Modern Marxism – Page 10 – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

December 20, 2021December 20, 2021

Sunlight Is a Disinfectant

Parents protest at Loudon County school board meeting, June 2021

Most people are unaware of what’s happening in the deep and dark recesses of their most significant public institutions. If they’re informed, a good portion would hit the barricades, and for good reason. Well, here’s a couple of stories on the role of sunlight (public exposure) in the disinfectant process for public policy.

A scheme to strangle the civilian firearms industry of capital was forged in 2018 by – who else? – Cal STRS’s Christopher J. Ailman, chief investment officer, with collaboration from a few other public and private investment officers (a full list below). Basically, in typically obtuse and vague language, the declaration is an attempt to abridge a legal and Constitutionally protected activity because it affronts the sensibilities of California’s coastal elites who then try to foist their sentiments on the rest of the country.

Read the thing (here). Most of it was written by someone completely unfamiliar with the process of purchasing a firearm in America. Anyone buying a gun in a store goes through a federal background check. The unregulated transfers and sales – gifts, inheritances, underground sales – will always exist, with or without our many laws, in the same manner as the regulated drug market will always face a shadowy illicit version. Pass a law and an underground clone will pop up.

Further, the statement is littered with “best practices”, the “best practices” of Nancy Pelosi’s home district. It’s as scam to work-around the agencies of popular sovereignty, a people’s elected representatives, by organizing the socially and culturally insular crowd in gated and walled estates to do what an elected government refuses to do, because they were never elected to do it.

Light was beamed onto the scheme first by National Review (“Woke Capitalism: A History”, KDW, July 1, 2021) and then to the NRA (“Florida’s Pension Fund Joined a Gun-Control Compact, Until…”, LW, America’s 1st Freedom, Sept., 21, 2021). The NRA noticed the name of Michael McCauley, Senior Officer at the Florida State Board of Administration, as a signatory to the screed. Remember, Florida doesn’t suffer from the ritual identity-mongering and victimhood of the power brokers in the not-so-Golden State. Jimmy Patronis, Chief Financial Officer for the state, was informed by the NRA and Florida quickly withdrew its name from the extortion racket. Florida is growing precisely because it is not California, and now McCauley knows it too.

Jimmy Patronis, Florida Chief Financial Officer

Parents have joined the fray in shedding light on another radical ploy of longstanding. All the pandemic Zooming may have exposed the people who run your child’s classroom to be on a par with the ethos in Nancy Pelosi’s home district. I should know of what I write as a 30-year veteran of a public high school classroom. A while back, I retorted to our superintendent that we are nothing but a finishing school for “good little Democrats”. It’s only gotten worse since my retirement in 2015. What began with the multiculturalist nonsense of “diversity is our strength” quickly metastasized into the rancid racism-to-fight-racism.

Whatever you want to call it – critical theory, critical race theory, deconstructionism, anti-racism, white privilege, systemic racism, etc. – it’s still nothing but Marxism for a new revolution to overthrow our Constitutional order and civilization. The ideological seed germinated in teacher training (going back to my 1970’s), in all textbooks that I’ve used, and reviewed as a department chair, for the past three decades, in supplemental materials, as the orthodoxy in the colleges and universities, and as the pervasive and presumptive outlook in faculty lounges. It is so in the ether that one should not be surprised that we have undergrads in spittle-laced tirades at deans who’ve called for a little tolerance.

Watch this report on student treatment of Matt Walsh.

Not too many parents want their kids to join the statue-toppling brigades. And parents are beginning to show up at school board meetings. Good for them. Keep it up. And, by the way, a great deal of “throw the bums out” is more than deserved. Start local, then continue on up through the bureaucracies and the federal ladder. Clean house. Extremist partisans fiddling with our pensions funds and children should feel the heat. It begins with the white hot rays of the sun.

RogerG

* “The Principles for a Responsible Civilian Firearms Industry” authors: Christopher J. Ailman, Chief Investment Officer CalSTRS; Christianna Wood, Fellow at Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative; Michael McCauley, Senior Officer at the Florida State Board of Administration; Peter Reali, Senior Director at Nuveen; John O’Hara, Managing Director and Senior Advisor at Rockefeller Asset Management; and Rakhi Kumar, Senior Managing Director, Head of ESG Investments and Asset Stewardship at State Street Global Advisors.

December 13, 2021December 13, 2021

Systemic Falsehoods

Jessie Smollett (l) with Robin Roberts of ABC News on GMA in February of 2019.

After Jussie Smollett’s arrest and her on-air interview with him, Robin Roberts said, “It’s [his arest] a setback for race relations, homophobia, MAGA supporters – the fingers were pointed at them [MAGA supporters].” She added, “I cannot think of another case where there’s this anger on so many sides, and you can understand why there would be.”

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Some like to say racism is systemic. Well, so can fallacies. In fact, today, systemic falsehoods are far more real and far more dangerous than any mythical resurgence of the Klan.

Three stories tell the tale of systemic falsehoods: two in America and one in Germany, all in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The first, chronologically, occurred in October 1938 after the Nazi government ordered its initial expulsion of German Jews. One of those was the Grynszpan family who had a son living in Paris with an uncle, 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan. A week later, Herschel walked into the German embassy in Paris and shot to death German diplomat Ernst vom Rath. After it, the virulent Jew-hatred of the Nazi Party would take to the streets throughout Germany in the organized assaults on Jews on 9-10 November called Kristallnacht, thus inaugurating the Holocaust. An excuse presented itself to implement a key part of the National Socialist revolutionary program and thought. Their revolutionary racism was solely based on a systemic falsehood, and millions would end up dead.

The second happened in America in 1955. It was the lynching and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till by a white mob in Mississippi in August 1955. The scurrilous racism in the minds of some Southern whites of the tarring of all Blacks with a dollop of depravity is much more than a systemic racism. It’s a systemic falsehood.

But a systemic racism in the Jim Crow South of 1955 would be matched later by a systemic falsehood for today’s revolutionaries in Antifa, Black Lives Matter, Inc., and the Democratic Party. Yes, they’re revolutionaries. For them, it’s forever Jim Crow in America, the better to overturn the “system” (revolution), not just reform it or even acknowledge the improvements. Germany’s National Socialists exploited one killing to carry out millions; today’s left-wing zealots do the same (with Michael Brown, George Floyd, whoever). Yet, facts on the ground don’t match their hype, but that won’t stop the torching of America’s cities nor the falsehood’s infiltration of the classroom, the donkey party, Congress, and the Biden administration.

The third incident is Jussie Smollett. He peddled the falsehood of an alleged assault by fictitious Maga supporters in 2018. A patently false story, now proven in court, would, in the ensuing years, help perpetuate the falsehood of ever-present systemic racism as if nothing has changed since 1955. For the disciples of this false catechism, our landscape was, is, and will be forever littered with Emmett Tills and Bull Connors. The fiction penetrated all channels of news and entertainment from the classroom to 30 Rock (NBC headquarters). Our cosseted cultural elites peddled the lie and “systemic racism” entered the lexicon as a fact, when it is no such thing – not any truer than the Big Lie was for the goons torching synagogues in 1938.

Jussie’s Smollett’s booking photograph after he turned himself into Chicago police on charges of filing a false police report.

Smollett got away with it for 3 years because our cultural avatars were predisposed to believe the lie due to the monotone influences in their cultural and educational bubbles. For a couple of years, they propagated Smollett’s lie until evidence of the hoax came to light and then they went silent. Smollett’s December 9 conviction on five counts of disorderly conduct for filing a false police report puts all those in the media who helped him peddle the lie in the dock alongside him. His desire to concoct the hoax and their desire to push it exposed a systemic gullibility stemming from a deeply embedded systemic falsehood: it’s forever Jim Crow in America. For this crowd, the nation is forever guilty.

Ideas have consequences, and so does this one. Crime is spiking all over America. Amazingly, some have contorted logic to blame the cops. In their muddled minds, police lack legitimacy in the eyes of the public and so crime is transformed into a form of protest. People perceive racist cops and feel justified in performing mayhem according to this flight of fancy.

It’s nonsense. Perception is key. Views about policing are too often guided by the media’s it-leads-if-it bleeds philosophy, only tailored to fit the popular systemic racism/racist cop scenario. No wonder Americans – left, right, and center – in various polls and studies (one by the Skeptic Research Center) have an exaggerated view of police shootings of unarmed black men, by a factor of 50.

What do you expect would happen after the public is fed a steady stream of the rare but viral videos of a shooting? Part of the blame lies with a media eager to validate their prejudices, and part is attributed to millions carrying in the palms of their hands a video camera. The public is armed with the things, social media spreads them at light speed, and media mavens cull them for the confirmation of their biases. Would we be a more balanced people without the things and the instantaneous social media hookups? Interesting question.

All the while, branding cops as racist isn’t exactly a booster to recruitment and retention. Who wants to join a profession that might bankrupt you in lawsuits or land you in prison, and/or tar you as a uniformed mob looking for more Emmett Tills to kill? In a great skedaddle, cops are leaving and recruits are scant. There are fewer people to man the cruisers and telephones, walk the beat, and investigate crime. Nationwide, the Police Executive Research Forum in June reported midsized departments showing a 26% drop in hiring and large ones recording a 36% fall, some with a 50% drop in applicants. The total number of sworn officers dropped from 720,000 in 2013 to 690,000 in 2018, and the slide continues.

Retirements are up, way up. Deep blue bastions are particularly feeling the pinch. The Chicago force experienced a 30% retirement increase in 2020 (560) from the previous year. Portland, that lefty playground, saw 117 (and counting) officers leave since July of 2020. The men in NYC blue, under the radical Bill de Blasio, saw 2,600 officers vacate their positions. The story is the same across the country. Amputated budgets (“defund the police”) and a dispirited force don’t make for public safety.

A little-known truth: fewer cops mean more crime. There’s a stronger correlation between these two criteria than the more popular one in elite circles of the lack of respect for cops leading to an epidemic of murders, torchings, robberies, and beatings. Using 911 calls as the metric, studies show that high-profile police killings don’t affect the number of calls (studies by Harvard’s Michael Zoorob, Tanaya Devi, and Roland Fryer in 2020), the exact opposite of what you’d expect if there was a general disgust with cops. Not surprisingly, after all the budget cuts, lambastings by media hogs, force draw-downs and stand-downs, and a disheartened rank-and-file, mayhem has returned. Everyone not enthralled by stupidity has recognized since creation of the London police force in the 19th century that more cops mean safer streets.

So, we’ve come to this pass: Can we trust any longer an elite so enraptured to systemic falsehoods? In the end, we’ll have nowhere to turn. Remember, they’re the same people who want to take your guns. Now, they want to take your cops.

RogerG

December 8, 2021December 10, 2021

MERS, SARS, COVID-19 and Natural Immunity

One question about our current epidemic: Does previous exposure to MERS (2003) and SARS (H1N1, 2009) improve a person’s immunological response to COVID-19? I’m an absolute layman on these types of issues and I didn’t stay at a Holiday Inn. Personal experiences raise this query, however. Our brains don’t stop functioning if we don’t wear a lab coat.

I am and was a healthy and fit teacher during my 30-year career. During the time periods of the spread of MERS and SARS, I became so ill that I took 2-3 days of sick leave, something un-heard of in my long career. Later, after retirement, I came down with fatigue and a low-grade fever that lasted 2 days, actually overnight, in spring 2020. It came and went and life quickly returned to normal. Was it COVID-19? I can’t say, but I haven’t had a bout of illness since then in spite of frequent and broad exposure, no vaccine, and the fact that I’m in a vulnerable cohort (age 69) during this latest contagion.

The similarities of the three bugs are manifest (see below). All three are of the Coronaviridae family. They mostly show as respiratory illnesses. COVID-19 could be different in that it was a product of gain-of-function research in the Wuhan lab. Thus, it had a far more serious pathological footprint. Still, could their biological likenesses arm a person’s immune system against all three?

No photo description available. — MERS virus

If so, the swath of the population with natural immunity is larger than previously thought. Again, if so, the politicization of the pandemic can be turned down a notch or two. Threats, mandates, and the one-trick-pony of vaccination-only can be laid to rest.

When science is drafted to a political cause, nasty things happen. Science is no longer “science” and politics becomes authoritarian (if not totalitarian). Marxism and its theoretical cousin, critical theory, are attempts to make a “science” of history and ideological sophistry. Its results are laid bare on our cities’ streets and in the radical left turn of the Democratic Party. This political scientization of our life is creating havoc with our civilization.

I’m sure that many people can shed more light on my question than I. I eagerly await enlightenment.

RogerG

November 11, 2021November 13, 2021

Revolutionary Justice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AG Garland in testimony before Congress in October

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RogerG

November 10, 2021November 13, 2021

The “Critical” of Today’s Marxism

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

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

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

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

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

Paulo Freire, a godfather of critical pedagogy

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

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

RogerG

November 7, 2021November 13, 2021

Veterans Day in a Time of Troubles

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, at a press conference in July of 202021.

This is a no-brainer: honor our vets. The people who sacrificed a part of their lives, maybe their limbs and entire lives, deserve our highest respect. This is their day. I humbly salute all veterans.

And what better time to also bring to light a sickness that has entered the services? Nearly all corners of our society are subjected, including the ranks and service academies, to a noxious and radical neo-Marxist ideology. It comes under a number of monikers like Critical Race Theory, ESG (“Environment and social governance” in business), DEI (“Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”), “Anti-racism” training, and “The 1619 Project” pedagogy. It has penetrated the upper echelons of command. Who can forget Gen. Mark Milley’s infamous endorsement of this neo-Marxism, “I want to understand white rage, and I’m white”? The comment was more than a reaction to January 6 and any “extremism” in the ranks. The “white rage” in Milley’s blast was presented as a factual premise, not a call for analysis and debate. And now the officer corps is getting a steady dose of it in their academy coursework. That’s right, we are training officers to hate the country that they are expected to defend. Now, all of us in our fair land are in jeopardy.

The neo-Marxist, race-based radicalism shows up in theater commander reading lists and into academy classrooms. Former cadets have come forward to describe the insidious indoctrination (see below). As one recounted, “I found myself instead in the classroom learning about how to be more sensitive.” She continued, “And this woke ideology that had taken over West Point really surprised me.” As a tutor for some students, she recalled cadets writing essays sympathetic with critical race theory and socialism. The students exclaimed that’s what they thought their profs wanted.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/story/west-point-glorifies-ignorant-submission-and-unethical-behavior-former-cadet/vi-AAQl1Z5

It appears in guidance reports about “diversity” and “inclusion” plans for West Point (see report here). Favoritism in admissions to certain races, alt-genders (?), and orientations hides under the cloak of “inclusion” and “diversity” – all this because the numbskulls in the Pentagon think that this gibberish is what the younger generation wants. And I quote from one report: “We must create an environment that appeals to the aspirations of American’s younger generation.” How do they, or any of us, know that these are the “aspirations” of the youth? And should it matter? Come on, wokeness, like the fear of leaving home, needs to be broken to create the kind of person who can kill our enemies and destroy their things.

Where will this lead if not stopped in its tracks? History provides a lesson in the Russia of 1917. Much revolutionary trouble for the Czar came from the newly drafted reserves billeted and milling around the capitol, Petrograd (fully described in Solzhenitsyn’s Red Wheel series and the writings of the historian Richard Pipes) . Radical socialists and Bolshevik agitators frequented the barracks of these large masses of idle soldiers. The troops participated in strikes and demonstrations and on numerous occasions marched to the homes and offices of civil authorities threatening their lives and creating ferment and instability. The navy anchored offshore proved to be a special hotbed of revolutionary fervor. Many of these same individuals were later recruited into the ranks of Lenin’s secret police, the Cheka, and Red Army to conduct the Red Terror. We seem to be repeating the grievous error. Bolshevik-like activists have found a home at West Point, Annapolis, Colorado Springs, etc.

The radicalized Preobrazhensky regiment marching on Nevsky Prospect, St. Petersburg. It’s a main street in Petersburg and designed by Czar Peter the Great as the route south to Novgorod and Moscow

What better way to celebrate the sacrifices of our vets by cleaning house at the Pentagon, throughout the command structure, and our service academies? Our country deserves something better than a restive and neo-revolutionary armed forces, or one so dispirited that it will fold in the face of the People’s Liberation Army.

RogerG

November 6, 2021November 6, 2021

Virginia, Progressivism, and CRT

Glann Youngkin in his victory speech after being declared the winner of the Virginia gubernatorial race.

One of my most frequently used clips in one of my World War I lesson plans was from PBS’s first major documentary on World War I, “The Great War”. In it comes this narrated passage about Woodrow Wilson: “Above all else, Woodrow Wilson was a passionate champion of democracy.” He was not. Above all else, he was a champion of rule by credentialed technocrats, and wanted to revamped our political order to shift power to them; the Constitution be damned. Popular sovereignty comes in second to the trained “expert” in his mind. Now that’s the real progressivism in definition and spirit. Yet, today, he’s Saint Woodrow.

A similar misconception revolves around the hot-button critical race theory (CRT). Some dismiss its threat and existence in the schools. Take for instance this question from PBS’s Yamiche Alcindor at Wednesday’s Biden press conference: “What should Democrats possibly do differently to avoid similar losses in November, especially since Republicans are now successfully running on culture wars issues and false claims about critical race theory?” “False claims”? Later, in a follow-up question, she proclaimed they are lying about it. MSNBC’s Joy Reid used a segment on her program to profess it isn’t being taught. Fact is, it is being taught and has been for quite some time. The troop is lying, or they don’t know what it is.

Such is the sorry state of public discourse at this time of stark division in our country. Anything requiring more then a few seconds to explain is reduced to rhetorical compression, making it easy for the facetious to sound reasonable to the gullible. CRT becomes a “ghost” and amazingly autocratic progressives become champions of democracy.

The issues rose to the surface in the weeks leading up to Virginia’s election. The uglier side of progressivism appeared in Terry McAuliffe’s famous debate quip, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” The comment may lack some context, but it can also stand on its own. For progressives like McAuliffe, everything in life is a matter of “science”. Science requires scientists, and scientists, including those pervasive “social” scientists, do it better, including the raising of your kids. So, parents, please go away. It’s progressivism in a nutshell.

More directly, CRT was in Gov. McAuliffe’s own Department of Education 2015 directive for schools in the state to “embrace critical race theory” (original document can be seen here).

The thing that McAuliffe claims isn’t being taught, but is, was also a big part of Alcindor’s matriculation though New York University to her master’s degree in “broadcast news and documentary filmmaking”, like it is in any place with a faculty lounge. Maybe it was so foundational in its bits and pieces that she can’t identify it as a full-blown theory, as the same thing is being done to all those kids laboring behind masks and plexiglass in COVID classrooms.

In a classroom it appears as “equity” or “anti-racism” teacher training. Buzz words hide the reality. In a textbook, it shows as a greater emphasis on oppression in its varied forms and less on those white males and the glories of western civilization in such things as Christianity’s equality of souls, rule of law, natural rights, popular sovereignty, personal and economic freedom, etc., etc.

The elements of CRT, such as “equity”, are presented to teachers at training sessions such as this one.

Marx provided the paradigm. Feudalism can’t help oppressing the commoners. Capitalism can’t help oppressing the “wage slaves”. It’s in the system’s DNA. CRT takes the dialectic and places the oppressor-whites and oppressed “people of color” in the combative roles. Simple. After that, it’s all downhill to ascribing differences in socio-economic stats to, you guessed it, racism. And the whole hodgepodge will carry the aura of “science” since there’s a bunch of people with degrees after their name selling it.

Never mind the illogic of it all. When you’re on a roll to the revolution, don’t let out-of-wedlock births, higher levels of crime, and high dropout rates stand in the way of the revolutionary clamor. Just with a wave of the hand make these also part of the indictment instead of being the explanatory factors that they are. In the hands of the revolutionary, stats are like kneading dough.

Tuesday’s election exposed the flim-flam of the two abstractions. McAuliffe’s progressivism is inherently authoritarian and Alcindor’s CRT is warmed-over Marxism. I can only hope that the electorate in years to come can cut through the noise and reject the poison.

RogerG

October 29, 2021October 29, 2021

A Disturbing Future

What’s in store for us in the not-too-distant future? The tea leaves before us aren’t so encouraging.

Most of the threats to our well-being emanate from our imagination running wild, but the resulting anxiety seriously alters our behaviors. Among the troubling trends is the possibility of hysterics routinely finding a home in government policy. The corresponding shocks to our workaday lives promise an endemic decline in the standard of living. The disruptions in our economic lives foretells disorder in our social, cultural, and religious spheres. Psychologically, we’ll forever be scarred by a gripping fear of contagions and hypothetical health crises. Crises, mostly imaginary, won’t be limited to the next virus. An accelerant for a mindset of terror is seen in the steady drumbeat of more speculative dooms. Our progeny will be swept up in it. In addition, progressive authoritarianism is waiting in the wings which will play havoc with our settled legal and political arrangements. The list may not be long enough, but it’s sufficient to present a vision that should keep you awake at night.

And, just think, we’re doing it to ourselves. No external enemy need apply as agent.

The response to corona pointed the way. A population now inured to mandatory isolations will find it easier to fall in line in regards to more mundane contagions to follow. The flu vaccine is taking on the rhetorical trappings of the COVID vaccine in popular media and public health bureaucracies. Reality could easily follow the rhetoric. Soon, masking, social distancing, stay-at-home orders, and business and school closures could be a recurring feature of life. A society in the perpetual grip of fear is one on the cusp of disintegration . . . or conquest.

Don’t expect an economy to thrive in this condition of instability. Investing for the long term will be replaced by retrenchment – the focus on the protection of life, immediate family, and assets. Hunkering down will be the order of the day, not the rambunctious risk-taking that makes for the economic expansion that is necessary to absorb the coming generations. The uncertainty could set the stage for a revival of medievalism, its increasing isolation, and a corresponding decline in the quality of life.

Look around you. Our quality of life is under stress. Shortages abound either due to hording, a lack of labor, or government’s infatuation with environmentalism’s inbred prejudice against commerce and its energy needs. COVID is the excuse to retard business activity while at the same time bribing much of the workforce to stay home with inflated government benefits.

What happens to the social maturation of children in this atmosphere of isolation? What happens to young adults when dating customs becomes more cumbersome? What then happens to marriage and the birthrate? What happens to family and friends when the holidays are zoomed? And, indeed, for adolescents and young adults, when education is zoomed? Graduating high school seniors at the junior high educational level does not bode well for upward mobility or social peace. Feudal-sized gaps in educational attainment will appear as the richer demographic cohorts utilize their willingness and means to break free of the straitjacketed and zoomed public schools.

Of course, that education will be increasingly festooned with the hysterias-of-the-moment. “Climate change” is at the top of the list. Evidence strongly suggests that “climate change” is happening and man has a role, with the pollution-belching power plants of China and India as the chief suspects: 2.8 billion in combined population, 35% of the world’s total humanity, and developing an affection for air conditioning and upwardly-mobile jobs.

The burning of coal at a Chinese steel plant.

But how much of a role? The widely parroted eco-apocalypse is a stretch to say the least, and any benefits – longer growing season, CO2 as fertilizer – largely ignored. Off-the-shelf mitigations – sun screen, more efficient housing design, natural gas/nuclear/hydro power – are readily available. And all this riding on a projected 1.1° C increase by the end of the century. Even this prognostication is more of a WAG (wild a** guess) or SWAG (affix numbers to the wild a** guess) than anything else. The extent of man’s role, the intensity of impact of GHG (greenhouse gases), and longevity of the temp spike is more up in the air (no pun intended) than is admitted. Yet, it’s hair-on-fire time. And off we go to a mutilation of our way of life, all made more palatable by the opinionated lab coats in the CDC or the University of East Anglia.

The craziness extends beyond a politicized science. The politicized lab is an indicator of the reign of progressive authoritarianism throughout the high status, elite sectors of our society. Much has been written on this. Muscular progressivism has become a status marker and overwhelmingly dominant in top drawer institutions. Society’s upper echelons are an ideological and social monoculture maintained through intermarriage (homogamy) and discrimination. It shows up everywhere from the Ivy League to the campus of Google to the boardrooms of the multinationals to the faculty senate to the newsroom to the people around the broadcast camera and movie studio. It’s ubiquitous and exceedingly stifling.

Prejudice abounds. Surveys from 2019 and 2020 show rising ideological intolerance among the self-designated “better” people; the most perfidious bigotry comes from the much larger progressive-left cohort. Dating sites such as eHarmony show a greater prevalence for partisan affiliations as filters: the left refusing to have romantic relationships with the right in much greater percentages than the other way around.

Not only are student bodies increasingly radical-left but they’ll easily jettison “free speech” for something tyrannically defined as “safety”. The “safety” is a euphemism for the abstracted threats to fashionable and recently-minted victim groups. The threat to that “safety” is the feeling of rejection by the alleged victim from someone simply expressing disbelief for their claim of victimhood and self-description. At this point, “safety” is cover for thought control when it’s translated into speech codes, “safe spaces”, and into curriculum. And today’s twenty-somethings and younger are four-square behind it.

The thinking muddles institutional autonomy and individual autonomy. Popularly elected legislatures and governors are castigated for trying to restrict an institution’s power to trample individual rights at the insistence of a radical student clique. Ironies of all ironies: institutional academic freedom is transmuted into a prohibition of basic individual rights.

The prejudice and bigotry of the young will be carried into their adult lives. Whether it be the classroom, tenure, boardroom, government, or employment, power positions will be the province of the progressive-left. If you want an example of the Kendi’s marriage of prejudice and power, here it is, albeit without the race-obsession. Here’s systemic bigotry staring back at them in the mirror. They have met the enemy and it is them.

What does this mean for our constitutional order? It means a simultaneous mixture of “expert” authoritarianism (meaning more power for people like them) and the dismantlement of hesitant Constitutional institutions such as a conservative Court, the Senate, and Electoral College. Anything is laid waste if it stands athwart the left’s path to the holy land of self-defined “equity”.

NEW YORK, NY – OCTOBER 25: People march across the Brooklyn Bridge to protest the Covid-19 vaccine mandate for municipal workers on October 25, 2021 in New York City. (Photo by David Dee Delgado/Getty Images)

To make the revolution permanent, unchecked and unassimilated immigration and control of the schools is essential for guaranteeing a pliable electorate. Empowered by a socially engineered electorate, the country’s traditional principles and ideals will end up on the trash heap for this permanent governing class. No more is justice to be fair – i.e., blind and neutral. Lady Justice must peek under her blindfold to grant favorable rulings to people of the right race, genitalia, gender self-designation, or intersectionality (combination) of any of the previous. No more is there to be fealty to equal protection of the laws. Far from it. Awards and penalties are to be assigned by race, et al. Paying heed to the geographical and cultural diversity (real diversity) of the country through federalism or other governing institutions will be discarded for the imposition of a left-wing conformity from an administrative center (DC). Consensual government is transformed into the North Korean kind. Elections will be of the perfunctory type.

Others, many more than I, have raised the alarm. Our world is changing before our eyes, and not in a wholesome way. At root, many of our young people are proving that an education can make you stupid as well as wise. The breadth and depth of understanding of past generations is lacking. In the end, many college graduates manifest the traits of a cult. They have beliefs that are, in essence, unexamined assumptions, unprovable and highly questionable. And to think that this is the generation that threatens to sweep way the legacy of a thousand of years.

“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34)

And so, many of you might still say that we have nothing to fear. Really?

RogerG

October 25, 2021October 26, 2021

Parents, Do You Know What Is Happening to Your Kids?

College classroom during the May 1968 uprising in France.

While watching the multiple episodes of Netflix’s “Last Chance U: Indy” (Independence Community College in Kansas), two things stood out: the young men in the football program need structure, and they are being indoctrinated in the classroom. The propaganda angle should be the most terrifying aspect because it reaches the entire enrollment. The program scenes shift from the practice field to the student interactions with a sincere writing/literature instructor and the art and sociology classrooms. A recurring theme of the literature and sociology instruction appears to be oppression, victimhood, and both are portrayed as a product of a pervasive system of injustice. I got enough in the brief scenes to instantly recognize the all-too-familiar pedagogy.

Sound familiar? If not, it should. Your kids are getting a steady diet of it from the tear-jerking first day of kindergarten to college commencement.

The indoctrination didn’t happen overnight. It had been building since the notorious 1960’s. A pivotal moment came in the worker/student uprising in Paris of May 1968. The mob dubbed themselves the “Soixante-Huitards”. It was a complete assault on “bourgeois” society with demands for a takeover of government, campus, and factory. Charles De Gaulle, the then French president, was frightened enough to seek momentary refuge in Germany. (The best rendition of this page in history can be found here.)

Soixante-Huitard demonstration in Paris during the May 1968 uprising.

The ideas behind the uprising are the same ones spouted by today’s propagandists such as Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DeAngelo, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and a majority of the professoriate in our country’s 4,500 campuses, public and private, secular and religious. The inspiration came from revolutionary apostles that included the Italian communist, Antonio Gramsci, the neo-Marxist Herbert Marcuse, with a host of others.
Then came a shift in strategy in the 1970’s: rather than burn it down, take it over became the cry. The German radical Rudi Dutschke pointed the way in an action plan that he dubbed the “long march through the institutions”. Clean up and attain tenure. Be the teacher of the scions of the Fortune 500 and soon the revolution will have the necessary acolytes in Big Sports, Inc., the NCAA, the corporate boardroom, the media centers, the schools, the publishing industry, Big Tech, and anyone in any position with a college prerequisite, all advancing the grand coup.

The success of the scheme is found everywhere, and especially so in entertainment. Take two recent examples from the fare on Netflix and Amazon Prime: “Red Joan” and “American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally”.

First, “Red Joan”. Ever since the public availability of the Venona decrypts of Soviet espionage operations in the US, Americans and Brits, some in top governmental posts with high security clearances (Harry Dexter White, Asst. Sec. of the Treasury, and Alger Hiss, State Department and adviser to FDR, for instance) were exposed as espionage agents for the Soviet Union, along with many others littered throughout the federal government, which included the most sensitive reaches of the Manhattan Project. Joan Stanley (“Red Joan”) was reputed to be the longest serving KGB spy transferring hundreds of British atomic secrets to Stalin’s Soviet Union. The film provides important context but, in the end, soft-pedals her treason. It treats her rationalization at the end of the film – the USSR with the bomb would balance the US and make for peace – as the Sermon on the Mount. An ounce of thoughtful analysis would expose its irrationality and quite possibly its duplicity.

If she was so concerned about world peace, why was she hell-bent on only giving the bomb to Stalin? Why not Hitler? If world peace through a balance of power is the goal, why not gift it to the National Socialists instead of just Marxist socialists? Instead, early in the film, she frequently states her desire for the Brits to get it before the Germans. Then, later, she wants the Soviets to have it. Her espionage only points one way.

Clearly, she has a bias for the international struggle against capitalism. Throughout the 1930’s, and thereafter, Stalin had proven himself to be as homicidal as Hitler. Picking one mass killer over another as the recipient of the ultimate WMD can’t be grounded in balance-of-power rhetoric. Only one answer stands the test of logic: she wanted the survival of the USSR, and, as it turned out, the suffering of billions for decades into the future.

One mass grave among many in Katyn Forest near Smolensk. 22,000 Polish officers and civic leaders were murdered here in 1940 by Stalin’s NKVD.

Additionally, a penchant for Marxist totalitarianism apparently goes hand-in-glove with a heightened sense of personal omnipotence. She arrogantly confers on herself the power to decide the policy of a popularly-elected government. For me, this is the ultimate treason. She supplanted the judgment of the people’s representatives for her own. This is a betrayal far graver than espionage. She avoided the noose due to age but she should never escape the shame that she so richly deserves.

The dominance of neo-Marxism in our cultural commanding heights makes it easy to retrospectively exonerate a betrayal for a Marxist cause. It’s even possible to transform the truly repugnant into a victimn. And so, we have “Axis Sally” on Amazon Prime. Mildred Gillars, Nazi propaganda broadcaster, is portrayed as a victim of Nazi extortion (seizure of her passport, threats) and rape by Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels. Yet, no evidence exists that Gillars and Geobgels ever met, let alone that he had the opportunity to rape her in a studio control room, let alone that they had a tryst where she put a gun to his head. Still, the fictions are a two-fer: heap mud on the already disgraced-but-dead and transform a noxious female opportunist into a chic victim.

It’s a given that Hollywood takes license with facts – nothing new. But the liberty with the facts is also the liberty to inject “Me Too”. How else to create a sympathetic character out of a vile anti-Semite and American functionary in the Nazi war effort? That’ll keep Madonna and her vagina heads energized in their perpetual state of victimhood.

“The March Through the Institutions” has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of the Soixante-Huitards. Even the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff sounds like Ibram X. Kendi. Even corporate heads are bolstering the political fortunes of a political party bent on destroying them. Surfing the offerings on tv and the silver screen is a joy-ride through the woke mind. At one time, tv was thought to be a wasteland. Well, it has metastasized into brainwashing.

Parents, your kids are being pummeled with it. They are getting it from everywhere. If you don’t want your kids destroying the prosperity that you inherited, seize the cellphone, watch your school board like a hawk, monitor your kids’ instruction, and restrict the influence of Hollywood’s baleful offerings. Above all, be an active shaper of the culture, not a passive recipient of it.

RogerG

October 19, 2021October 20, 2021

A Broken Supply Chain. What Did You Expect?

A shopper walks past empty shelves where bread is normally displayed in a supermarket, Sunday, March 15, 2020, in Boston. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)

The April, 8, 1966 issue of Time magazine had as its cover story “Is God Dead?”. No, He isn’t dead but increasingly many have relegated Him to the attic with the rest of the old bric-a-brac. Nature hates a vacuum and so do we in our lives. When God is dethroned, the state will be enthroned. Well, alas, it came fully to pass, thanks to the pandemic.

If we should have learned anything from the 20th century, we should have grasped the obvious reality that the state is a very poor repository of our hopes and dreams. Central planning was a catastrophe both in material and immaterial ways. Most of us knew this; yet here we are: galloping inflation, a labor supply willingly eschewing labor, authoritarianism everywhere, and empty store shelves. We’re starting to look like those 1970’s photographs of the Soviet people queuing up to enter Soviet stores to find . . . nothing much.

Soviet citizens waiting outside a Soviet store in the 1970’s.

1970’s Russian shopper looking at an empty meat cooler.

How did we get here? Look no further than the frantic reaction to the virus. Please excuse me for crowing a bit but back in March 2020, I bellowed that we ought not be doing this. The “this” is the extended lockdowns, the silly parsing of “essential” from “nonessential”, universal and mandatory masking, rampant social distancing, business and school closures, and an end to social and organized religious life. We are now paying the piper for this sin, and a host of others which accreted like barnacles to our ship’s hull.

We got to central planning through the back door. The Bolsheviks, instead, simply banged down the front door. We nurtured ours over a century-plus, and when COVID hit, the “crisis too good to waste” brought out in full regalia the inner autocrat. Concentrating power over things large and small in the hands of a Bill DeBlasio, Gavin Newsom, or Joe Biden runs square into Hayek’s knowledge problem: no small group of people has the knowledge and expertise to manage something as varied and multitudinous as a nation’s economy. In the end, crap will happen. And it did.

Ships waiting for entry off the California coast.

Some blame the 95 cargo ships lining up outside the ports of Long Beach and San Pedro on the Longshoreman’s Union. Granted, their featherbedding and labor contracts can make life a living hell. Some mention the neglect of our nation’s ports. Some could rightly point the finger at the eco-craziness of California’s war on diesel trucks and trains – and anything fossil fuel that keeps us warm and gets us to work. I don’t know of many interstate truckers who relish driving in the state. All true, but all of it preceded the current mess and shelves were brimming at the time.

Biden and company have hit upon the canard of trying to convince us that a mess isn’t a mess, but is actually a sign of good times. It’s gaslighting as state PR. This headscratcher ignores his role in bribing workers to stay home. Drive around in that over-priced electric car of yours and you’ll see Help Wanted signs as ubiquitously as Biden/Harris 2020 yards signs in the DC metropolitan area. Employers will take anyone breathing, and maybe not.

What of his – and the rest of the Democrat gubernatorial lineup – mandates and threats? It’s hard to run a business when suffocating the workforce behind masks and forcing unwanted vax jabs on the 30% who are reluctant. Who’d want to come back to work? Better to take the unemployment comp festooned with an extra $300 a week and enjoy the extended staycation.

Economic life is disrupted. And once down, overburdened with a dump truck load of taxes and regulations, it can’t get up. Like the weightlifter, we can add the weights to the bar when he’s already erect with it. But from a deadlift? The hysterical reaction to the virus knocked the economy down and they piled dumbbells on the corpse. The result is the long line of ships waiting offshore and ships’ anchors tearing holes in pipelines, which will be used to further the war on fossil fuels. Go figure.

Go ahead, don’t let God get in your way, continue to replace the old priesthood with the credentialed “expert” and their computer models, and welcome to the Soviet lifestyle.

RogerG