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A Spring and Summer of Disrupted Lives and Riots

Destroyed sections of downtown Minneapolis after riots on May 28.

Lately, so much has been happening that scarcely a day goes by without a portentous event so serious that the normal Facebook frivolities seem senseless. ‘Tis a spring and summer of disrupted lives due to authoritarian reactions to a virus and viral videos being exploited for revolution.

The tension has been building before Trump. Riots have been roiling since the ludicrous attempt to turn Michael Brown into a hero in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014. Parts of Portland has been occupied Isis-like by Antifa for the last few years. Now, we are experiencing viral videos exploited for more revolution by one Marxist group birthed in Ferguson – BLM – and another gaining prominence after a Democrat temper tantrum for losing the 2016 election – Antifa.

Police officers using tear gas on rioters in Ferguson, Mo., August 2014.

The truth in both the George Floyd (Minneapolis) and Jacob Blake (Kenosha) cases is getting murkier by the day. The crown jewel in the uproar over police brutality is the death of George Floyd, and, as it turns out, he had enough fentanyl in his system to kill him nearly four times over. And I quote Hennepin County Medical Examiner Dr. Andrew Baker: “If he were found dead at home alone and no other apparent causes, this could be acceptable to call an OD. Deaths have been certified with levels of 3 [he had 11 ng/mL]”. One side effect of overdose is swelling of the lungs, which might explain Floyd’s cry while in the back seat of the police cruiser, “I can’t breathe”, and this before his escape from the car and the officer’s knee to the neck – something missing from the truncated, mob-inflaming version of the video.

As for Jacob Blake, he’s no Boy Scout. He had an outstanding warrant for sexual assault and this was relayed to the officers by the dispatcher according to department recordings. More importantly, why did he continue to ignore officer requests to stop and walk to the front door of his car, open it, and reach in, all while apparently holding a knife? I wouldn’t doubt the stories of prior convictions in his background.

And then we have the case of 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha this past Tuesday (Aug. 25). The circumstances of his shooting of 3 people is a huge fog bank. I suspect that more will come out both for and against the shooter.

One lesson from the ubiquitous use of smartphone video is the unreliability of them. They’re great for mob and vigilante justice. Too much is left out before the moment “play” is hit or the footage gets to the hands of a zealot. And then, beware, board up your business and flee the city.

That’s where we are at … until the fever breaks in our partisan media or a clear, unmistakable injustice is about to be inflicted that even Anderson Cooper can’t ignore.

I’m reminded of 14-year-old Bobby Fijnje who was charged with multiple counts of child sexual assault in a church child care center in 1989. He was hounded by Dade County DA Janet Reno – yeah, that Janet Reno, later to be Clinton’s AG – as a sexual fiend in a case based on “repressed memories” of children ferreted by a couple of buccaneer child therapists. The brave kid, rather than cut a deal, chose to go to trial and was finally acquitted of all charges. It broke the fever for any more jihads against phantom day care center child abuse – only to leave Reno to prove the Peter principle at Waco and guilty jurisdictions to pay millions in damages to the unjustly convicted.

Bobby Fijnje at age 14 in a picture in his parents’ home.
Janet Reno as Dade County DA.
Child therapist inventing stories of abuse by the use of very leading questions in an interrogation of a 5-year-old.
The flames consume the Branch Davidian compound in 1993 killing 74 people, 23 of them children, in an assault approved by Janet Reno, Clinton’s AG.

Will something like that rescue us from our current mania? We’ll have to wait and see. In the meantime, if you live in a city or state under Democrat control, keep your options open by preparing to jump in the car at a moment’s notice as if a category 5 hurricane is bearing down on you.

RogerG

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The Great Skedaddle II: A Vignette

Portland woman getting dowsed with white paint after challenging “protesters” for damaging property.

We are sorting each other out; however, events have accelerated the process, like the coddling of violent anarchists by woke metropolitan governing establishments. Moving vans have been pulling out of California for decades, and now the itch to relocate has spread up and down the Pacific coast from Seattle to San Diego. The driving force, unbeknownst to urban politicos, is something that they like to call “progressivism”, but in reality it’s “socialism” (public control – not ownership – of economic activity). Combined with the cultural leftism that is resplendent in urban public policies, a noxious brew of codes and mandates is offered up that is not conducive to healthy living.

Here is one mother’s account of what has happened to her beloved Portland.

Signs at a protest against racial inequality and police violence in Portland, Ore., July 30, 2020. (Caitlin Ochs/Reuters)

It’s better to put a face and life (and lives) to the great migration. Her rendition of the situation indicates that the problem is much broader and lies much deeper than a particular set of city councilmen or mayors. Granted, local elections aren’t attention-getters and turnout is low, but the majority who does show up at the polls is remarkably, consistently, and militantly of the left down to their personal values. These are popularly-elected governments. And as a result, the tolerance of the Sermon on the Mount has been turned into open and pervasive hostility for the few remaining holdouts of tradition.

“Joanna” in the article describes the stance of her liberal/left neighbors change from friendliness to sneers and bitterness for her support of Republicans and Trump. 2016 was a watershed in her mind. Everything went south as many residents on her street became surly after the rest of the country seemingly rejected their vision of the better world. To borrow a woke term, many urban denizens were “triggered” by the folks in flyover country actually voting their interests and values.

Trump sign vandalized in Eastern Shore, Md., Juyly 4, 2020.

The scene, in my mind, must have been reminiscent of Bolshevik agents in the 1920’s and 30’s stoking hatred among peasants for the ones who happen to be a little better off. Only in this case it isn’t Central Committee operatives doing the dirty work. Minds have been shaped for years in the fashionable media-saturated existence of our urban complexes and too much formal public education without wisdom. Portland has been a basket case for years, and the rest have been teetering on the edge of oblivion for quite some time.

The Great Skedaddle II, ironically, is now starting to include more than the few remaining Republican holdouts in our metroplexes. As one pundit (a Democrat) put it, law-abiding Democrats are joining the caravans. Even they can’t stomach the consequences of their beliefs.

Take a look at the interview.

RogerG

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An Indomitable Spirit

Li Zhensheng at the time of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

We are experiencing a collective amnesia. As the Democratic Party descends further into a mania for a collectivistic dystopia, reminiscent of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and as the movement’s younger zealots deface the public square and intimidate alternative voices, our country seems adrift on what to make of it all, having forgotten or never been informed that history is rhyming, as Mark Twain would have put it.

It takes monumental courage to persevere in the face of brutalities from the mob, like the ones currently pillaging our public squares. There are a few such people who deserve our everlasting praise for their stand for decency. One such person was Li Zhensheng, the sometimes covert photographer of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, who passed away June 23 of this year in Queens. He gave voice to millions of voiceless victims who, without him, would have remained nameless and unknown abstractions.

He showed in good resolution what a crowd of mostly young and indoctrinated zealots can mutilate in the name of their narrow, close-minded cause. Thank you, Li Zhensheng, for reminding us of the danger posed by street-thugs-with-a-cause.

The Cultural Revolution poster says it all: “Destroy the old!”

Please view the photographs with an eye for their resemblance to what is happening today in places as diverse as our Senate Judiciary Committee during the orchestrated sliming of Brett Kavanaugh to the streets of Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, Chicago, NYC, and beyond. Today’s mobs take no second place for wanton depravity.

Beatings and public humiliations. Sound familiar?
Youthful zealots. Look familiar?
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Youthful zealots. Look familiar?
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Public beatings and humiliations. Look familiar?
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Assault, battery, and humiliation. Remind you of anything on the streets of Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, NYC, etc.?
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More of the same, like more of the same on our urban streets.
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More of the same.
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Pity the victim who falls to the mob.
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More beatings and public humiliations. Welcome to the world of BLM and Antifa. The scope of their vision is totalitarian.
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More of the same. I could flood the zone with Li’s photographs, every one a precursor of our current and thuggish street theater.

RogerG

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Our Times and the Responsible Citizen

Rioters throw back tear-gas canisters fired by federal law-enforcement officers in Portland, Ore., July 29, 2020. (Caitlin Ochs/Reuters)

Please read the interview between National Review’s Michael Brandon Dougherty (a man of the right) and Michael Tracey ( a left-leaning independent journalist) found here.

Michael Brandon Dougherty
Michael Tracey

What you have been reading and viewing in mainstream media about our current urban disorders is a sham. It is the duty of the responsible citizen to ferret out fact from fiction, there being much to filter and uncover. The needs of our current moment require something more than quips on Facebook.

A party line was evident since the disturbances first erupted in our cities a couple of months ago. The Democratic Party line is to characterize the events as “peaceful protests”, with emphasis on “peaceful”. Jerry Nadler (D, NY), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, went so far as to characterize contrary reports of violence as a “myth that’s being spread only in Washington DC.” The word “peaceful” is ubiquitously attached to “protest” in Dem Party circles and throughout much of our biased legacy media: CNN, MSNBC, the networks, and big city urban dailies like the NYT and WaPo. But is it true?

No, no, no! Tracey went across the country reporting on the events. He didn’t find “peaceful protests”. He discovered something that can only be described as an insurrection. While ostensibly the “protests” started as an outcry against racism, at the tip of the spear were white middle-class urban twenty-somethings, and the victims were overwhelmingly minorities, many black. Far from there being only marches and speeches, Tracey discovered a bombed-out, boarded-up, and vandalized urban landscape stretching for blocks, a hulking mass of dystopia.

A portion of downtown Minneapolis after the riots.

Portland he describes as “unique”. It has been in a permanent state rebellion for years. So, why are the Democrats so keen on hiding the truth about Portland, et al? One answer: politics! Since the election of Trump, the “Resistance” became the “Movement”, not that there’s much difference between the two. The “Movement” encompasses more than the armed militia of the Democratic Party on the streets of Portland – BLM, Antifa, and other muscular utopians – but also the cores of our major cultural institutions. Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s account of Russia at the dawn of revolution depicts a similar malign disorientation. The threat is real and broad based.

Louis Vitton store front, downtown Portland, May 29.

We are facing a real revolutionary march down the well-traveled road of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror and the Bolshevik’s Red Terror. This will not end in a pretty place if allowed to fester and grow. The American people will have to steel themselves against an onslaught of misinformation meant to advance a huge totalitarian-like power grab. So, please read.

Priest and landlord condemned before a Red Tribunal during the Bolshevik Red Terror..

RogerG

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Democrat/BLM/Antifa Year Zero

Undated photo inside the original wooden memorial at Choeung Ek. We see the remains of the victims of the Khmer Rouge.

From the politicization of science to further a centrally planned future in grand schemes like the Green New Deal to the New York Times’s “The 1619 Project” refashioning of our self-identity as a nation to fit the leftists’ prefabricated, all-purpose explanation for western civilization and America, we are getting very close to the Khmer Rouge’s Year Zero as frighteningly displayed in 1984’s “The Killings Fields”. Maybe you have heard of Democratic Party politicians (most recently at the Barr hearings before the House Judiciary Committee) and left wing activist academics claiming that you are a racist because of the race of your supporting staff or for making the simple truism that all lives matter. We have seen pastors leading their congregations in groveling acts of submission or confession of sins for which there is no sinful act. In fact, your melanin count alone is enough to condemn you. The radical dogma has penetrated the universities, teacher colleges, your child’s classroom, and Big Sports. It’s everywhere.

White citizens and police officers wash feet of black leaders, ask for forgiveness in Gary, NC, June 7.

It’s an eerie world, and it’s descending on us very rapidly. The Democratic Party is the revolutionary party for this new totalitarianism. The revolution isn’t solely on the streets of Portland, et al. It’s appearing on your ballot in November 2020.

The Killing Fields clip below was one of a few that I would use in my World History class to introduce students to the real nature of 20th century totalitarianism. Of particular note is the dismantlement of the family in the camp’s school scene. A signature doctrine of BLM also belonged to the Khmer Rouge. Key to constructing the utopia is mind control (the radicalized curriculums) and supplanting memory (statue toppling and the imposition of their “History”) in order to mold the minds of the people so they will better fit into their new world order. Please watch the minute and a half clip for it could be in your and your children’s future.

RogerG

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This Won’t Be the First Time a Union Killed Its Own Industry

Leaders of United Teachers Los Angeles said Monday (June 8) they support a movement to eliminate the Los Angeles School Police Department, a force of about 400 that serves the L.A. Unified School District , Incoming UTLA president Cecily Myart-Cruz said, “We have to dismantle white supremacy.”

I was a teachers union local president. I know what teachers unions are all about. They are about maximizing rewards for their members, not students, as they push lefty curriculum. Circa 2020, they want to keep the schools closed, their full pay for “distance” instruction, with as few work hours as possible, and no accountability. Plus, plus, this from the microphone of incoming United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) president, Cecily Myart-Cruz: they are all-in for defunding police, the district’s campus police that is. UTLA is a combination of CHAZ (of Seattle fame) and La Costra Nostra. Give them what they want or they will extort the education of your children.

Check it out here.

The prospect of more loosey-goosey “distance” learning is driving more parents to abandon the public schools. Some are turning to self-help by forming learning pods for their children. They might even learn that they don’t need Myart-Cruz and her UTLA cohorts.

When schools reopen, and they will have to reopen – probably after the Biden/AOC regime wins the White House – these teachers might wake up to fewer kids in the classroom. With budgets crimped by the lockdowns, and ADA numbers falling, many of those teachers in the photo might be looking for barista jobs. My guess: math and economics won’t show up in the college transcripts of the pink-slipped.

UTLA, CTA, and NEA are to the education industry what the UAW was to the American auto industry by the end of the 20th century. Sometimes, poison is self-administered.

RogerG

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Adolescent Rebellion

One thing that I told my sons when they were younger was that the adolescent’s lack of self-control and impulsive judgment when possessed by an adult can lead to a life in and out of the criminal justice system. Now fuel that impetuousness with an enthusiasm for new ideas that aren’t new. Many of the notions have deeply troubled histories, unbeknownst to the excited zealot. So, pile ignorance on top of rashness. Now we have quite the noxious brew of a personality. Have I accurately described the malicious clowns laying waste to the city centers around the country?

Maybe add pampered to the list of personality traits of the miscreants who are pillaging our public squares. Here’s the cartoonist Michael Ramirez’s succinct portrayal that does a better job in making the point.

RogerG

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Disgusting!

Watch Dan Cathy, CEO of Chick-fil-A, engage in an act of secular humiliation.

Cathy’s heart may be in the right place, but this isn’t an act of humility in the Christian tradition. It has more in common with the mob’s contemptible and often brutal denunciations in the heady days of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Anyone seen as better off than someone else – “privileged” in today’s groupthink – was publicly abased, often with torture and/or death. If you’re keeping a scorecard of misery, the death toll ranged from hundreds of thousands to millions, and only ended when Mao succumbed to join the rest of history’s great monsters in evil’s hall of infamy. “Transformative” revolutions, which Antifa and Black Lives Matter are pursuing, don’t end very well.

He might think that he’s fulfilling the expectations of Christ. In reality, he’s helping to sustain a totalitarian movement which will have disastrous implications for all of us – black, white, et al.

“Black Lives Matter” isn’t limited to the literal meaning of the words any more than “Bolshevik” (the majority) is. It’s the title of a political front that can be loosely organized, sometimes more disciplined, but coalescing around a set of lies and half-truths. The demands around the unprovable “systemic racism”, the calls for reparations and defund/abolish the police, and the always fungible “white privilege” are a replay of the dangerous jargon on Krisallnacht (Germany, 1938), the Petrograd Soviet/Bolshevik Central Committee (1917), Mao’s Chinese Communist Party (1949), the Khmer Rouge (Cambodia, 1975-1979), etc.

A Khmer Rouge soldier waves his pistol and orders store owners to abandon their shops in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, as communist forces take over the capital in April, 1975. (Photo: AP)

Required reading for Cathy and any of our corporate leaders should be the “Black Book of Communism” by Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Andrzej Paczkowski and several other European academics. The “rich” – or “privileged” in today’s jargon – don’t end up in a nice place.

An act of public humiliation at the feet of a Christian rapper is not what this moment requires. It’s steadfastness. This moment necessitates Christians to denounce an anti-Christian crusade, not engage in displays of ostentatious humiliation that do nothing but give it a credence that it doesn’t deserve.

Cathy, get up off your knees and both you and Lecrae condemn a movement who’ll bring nothing but misery to the “privileged” and “unprivileged”.

The whole scene was disgusting, far from righteous. Shame on you, Dan Cathy. You have given me another reason to steer clear of Chick-fil-A.

RogerG

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On Abandoning Professional Sports, Part II

MLB front offices take up the mantra of the neo-Marxist Black Lives Matter, July 10.

“Big Sports” in America has chosen to hitch their wagon to a radical political movement founded upon a mountain of untruths, half-truths, and out and out lies. If the NFL, NBA, MLB and MLS want to join the ranks of the perfidious, I refuse to let them drag me into the position of being an unwitting patron of the deceit. I’m cutting my ties with them. I love athletic competition, not athletic competition tied to a neo-Marxist revolution.

Indeed, since all of us are created in the image of God in the Abrahamic tradition, black lives matter, as do all lives. Black voices matter, as do all voices. Of course, some voices matter more than others if what comes out of the mouth is grounded in reason and empirical data. Sadly, that isn’t always true. Some claims carry an unwarranted ring of truth only because they are repeated so often that the unthinking person becomes even more unthinking and prone to political manipulation. Watch Thomas Sowell provide much for your typical social justice warrior to ponder before they rush off to the next statue-toppling bacchanalia.

Of particular note in this 1981 episode of Firing Line is the rank condescension coming from an established east coast liberal, one with all the respectable Ivy League and professional credentials, Harriet F. Pilpel. She joins Buckley in the questioning of Sowell. She exhibited one the most blatant examples of vile noblesse oblige since the days of rampant serfdom. Some of her queries were predicated on her assertion of the inability of poor black parents to make the “best” choice of education for their children. Without saying it, she was all-in for the overseer of the antebellum South to be replaced by the overseer of the education bureaucrat and the self-serving officers of the teachers’ unions. Frankly, it was disgusting.

And these were the architects of the War on Poverty – a “war” we are still waging … and apparently losing. A Princeton degree is not a license to supplant the parental rights of the poor. The results of these overweening social engineers is not encouraging, what with the annihilation of civic order and the nuclear family in poor neighborhoods. It’s currently playing out on our inner-city streets.

Watch Sowell demolish these false preconceptions.

RogerG

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On Abandoning Professional Sports

Jul 8, 2020; Orlando, FL, Orlando, FL, USA; MLS players participate in a black power salute before the game between the Inter Miami and the Orlando City at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex. Mandatory Credit: Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports

More correctly, will we leave them or did they leave us?

Corporate America and our professional sports franchises are surrendering to a malicious assemblage of half-literate, quasi-Marxist fanatics and a similarly ill-educated brood of young middle class, mostly white malcontents. Take your spoiled college snowflake and mix them with incendiary black Marxists and you have the crowd that Big Sports wants to ingratiate.

The NBA will paint “Black Lives Matter” on their courts and permit the mob’s sloganeering on player jerseys. The NFL will denigrate the national anthem with a prior performance of something referred to as the “black national anthem”, “Lift Every Voice and Sing”. “Lift Every Voice” has been weaponized by extremists, and has no place as a prelude to our consecrated national anthem. Expect a scourge of kneeling at every game, not just the opening ones, from now on. MLB and MLS will have their own radicalized displays to mar the joy of athletic competition.

Recently, Premier League Football players sport Black Lives Matter endorsements on their jerseys.

I’ve had enough. How about you?

The most disgusting aspect of our current moment is that the perpetrators are zealots for a pack of lies and disastrous notions. “Systemic racism” is a fabrication to be peddled to the truly ignorant, in spite of – or because of – trillions of dollars of national treasure devoted to K-to-grad-school. Disparities aren’t due to some mysterious, skulking “man” but have an origin in social factors such as lifestyle choices and government efforts to subsidize those personal wrong turns. You won’t hear that coming from our over-priced millionaires in team uniforms and the mandarins in the NFL’s New York City headquarters.

Black lives do matter, as do all lives. And black voices matter, especially, as with all voices, the ones who have given these issues more thought than your pampered social justice warrior wrapping cables around a statue. Thomas Sowell is one important voice … and a black one at that. Rather than watch another gaudy season of Big Sports, pay your dues as a citizen by tuning into the antidote to the shouts of the radicals in the streets. Watch other black voices who put to shame the chants and grotesque behavior that parades across your tv screen.

ESPN’s ESPY awards show co-hosts Megan Rapinoe, Sue Bird and Russell Wilson wear t-shirts endorsing the neo-Marxist Black Lives Matter.

Sowell in this video puts the blame for the leftist mania squarely at the feet of an unexamined vision. The vision requires you to believe that bad things are corrected by a new army of government employees peddling more dollars. The vision is rooted in a disparagement of traditions, morality, and institutions such as marriage. The results are horrifying to the most vulnerable, the poor of every stripe.

Check it out, get a cup of coffee for the 53-minute presentation, and be prepared to have your mind stretched. Oh, more videos will follow. Enjoy.

RogerG