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Progressivism Is the Problem

The federal Leviathan

James Madison, Federalist 51:
“In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates.”

One of the banal buzzwords in common usage about our Constitutional government is “coequal”, as in coequal branches. It’s drummed into the head of the kiddies and is trotted out ad nauseum by the over-exposed telegenic punditry. Part of the problem lies in other banalities like “checks and balances”, with emphasis on “balances”, that reinforces the mischaracterization of our government.

Think about it. In its simplest and correct form, our republic is composed of an executive to carry out the laws, a court system to adjudicate disputes according to the law, and a legislature to legislate, make the law. Look at it. The first two act on the law that is made elsewhere, in Congress. Constitutionally, they can do little unless there is a law made by . . . Congress. Sorry, that ain’t “coequal”. If the infantry is the queen of battle, the Congress is meant to be the queen of governance in a republic.

So, what has happened to Congress, it being the weak sister in the triumvirate? Nothing, except what Woodrow Wilson and FDR did to it. You might say that they ran at full speed with Hamilton’s “energy in the executive” (Federalist 70) toward progressivism’s dream of the big state, leaving the 535 squabbling inhabitants of the Capitol Building in the dust. What started with the Wilson/FDR imperial presidency, who then badgered Congress into effectively dispensing with a sensible reading of the Commerce Clause, made its way into an imperial judiciary who regularly legislates from the bench. Congress quickly became the footstool to a hyper-president and a non-entity to our uber-judges.

There’s more to the story. The “more” concerns the progressivism that’s in the head of all self-proclaimed liberals from the last couple of decades of the 19th century to the present. Deep in their cranium is IMPATIENCE to accomplish great and heroic deeds. They’re frustrated with the divided powers and checks and would like nothing better than to dispense with the whole racket by interpreting it out of existence, which they’ve done with the complicity of the Courts.

In that, they’ve got a lot in common with the communists. Communists are impatient socialists, and not at all receptive to the cautious instincts of their Fabian/Menshevik brethren. No need to wait for electoral success when a gun will do the trick right now.

As an aside, maybe this explains the socialist Bernie Sanders’s attraction to the Democratic Party, to caucus with them and seek their party’s presidential nomination. At an intuitive level, the Democratic Party’s progressivism and international socialism are kindred spirits. They are drawn like moths to the light bulb of the big state to accomplish great and good things. The quicker, the better.

One of the chief results of this turn of affairs is a Congress that can’t even pass a budget, their principal power of the purse. The presidency thrives in the Congressional chaos. The national government ends up running on continuing resolutions to avoid the stink of obvious Congressional impotence. These mega-bills carry forward the huge junkyard of federal spending, with a plus-up for inflation and some additional items heaped on the pile. Junk becomes a forever-thing. Also, buried in the all the junk are the many loopholes exploited by presidents.

The Courts are in their own progressive universe, not having to worry about legislative impediments to the agenda or impeachment, owing to Congress’s barrenness. Yet, reform of the Courts did happen despite Congress’s infirmity. It took some doing in the Senate and abnormal clear-sightedness by the normally bombastic Trump but the majority of black-robed potentates became a majority of Constitutionalists.

The same Trump who was instrumental in helping to herd the Courts back into their proper Constitutional sphere also exhibited many of the same power reflexes of his progressive forbearers. By fiat, for example, he shifted Pentagon money for bases to money for his wall. Not that we don’t need a wall. For heaven’s sake, we need something to manage the human tidal wave who’ve discovered the American minimum wage to be professional income in their homelands without air-conditioning.

Honduran migrants take part in a caravan heading to the US, on the road linking Ciudad Hidalgo and Tapachula, Chiapas state, Mexico, on October 21, 2018. (Photo by Pedro Pardo / AFP)

One’s view of potentates in the Oval Office spins on whether they’re your potentate or someone else’s. Caught up in the right’s frenzy for Trump, some conservative pundits became Trump pundits. To be clear, the terms “conservative” and “Trump” aren’t synonymous. Catching the “populist” wind in their sails, they turned on a dime on issues such as the Iraq War, free trade, and big-state entitlements for their audience-constituents. They became big-state activists like many Democrat caucus members. It’s just a big state for your side.

Thus, in lock-step defense of Trump, they expounded on how well “Trump ran the country” or how well “Trump ran the economy”. Right there, they fall into the progressive trap. A real conservative, not a Trumpkin, would cringe at such language. The president doesn’t run the country or economy. He’s elected to only run the executive branch. In our country, the people run the country and economy (a free market), not a histrionic huckster from Queens or a doddering fool beholden to the revolutionaries in his party.

We’d be well-served if that message made its way to the people. But, alas, that popular brain is taught to venerate Saint Woodrow and Archangel Franklin. We can’t get past the progressive hokum to appreciate the blessings of debate, dialogue, and compromise in a fractured society like ours, something a Congress is meant to channel. It can be slow and messy, but at least we’ll have our rights, religion, and property instead of losing them to “energy in the executive” or “energy in the judge’s chambers”.

To put it bluntly, progressivism is anti-democratic, anti-republic, and anti-Constitution. Progressives want to take the Elastic Clause and make every place that they control as elastic in power as possible. After all, it’s the ends that matter to them, not the means. Why worry about those bickering mouths at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue? It saves time and effort to simply saddle up the black robes and chief executive to build the new world. Get ‘er done is the operative principle.

None of this is explained to the kiddies or adults. Don’t expect it from the schools. We reason from unexamined progressive assumptions to . . . whatever dominates Twitter and our other screens. It’s easy to be tossed hither and yon if you’re not grounded in the basics of our Constitutional order.

Progressivism set the table for this distortion of our consensual mode of governance. Heck, for the progs, it doesn’t even have to be consensual. An all-powerful EPA, ATF, IRS, FEC, SEC, FTC, etc., works fine for them.

RogerG

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America’s Soul-Destroying Time

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

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

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

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

Please watch the video.

RogerG

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9/11/2021, An Eviscerated America

Eviscerate: verb; to deprive something of its essential content.

Well, here we are, 9/11 twenty years later. The event is a two-decade saga bookended by an aerial assault killing nearly 3,000 people and an ignominious August 2021 retreat from Afghanistan. 9/11 is more than just that horrible day at the start of the new millennium. The saga as it played out came to signify something far more disturbing. We are no longer a nation capable of great, heroic deeds. We are eviscerated of moral fortitude. There’s nothing left in the tank of courage in the face of pain and adversity. Yes, we might never forget the day, but we also don’t really care enough to deal with a messy world with thousands of killers running around in it. They, the killers, have the fortitude; we don’t seem to have much of it. How did we get to this point?

From this
To this

Of course, not all of us are so enfeebled. It’s just that it’s easier today to cobble together an electoral majority to cut and run. The 2020 election gave us two bugout enthusiasts at the top of the ballot.

What has drained us of that moral fortitude? Simply put, our brains have been crafted to not handle it. On the one hand, for most of us, the world beyond a person is the one presented by Hollywood. Honestly, people don’t read, really read and contemplate; movies, audio-visual is the talk of the town. In an earlier era of cinema, war is capture the flag. In addition, today, the prevalent story line is one of oppression. Combine the two and you have a debilitating impatience. And why defend a cruel nation with a cruel people anyway? After a few decades of nearly non-stop self-flagellation, who would want to come to its defense?

Hollywood, a main culprit in the slide, hasn’t been kind to adult reasoning. American cinema reached its apogee in the runup to World War II and its aftermath. WWII on the big screen and tv was implanted in a generation’s mind to such an extent that all subsequent wars were unfavorably compared to it. But what do you do in a world where your enemies have no uniforms and no borders and capital city to invade and seize? Religious, militant, and ideological movements aren’t defined by the attributes of a nation-state. Capture the flag seems hardly appropriate when a walk through a South Chicago neighborhood on a Saturday night is the more accurate metaphor.

On the international stage, organized murderous rage is more than a crime. It’s a national security threat, as we should well know. It’s an international crime wave demanding attention. Think of it as law enforcement without a Fifth Amendment and the Miranda warnings. Intelligence gathering, training up cadres in the neighborhoods, raids, and support for allies over the long haul shadow hunting down the mafia in drawn-out domestic law enforcement crusades. It’s a dirty business. We don’t have the stomach for it because we lack the persistence. Fighting organized international terrorism lacks the visual glory of victorious columns entering Germany.

Our entertainment industry certainly created false expectations about war, but it also worked to define us as a people in the most horrible way possible. As Christianity has receded, a racialist Marxism filled the vacuum. America as the oppressor of the “other” became settled doctrine throughout the culture. What started as the ramblings of Herbert Marcuse, C. Wright Mills, and others of the 1950’s, and continued into the 1960’s in the Port Huron Statement of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), eventually funneled its way into the faculty lounge. Tweed and tenure replaced long hair and jeans. The line of descent extended into all branches of the cultural commanding heights: business, education, entertainment, publishing, the press, fashion. The beautiful people had a neat set of fashionable views to foist on their fans; Big Sports, Big Soft Drinks, Big Airlines had a rationale for boycotting Georgia.

And the Democratic Party became the institutional focal point for the revolution. It’s one thing to organize conclaves to plan protests; it’s quite another to have the full force of one of the two great political parties to push the radical dogmas. The Biden campaign became the avatar for the neo-Marxist program. Once in power, radicalism became policy.

It permeates everywhere in DC. The normal bastions of American exceptionalism like the military showed signs of the corruption. Can anyone forget the comments of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, before Congress in June? He sounded like the academic half-wit Ibram X. Kendi or AOC when he confessed a desire to “understand white rage”. There can be nothing as dispiriting to the ranks as being called a mass of racists by their principal commander.

No, he can’t squirm out of it by saying that he was referring to the academic study of CRT. His comment assumed the factual presence of “white rage”, not the study of its hypothetical existence. Besides, it’s part of the heated political rhetoric of the radical left that has a home in the media and donkey party. Milley proved that he is a sellout to the radical program, and he may be proof of the radicalization in the command structure and the deep penetration of the radicalism in the Pentagon’s training academies. The crushing of national morale goes alongside the crushing of morale in the ranks of the people responsible for keeping the nation safe.

All of this has taken place in the span of the twenty years since 9/11. The bugout from Afghanistan was disgraceful. It’s hard to tell what Trump would have done if he had been the 2020 victor, despite the unconvincing after-the-fact denials by him and his apologists. There are too many Trump statements from his 2016 campaign, presidency, and the pre-August period to deny that Trump was anything but a loud devotee of withdrawal.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (C-L) meets with Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar (C-R) in the Qatari capital Doha on November 21, 2020, (Photo by Patrick Semansky / POOL / AFP)

It’s hypothetical that he would have done it better. If anything, Trump and his people are proving the validity of Kennedy’s famous cliché after the Bay of Pigs disaster: “Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.” And nothing else.

The American people boxed themselves into a corner. Or more correctly, they allowed themselves to be boxed into the corner. A steady drumbeat to get out for over 5 years will have an effect on opinion polls.

But if you think about it, if it’s correct to assume that Trump would have done it better, it’s equally hypothetical to conclude that he would have left America in a better strategic position even if he won in 2020. A withdrawal is a withdrawal, and there’s nothing in the public record to indicate that he would have left a residual force. Everything coming out of his mouth and Twitter feed was a declaration to get everyone out. If anything, we hypothetically might have avoided the chaos at Kabul airport, but we still would have abandoned the country to the Taliban. Absent the steel of American logistics and air support, Afghan forces likely would have recapitulated their collapse under the guise of Trump. Afghanistan reverts back to 9/10, the Taliban and their movement’s deeply interconnected cousins – al-Qaeda and ISIS – rule the land, and America lost an important chess piece in the big game of national security.

So, here we are on the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. The Taliban and their nest of jihadist allies are in charge. In a recent broadcast on Afghanistan’s national RTA television station, the Taliban celebrated our defeat with a honorific of the 9/11 attacks as “the result of the United States’ policy of aggression against the Muslim world.” They celebrate the “martyrs”. For us, we go into mourning for our dead, as all those who fought, bled, and died in that God-forsaken place must come to grips with personal sacrifices that were diminished by power-hungry politicos who have sold the country on the non-sequitur of retreat-as-victory.

We ran and all we have to show for it is mourning at memorials, the memory of a disgraceful exit, and graves and scars for our wonderful veterans. And the world after the retreat is a far more dangerous place for America and Americans.

RogerG

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Our Marxist Zeitgeist

Scene from “Raya and the Last Dragon”

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

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

Ross Douthat

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

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

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

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

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

Something to think about, don’t you think?

RogerG

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Railroaded by 2 Percent

I’ve previously mentioned my astonishment at the sudden embrace of extremist and exotic ideologies by powerful institutions in the Western world. The spittle-laced fulminations of college social justice warriors and the terrorist-clad thumpings of Antifa groupies are now mainstreamed. What’s happened?

What makes the commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Mark Milley, sound like AOC? Or corporate heads like Kimberly Boyd, Hasbro’s senior vice president of global brands, to say something really stupid to defend the removal of “Mr.” from “Mr. Potato Head”? She said,

“Culture has evolved. Kids want to be able to represent
their own experiences. The way the brand currently exists—
with the ‘Mr.’ and ‘Mrs.’—is limiting when it comes to both
gender identity and family structure.”

Everyone of any prominence is jumping on the bandwagon. Lunacy has become the new normal. It’s now everywhere. Your kids are getting it in kindergarten under the pretentious moniker “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI). Personally, I think that “Inclusion” should be moved to the middle to make for a more accurate acronym – DIE.

Soon, we’ll all be lunatics.

Once again, how did we get here? My answer: 2% runs the world. They don’t have to be talented; they just have to be opinionated. The clique is cloistered in high-rent zip codes and on Twitter and Instagram.

This came to mind when researching the relative size of the crowd on Twitter. According to the NY Post, 22% of Americans use the digital grapevine. Of that number, 10% account for 80% of the digital burps (tweets). That means that the rantings of 2% of the American population carry the potential for the jihad. (See the story here)

History confirms the dynamic. Do you think for one moment that the Russian Bolsheviks of 1917 were a popular movement? I don’t even think that they busted the threshold of 2% in popularity or even name recognition. Yet, a cadre of useful idiots and tightly organized zealots can count for more than the silent majority. It’s amazing that revolutions can be a march to ruin on so little.

RogerG

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Pure Poppycock

Befuddled American voter?

Politico-speak on the stump is a crock. Not always, but it happens often enough for many to avoid politician interviews like an evasive maneuver to escape an encounter with one of the many homeless madmen wondering the streets of downtown Los Angeles. Trump prattles on about the Chinese paying “paying billions and billions of dollars” in US tariffs, apparently not knowing, or not caring, that businesses don’t pay business taxes – of which tariffs are. We do! Biden and his Democratic Party coterie babble on about the “rich paying their fair share”. It’s all just stupendous nonsense. But, apparently, a block of the public eats it up.

No more accurate indictment of the current state of journalism, the schools, and media can be found than the popular currency of pure tripe. Since Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer currently possess the lion’s share of power, their balderdash takes center stage, because they now have the reins to foist it on us. Conversely, the job of the Republicans is to stand athwart history and say “Stop!”

So, what of this “fair share” blabbering? Simply put, it ain’t true. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) numbers don’t support the popular fiction of the rich escaping the taxman while the little guy and gal gets punched in the gut by the tax code. It’s class pandering reminiscent of the kind perpetrated by Marxists – or in its newest incarnation in the race-pandering of Kendi’s or Deangelo’s Systemic Racism.

Let’s take a look at the numbers. Fact: U.S. income taxes in terms of who pays what are the most progressive in the world (Thank you, Marian Tupy of the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity). I don’t see how they can be made more progressive without the targets turning over their entire income receipts to the U.S. Treasury. The top 1 percent of wage earners account for 40.1 percent of all federal income tax receipts in 2018, and this after Trump’s so-called “gift to the rich” in the Republican tax reform bill. The Tax Foundation found that the richest of the rich – the top 1 percent – paid a greater share (40.1) than the bottom 90 percent (25.4). Average paid tax rates tell a similar story. The Dems are engaging in the old gambit of the Big Lie, and it’s that simple.

Why do they lie? Well, they share with Marxists the same hate for the rich – and like Kendi and Deangelo of CRT fame grovel in a hate of “whiteness”. The hate is tied to the Marxist flimflammery of systemic class oppression. Marx called it Scientific Socialism in the same manner of all demagogues who seek to monopolize the word “science” to magically turn their dictums into imperial truths. But if the well-to-do are in the catbird seat according to the hucksters, who are the uber-rich politically supporting? You’d be forgiven for assuming that the greater the wealth, the greater the propensity and power to bend the state to further the material interests of those who own the greatest share of the national wealth. Oh, how shocked you’d be when the reality is uncovered.

Three of the Dems’ big underwriters: Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg, George Soros

Point of fact, it was disclosed in various reports. In 2020, The eat-the-rich crowd under Biden overwhelmingly got the backing of the billionaire class. According to Forbes, Trump got 133 billionaires to throw some cash his way. Biden benefitted from 230. In raw numbers from the Federal Election Commission, Biden was drowning in $1.074 billion in his basement as Trump garnered $812 million.

What’s with the super-rich? Why invest in your own demise? Many answers are possible. Certainly, Trump is a lightning rod who instills profound love in some and manifest hate in others, in equal measure. Trump-hate played a role. Also, it could be that these people are so well-heeled that they’re insulated from the consequences of their beliefs to such an extent that fantasies can be seriously entertained. But I think that something more profound is afoot.

Somehow, it’s gotten into the heads of the Zuckerberg-to-Bloomberg crowd that to be considered well-rounded smart and sophisticated means to be a lefty. Lefty is fashionable. Esteem within the group won’t be acquired if you’re driving into the parking lot of your effete soirée in a pickup truck flying the Gadsden flag. A chauffeur-driven Jaguar and the spouting of lefty drivel will earn the necessary style points.

But in the end, it’s all pure poppycock. The Marxism-without-saying-so is still ruinous. Systematized envy, the very essence socialism, is never a path to prosperity. Similarly, the never-ending hunt for white racism will never be a path to social peace any more than it was when Jim Crow was a popular socio-political menu choice. The real Jim Crow 2.0 isn’t the Georgia election law. It’s what is arising out of the growing CRT industry.

Once again, it comes down to pure poppycock, but this poppycock isn’t some knock-off little innocent thing. This time, it’s got the backing of some very deep pockets. Watch out, America.

RogerG

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A New Grassroots Movement to Combat the New Racism

Please watch this CBN report on the growing Loudon County, Va., parents’ protest.

CRT is the new racism and destroys any conception of timeless truths, like “all men are created equal”. In the Christian tradition, all souls are equal. Critical race theory and its grandpa, critical theory, seeks to erase these sacred truths from public memory and replace them with Marx’s dialectic with race, not class, as the catalyst.

L-R of Karl Marx: Elijah Muhammed, Nation of Islam; Derrick Bell, Critical Legal Studies theorist; James H. Cone, exponent of Black Liberation Theology.

Protect your kids from it. Challenge it at your school, school board, and take it to the state capitol. But first, know what it is so you can’t be bowled over by dimwitted teacher union mouthpieces and the far-too-numerous lefty educrats. Here’s where you go to get armored up to protect your kids and schools: https://heritageaction.com/crtbook.

Heritage Action will give you the goods on CRT so that you’ll know more than AFT president Randi Weingarden and NEA head honcho Becky Pringle. Don’t let them intimidate you with the charge of “racist” so they have a free hand to indoctrinate your kids in warmed-over Marxism.

Get Heritage Action’s e-booklet and go get ’em.

RogerG

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CRT, It’s Not a Theory.

Randi Weingarden gets it so wrong, and she presents herself as the uber-teacher. She has no clue about critical race theory. Watch the drivel for yourself.

The “T”, or theory, in CRT (critical race theory) is the most deceitful initial in the title. It’s not a theory. The appropriation of the word serves the purpose of creating an aura of science, of objectivity, in order to preempt opposition. The fact is, it’s more akin to a dogma, or set of dogmas, an ideology. As in a dogma, conclusions are pre-established on faith and the rest of the verbiage is used to justify the pre-ordained verdict. These acolytes of CRT think and behave more like missionaries as they propagate the faith under the taxpayer’s dime or lefty numbskull billionaire donors.

They’ve got it backwards. Instead of evidence being used to test a possible hypothesis to establish a sound theory, or explanation, these zealots already have their minds made up and will devote the rest of their efforts and resources at gaining new believers. These are doctrines and not credible hypotheses or theories.

Antifa prepares to confront Patriot Prayer group in August 2018. Look at all the white faces from middle class backgrounds in the photo.

The thought-storm begins with the doctrine of the powerful greasing the skids for the powerful. It’s a thought-commitment that preexists any other cognitive work in the thought process. This is where you find the “system” in systemic racism. All other reasons, data, and evidence is swept into the pre-ordained belief of a system of oppression. They rake in a plethora of unequal socio-economic stats by race and then in a leap of faith say, “Aha, it’s racism!”

It’s silly because so much can come between the disparate numbers and the conclusion, like the social annihilation of the Black family or bureaucratic devolution of the public schools, particularly inner-city ones – thanks to Weingarden’s proteges. Far from proof of a system of racial oppression, the additional evidence destroys the pre-ordained conclusion.

Rather, the “Theory” is essentially an ideology. An ideology has two main characteristics: a system of beliefs, or dogmas, and the powerful instinct to proselytize the creed. Integral to the spread of the faith is the capture of the centers of culture and government. The former shapes the popular mind and the latter enforces the ideological homogenization. What the schools and entertainment can’t accomplish, the state will.

NEA president Becky Pringle promises the teaching of critical race theory in the classroom and the defense of any teacher doing so. The legal apparatus of the union will be ginned up to challenge state laws banning the ideology in the classroom.

We are seeing the marriage of CRT ideology with powerful institutions from K-to-grad-school to the Pentagon. Commissars have their noses in the air for any whiff of disparate outcome to jump into feverish action. The kids’ minds are being gradually closed to any other alternative thoughts. We are breeding the minions who’ll perform assisted suicide on our cherished USA.

Weingarden is a living and breathing example of how bad things have gotten. Parents, if nothing else, shield you kids from the onslaught. Take them away from the clutches of her flunkies.

RogerG

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This Is Your Brain on CRT

It’s similar to your brain on DiAngelo (l) and Kendi.

Remember those 1980’s “Just Say No” ad campaigns: This is your brain on drugs? Well, watch the guru of “Anti-racism” and critical race theory (CRT), Ibram X. Kendi, stumble through a simple definition of racism. Think, this is your brain on Kendi’s “Anti-racism”. Watch it here – it begins at the 34:06 spot on the tape:

When asked to define racism by a member of the audience, Kendi says, “So racism, I would define it as a collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity that are substantiated by racist ideas.” Any simpleton can pick up the fact that this is hooey. Let me get this straight: He uses a word in a few of its forms that he hasn’t defined in order to define it. Got that?

It’s worse than farcical logic. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of a circular firing squad.

I’ve always considered mental agility – for instance, speaking extemporaneously, off the cuff, with competence – to be a component of intelligence. Kendi is hardly coherent when forced to ad-lib. This guy is a lefty show pony.

Just think, this is the person whose book is on the Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday’s recommended reading list for the ranks under his command. This is the guy who is an inspiration for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley. If these Pentagon potentates are sincere, I question their mental fitness to drive a car, let alone run military operations around the world.

I’m reminded of the congressional testimony of the pre-Pearl Harbor commanders after Dec. 7, 1941. Are we about to experience more Dec. 7’s and subsequent congressional mea culpas?

Circa 1946: Adm. Husband E. Kimmel at Pearl Harbor Hearing. (Photo: George Skadding, Time & Life Pictures)
Battleship row, Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941.

It’s too frightening to contemplate. Watch the video.

RogerG

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Useful Idiot

Austin (l) and Milley before Congress on June 23.

Useful idiot: noun; a derogatory term for a person perceived as propagandizing for a cause without fully comprehending the cause’s goals.

The “useful idiot” is a term that is often wrongly attributed to Lenin, but can be traced back to post-WWII Italian politics when centrist democrats used the phrase in reference to the social democrats who were considering an alliance with the Italian Communist Party. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley’s comments before Congress on June 23 (see below) are a shocking admission that post-WWII Italian politics are analogous to the emerging alliance between the radical left and the people managing our arsenal of democracy. We might be viewing the beginnings of a new Red Army, and I’m not exaggerating.

His remarks were, to put it succinctly, appalling. Most egregiously, he used lefty jargon to justify lefty indoctrination of the ranks. That’s right, lefty indoctrination. The mashup of illogic began with a partisan rendering of the Jan 6 capitol riot. Let Milley speak for himself: “So what is it that cause[d] thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the constitution of the United States of America?” The former US District Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Andrew C. McCarthy, put the kibosh to that story line (read his piece here).

McCarthy’s point is that what happened on Jan. 6 wasn’t an insurrection. The protesters weren’t trying to “overturn the constitution of the United States of America”; they were mistakenly trying to rescue it at the behest of the commander-in-chief, the then-president Trump. None of those arrested are likely to be charged with anything close to treason. The legal equivalent of trespassing and its derivatives are mostly in the offing. The reason: there’s no evidence of patriotically-inspired, flag-waving rioters wanting “to overturn the constitution of the United States of America”. 49-year-old grandmas and a shaman-pretending clown don’t make for an overthrow. Yet, Milley chooses to sound like AOC.

The protest crowd around the Capitol Building, Jan. 6

He then goes on to use his mischaracterization of Jan. 6 to justify radical left brainwashing at the military academies. That’s because he misconstrues the purpose of a military academy with that of a university. West Point exists to create an officer corps. UCLA exists to broadly educate a population, albeit, today, oriented extreme left. The SDS and Weather Underground of the 60’s, and their offspring, have filled today’s faculty lounges. The alleged call for free thought created a huge safe space for the nurturing of a whole host of lefty-inspired and self-defeating balderdash. Out of this hothouse came the buffoonery of critical race theory (CRT), its jargon, illogic, and Milley consequently making a fool of himself. That’s just what we want: a military closer in its thinking to Code Pink or the Black Panthers than George Washington.

Antifa on a US college campus.

The foolish premise to Milley’s bombast was a complete confusion of propaganda and teaching. He began by surrendering the validity of lefty boilerplate when he said, “. . . I want to understand white rage and I’m white, and I want to understand it.” What’s this “white rage”? It’s lefty lingo for anyone who opposes with them. Of course, it was used to brand the protesters as “white supremacists”, and Milley repeats the lie. They were Trump supporters and this group is more diverse than ever before. I guess in Milley-babble Trump’s people of color are now trying to reinstate the KKK. Milley’s brain is just a hot mess.

After surrendering the rhetorical battlefield to lefty banalities, he used the excuse of an “open mind” to condone indoctrination. Ideas studied for analysis (real teaching) is far removed from accepting their validity and engaging in political confessionals. This isn’t a scholarly study of Lenin or Mao but a form of brainwashing. Milley has little clue as to what he is saying.

Milley’s comments were an insult to the American people and all those laboring in the ranks trying to defend what Milley apparently believes to be an irredeemably racist country. That’s the “systemic” aspect of systemic racism, the essence of the radical doctrines emanating from the radical high priesthood of CRT. Now we have proof that the farce is the governing doctrine of the people commanding the most sophisticated fighting force in history.

I’m scared! Should you?

RogerG