The 1990s Mass Psychosis

McMartin Preschool Trial on emaze
The child sexual abuse mania that began in 1984 but would stretch into the 1990s

“Against stupidity we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no use.  Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved -indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be brushed aside as trivial exceptions.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“All one’s neighbours [sic] are in the grip of some uncontrolled and uncontrollable fear. . . In lunatic asylums it is a well-known fact that patients are far more dangerous when suffering from fear than when moved by rage or hatred.” — Carl Jung

Was there something in the water during the 1990s?  Episodes of mania abounded.  Looking for causes, Bonhoeffer emphasizes a stubborn belief in things that aren’t true, a kind of stupidity.  Jung looked to the role of fear in animating a broad sense of hysteria.

Either way, certain periods of history seem susceptible to a kind of mass psychosis.  The 17th-century Salem Witch Trials were but one example.  Throughout the Reformation period, executions by burning at the stake were frequent except in the 16th-century Dutch Republic and northern Poland-Lithuania, so much so that one historian referred to the two as “state[s] without stakes”.  The climate-change frenzy of today is only the latest episode in the recurring epidemics of madness.  Though, the 1990s, for whatever reason, exhibited multiple occurrences.

From the 1980s into the 1990s, across the country from California to Florida, child day-care was allegedly and suddenly plagued with the most fantastical charges of child sexual abuse.  Janet Reno rose to fame from Florida DA to Bill Clinton’s Attorney General, and then her oversight of the Branch Davidian siege and inferno in Waco, riding her “Reno method” to secure many false child-abuse convictions, alongside ruined lives, numerous lawsuits, and subsequent legal judgments that nearly bankrupted many guilty local jurisdictions (see #1).  It was a disaster all around.

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he PBS website for “The Child Terror” which chronicled the frenzy about child sexual abuse at day care centers
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Janet Reno, Florida DA and US Attorney General, a key figure in child-abuse mania and the Waco inferno
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The inferno at the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco in 1993

Then in 1996 during the Atlanta Summer Olympics came the Centennial Olympic Park bombing.  Security guard Richard Jewell was turned from hero to goat by the FBI’s fixation on him as the culprit, all recounted in Clint Eastwood’s 2019 film, “Richard Jewell” (see #2, #3).  In this case, a powerful institution fell under the spell of the “somebody within” trope to single-mindedly focus on Jewell, going so far as claim that he was afflicted with a mysterious “hero syndrome” (or complex), hounding him and placing his life under a microscope only to discover the real offender a couple of years later.  Organizations can suffer from a self-imposed group myopia among its “professionals”.

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Credentials and training don’t immunize a person from half-baked notions taken as truth.  Today, we see entire professional associations oblivious to the necessity of a block-chain of evidence that ties it to a relevant conclusion, the essence of science.  Instead, we’ll see them endorse the fashionable ideas of many of their broader demographic peers and stubbornly persist in logical quicksand.

Then we have the JonBenet Ramsey murder case from 1996.  The phenomenon repeats itself. Netflix has brought the incident to light in “Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey?”.  Watching all three episodes makes clear that the treatment of the case by law enforcement has much in common with the 1990s’ day-care child abuse mania and the Jewell persecution.  The case had gone cold because of the time wasted by Boulder PD detectives on a preoccupation with the parents, one or both, as the killers.  If that wasn’t enough, the media played along in wild speculations about the family as they were fed derogatory leaks in order to intimidate the Ramseys into confessions.  Delinked from empirical evidence, CBS’s “60 Minutes” went on a wild ride to blame JonBenét’s older brother only to suffer at the wrong end of a lawsuit.

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On Netflix

Similarly, after a few years, the Boulder PD’s lead detective on the case tried to make another kind of killing by writing a book that tried to accomplish what the Boulder DA and PD couldn’t in a court of law: pin blame on the parents.  Like the 60 Minutes’ smearing of the brother, this too ended in a lawsuit with the author and publisher penalized with a sizeable award for the Ramseys.

Don’t think for a moment that we have progressed beyond these barbarities of a few decades ago.  Remember the 2020 summer of riots fueled by a noxious, mysterious, hidden, and unconscious racism?  What of transgenderism and the assertion that one can feel or think themselves into another sex, all assisted by the rhetorical hocus-pocus of “sex-at-birth” and the invention of a separation of gender from sex?  It’s hard to imagine a greater child abuse than placing our children under its spell and sanctioning chemical and surgical interventions and transgender mind manipulation.  Welcome to the Island of Dr. Moreau (see H.G. Wells’s story)

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The 2020 George Floyd riots in Portland, Ore.
George Floyd protests: crowds gather in Washington, DC
Protest in Washington, D.C., June 2020, against “racism”

MAGA has its own fancies.  Tariffs are seen as a ticket to national prosperity. They want America to be great again while abandoning Eastern Europe to Putin.  Reunionizing the workforce to gain the political allegiance of union bosses and boasting of a return to fiscal sanity while avoiding the trainwrecks of the entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, half the federal budget) is proof that Alice isn’t alone in her Wonderland.  They like armies and navies so long as we don’t do anything with them.  It doesn’t get much more insane than this.

There’s more.  Climate change has the same popular pull as were charges of heresy for the Spanish Inquisition.  Think about it.  To get from a gradual increase in atmospheric temperatures to herding everyone into electric vehicles and the experiences of blackouts and bankrupting utility bills requires the hasty conclusion that humans are bringing an end to Gaia.  The empirical relationship between the apocalyptic hucksterism and warmer weather is, to put it kindly, shaky.

Will any of the so-called remedies do any good?  For every 100 electric cars sold in California, China is building a new coal-fired electricity plant.  Ditto for India.  Any estimates of climate improvement from the bankrupting of the California population are nothing but proof that 17th-century witchcraft is alive and well.  Yet here we go with Biden bringing California absurdities to the nation.

Three decades on, we’re still as foolish as ever.  Don’t go around holding your head high.  Mass psychosis might be in our social DNA.  Higher ed, more college degrees, greater “professionalization”, more credentials, and exuberant education spending is hardly a cure.  It’s proven to be an accelerant.  The country’s next mass mania is just around the corner.

RogerG

Sources:

1. An excellent rendition of this gross prosecutorial misconduct during the time can be found at “The Child Terror”, Frontline, PBS, at https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/terror/.
2. The Wikipedia page on “Ricard Jewell” affords a description of the basic facts.
3. “THE ‘HERO SYNDROME’”, Sergeant Ben D. Cross, Arkansas State Police, 11/1/2014, at https://www.cji.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/the_hero_syndrome.pdf
4. “Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey?”, now showing on Netflix; website at https://www.netflix.com/title/81705443

Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be . . . College Students

Students spray paint pro-Palestinian messages at a protest encampment at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., April 28, 2024. (David Ryder/Reuters)

Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings in a song admonished mothers to not “… let your babies grow up to be cowboys”.  As the saying goes, that was then, this is now.  It’s not cowboys that we ought to be worried about.  It’s college students. College is in the process of demolishing itself.  Look no further than the Ivy League.  From there, a degradation has taken root that has spread like a cerebral small pox epidemic, infecting the vast majority of campuses.  They’re proving themselves to be embarrassments.  The rot extends right through the administrations to the faculty and passes into the students.  Beware, parents, your kids may leave the house leaning right but may return with a criminal record for defacing veterans’ cemeteries.

To be fair, not all of higher ed is an intellectual cesspool, but the problem is so pervasive that it has begun to besmirch nearly anyone with a degree on their resumé.  Add Sociology or Humanities or English Lit or any of the “soft sciences” and their paper bio could be well on its way to the circular file.

The recent antisemitic pro-Palestinian encampments and protests are telling us the time of day.  The fixation with the “marginalized” now includes a sanction for the genocidal butchery of 10/7.  So warped is the thinking that the charge of “genocidal butchery” has become monopolized by those who committed actual “genocidal butchery” – the kind that you saw with your own eyes on 10/7 – and daily perform war crimes using civilian human shields, not shirking from hiding their military caches and facilities in and under schools, hospitals, orphanages, and housing complexes.  Thus, savagery is excused.  The natural apprehension about civilian casualties is distorted to pardon unspeakable barbarism in practice.  What a warped universe.

Israeli soldiers carry the body of a victim of an attack at Kibbutz Kfar Aza, in southern Israel, on October 10.
sraeli soldiers carry the body of a victim of an attack at Kibbutz Kfar Aza, in southern Israel, on October 10. (Violeta Santos Moura/Reuters)
Hamas terror attacks
Hamas body cam photo of terrorist shooting indiscriminately into a house in Israeli kibbutz near Gaza border. (Israel Defense Forces via AP)

Don’t expect many of today’s college students to get it, having been raised on a steady diet of the oppressor/oppressed falderol throughout K-grad school, from public and elite prep schools all the way to the identity-mongering college curriculums.  The curriculum of entire college academic departments, many of them mandatory for graduation, are based on this narrow little looking glass.  The kids’ minds are forced shut, unable to exercise any kind of self-examination.

Student demonstrators occupy the pro-Palestinian "Gaza Solidarity Encampment" on the West Lawn of Columbia University on April 24, in New York City.
Anti-Israel tent encampment at Columbia University
Pro-Palestinian student protesters continue demonstrations on the eighth day of the 'Gaza Solidarity Encampment' at Columbia University in New York on April 24.
Pro-Palestinian student protesters continue demonstrations on the eighth day of the ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’ at Columbia University in New York on April 24. (Fatih Aktas/Anadolu/Getty Images)

For instance, a radicalized Columbia faculty senate in a 62-14 vote on Friday (4/26/24) approved a resolution to investigate the administration of an already weak and vacillating college president for finally taking action against an illegal campus encampment and student-led pogrom targeting Jewish students.  Aleksander Solzhenitsyn wrote of a strikingly similar situation in his three-volume The Red Wheel, a novelized account of the socio-political setting leading up to the Bolshevik Revolution.  He’s got the same mix of characters of academic adults and youths who’ve been radicalized.  There’s something about the violent potential in socialism.

Not that all socialists are militant fanatics, mind you.  It’s just that socialism is a systematic critique of a society, and there’s few things more thrilling for those immersed in a bubble divorced from realities, for four years or in a life of tenure, than the exciting prospect of overthrowing everything.  Bulls in china shops are electrifying things to be for such young and stilted minds.  The narrow-minded don’t know that they’re blinkered because they don’t know or understand or appreciate any alternatives.  These are the reincarnated “comrade children” of the Khmer Rouge, alongside their adult abettors.  Welcome to Columbia’s faculty senate and a chunk of the student body.  The best and brightest or the worst and barbaric?

Not surprisingly, the faculty is as extreme as the youths given the fact that they curated this mess.  It doesn’t take much to uncover the concomitant antisemitic student rage.  Take, for instance, Khymani James, leader of the Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) cell who announced (see #1 below), “Zionists don’t deserve to live.”  Such bombast would be treated as isolated anecdote until one notices that the school’s Jewish students were advised to stay home due to rampant Jew-hatred on campus (see #2 below).

Khymani James
Khymani James, shown in this photo from 2021

Ya think?  This neo-Marxist antisemitism is in the academic ether, and in more than faculty offices and campus greens.  George Washington University exploded and since the Jacobins also control the Washington, D.C., city government, the city won’t help the school enforce its rules.  It declined the school’s request for police assistance.  In the worst governed cities, we find the worst behavior.  Get out of DC if you can and move the college to more civilized environs.  The nation’s capital is a hot mess, and has been for quite some time.

As usual, Texas is showing how to handle the miscreants.  The Austin chapter of the Palestine Solidarity Committee called for another one of these campus intifadas and were promptly arrested and carted off. UT’s Office of the Dean of Students declared to the group, “The University of Texas at Austin will not allow this campus to be ‘taken’ and protesters to derail our mission in ways that groups affiliated with your national organization have accomplished elsewhere.”  Enough said.  Call momma for the bail money.

Pro-Palestinian protesters demonstrate at the University of Texas on April 24, in Austin, Texas.
Pro-Palestinian protesters on the campus of UT, Austin

Yale and Princeton followed suit in showing more backbone than Columbia.  As soon as the tents went up on Princeton, the school authorities ordered them down “now”.  Down they went and the waifs then resorted to their usual standby, a sit-in.  Yale’s campus police did the work of clearing the foolishness by arresting around 45 (see #4 below).  Mom, expect a call.

Los Angeles’s USC constructed a pickle for itself.  It’s got the usual intifada circus on campus but it is happening at graduation time.  They really stepped into it when they chose a self-styled pro-Palestinian activist to be the valedictorian, Asna Tabassum.  This one is a real winner.  Her Instagram profile links to a pro-Palestinian website that proclaims,

“Zionism is a racist settler-colonialist ideology.  One Palestinian state would mean Palestinian liberation and the complete abolishment of the state of Israel.”

USC student Asna Tabassum speaks to ABC News, April 16, 2024 (Video screenshot)
USC student Asna Tabassum speaks to ABC News, April 16, 2024 (Video screenshot)

The choice of speaker amid the broader call for intifada ignited a real hornet’s nest.  The school canceled the school-wide graduation (see #4 below).

How did this person get into a position to be valedictorian?  Good grades, high GPA?  Well, today, given rampant grade hyper-inflation, they have as much value as the Turkish lira (54.8% inflation).  Watch her tying herself in knots in an attempt to avoid the charge of Jew-hatred.  Like many of her fellow protesters, she is a contortionist in concocting a hypothetical distinction between venom for Zionism and antisemitism.  It’s a difference without a difference.

An overly inflated GPA must be the culprit since one need not be a genius to see that a one-state “river to the sea”, with the obvious right of return, would lead to another wholesale slaughter of the Jews.  Just take today’s Iran and graft it onto the narrow trip between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.  Combine the Sharia viciousness of Hamas and gross misgovernance of the PLO and see what you get.  Get the idea?

Living cheek by jowl with people who’ve been raised on a steady diet of characterizations of you as evil incarnate isn’t a recipe for kumbaya (see #5 below).  Sorry, Miss Tabassum.  Ditto for the munchkins in our classrooms.  Parents, another four years in a neo-Marxist bubble isn’t necessarily a pathway to betterment for your offspring.  As the song goes, mommas don’t let your babies grow up to be . . . college students.  Beware, oh, beware.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. “‘Zionists Don’t Deserve To Live’: Meet The Leader Of Columbia University’s Anti-Israel Encampment”, Kassy Akiva, The Daily Wire, 4/25/24, at https://www.dailywire.com/news/zionists-dont-deserve-to-live-meet-the-leader-of-columbia-universitys-anti-israel-encampment
2. “Columbia rabbi warns Jewish students to go home, don’t come back to campus because of ‘extreme antisemitism’”, Doree Lewak and Isabel Keane, New York Post, 4/21/24, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/columbia-rabbi-warns-jewish-students-to-go-home-don-t-come-back-to-campus-because-of-extreme-antisemitism/ar-AA1nouyc
3. “George Washington University Suspends Students for Organizing Anti-Israel Encampment”, James Lynch, National Review Online, 4/27/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/george-washington-university-suspends-students-for-organizing-anti-israel-encampment/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=second
4. “USC Cancels Graduation Ceremony over Anti-Israel Protests”, Brittany Bernstein, National Review Online, 4/25/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/usc-cancels-graduation-ceremony-over-anti-israel-protests/
5. An accurate window into what Israel is facing can be found at the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) at https://www.memri.org/

They’re Still Leaving as of Friday, 12/29/23

Local Moving Labor | U-Haul

In “Poltergeist II”, the little girl stares into the snow of the TV screen and announces, “They’re baaaaack!”.  Who’s back?  The ghosts, of course.  For those chronicling the decline of California, the iconic declaration must be reworked.  A person staring at their daily news feed comes away with stories of people leaving the state saying, “They’re leeeeeeeeeeaving!”  This time, it’s Time magazine in “Americans Are Fleeing Los Angeles More Than Anywhere Else for First Time” (see below).

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The little girl from “Poltergeist II”

And I quote from the story: “Los Angeles was not at the top of the list [of places to move to], instead becoming the area residents were most likely to move away from.”  According to a Redfin report, “That marks the first time on record [LA] has been the number one place homebuyers are leaving, and the first time in over two years the Bay Area has dropped out of the number one spot.”

A dubious distinction for the not-so-Golden State.  LA occupies the top spot, but the rest of the list is a who’s who of American urban dystopia, all of them Democratic Party satraps. San Francisco, New York City, Washington, D.C., Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit and Denver are kryptonite to businesses and the middle class.  People are voting with their feet as they have for millennia.  Hell on earth is not a magnet.

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A common strip of homelessness in Los Angeles
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Litter from the chronic mobs of thieves along rail lines in Los Angeles

Welcome to urban America, and for the globe-trotting foreign traveler, reconsider that visit to the City by the Bay or Disneyland. Unless you’re a member of a major bowl game broadcast crew like the ESPN team reporting from the floor of the Rose Bowl, who’ll speed from the airport to hotel to the Rose Bowl in a limousine, you’ll risk face-to-face encounters with urban dysfunction.

For Californians, get out. For visitors, stay away.

business exodus people leaving california

RogerG

Source:
* “Americans Are Fleeing Los Angeles More Than Anywhere Else for First Time”, Suzanne Blake, Time, 12/29/23, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/americans-are-fleeing-los-angeles-more-than-anywhere-else-for-first-time/ar-AA1md8sC?ocid=msedgntp&pc=LCTS&cvid=483db5997a504d34a10fb00840ed94db&ei=52

They Just Don’t Get It

Guns, technology, and police shootings; San Francisco board of supervisors elections; AirBnB ...
County of San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Mayor Londond Breed center
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San Francisco Mayor London Breed

Many of our debates are vastly off-kilter. It begins with hugely consequential things.  Republicans seem intent on foisting Donald Trump on the country again.  The Democrats are focused on making a shambles of our country.  The former makes the latter more likely.  The abhorrent DJT is simply too ugly a face for the GOP to succeed among a national electorate.

It doesn’t stop there.  The so-called solutions have the maturity and depth of understanding of locker room humor.  Trumpkins insinuate that the country needs a Tasmanian Devil (of Looney Tunes fame) to fight, fight anyone, anyone coming from any direction, making enemies of friends.  The Dems and their fellow cultural revolutionaries (their inspiration: Mao), after creating swaths of wreckage from their cuckoo ideas, want the help of people, who they have habitually tarred, to clean up their mess.

For the revolutionaries in power, more cops to reverse the doom loop of places like San Franscisco is much less feasible of an option after years of decriminalizing criminality and the branding of cops as racists.  What they just don’t get is the fact that once the slide is initiated, like an avalanche, it’s awfully hard to stop.  This class of revolutionary ruler is emotionally and mentally ill-equipped to address the situation.

The carnage is glaringly obvious to all. Type “doom loop” and/or “San Francisco” in YouTube’s search field and you’ll see.  The list of major retailers abandoning the city is too well-known to require mention here.  The two largest downtown hoteliers prefer foreclosure to continuing operations among the filth and crime.  The iconic Westfield Mall has discovered a similar affection for foreclosure.  San Francisco is the donkey party’s policies taken to their logical conclusion.

Mayor London Breed quipped in support of additional funding for public safety, “San Francisco must be a safe and just city for all”, and her fellow-travelling potentates on the Board of Supervisors responded with an additional $60 million in funding for the Police Department and 220 more officers.  I don’t know what 220 more cops will be able to accomplish for residents, under the guise of the same ravenous Red Guards who created the situation, except spend a whole lot more money for more uniforms, training, equipment, and compensation with little real power to do anything to clear the public spaces.  What high-quality candidate for SFPD recruitment would be willing to step into that minefield?

My guess is, if the same clowns are running the show, that things might marginally improve, but “marginally improve” is a bit like “marginally mugged”.  It’s still going to be horrible, and managers responsible for many employees will recommend Zooming (stay home) if at all possible, instead of running the gauntlet.

San Francisco's Federal Building: A Desolate Symbol Amidst Escalating Crime & Homelessness Crisis
A view of the troubling walk to the entrance of the San Francisco’s Federal Building

And that includes federal employees at the downtown federal building.  HHS Assistant Secretary for Administration Cheryl R. Campbell issued the following advisory to SF district managers earlier this month, “In light of the conditions at the (Federal Building) we recommend employees … maximize the use of telework for the foreseeable future.”  Even with the added cops, any return to the office workstation won’t survive the next assault.

Nancy Pelosi’s well-publicized pleas won’t matter squat if the people in charge fundamentally still think like her.  That’s the crux of the matter: the critical mass of politics in San Francisco is infatuated with the power of the state to create Shangri-la and the view of the world through the lens of systemic victimization.  So long as that sticks between the ears, decline becomes more than an option. It’s a perpetual reality.

Ideas matter, and boy do they matter.  The clowns in San Francisco City Hall just don’t get it.

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RogerG

Read more here:

* “HOW SAN FRANCISCO BECAME A FAILED CITY”, Nellie Bowles, The Atlantic, June 8, 2022, at https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/how-san-francisco-became-failed-city/661199/

* “Federal workers in San Francisco told to work remotely ‘for the foreseeable future’ because local crime is so bad”, Chris Morris, Fortune Magazine, August 14, 2023, at https://fortune.com/2023/08/14/remote-work-federal-workers-san-francisco-work-from-home-crime-drugs/

Our National Decomposition Continues Apace

Union organizer and Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson speaks after being projected winner as mayor on April 4, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois. (Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)
Teacher union organizer and Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson speaks after being projected winner as mayor on April 4, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois. (Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)
Supreme Court candidate Janet Protasiewicz reacts while speaking at her election night watch party in Milwaukee, Wis., on Tuesday, April 4, 2023. Protasiewicz, 60, defeated former Justice Dan Kelly, who previously worked for Republicans and had support from the state's leading anti-abortion groups. (Mike De Sisti /Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel via AP)
Janet Protasiewicz speaks at her election night party in Milwaukee after she defeated former Justice Dan Kelly for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat. (Mike De Sisti / Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel)

 

Our national decomposition shows little sign of abating.  Elections in Wisconsin and Chicago indicate that there remains an appetite for decay.

Another word for decline or decomposition of a culture, civilization, or nation is degringolade.  Whichever word is used, however, we are experiencing it.  Nature isn’t doing it to us.  We are doing it to ourselves.  The precipitating factor is what is bouncing between our ears.  A sizeable chunk of the electorate, without even knowing it in many cases, is sold on toxic neo-Marxism in the guise of modern progressivism.  Today, progressivism and this updated Marxism are synonymous.  I’m beginning to sound like a broken record since I’ve certainly mentioned it often enough but can’t get away from it.  It’s constantly resurfacing in many places around the country.

This isn’t the progressivism of Woodrow Wilson.  As a refresher, this current edition is a relatively modern refashioning of Karl Marx’s paradigm: the systemic oppression of the oppressed who are defined by an ever-fungible list of outgroups covering everything from XY girls to the poor to anyone with high melanin counts.  To the rescue in this blinkered ideological schematic is a complete, top to bottom, inside and out, overhaul of all societal arrangements from the family to property, a thoroughgoing Marxist revolution.  Sound familiar?  Read BLM’s mission statement before it was scrubbed clean of too much revelatory information (see below).  We’ve proven to be quite creative in defining the “oppressed”, or victim groups.  For greenies, you might add the mother goddess Gaia (earth) to the list.  Anyway, this latest edition fairs no better than the kind that lurked behind the Iron Curtain or Mao’s China or is lurking in North Korea and Cuba.  It is a sacking of our heritage and thrusting the country into despair.

The canary passing out in the coal mine in this moment of our evisceration is urban America.  Our cities are crumbling, and so are the states dominated by them. The story has been acted out before.  We are historically rhyming with 4th and 5th-century AD Rome.  The Roman Empire didn’t go out in a boom but a whimper.  The cities became unlivable, mired in high taxes, crumbling infrastructure, a deterioration of services, lack of security, and overburdening controls.  Who’d want to live there?  Apparently, many didn’t by the 5th century.  The population of the city nearly emptied from over a million in the 1st century AD to 30,000 by the 5th.  Other similarly weakened urban places suffered.  People flocked to fortified estates, monasteries, and towns with natural defenses.  It’s the beginning of feudalism.

visigoths+%281%29.jpg 1,405×1,005 pixels | Vikings | Pinterest | Roman empire and Roman legion

Feudalism is returning.  Today, in the good ‘ol USA, people are rushing to states and places where 3-strikes laws mean something, where taxes and bureaucracies aren’t bleeding producers white, where parking your car on the street in front of your house isn’t an invitation to vandalism.  In other words, where neo-Marxism/progressivism is held in disrepute.

Where boys’ and girls’ bathrooms are separated by a wall.  Where nature’s chromosomal distinction hasn’t been buried by the linguistic manipulations of pronouns and “birthing person” for “woman”.  It’s just the opposite in our urban neo-Marxist silos.  Entirely mired in the mindset, many of our cities and urbanized states are busy advancing the revolution by eliminating other distinctions such as the one between criminal and law-abiding.  Judges and local potentates treat criminals as victims and their real victims as . . . well . . . .

As if we need any more evidence, Whole Foods announced yesterday (4/10/2023) that it was “temporarily closing” its 65,000 square foot San Francisco outlet at Eighth and Market, the Trinity section, that it just opened last year.  According to a company spokesman, “If we feel we can ensure the safety of our team members in the store, we will evaluate a reopening of our Trinity location.”  The area has been plagued by brutal beatings, stabbings, killings, and accidents in recent weeks.  Too few cops and law-unenforcement is making San Francisco look like 5th-century Rome (see below).

These arbiters of revolutionary justice in places like San Francisco have their own vocabulary to push this cultural revolution. “Decarceration” is the go-to for releasing offenders to reoffend, just call it “low-level crime”, which is another word for “inconsequential” to Soros-backed DA’s – inconsequential to everyone but the person left battered, bruised, and bleeding in the subway.  Barbarian invasions aren’t doing it to us, unless barbarian refers to the urban powerful who have drunk the neo-Marxist Kool-Aid. Your progressive DA, judges, city council, mayor, governor, and state legislature are performing the role of the Visigoths and their King Alaric in laying waste to Rome in 410 AD.

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Visigoths sack Rome in 410 AD.
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Minneapolis in the 2020 summer of riots.

The only recourse for those not too fond of the mayhem is to vote with their feet.  Get out!  But these are democracies – surprise!  The corruption is democratic.  People are voting for mayhem. How’s that possible?  It might have something to do with a little cost/benefit analysis on the run: the rewards of group largesse from the public treasury are greater than the costs of possibly losing your little girl in a drive-by.  I know, it’s hard to believe.  But, on the other hand, it could just be stupid people being stupid, something not unheard of in the annals of democracy.

Or it could be due to the overall social decomposition extending to our schools.  People aren’t taught any better; they don’t know any better; and are easily led into believing nonsense.  Yet, policy-nonsense still behaves, as it always has, whether popularly chosen or not, like a drunk behind the wheel.  It’s a disaster careening down our thoroughfares.  And like most drunks, all-too-often they don’t get sober till they hit bottom.  Apparently, our urban electorates haven’t hit bottom.  Or it could be that the voter pool has been reduced to the drunks, the sober having fled to safer climes (red states).

A sizeable majority – by ten points – of Wisconsin voters recently failed the field sobriety test but still grabbed the car keys.  Some attribute the recent election of the Visigothic Janet Protasiewicz to the State Supreme Court to the abortion issue.  Probably true, but Wisconsinites have now let the Visigoths through the gates with a new Visigothic majority on the Court and, as a result, will get much more than carte blanche abortion.  Protasiewicz promised during the campaign to rewrite the state’s redistricting maps to the advantage of the neo-Marxists who promise more sacking into the foreseeable future.  In addition, expect more teacher-union power to dictate your child’s education, backdoor racism in diversity-equity-inclusion, and higher taxes to finance the revolution.  The whole litany of policies to promote the revolution against hypothetical systemic “oppressors” are about to be unleashed.  And so will a run on exiting U-Hauls, proving once again that the only thing efficiently produced by Marxism is refugees.

Money is the mother’s milk of politics . . . and revolution.  The donkey party neo-Marxists, in spite of their dismal record, are well-funded from a network of similarly intoxicated donors.  The precedent was established by Lenin in 1917.  The Bolsheviks were bankrolled by Imperial Germany. A revolution rides on more than fulminations.

Money and an election system reshaped to the advantage of their base put Protasiewicz in office, and gave Chicago another Alaric-style mayor, Brandon Johnson, to replace the Visigothic Lori Lightfoot.  The guy is marinated in neo-Marxism, like his predecessor.  San Francisco, Wisconsin, and Chicago are pointing the way to the future, the same future viewed by 5th-century Romans and early 20th-century Petrograd residents.

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If not arrested, our condition will continue to deteriorate . . . until riveting calamities shock us back to our senses.  Hopefully, by then, it won’t be too late.  Hopefully, we won’t wake up to news of two aircraft carriers sunk in the western Pacific, and our response is crippled by an economy unable to meet the demands of the moment, or a population unwilling to fight after years of anti-western indoctrination in our media and schools.  A pool of recruits rattled by gender dysphoria and accusations of white privilege can’t instill much confidence.

The signs of decay aren’t limited to the popularity of chic neo-Marxism among urban sophisticates.  Another passed-out canary is plummeting birth rates and closing maternity wards.  It’s hard to have a robust generational talent pool to face the threat with a population befuddled by pronouns and fungible sex-identity, all as the population shrinks.  We’ve got a lot to worry about.  And all the while, neo-Marxism, acting like the Visigoths, is busy hollowing out the nation and its civilization.  At this late hour, the odor of national decomposition is beginning to overwhelm the olfactory glands.

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RogerG

Read more here:

* BLM’s mission statement included the following:
“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.” It’s straight out of the writings of Karl Marx, nothing unusual for the self-professed Marxism of BLM’s founders of Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi.

From the Wayback Machine Archive, Black Lives Matter: “What We Believe”, at https://web.archive.org/web/20200408020723/https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/

* “Whole Foods closes San Francisco flagship store after one year, citing crime”, Jordan Valinsky, CNN, 4/11/2023, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/whole-foods-closes-san-francisco-flagship-store-after-one-year-citing-crime/ar-AA19IDPH

* If you’re interested, here’s a local San Francisco newscast about people getting out during the Covid shutdown: “On The Move: San Francisco residents on the move during the COVID-19 economic downturn” at

It Stinks to High Heaven

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FBI agents block one of the gates at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago during the raid on August 8.

What stinks?  The FBI’s newly released affidavit in support of a search warrant, that’s what (see below).  Oh, it’s heavily redacted but what it does expose is the insidious operational habits of the Washington Insiders Club, of which the upper echelons of the FBI are charter members.  And to think that a judicial officer approved this monstrosity.  Amazing.

The first big tip-off was the author and chief protagonist for the Trump investigation and the search warrant being “a Special Agent with the FBI assigned to the Washington Field Office”.  I smell a rat, the same set of rodents that scamper the hallways of the J. Edgar Hoover Building (FBI), the Executive Office Building, Langley (CIA), and Pentagon, not to mention the incestuous political den of lobbyists and big-wheel legal eagles who wallow in the same rarified DC cauldron.

The second thing that glaringly stood out was the “referral” to the FBI from the administrators at the National Archives.  It seems that, when it comes to Donald Trump, the big wheels in DC snap to 11, to borrow a little from “This is Spinal Tap”.  They’re on a hair trigger.  In January 2022, the Archives received 15 boxes of materials from Trump.  Hardly did a month go by and they’re off to the FBI demanding a criminal investigation of Trump.  Mmmm, does Hillary/Clinton in 2015 and 2016 remind you of anything?

This is completely unprecedented.  The people who run the National Archives are not gods.  Their demands do not attain the automatic status of the Ten Commandments from the hand of God.  Implicitly recognizing this fact, there’s normally an extended period of negotiations after the transition from one administration to another.  And Trump was cooperating.  Who among that claque would have dared to behave in this manner with Barack Obama?

The statutory basis for the warrant is astoundingly absurd.  The affidavit is junked-up with references to the Presidential Records Act and various provisions on the handling of classified materials.  There’s even a startling mention of an executive order.  What?  Executive Orders exist at the whim of the president.  They are a creature of him and his office.  They only count if he chooses, or unchooses, to make them count.  This only shows that the vigilantes wanted to throw the kitchen sink at Trump.

For the rest of the statutory laundry list, there’s the litany of what constitutes classified materials and the improper handling of them.  When I read this part of the screed, the thought of Hillary Clinton kept popping into my head.  Wasn’t she conducting the nation’s foreign policy from her own private server and cellphone?  And, interestingly as it turned out, there was evidence of the hacking of her devices.  Trump is accused of hypothetical carelessness; Hillary actually did it to the advantage of foreign adversaries.  There’s evidence of it.  And then-Director Comey goes before the press in 2016 to announce that “there really wasn’t a prosecutable case”.  And there is on Trump?  Incredible.

The lack of inquisitiveness and what constitutes a “prosecutable case” has an obvious partisan lean to them.  The affidavit supporting a warrant on Hillary would sound much like the one served on Trump, except there was more evidentiary basis of actual harm to the nation on Hillary’s home server and her personal cellphone.  This should have gone to trial.  And the hush, hush in regards to the laptop of the scion of the Biden dynasty, Hunter, going so far as to troop out other DC partisans who never saw the laptop to tout the line that it was “Russian disinformation” without a shred of evidence, is execrable.  The brazen double standard screams injustice.

Then, if you notice, the warrant’s author engages in an opinion spat with supporters of Trump.  It’s something that belongs on Twitter or the op-ed pages of his/her favorite NY Times or WaPo, going so far as to cite a TV news report of “‘Moving Trucks Spotted At Mar-a-Lago” (item #30).  That’s worse than hearsay.  No one is placed under a presumption of legal sanction to tell the truth in such stories, and they are notorious for casting events to fit a preconceived view.

In what has all the appearances of petty spite, the producer of this gem writes like Paul Krugman picking a fight with Larry Kudlow on Twitter.  He/she targets Breitbart and Kash Patel for special abuse (item #53).  It’s very unseemly in a document meant to justify a government invasion of a person’s home.  This kind of government behavior should anger any American as it did John Hancock, enough to have him sign with a flourish the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

What of the redactions in the affidavit?  If the denizens of the DC snake pit can go before the press to tout the laptop as “Russian disinformation” with no proof, then this discredited crowd has no grounds to dismiss my speculation on the blotted-out names, sources, and methods of investigation.  They boil down to Trump’s possession of classified materials or an assessment of Trump’s evil intent by a group of long-discredited people.  The possession of classified materials by a recent ex-president shouldn’t be surprising.  Negotiations, compromise, and a back-and-forth period are to be expected.  Just because the demi-gods of the Archives in a pique of Trump animus want to go to 11 doesn’t mean that the public ought to tolerate this partisan jihad.

The affidavit still stinks to high heaven.  I am convinced now more than ever that the FBI and the rest of the agencies, bureaus, departments in DC should be farmed out to rest of the country, far beyond the Beltway.  Breakup DC!  Only the most essential skeleton staff should remain.  People like the “Special Agent with the FBI assigned to the Washington Field Office” should get a daily dose of what the rest of the country thinks of them.

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RogerG

Source:
* The affidavit at https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.617854/gov.uscourts.flsd.617854.102.1.pdf

Perilous Times in the Age of Mordor, i.e., District of Columbia

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FBI agents block a point of egress at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate early morning 8/8/22.

Two days ago, the FBI conducted a raid on President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.  All agree that it was unprecedented.  More than that, it was shocking.   We’ll have to wait for more information before anything more can be definitively concluded.  Still, given all that has happened from 2015 to the present, maybe even going back further to the 1990’s, I am worried for my country.

Yes, we are divided.  The red/blue thing is real. No surprise.  Also, no surprise, DC is deep, deep blue, almost to the color of deep space, and it just so happens to be the seat of immense federal powers.  DC down to its lowliest employee is as one-party as California.  The District is a big seat for the Democratic Party, the party of government, alongside the DNC’s other seats in dysfunctional urban nodes, college campuses, most of corporate media, and Fortune 500 boardrooms – the narrow, isolated cultural satraps of America.

What we know at this point is that a DC-headquartered Justice Department directed the DC headquarters of the FBI to pursue a search warrant before a DC federal magistrate so that the DC FBI could fly down to Palm Beach to search the home of a DC-detested ex-president.  These dysfunctional urban nodes already have an outsized and sometimes malignant influence on the rest of the country, and none is more noxious than DC, similar in toxicity to Mordor.

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DC or Mordor?

Why the sanctioned incursion into Trump’s home?  Frankly, it’s odd if we ignore the inordinate bias in the District.  Andrew C. McCarthy in a piece yesterday morning reasonably speculates that Biden’s people and their natural allies in the bureaucracy are out to pin criminal charges on Trump.  It’s about January 6 and not some classified materials in Trump’s possession.  The documents and the Presidential Records Act were just a pretext.  Breaking into an ex-president’s personal safe and seizing boxes of documents is actually about using the big net of a broad search to capture pieces of incriminating evidence of other flashier criminality for a big show trial later, a common prosecutorial tactic.

Political Cartoons by Bob Gorrell

Now, think about it.  If it’s about January 6, charges in the capitol riot up to now have centered on obstruction of a federal proceeding (counting electoral votes) and defrauding the government (perpetrating lies in order to obstruct).  The AG Garland cabal would have to show that Trump plotted the riot and disseminated knowing falsehoods to encourage the criminal actions.  That’s a big mountain to climb. Fraud requires a personal understanding that the theories are false.  But they’re theories, maybe goofy ones but still theories.  Belief in an exotic legal theory is not a crime.

After all, the henchmen of the Democratic Party have been foisting on the public racist anti-racism, CRT, identity favoritism as “equity”, the disjunction of gender from chromosomes, blatant discrimination against people of faith, defund the police, non-prosecution as public safety, and fighting inflation by opening up the fire hose of government money.  If eccentric legal theories are fraud, well, how do you rate these?   If that is our standard, search warrants could be easily acquired on the Pentagon, CIA headquarters at Langley, the J. Edgar Hoover Building (FBI headquarters in DC), the Justice Department offices, the Treasury Department, the White House, other DC federal office buildings, and almost any college humanities department in the country.

Hanging the prosecution hat on the peg of legal foolhardiness is an exercise in futility.  Taking an active part in the riot has equal difficulties.  Reveling in the scenes on TV is neither evidence of obstruction or fraud.  Unseemly, yes, but not criminal.  The anticipated smoking gun may turn out to be a pop gun that a kid put in the oven.

All in all, it’s a risky venture on the part of the donkey party.  If nothing comes of this but embarrassment for Trump, red America will be enflamed.  What a trade-off: Great dangers in exchange for the likelihood of little reward.  The plebes in the hinterlands could very well conclude that the Democratic Party in their DC redoubt is at war with them.  And, in a way, they’d be right.

After all, the historical record going back to the 1990’s would encourage the conclusion that a monumental threat to the people arises from DC’s cultural and physical cocoon.  Remember Ruby Ridge and Waco?  In both cases, DC-headquartered federal law enforcement in their isolation conducted military-style raids with disastrous results.  DC FBI agents on a plane to Ruby Ridge wrote down broad rules of engagement to shoot anyone with a gun at Weaver’s home.  And, that they did, killing Weaver’s 14-year-old son and his wife as she was holding their infant daughter.  A federal agent in commando-style gear was also killed.  The ATF for its part conducted a Battle of Kursk operation against a religious sect outside Waco culminating in a lethal fire.  The stage for the cataclysms was set in the secluded environs of DC offices.

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Staging area for federal agents next to Randy Weaver’s home at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, 1993.
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The Branch Davidian dormitories consumed in fire after nearly a 2-month siege by federal agents in 1993.

The barbaric overreaction took place in Oklahoma City in 1995, the second anniversary of the Branch Dividian debacle.

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The destruction of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City after the bombing in 1995.

Fast forward to 2016, and DC and its patron, the Democratic Party, are at war with the results of the 2016 presidential election.  The nexus of the Clinton campaign, the DNC, Obama operatives, the FBI, the CIA, the administrative agencies at one time or another conspired to remove, thwart, and hogtie Trump throughout his term . . . and after.  The Clinton Campaign’s Steele dossier.  The fraudulent FISC warrants based on it. Crossfire Hurricane.  The impeachments, one based on a donkey party agent in the Pentagon.  The Joint Chiefs chairman subverting the authority of the president as commander in chief to our biggest foreign adversary.  And now the hunt for criminal charges against him.  It’s monomaniacal.

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This latest episode smells as bad as the others.  If nothing else, any return of the people’s government back to the people demands that DC be broken up.  Other than the immediate staff of the three branches, the rest should disburse into the boondocks.

Disband or move the DC Circuit Court of Appeals and DC District Court outside the District.  Leave just a municipal court to handle judicial matters for the District’s residents.  Currently, a double system of justice – one for R’s and one for D’s – is clearly evident in the District.  No good has come of federal judges, prosecutors, juries, and grand juries fully marinated in the DC socio-political eco-system.  Till that time, routine changes of venue should be the order of the day.  It’s the only way to stop the inherent partisan weaponization of the District’s justice system.

Trump, as personally repugnant as he is, has given us the time of day.  The clock says it’s time to give Mordor (DC) an induced coma, or induced recession, in order to save our constitutional republic.  Having Mordor look more like today’s Detroit is far healthier for the country than a city with a burgeoning workforce that has forgotten “servant” in public servant.  If allowed to fester untreated, a dark time awaits.  I don’t think that people outside the blue bubbles are going to tolerate for long an oligarchy run out of Mordor.

Political Cartoons by Tom Stiglich

RogerG

Source:

*” The FBI’s Mar-a-Lago Raid: It’s about the Capitol Riot, Not the Mishandling of Classified Information”, Andrew C. McCarthy, at FBI Mar-a-Lago Raid: Capitol Riot Real Reason | National Review

The Disgraceful Politics of the Grisly

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Dr. Caitlin Bernard, the Indiana physician who broke the story.

On the right, we have QAnon and tales of a pedophilia ring under the watchful gaze of Hillary Clinton, or something like that. It’s hard to follow politically inspired derangements.  If that doesn’t startle, Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, Ga., 10th District) has openly speculated on a Jewish conspiracy of space-based lasers to ignite forest fires in California.  I hope she was kidding, but one can never be sure with this mouth without a filter.

Why do I mention the cuckoo Right?  The delusions of the Left prove that the affliction isn’t one dimensional.  Case in point: a story is heralded in the press of a pregnant Ohio 10-year-old who had to flee the “coat-hanger R’s” of the buckeye state to the “coat-hanger R’s” of Indiana for an abortion, all to heap scorn on the Dobbs decision.  The president, exhibiting his usual foot-in-mouth antics before a mic, repeated the story.  The story is starting to unravel, and it’s beginning to look more like a tale of an unenforced border, thanks to Biden.

I was initially skeptical of a pregnant 10-year-old.  That part now appears to be true, though there’s much more to the story. A pregnant 10-year-old?  That’s rape simply by the combination of the two words, and it was reported to Columbus, Ohio, authorities by the girl’s mom on June 22.  A suspect was arrested: an illegal border-crosser from Guatemala.

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The alleged rapist, an illegal Guatemalan immigrant (name kept anonymous)

The fable also opens up a can of worms for Columbus.  The city, run by lefty Dems, hasn’t officially adopted the moniker of “sanctuary city” but it behaves like one.  In 2015, the city issued a “Police Directive” to prohibit police cooperation in the enforcement of immigration law.  In 2017, Columbus Mayor Andrew J. Ginther (D) was more emphatic.  His proclamation announced that “no city department or employee may use city moneys, equipment, or personnel for the sole purpose of detecting or apprehending persons based on suspected immigration status, unless in response to a court order.”  Can’t be much more “sanctuary” than that.  Is he equally as insistent when it comes to holding suspects for violating federal counterfeiting or kidnapping laws?  I kinda doubt it.

Furthermore, word is leaking out that the sole source for the breaking story was Dr. Caitlin Bernard of Indianapolis, a Dem activist and abortion enthusiast.  And there is reason to believe that she may not have been the treating physician but only overheard another doctor who was.  Anyway, either way, if she or anyone learned of the child sexual abuse and didn’t report it, they become eligible for enrollment in the hoosegow.  Don’t be surprised that soon the story gets buried on A-10 as the public’s gaze is redirected to another phony outrage.

The real story is turning out to be the lengths that ideological hopes outrun the facts.  Even more troubling, facts are invented or omitted to get at Kavanaugh, the Court, anybody running for office with an “R” after their name, or anyone opposing abortion from conception to the maternity ward crib.  Lost in the shuffle is the grisly fact that we’re talking about snuffing out human life.  There was a time when, even in states that legalized the procedure, people were disquieted enough about it to keep it private.  Not anymore.  A couple of days ago, the Schumer-led Senate gave a forum for some to loudly and proudly proclaim theirs.  It’s grisly!

Now we have the disgraceful politics of the grisly to add to “defund the police”, neo-Marxist indoctrination everywhere from West Point to kindergarten, school buses unloading kids into a gauntlet of crack heads, immigration lawbreakers being shepherded around the country at taxpayer expense, and people and property under constant assault.  And I haven’t gotten to the unraveling economy.  Amazing, absolutely amazing!

RogerG

Sources:

*The Columbus Dispatch story: https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/2022/07/13/columbus-man-charged-rape-10-year-old-led-abortion-in-indiana/10046625002/
*https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/indiana-abortionist-dodges-questions-about-story-of-alleged-ten-year-old-rape-victim/
*https://www.nationalreview.com/news/illegal-immigrant-arrested-for-allegedly-raping-ten-year-old-ohio-girl-at-center-of-viral-abortion-story/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first
* Columbus’s sanctuary city status: https://www.fairus.org/issue/sanctuary-policies/10-largest-sanctuary-cities-united-states
*The background of Dr. Caitlin Bernard: https://spectator.org/caitlin-bernard-abortion-phony-story/

The Times They Are A-Changin’

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That’s right, for the times they are a-changin’.  We are in a moment similar to the era of Bob Dylan’s youth.  Back then, the target of his ire was the hideous Jim Crow.  The same lyrics could equally apply to the reign of the radical left from the halls of power in Washington, DC, to big metropolitan areas and deep blue states.  Signs are everywhere that “the times they are a-changin’”.

The lyrics of Bob Dylan’s first stanza are poignant:

Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.

San Fransisco voted world's filthiest slum
San Francisco homeless encampment in 2018

Watch as the smash and grab phenomena sweeps the country in 2021-2022:

I’ll give you three indications that the ruling radical left of the donkey party might “sink like a stone”: (1) 1.7 million voters changed their registration from Democrat to Republican, a net gain of a 1 million to the R’s, from 2021 to 2022; (2) Arizona’s Gov. Doug Ducey signed a bill that allows the state’s students to take $6,400-per-pupil to a school of their parents’ choice; and (3) a San Diego school district dumped their identity-mongering, DEI-loving Superintendent.  Let’s take a closer look at each one of these horsemen of the apocalypse.

The Democrats have a problem: they have a “smell of death” around them (to borrow from Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “That Smell”), thanks to “defund the police”, their destruction of livelihoods and standards of living in greenie radicalism, constant campaigns of race and gender warfare, homoerotic curriculums to 7-year-olds, willful refusal to enforce laws, the erasure of the borders of the United States, a concerted effort to suspend the laws of economics in order to bribe and coerce the people into the preferred lifestyle of a fashionable clique, and . . . you get the picture.

The pungent odor that proceeds them has caused 1.7 million voters to flee the smell of the Democrat ship and crawl on board the USS Republican Party.  Some 600,000 went the other way for a plus-1-million gain for the GOP, something not seen since the Elder Days (Lord of the Rings lingo).  According to the AP, who broke the story, the biggest change occurred in the suburbs, by people who previously found Trump repulsive.  Well, Trump’s no longer at the head of the parade. It’s Biden and his cohorts of lefties and greenie utopians at the tiller of state.  It’s not a good look for moms and dads who have to regularly fill up the family sedan and balance the checkbook.  And what awaits them as they go for a walk?  Try ducking stray bullets, avoiding the long strings of homeless encampments, the random assaults by the criminally insane, staying clear of the parks for the drugs and filth and crime, the incessant car and home break-ins, and the schools that aren’t any better, if they’re allowed to be open.  It’s heathier to hunker down with Netflix, popcorn, and a 45.  As Lynyrd Skynyrd put it, “Ooh-ooh that smell”.

And, boy, did parents get a whiff of what’s happening in their child’s classroom.  The lockdowns not only forced parents to sacrifice making ends meet but the end to in-person instruction also showed to many that they could live without the offerings of the teacher unions and the captured education Borg.  “School choice” became more popular, and Gov. Ducey of Arizona and legislative Republicans responded with an expansion of the state’s voucher-like Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA’s).  If an off-the-charts lefty San Francisco school board majority could be sent packing in, of all places, San Francisco, what do you think can be done in saner locales?

Arizona Governor Doug Ducey in Pheonix on June 17, 2022

It’s amazing to know that the unions’ agitation for school closures also exposed their shenanigans.  It took away the barrier of gates and walls that protected them from any scrutiny.  Parents are awake everywhere from Loudon County to San Francisco.  Arizona has reacted, with other states soon to follow.

Simply put, all that Arizona did was to empower parents with the ability to walk away.  Lets’ see how the Borg survives without the gravy train.

All of the ideological bile that runs the schools came to a head in another place, Sand Diego.  The San Dieguito Union High School District Superintendent let the cat out of the bag, the feline of identity-mongering that is. The mental straitjacket of diversity-equity-inclusion (DEI) that runs the district came out on YouTube.  Take a peek below.

In a training session last week, Superintendent Cheryl James-Ward reduced the kids to a collection of groups.  And as groups, the children’s individuality was smothered under generalizations and racial, socioeconomic stereotypes.  Like a true Marxist, the main target was the successful, the successful who happen to be labeled Asians.  Asians are the Kulaks of Stalin’s fevered imagination in the fevered imagination of James-Ward.  Not enough D’s and F’s for Asians and too many for the oppressed, a problem to be corrected by bureaucratic intervention.  There you have it: the script for bringing one group down and artificially elevating other groups, all done to make the charts look good.  James-Ward would make for an excellent colleague of Orwell’s Winston Smith in the Ministry of Truth of “1984”.  The world of Oceania, though, is not to the liking of most people, Asian or otherwise.

San Dieguito UHSD Superintendent Cheryl James-Ward in a local tv interview on April 23. 2022.

She’s gone, fired by the school board, and so are 1.7 million from the Democrat voter registration rolls, and many Arizona parents who now have the financial heft to escape the Borg’s monopoly.  To borrow again from Lynyrd Skynyrd:

Oo-oo that smell
Can’t you smell that smell?
Oo-oo that smell
The smell of death’s around you

Bob Dylan got a whiff of the same smell and it drew him to the conclusion that the “The Times They Are A-Changin’”.

Lynyrd Skynyrd performing That Smell:

RogerG

Bibliography:

*AP story on the Democrat’s loss of 1.7 million voter registrations in the past year: https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-biden-covid-health-presidential-e50db07385831e67f866ec45402be8b9

*The story of Sand Diequito School District’s firing of Supt. Cheryl James-Ward: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/california-school-district-fires-superintendent-for-divisive-comments-about-asian-students/

*The story of Arizona’s expanded school choice plan: https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/06/arizona-passes-universal-school-choice-for-1-1-million-students/

A Flummoxed President

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Biden and New York City mayor, Eric Adams, at yesterdays’ meeting (2/3/22).

Flummoxed: adj.; bewildered or perplexed.

I am flummoxed and so is our president.  I am perplexed by young people, formally educated and from comfortable backgrounds, storming police stations, burning down central business districts, and imposing on us their warped views by defacing our monuments and memorials.  I am further bewildered by a refusal to recognize the most elemental of things: if you don’t enforce the law, there is more law breaking.  Our president is equally flummoxed and displays it regularly.  He strode into New York City yesterday (2/3/22) and announced that he was going to lead an effort to arrest, wait for it . . . guns!  Arrest guns, not the people who use them to commit heinous acts.

Yes, that’s right, President Biden declared a crackdown on inanimate objects.  The favorite phrase in vogue among his people is “gun violence”.  And they don’t mean violence committed by human beings WITH guns.  They mean violence BY guns.  It’s as if these metallic things have a mind, a will of their own.  They jump from the coffee table to a person’s hand, take over the psyche, and drive the individual to commit horrifying acts with them.

Nary a word about blue-bubble public leaders vilifying the police, robbing their budgets, and refusing to prosecute lawbreakers.  Check this out: mobs using phone calculators during smash-and-grabs to guarantee that their thefts don’t exceed $950, thanks to the voters and political establishment of California (Prop 47).  And blue-bubble potentates don’t need a Prop 47 to set a baseline for allowable criminality.  They’ve got Soros-funded henchmen as DA’s refusing to fulfill their oaths of office to faithfully enforce the laws, and thusly are deserving of impeachment.  Sorry, “prosecutorial discretion” doesn’t cut it.  This is not discretion; it’s essentially ripping pages out of the duly-passed code of laws.

Our exalted president says not a word about the vastly more significant contributions of his party to the mayhem.  Get prepared for a campaign to hamper your ability to own a gun to protect yourself from the lawlessness that they inspired.  Mr. President, you should be condemned for not lowering the boom on your party’s abettors of criminality while leaving the rest of us without any means to protect ourselves.

Watch yesterday’s disgusting spectacle on the video below.

RogerG

P.S.:

See the source image