budding totalitarians can’t help themselves because they are, in their heart of hearts, little busybodies. As incessant buttinskies, mostly upset that the world didn’t conform to them, they seek power to make it so. Call it a form of therapy, one that comes at the expense of everybody else. And the rich go along because they can appear high-minded and, by the way, have the wealth to shield themselves from the many ill-consequences. It’s an alliance of the logically incontinent and the self-loathing/self-serving. As with the Russian peasants of the 1930’s, though, there will be no place to run for the average Joe and Josephina.
An Academic Control Freak
The surrender to this class of power-seeking busybodies began when late 19th-century academicians peddled the “expert” as the proper repository for governmental power. It’s progressivism’s greatest “contribution” to civilization. The accolade of “expert” was reserved for people like them, folks with degrees. A degree wrongly became a synonym for wisdom.
Our modern campuses of insulated little social cocoons are now a hotbed where certain whims are nurtured and fortified in ideologized academic departments and staffs. The graduates with those unexamined assumptions trickle out into the institutional centers of power and influence. The ridiculousness becomes the incontrovertible “truth” in the uncultivated mind of the rioters, BLM, Antifa, opening ceremonies of NFL and NBA games, corporate HR departments, and Democratic Party slogans. Within a fortnight, the miscreants who recently chanted “Pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon” were turned into beacons of light.
Ibram X. Kendi
One of the academic abettors of this philosophical tyranny is Boston University’s Ibram X. Kendi, the occupant of the prestigious Andrew W. Mellon Professorship of the Humanities. The previous possessor of the title was philosopher and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. So, the position went from Wiesel’s classical liberalism to the racism of classical liberalism. It’s the crux of Kendi’s infantile explanation for all of human experience.
He wallows in the impatience of Marx, but replaced the proletariat with race, particularly blacks. Marx rejected previous norms and institutions – everything from family to constitutions, much of the corpus of classical liberalism and a good portion of western civilization to boot – because they inexorably exploited the masses of “wage slaves”, the working class. He was consumed with results, not the results of minor adjustments but with the apocalypse of existential revolution to overturn all of society. Take Marx’s general outline, replace a few nouns, recognize that both are obsessed with imposing fantastical complete equality in all its manifestations, and you have Kendi’s hectoring invective, How To Be An Antiracist.
This polemical diatribe is taken as the stuff of real scholarship. Au contraire, it’s a 284-page op-ed, a set of opinions wrapped up in biased verbiage. The quality of Kendi’s thinking can be seen in his clownish attempt to define the thing that he claims is the omni-explanation for nearly all of reality, racism. He writes, “Racism is a marriage of racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities.” In case you missed it, he sounds like an eighth-grader in repeating a form of the word and its surrogates in his definition of the word. The circular thinking resides alongside his opinions, which are one kind of conclusion, being used to reach other conclusions. There’s much in this polemic that is sand in the gears of logic.
He’s proof that ethnic studies departments do not broaden the mind but generate the next generation of radicalized activists. And they are pouring into the streets of Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, New York City, Rochester, Kenosha, almost anywhere sympathizers hold the reins of power.
A riot against racial inequality and police violence in Portland, Oregon, August 2, 2020. (Caitlin Ochs/Reuters)
None of Kendi’s end-state of absolute equality can be achieved without the power to impose it. Inequality rears its head no matter what. Past attempts at equality-mongering (Remember the Iron and Bamboo Curtains?) only led to an aristocracy of overseers – people like Kendi – to patrol the jurisdictions of the equality-of-all-things. If the commissariat didn’t exist, life would revert back to its prior condition of an overclass of the powerful, talented, or most fortuitist. Unknowingly or knowingly, if Kendi and his followers get their bite at the golden apple of power, it’ll just be the powerful of the few with the guns.
The walls of absolute equality will have to be forever manned with incessant forays into people’s lives to enforce the multitude of decrees, sub-decrees, sub-sub-decrees, ad infinitum. Kendi and his initiates in the streets are actually control freaks par excellence.
Kendi is only one of the latest inductees into the rogue’s gallery. He’ll have to maneuver for floor space with the likes of Xi Jinping and Stalin. Much of the Democratic Party leadership is waiting in the wings to join him and them. As for the rest of us, we’ll have nowhere to run. The United States as the traditional haven from tyranny will have been eclipsed. Sad, really sad.
Kansas City Chiefs and Houston Texans players meet on the field during a moment of “unity” before an NFL football game Thursday, Sept. 10, 2020, in Kansas City, Mo. J.J. Watts called the boos from fans “unfortunate”. Watts naively thought the word to be innocent enough. In reality, the word is politically charged and synonymous with “systemic racism”. Unbeknownst to Watts, it is laden with political sloganeering. The booing fans had a better understanding than him. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)
Jason Whitlock’s post on Outkick.com about the NFL’s season opener says it all. It can be found here.
Jason Whitlock
Here’s the opening paragraph from today’s Daily Mail on the NFL’s opening night of the 2020 season: “Kansas City Chiefs fans booed a moment of silence aimed at promoting racial justice, the Houston Texans remained in the locker room during the Star-Spangled Banner, and the reigning Super Bowl champions lined up for a singing of ‘the black national anthem’ on Thursday night as the NFL opened its 2020 campaign under dramatically different circumstances than any other season in league history.”
I didn’t watch the game since I don’t have a taste for mixing left-wing politics with athletics. Make no mistake about it, the whole thing legitimized a left-wing agenda.
In the write-ups on the game, a ritualized justification for the politicized antics at the start of the game hovered around the words of “unity” and “solidarity”. What nonsense! Unity and solidarity for what? The lexicon is cover for the development of a group mind, the kind of group mind found in past and present ideologized tyrannies. Do places like Berlin, Moscow, Havana, and Pyongyang remind you of anything?
North Korean students perform in front of Kim’s statue at Changdok School in Pyongyang in 2012.
The words cover a pack of monstrous ideas, the kind of ideas that insult the mind. “Systemic racism” is inherently improvable but politically useful in a power grab. So were Marx’s “worker alienation”, Galton’s “genetic determinism”, Lenin’s “revolutionary theory”, National Socialist “racial inferiority”, and the like. Such words appeal to the worst in us, and not surprisingly bring out the worst in our behavior. Look at our college campuses and urban conflagrations. Disgusting!
BLM, ChicagoLooters smashing a window of a store front on School street after the Black Lives Matter rally at the Massachusetts State House. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)
The catch-words remind us of humanity’s past sins while ignoring how our political legacy paved the way for enormous betterment of all people. What will they replace it with, an energized central government with them in the catbird seat? The spectacle was appalling. It deserved to be booed, and I hope the ratings are terrible.
Goodbye NFL. You have managed to spoil a once good thing.
The prophet: Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), British historian, philosopher, writer.
If you’re interested in plowing deeper into the causes of the current spate of riots, statue toppling, and angry mobs from Trump’s inaugural through the Kavanaugh hearings to the mayhem in our cities, one need look no further than a recent piece in National Review (August 29) by M. D. Aeschliman. In a nutshell, today’s urban street thugs – always half-literate despite privileged college admissions and comfortable upbringings – are unknowingly devotees of the 18th century’s Jean Jacques Rousseau, a man who dumped his children on the doorsteps of orphanages for someone else to be burdened with their upkeep. Rousseau is responsible for much of the secular dogmas and liturgies of today’s left. It’s a direct contradiction to Christianity and nearly all norms that have made human flourishing possible.
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Rousseau would make two things broadly popular: hedonism and a coercive state. On the one hand, he dispensed with the truth of human corruptibility in the doctrine of original sin and replaced it with a benign emotionalism that was, in his mind, ruined by centuries of traditions. And off our angry urchins go running to the latest gang assault on a statue, a re-imbibing of the NYT’s “The 1619 Project”, and the erasure of anything older than last hour’s Twitter storm. The shattering of norms – that old stuff again – points the way to a radical individual autonomy and a sanctioning of depravity. For Rousseau, nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of self-defined sensualism.
Nicolas Poussin, Bacchanal before a Statue of Pan, 1631 – 1633.
On the other hand, if we aren’t to be governed by anything older than last night’s leftovers and life is one continuous bacchanalia, Rousseau deposits in tradition’s stead the shadowy, spectral-like “general will”. The people according to Rousseau have a mind, or “general will”, but how do we know what it wants? Good luck … and run to the hills. Flight is the only practical option because there will always be someone to step forward with the power to decipher the national brain. Der fuhrer would make much of the all-conquering national will as embodied in him. Lenin’s will was not safely questioned. Longevity as a real or imagined opponent of Mao was an alien concept. Need I mention others who drank from Rousseau’s well? Tradition- and norm-bashing seem to lead to ugly places.
The historian Thomas Carlyle, the real prophet of today’s woes, writing in the middle of the 19th century did more than anyone to accurately plumb the depths of the French Revolution – the child of Rousseau’s mendacious thoughts – in his book of the same name. As a radical to the Tories and Tory to the radicals, he could fathom the errors of a barnacle-encrusted society while at the same time appreciate the fragility of the social order. The Jacobins destroyed the old social order and created tyranny.
Depiction of the storming of the Tuileries Palace on August 10, 1792 (artists: Jean Duplessis-Bertaux ).
Are BLM, Antifa, and the radicals now firmly ensconced in the leadership of the Democratic Party taking the place of yesteryear’s Jacobins, Bolsheviks, Red Guards, Khmer Rouge, Hugo Chavez’s Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV), and Castro’s Cuban Communist Party? Or are we to separate the Democratic Party and place it alongside Kerensky’s Socialists? And you ought to know what happened to them. For the Bolsheviks, two’s a crowd and off to the gulag and execution squads for moderates and competitor extremists.
Please read the article … and reread it. You’ll get more out of it the second time around. If you don’t want to work that hard, turn in your citizenship card because a republic requires its citizens to do the heavy lifting, or be horrifically ruled by the few who will. Lenin had a name for them: The Vanguard Elite.
The Vanguard Elite: 1920 Bolshevik Party meeting: sitting (from left) are Enukidze, Kalinin, Bukharin, Tomsky, Lashevich, Kamenev, Preobrazhensky, Serebryakov, Lenin and Rykov.
