School children with masks and behind Plexi-glass in a San Diego school during the COVID-19 pandemicDestroyed, burned, and abandoned cars at music festival, Israel, October 7. Some UN aid workers were implicated in the massacre.
If the quality of our civilization can be gauged by the quality of our institutions, then we’re in serious trouble.
Domestically, our schools, FBI, CIA, a good portion of big business, the entertainment industry, federal bureaucracies, many state bureaucracies and local governments, many of them urban, much of the judiciary (federal to local, judges to juries), and the health bureaucracies (federal to local) have soiled themselves in neo-Marxist claptrap, authoritarian impulses, or rank donkey party partisanship. The rule of law is actually the rule of deeply compromised men and women. And it gets worse when we saunter on down to Turtle Bay in New York City, the United Nations.
We get daily reminders of the civilizational decay. Now, it’s another UN flight into gross immorality. The affiliated International Court of Justice (ICJ) trampled on any remaining moral authority that it may have possessed by bizarrely indicting Israel on charges of genocide. The absurdity of the pronouncement is obvious if you just think it through: the victim of genocide is guilty of responding to it. Then, the UN’s human rights conglomerate reserved for Iran the “Chair for the Human Rights Council’s one-day ‘Social Forum’” (see #1 below). Adding moral injury to moral injury, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East had people who were involved in the massacre of 1,200 mostly civilian Jews in Israel on October 7 (see #4 below). Can the “international community” get any more putrid?
The ICJ, specifically ordered Israel to stop “genocide-attacks” on Palestinian civilians in Gaza after, of course, finding evidence of “Israeli genocide” (see #3 below). Let me get this straight: the organization that runs Gaza stormed into southern Israel and slaughtered 1,200 Jews, took over 200 hostages, is not the party guilty of genocide; it’s the country who responded to the genocide. How does that compute?
Let’s rattle this around in the head a bit more. The nation that defends itself against a genocide is guilty of genocide as the original perps of the primary genocide commit another war crime by using the Gaza population as a writ-large human shield (see #2 below). Does this make any sense? Completely absent from the black robes’ decision is Hamas’s fundamental war crime – Gaza civilians as human shields – which immensely complicates the Israeli defensive response without running afoul of “genocide”. The elaborate and massive tunnel network under and into hospitals, schools, homes, large apartment buildings, orphanages, wherever civilians congregate in large numbers, the kind of civilians that are easily exploited for propaganda purposes, didn’t grace the Court’s printout. Since civilian casualties are inevitable when the human shields are used in crowd number, the Court’s opinion is tantamount to a blessing for the practice of large-scale human shields.
Maj. (res.) ‘Mem,’ a combat engineering officer, shows a tunnel that troops found inside a home in northern Gaza. The entrance was hidden underneath a bed in a children’s bedroom, November 7, 2023. (photo: Emanuel Fabian/Times of Israel)
If that isn’t crazy enough, we get to experience mullah-ruling Iran as a guardian of human rights. Isn’t that like the Grand Dragon of the Klan heading the Office of Civil Rights? Gracing the mullahs with the Chair of the UN Human Rights Council’s one-day “Social Forum” at the end of last year was too much even for the Iran-appeasing Biden administration. Biden’s Human Rights Council Ambassador Michele Taylor wrote (see #1 below), “It is unacceptable that any body associated with the promotion and protection of human rights be chaired by a representative from a nation implicated in such persistent and flagrant human rights abuses as Iran.” Exactly.
Yet, here we are, but there’s more. Speaking of the 1,200-person atrocity by Hamas on October 7, UN Works and Relief Agency workers were implicated in the barbarousness. Several had to be fired. Where’s the prosecutions (at the ICJ)? And related is the Hamas hijacking of that much-vaunted AOC-demanded “humanitarian aid” to Gazans (see #4 below). According to one source, “Hamas has their hands on UNRWA administration workers, and it manages UNRWA. . . . From the day they [Hamas] rose to power they took control of everything.” Much of the aid is dispensed by USAID. The federal organization’s Office of Inspector General (USAID OIG) “…has identified deliberate interference and efforts to divert humanitarian assistance in regions where FTO [foreign terrorist organizations, Hamas] activity is prevalent … [t]his includes systemic coercion of aid workers by FTOs…”, as reported by Jim Geraghty of National Review (see #4 below). Things at UN headquarters and in the field resemble the anti-Semitic chaos on our college campuses.
It’s getting so bad that almost anything with thousands of employees, funded by taxpayers, distant from them like D.C., the Hague and UN, and big-international in scope is a civilizational embarrassment. The little taxpaying guy and gal in the U.S., and the nation of Israel, get hosed. In this sense, bigness has become badness. I’m skeptical that anything can be done about the situation short of tearing the whole edifice down and starting over.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Outrage as Iran regime chairs United Nations Human Rights Council body despite ‘alarming’ abuses”, Peter Aitken, Fox News, November 2023, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/outrage-as-iran-regime-chairs-united-nations-human-rights-council-body-despite-alarming-abuses/ar-AA1jhvrT
2. “Human Shields in International Humanitarian Law: A Guide to the Legal Framework”, Beth Van Schaack, Just Security, 12/7/2016, at https://www.justsecurity.org/35263/human-shields-ihl-legal-framework/#:~:text=Making%20the%20civilian%20population%20or%20individual%20civilians%20the,and%20Article%208%20%28e%29%20%28i%29%20%28applying%20to%20NIACs%29.
3. “ICJ ruling: Key takeaways from the court decision in Israel genocide case”, Reuters, 1/26/24, at https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/key-takeaways-world-court-decision-israei-genocide-case-2024-01-26/
4. “What about the UNRWA Humanitarian-Aid Trucks?”, Haley Stack, National Review, 1/26/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/what-about-the-unrwa-humanitarian-aid-trucks/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=fifth
Iowa Republicans tromped to their caucuses and chose . . . Donald Trump. They’re hungry for a repeat of 2020 and the dismal results of 2022. As I’ve said before, if Trump is the party nominee, I’ll leave the presidential line on the ballot blank.
Please don’t press the same old tired binary (if not him, then it’s them). I did that calculation twice. I can’t do it a third time. His protectionism and isolationism, alongside his repugnant behavior in and out of the Oval Office, make him a poison in the party. Personality cults are not a healthy thing when it comes to governing.
A discouraging outcome in November, maybe outright defeat, could be very therapeutic for the party in removing his baleful influence.
Bottom line: he’s the best chance for the Democrats to remain in power. Whole demographics can’t swallow him, never could. The Democrats ruin the country, and the Republicans choose the least electable candidate. Go figure. A vote for Trump is a vote for the Democrats’ campaign strategy.
I’m out, from being a voter in the presidential contest that is. I may have to rethink my party registration.
The term (radioactive personality) comes from the National Review editors’ op-ed on the eve of the Iowa caucuses (see below). Indeed, Trump is a radioactive personality. It bodes ill for the GOP in November.
No doubt about it, it’s true, and it’s true not because Trump drives the Left – which means the root-and-branch of the Democratic Party – nuts, but because everyone, even his friends and loyal supporters, recognize his self-absorbed boorishness and then run to a banal recitation of his accomplishments. The reprehensive demeanor is hard to avoid. This simple fact has profound repercussions. Going into this election’s primaries, Trump is the weakest rival to Biden in a general election, also, no doubt about it. If the Democrats should change their standard bearer, all bets are off for even the rosiest Trump scenario of a narrow victory in November.
How radioactive is he? His avid fans are giddy about his head-to-head slight lead (within the margin of error) in some major polls. Remember, he’s running against a guy who every day reminds the public that he belongs in a nursing home and not the oval office. In addition, look at the hash Biden’s party has made of the country and our national security. Everything from Abbey Gate (the deadly Kabul fiasco), inflation, the uncontrolled border, the assault on our standard of living in eco-totalitarianism, the neo-Marxism in DEI, the boosterism for transgenderism’s teenage genital mutilation in “gender affirming care”, the orchestrated annihilation of American education, et al, doesn’t leave much for the donkey party to run on, except the looming Trump ascendancy if he is the GOP’s avatar.
The tone for the general election is set. Biden’s speech last week in Blue Bell, Penn., made Trump the focus of evil in the world. It’s a replay of the strategy in the 2022 midterms. Did it work then? I don’t know, but the expected GOP banner year turned out to be The Great Disappointment. Apparently, it’s safe to assume that enough people fell for it. If anything, the person of Trump animates the Democrats and sends shivers down the spine of at least a sliver of Republicans. Not good for someone who’s already a close-run thing.
Biden’s “Jim Crow 2.0” speech from Sept. 2022 in the runup to the 2022 midterms
The polls tell the tale, and have been telling the same tale for quite some time. The second-place candidate in the Republican primary contest does significantly better than Trump in a face-off with Biden in the general. The crazy Trump indictments and other Democrat shenanigans have certainly contributed to a heavy sympathy vote among Republicans for Trump. While they have contributed to Trump’s political ballast among GOPers, once Trump gets out of the safe confines of the Republican primary, expect Democrats to cater to the electorate’s already deep disdain for the man from Mar-a-Largo, if only they can successfully distract the voters away from Biden’s catastrophes – a big “if”.
Follow the FiveThirtyEight aggregate of polls and follow them from 2023 on (see below for the latest). The trend is clear. At best, Trump eeks out a lead in the margin of error. The polling details vary (for instance, registered vs. likely voters) but the direction is obvious. Biden screws up, Trump improves, slightly! Yesterday (Jan. 10), the YouGov/The Economist poll registered a Biden and Trump tie at 43%. Both are stinkers with negatives in the mid to high 50s. The last time, December 2023, a general pairing of Haley or Trump versus Biden by the Wall Street Journal shows Haley smashing Biden by 17% with Trump squeaking out only a 4-point lead (see below). For the life of me, why are Republicans determined to make their election prospects so difficult? It makes me wonder if this is populist sadomasochism at work.
Nikki Haley (l)
I’ll leave the prognosis of sadomasochism to the field of psychology, but, at the very least, one must conclude that we live in crazy times. Trump is still radioactive, and Biden is a bumbler after having surrendered to his party’s neo-Marxism. Oh, America, why are we so gun-ho for mediocrities, and repulsive ones at that?
RogerG
Sources:
* “Republican Voters Can — and Should — Rethink Nominating Trump”, The Editors, National Review online, 1/10/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/01/republican-voters-can-and-should-rethink-nominating-trump/
* Latest FiveThirtyEight polling at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/
* “Why Nikki Haley polls better against Joe Biden than Donald Trump does”, Steven Shepard, Politico, 12/9/2023, at https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/09/haley-electability-trump-biden-polls-00130926
The Protected: John Kerry windsurfingThe Unprotected: residents of East Palestine, Ohio, waving Trump flags, Feb. 2023
Peggy Noonan’s growing “political dynamic” of our times (from 2016):
“There are the protected and the unprotected. The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it …. The protected are the accomplished, the secure, the successful—those who have power or access to it. They are protected from much of the roughness of the world. More to the point, they are protected from the world they have created [emphasis in the original].”
Peggy Noonan in a speech from 2017
She’s right, and it should gall anyone with half a brain.
************
I had a little time Wednesday, 1/3/24, while exercising to listen to Hugh Hewitt’s radio show. He inspired me to take a third look at Peggy Noonan’s piece from 2016, “Trump and the Rise of the Unprotected” (see below). Hewitt used the article as a launching point to discuss the fall of Claudine Gay, the disgraced president of Harvard. His point was that the vast majority of working Americans don’t care squat about the problems of a Harvard president. If anything, the episode reminds the common person of the rank favoritism of those who have placed themselves above the mire that they have made for everyone else. Good point, but it only goes so far.
Lets’ face it, Gay was not hired for her high achievements in scholarship or administrative skill. She fit the new ideologically laced identity standards of our insulated, self-anointed aristocracy: black, female, immigrant-affiliated, and predictably left-wing. She fits the superficial bill. She was placed on a fast track to a fully tenured professorship, Dean of the Arts and Sciences, and the Harvard presidency. Yet, she’s an empty suit with a checkered resumé. It should rankle the parents of any working-class kid who was booted for the same infractions committed by the appointed sovereign of Harvard College, one whose academic accomplishments are extremely thin and plagued by charges of academic fraud, plagiarism (see below).
The disgraced Claudine Gay, and protected, at a Harvard graduation
Don’t think for a moment that she’s relegated to a bread line after her resignation. She’ll still garner $900,000 a year as a Harvard professor. She’s protected no matter how bad she’s been. If that doesn’t pore salt into the open wound of the “unprotected”, nothing will.
Yet, where does the recognition of this new political battle line take us? Nowhere, and fast.
Politically, it could easily end in a disaster. Are the animated “unprotected” sufficient in number to constitute a governing electoral majority? Recent history makes that possibility very tenuous. The Trump victory of 2016 was by the skin of his teeth. With narrow majorities for both parties in Congress during his term, it teetered wildly between Reaganite measures and Trump impeachment. By 2018 and 2020, the Republican congressional footprint shrunk. The expected GOP banner year of 2022 would go down as the Great Disappointment. It is apparent that a rebellion of the bellicose “unprotected” isn’t enough. Plus, you have to factor into the political calculus what is lost in a stance catering to the shrillest in those ranks.
And that brings me to Donald Trump. As a character on our political stage, he’s both the middle finger to the “protected” and repulsive, repugnant to large swaths of the voting public open to the GOP being the antidote to the left-wing lunacy coming from our so-called “betters”( the “protected”), the supporting mass of the Democrats’ progressivism. Is the goal of a political campaign to win or simply be a stage for venting? Losing leaves only the wallowing in wild conspiratorial excuses.
Chief among the excuses is the charge that the system is rigged. It is, and the complainers (the “unprotected”) are right to be up in arms. The pandemic brought it all into the spotlight. Protests for thee but not for me. Private and open schools for thee and closed ones and distance-learning for my kids. Then, parents learned of the hard-core porn and neo-Marxist indoctrination that were being inculcated into their children. The “unprotected” experienced the loss of one to two years of learning while the “protected” raced forward in their exclusive private academies. Small and medium businesses were shuttered and jobs lost leaving a monopoly for the bigs. Cops closing down church services as rioters were free to torch the downtowns and federal courthouses from one megalopolis to the next. 2020 to 21 was a disgrace, courtesy of the “protected”.
Though, admittedly, the rigged-system charge sounds eerily like the banal Marxist complaint, the one wholly embraced by the “protected” Left. When a complaint goes “systematic”, that’s carte blanche to tear down the society, the system, a totalitarian uprising. This time from the right, Donald Trump hinted as much when he suggested that his followers should not adhere to the niceties of the Constitution. To correct the alleged fraud of his election loss, on Truth Social in late 2022, Trump called for “the termination of all rules . . . even those found in the Constitution” (see below). He quickly took a rhetorical two-step away from it. But still, root-and-branch actions to upend the “system” was broached by a figurehead on the Right. The Constitution to the woke snowflakes is a white man’s slavery compact. For Trumpers, and Trump himself, it is a compact for sinecures of the “protected” Left and election fraud. For both sides, the ends justify the means. History is not encouraging about the repercussions of that tact.
I’m not quite ready for the Hobbesian life of solitary, nasty, brutish, and short outside the rule of law. Yet, that’s a possible destination for the country for both sides.
As we head into election season 2024, the faces of both parties – Biden and Trump – appear ugly to overwhelming numbers of voters. It’s a battle of the repulsive. FiveThirtyEight’s list of current polls consistently register disgust. Media and the incendiary commentariat focus on the head-to-head matchup. Trump is up, Biden is down, but regardless, 52% to 55% consistently view both with a jaundiced eye (see below). If Biden v. Trump II was pay-for-view, the investors would face a ratings disaster.
My worry is the down-ballot. If Trump should win, it won’t be by much, and he won’t have coattails, never has. If Biden wins, ditto. If elected, I expect Trump to be immediately impeached if the Democrats ascend to the majority in the House and Senate. If roles were reversed and Biden wins, Republicans will impeach not only Biden but his entire cabinet, leaving the VP to giggle and uptalk her way through the next four years. Unitary GOP government would give us more chief executive flamboyance and impulsiveness, and Trump isolationism and protectionism. Unitary donkey party rule will be an attempt to turn the country into California. Either way, the “unprotected” will get screwed either as part-and-parcel of them getting what they want – Trump elected and proving the failure of protectionism, isolationism, and chaos in the executive once again – or being the target of command-and-control social engineering after another Trump election failure and more donkey party eco-totalitarianism.
The “unprotected”, by themselves, don’t make an electoral majority. Their middle finger to the “protected”, in the person of Donald Trump, is repugnant to the vast center of the electorate. The goal of politics in democracies is to win and the “unprotected” don’t have the numbers by themselves. Trump is a divisive figure, not a unifying one. After all, he’s a middle finger, not a statesman. Thus, by default, given the narrow appeal of the orange man, the “protected” have a good chance of remaining protected and in power to continue to make hash of our lives. We need to move beyond a mere repeat of the same contest and practice a little more election calculus. The equation ends in the unavoidable conclusion: if the “unprotected” want protection, first, win elections!
RogerG
Sources:
* “Trump and the Rise of the Unprotected”, Peggy Noonan, originally published in the Wall Street Journal, 2/25/2016, at https://peggynoonan.com/trump-and-the-rise-of-the-unprotected/
* “Is Claudine Gay a Plagiarist?”, Christopher Rufo and Christopher Brunet, 12/10/23, at https://christopherrufo.com/p/is-claudine-gay-a-plagiarist
* “Trump Backtracks On Calling For ‘Termination’ Of Constitution Following Backlash”, Sara Dorn, Forbes, 12/5/22, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2022/12/05/trump-backtracks-on-calling-for-termination-of-constitution-following-backlash/?sh=7118d1d74161
* FiveThirtyEight latest polls at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/
Solar panels and windmills in India. The scene is familiar in the USA, especially California.Utility bill shock thanks to “sustainable” energy
King Claudius: “O, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven. It hath the primal eldest curse upon it. A brother’s murder.” — Hamlet, William Shakespeare
King Claudius in Zeffirelli’s “Hamlet” from 1990
Claudius’s lament was over the festering memory of his murder of his brother to gain the throne. Today, similarly, we have much to lament. People who should know better, but don’t, are our bane. It’s unsettling as we watch the barbarous takeover occurring before our eyes. The religio-ideology of environmentalism and genderism is poisoning us as Claudius did his brother King Hamlet.
The offenses to good order are mounting daily. In some west coast states (Washington, California for example), mental health professionals are forbidden by law to use any other approach to gender dysphoria than acceptance of a teen’s declaration of their new sexual identity. For the parents, they are straitjacketed into only assent to juvenile whims. Any other response is treated as criminal child abuse. It’s a command for fully irreversible teenage mental and genital mutilation. In some states, even famously conservative ones, voters have approved in clever wording an open license to expunge the next generation. People are tramping to the polls to give individuals the power to end human life from conception to the moment of exit from the birth canal, and maybe after as well. Don’t be fooled with the feigned “health of the mother” check since it’s been interpreted out of existence. On the eco front, climate-change is the cudgel to brow-beat people into a depreciation of their own and their children’s prosperity. Disfigured children, abortion mills, and a completely fabricated and permanent mass decline in the standard of living could be our lot if we continue down this path.
Sex change operation. Massachusetts mandates insurers cover sex-change treatments.
A mass propaganda push ensues to manufacture broad compliance with this dystopia. Search engines are in the vanguard. Try a Google or Bing search for “states who ban alternatives to gender affirming care”. You’ll get the opposite: states who ban gender affirming care, not those who banned alternatives. It’s the wrong end of the telescope. You have to come up with the partisan jargon employed by the revolutionaries against their opponents to get an inkling, albeit a distorted one, of the proper state of play. For instance, the rhetorical contrivance “conversion therapy” must be employed, which in actuality is talking therapies to help a person come to grips with their birth gender, but is now freighted with sinister connotations throughout most of the search offerings.
Likewise, the campaigns of illogic and ideological activism litter the search results on climate change. “Criticisms of climate change ideology” in Bing actually listed criticisms of the critics of climate change ideology. In third place, right behind the left-wing Guardian’s “’Word salad of nonsense’: scientists denounce Jordan Peterson’s comments on climate models” and ExxonMobil’s PR-kowtowing to the hysteria, was David Vetter’s piece in Forbes, “5 Big Lies About Climate Change [from critics], And How Researchers Trained A Machine To Spot Them” (see below). I’m amply familiar with the arguments having taught college-level Physical Geography for years.
David Vetter is an architype of the activist journalist with some exposure to science, actually an ideologically-laden version of science, not “science” as such. His LinkedIn page tells the tale. He matriculated through Cardiff University to a masters in International Journalism, and then he’s off to Oxford for a masters in Science – not anything approaching Physics, mind you, but the science of “Sustainability, Enterprise, & Environment”. It’s a little bit of science, only enough to buttress the activism, and a whole lot of ideology.
David Vetter (Forbes profile pic)
His article immediately produced the poker tell of non-science masquerading as science. In the very first sentence he gave away the store: “the science is settled”. What? The science of something as complex as our climate is “settled”, settled in the sense that we can move immediately to hammering in the coffin nails to our personal prosperity, justifying an end to cheap, reliable energy? Understanding the relationships between the many elements of our atmosphere and the natural and human injections into it is a perpetual scientific enterprise. “The science is settled” doesn’t cut it. It’s the pitch of the activist, not the scientist who wants to be respected as a scientist.
The sleight-of-hand of “the science is settled” leads to attempts to make the chicanery seem unassailable. One way is to construct a black box which will conjure condemnations of their critics. Vetter in his piece uncritically describes exactly that. Politicized scientists devised software to tar opinions that they don’t like. They’ve come up with a way to artificially make their opinions superior to those of their critics without having to scientifically prove it. It’s more sleight-of-hand to hide the initial sleight-of-hand. Garbage in, garbage out.
Target #1 for the hysterics like Vetter is the grid. Prepare yourself for vast stretches of the landscape and seascape consumed under huge blankets of solar panels and forests of mammoth windmills stretching over the horizon, and intermittency, brownouts, blackouts, and bankrupting energy bills. Target #2 is your car.
Your car must fit into this central planner’s dream. That’s no easy task. Today’s common vehicle with its internal combustion engine (ICE) was the result of decades, a century and a half, of trial-and-error and interplay of many generations of tinkerers, producers and consumers. Now, the economics of organic development are to be suddenly replaced by the central commands of politicians and their government bureaus. Out of politics – for government is politics and politics is government – come the central planners’ edicts in the form of numerical quotas on date certain. Collectivists of all stripes love blunt commands to bring everyone into line. It’s the mental fingerprint of totalitarians. Stalin loved his Five-Year Plans. The CCP loved their one-child policy and forced abortions on a grand scale. From today (2023) to 2050, the plan is for all of us to be shoehorned into their choice for us.
Extolling the virtues of central planning in the Soviet Union
Would you fly on a plane designed in a confab between technocrats of the Department of Commerce and the staff of Bernie Sanders? Count me out. The electric vehicle isn’t that much different. Oh, the cabal won’t engineer the thing from the ground up. They don’t have to. Stalin’s potentates in Gosplan (Soviet central planning agency) and the politburo didn’t. They just ordered the heavy-manufactured thing into existence like God in Genesis, but left the dirty details to less-than-benighted underlings. In America, failure is rewarded in unionization and civil service protections, something called tenure. For Stalin and the gang, failure in living up to the fancies of the junta means show trials for “wreckers”, zek-status in the Gulag Archipelago, or a mass grave in Kurapaty Forest.
Our ruling over-caffeinated simpletons are following a movie script, “Field of Dreams”. The farmer Ray in the movie hears a voice telling him, “If you build it, he will come”. It’s the activists’ voice in the heads of Gov. Gavin Newsom, his super majority of totalitarian utopians in the state legislature, everywhere the donkey party is in power, and the entire Democratic Party ensconced in DC. Translation: “Build the EV, and we’ll force the others to buy it.” But the thing ordered into mass production, and the forced scuttling of the second largest family investment, is a mass incoherency.
As a golf cart in a Florida planned-unit-development, it’s a great concept. Try selling the thing to anyone travelling a couple of hours to do their once-a-month Costco shopping, visit grandma, or road-tripping to Yellowstone. Try selling the idea to anyone responsible for distributing the tonnage from port to Amazon warehouse to your suburban doorstep waiting for thieves to take it. Not everyone lives in the tightly packed confines of our urban hellscapes. Not everyone lives within reach of California’s coastal Highway 1. The EV is designed for pampered urbanites living in mild climates, and close to the frequently vandalized charging stations – much like everything else vandalized in our cities – which are tied to a grid made unreliable by the same geniuses forcing you into the EV. Does any of this compute?
The ridiculousness of it all is intensified by the flight of the middle class from our decaying cities. It seems that people with kids don’t appreciate over-taxation, skyrocketing housing costs, a cost of living made unsustainable by those things labeled “sustainable”, the crime and broad urban dysfunction, the Soviet-style schools, and the horrible thought that once your kid is infected with the social contagion of gender confusion, they’ll fall into the clutches of those who are striving to permanently scar their minds and bodies, and you won’t be able to do anything about it. Imagine it: H.G. Wells’s “Island of Dr. Moreau” made real.
Of course, the advocates of dystopia will face declining congressional representation each new census. But, wait, the activists in and out of government have an answer for this new unintended consequence of coercing others to live the activists’ dreams. They’ll just open the immigration floodgates to the global poor. Then, these teeming hordes will be shuttled in sufficient volume to fill the vacuum left by the skedaddling middle class in time for the next census.
Still, more of the taxpaying middle class will be scattered over flyover country, in places unsuitable for the bi-coastal, urban zeitgeist of EV-love. The weather doesn’t cooperate, and the long distances can quickly turn the EV into a death trap. Oh, well, they’ll vote Republican; so, who cares? Right?
Stuck in an EV in winter waiting for a charge
The whole incongruency – in exchanging what works for what doesn’t – glares at you in the face. When it comes time to get rid of the EV, there isn’t much of a resale market for it (see below). Once used, who wants it, because who knows how those delicate batteries were treated? Not staying within the optimal charging window of 20%-80% and frequent fast-charges permanently sap it. Has anyone religiously followed the strictures in charging their cellphone, or anything for that matter run on a rechargeable battery? What makes you think that it’ll be any different with the Biden-car? You can’t order an end to quick-charging if you want to sell the thing to anyone with a life, nor will mandatory gizmos to prevent over-charging be any more effective. You’ll have to perform the mental trick of 80% becoming 100%. 300 miles of range is actually 240; but long before that, systems start shutting down to preserve power to the wheels. Playing it safe by over-charging is the norm. And do you think that people in the resale market don’t know this? If they don’t, they’ll soon discover it.
Our future?
Let’s put numbers to the absurdity. The numbskulls in central planning realize that everyone, including the unwashed masses trying to get to work and the kids to school and soccer practice, must be in an EV to create the illusion of mass acceptance of the contraption. The rich can afford anything, including Elon Musk’s latest offering, with or without a government bribe, er, subsidy, er, rebate, er, fully refundable tax credit. So, the bribes ($7,500) are concocted with income ceilings: $300,000 for married couples filing jointly, $150,000 for individuals (see below). And you won’t have to wait to file your taxes to get it.
To keep leasing within the totalitarian fold, it’s even easier to garner the bribe since the dealer and you don’t have to worry much about the red tape of the domestic content and manufacture folderol of an outright purchase.
The problem is, with leasing and rentals, they’re swelling the used-EV supply. But dealers and rental companies can’t get rid of them. They’re stuck with something quickly losing its value. EVs are the worst segment in the used car market, their value collapsing nearly 50% in five years after purchase. Rental companies are limiting their purchases and some such as Sixt SE won’t buy any more Teslas. And to think that the zealots in power want you to buy the thing where it’ll occupy half the floor space in your garage next to the thing that works, the thing for which you are holding onto in a death grip – your good ‘ol fossil-fueled sedan. Indeed, the central planners’ dream stinks to high heaven, while collecting dust among all the other junk in your garage.
To hide the disruption and devastation in the automobile industry, the euphemism “transition” will be applied and a host of subsidies, kickbacks, tax largesse, and domestic-content favoritism will be showered on Detroit. Meanwhile, as lunch-pail Joe shows solidarity with UAW strikers, his administration is bribing and coercing their employer into reducing the payroll. The planners’ forecast of growing employment in the EV’s “battery belt” to replace losses elsewhere should ring hollow to UAW members since America’s “belt” is mostly in the non-union South. Still, net jobs in the industry could very well be negative. Hints abound of things to come. Stellantis, parent of Chrysler, announced in December 2023 that they plan to cut 3,600 jobs in the unionized Midwest due to California’s increasingly draconian fuel-efficiency standards. Mandatory EV sales targets as a percentage of all sales and these blunt mpg targets encourage compliance by not necessarily increasing production of EVs, or expanding total production, but lowering production across the board. It’s a side effect of California zealotry, and, after all, Biden’s and Schumer’s DC is California, Jr.
Where California goes, the donkey party’s national potentates follow. It’s said of California that lately the only thing that it produces in abundance is refugees in an imitation of Marxism-Leninism behind the Iron Curtain. Wrong. It’s bad ideas. CARB (California Air Resources Board) has ordered into existence something that doesn’t exist: “zero-emission” locomotives (see below). First, the CARB authoritarians have ordered the train companies to squirrel away money in preparation for their 2035 deadline when all new locomotives will be, magically, “zero emission”.
Of course, if you throw enough money at any Salvador Dali-like adventure into surrealism, reality can be forcibly contorted to fit the vision, but who wants to live in the result? Who can live in the result? The things carrying the freight will likely be battery-powered with less toque and horsepower, less range, less hauling capacity. It’s the same approach in the state’s edicts for tractor/trailers, the trucking industry. The consequence is batteries, batteries everywhere, and diminishment of your well-being. Shortages, jumps in distribution costs, and mounting difficulties in getting anything for producers and consumers will translate into you living poorer. The average person will get smacked, and royally.
The reality of California’s battery-powered locomotive?
But your well-being is beside the point for utopians drunk with power. Without a doubt, this is state tyranny as obvious as slavery in the ante-bellum South. A state in the grip of lunacy shouldn’t be allowed to drag everyone else into its self-imposed quicksand, which is the current state of affairs. Clearly, ports, trucking, and trains are the stuff of interstate commerce, and the feds in the Constitution govern it (Art. I, Sec. 8, Cl. 3). Also, clearly, California is interfering with it, obstructing it. Any state action so egregiously injurious to interstate commerce should be brought to heel. Existing Supreme Court case law affirms the Constitution’s plain language in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), Wickard v. Filburn (1942), Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States (1964), Katzenbach v. McClung (1964), et al.
So, the power is there; why isn’t it exercised? Our federal government is crippled by two evenly matched and irreconcilable sides. One is in the grip of neo-Marxism and the other, the antidote, is consumed in a repulsive cult of personality. Much of the blame for this sorry deadlock lies with the electorate, for they are equally befuddled by two unpalatable options, or they’re boosters of the nonsense. They won’t, and maybe can’t, give the antidote the requisite overwhelming majorities in Congress and the executive branch to right the ship. We end up muddling through with California idiocy pulling the rest of the country into a morass.
It’s all so worrisome as we inch closer to a government-engineered suppression of our personal prospects.
More could be said of California’s inspiration in the federal government’s latest assault on the ubiquitous electric motors used in all American manufacturing. It’s more of the same ilk. They want to onshore manufacturing while they pummel manufacturers with an additional cost of $20,000 per employee in new regulations. It’s like the EV and batteries, batteries everywhere. Something stinks to high heaven; or, more accurately, it’s as toxic as phosgene or chlorine gas wafting over WWI battlefields. King Claudius has nothing on these dunces.
RogerG
Sources:
* “5 Big Lies About Climate Change, And How Researchers Trained A Machine To Spot Them”, David Vetter, Forbes, 11/19/21, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidrvetter/2021/11/19/5-big-lies-about-climate-change-and-why-researchers-trained-a-machine-to-spot-them/?sh=9d2a24349f47
* “2023 Study Shows Electric Vehicles Are Worst for Resale Value”, Marc Wiley, MotorBiscuit, 11/14/23, at https://www.motorbiscuit.com/studies-show-electric-vehicles-worst-resale-value/
* “Top 25 Cars That Hold Their Value the Best – and the 25 Worst: Electric vehicles are the worst at holding their value, while hybrids, sports cars and trucks depreciate the least”, ISeeCars, 11/6/23, at https://www.iseecars.com/cars-that-hold-their-value-study#v=2023
* “The $7,500 tax credit for electric cars will see big changes in 2024. What to know”, Camila Domonoske, NPR, 12/28/23, at https://www.npr.org/2023/12/28/1219158071/ev-electric-vehicles-tax-credit-car-shopping-tesla-ford-vw-gm
* For a horror story with a rental EV: “Car-Rental Companies Are Ruining EVs: Good luck charging your surprise electric rental car.”, Saahil Desai, The Atlantic, 6/16/2023, at https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/06/electric-vehicle-rental-cars-hertz-chargers/674429/
* “No one wants to buy used EVs and they’re piling up in weed-infested graveyards”, Monica Raymunt and Bloomberg, Fortune, 12/22/23, at https://fortune.com/2023/12/22/no-one-wants-to-buy-used-ev-piling-weed-infested-graveyards-tesla-bmw-vw/amp/
* “California Kills Auto Jobs in Toledo: Stellantis warns of layoffs in the Midwest owing to the Golden State’s electric-vehicle mandate.”, The Editorial Board, The Wall Street Journal, 12/11/23, at https://www.wsj.com/articles/california-kills-auto-jobs-in-toledo-electric-vehicle-mandate-15c44a5c?mod=hp_opin_pos_1
* “California Mandates Green Trains That Don’t Exist”, Dominic Pino, National Review, 12/28/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/california-mandates-green-trains-that-dont-exist/
In “Poltergeist II”, the little girl stares into the snow of the TV screen and announces, “They’re baaaaack!”. Who’s back? The ghosts, of course. For those chronicling the decline of California, the iconic declaration must be reworked. A person staring at their daily news feed comes away with stories of people leaving the state saying, “They’re leeeeeeeeeeaving!” This time, it’s Time magazine in “Americans Are Fleeing Los Angeles More Than Anywhere Else for First Time” (see below).
The little girl from “Poltergeist II”
And I quote from the story: “Los Angeles was not at the top of the list [of places to move to], instead becoming the area residents were most likely to move away from.” According to a Redfin report, “That marks the first time on record [LA] has been the number one place homebuyers are leaving, and the first time in over two years the Bay Area has dropped out of the number one spot.”
A dubious distinction for the not-so-Golden State. LA occupies the top spot, but the rest of the list is a who’s who of American urban dystopia, all of them Democratic Party satraps. San Francisco, New York City, Washington, D.C., Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit and Denver are kryptonite to businesses and the middle class. People are voting with their feet as they have for millennia. Hell on earth is not a magnet.
A common strip of homelessness in Los AngelesLitter from the chronic mobs of thieves along rail lines in Los Angeles
Welcome to urban America, and for the globe-trotting foreign traveler, reconsider that visit to the City by the Bay or Disneyland. Unless you’re a member of a major bowl game broadcast crew like the ESPN team reporting from the floor of the Rose Bowl, who’ll speed from the airport to hotel to the Rose Bowl in a limousine, you’ll risk face-to-face encounters with urban dysfunction.
For Californians, get out. For visitors, stay away.
RogerG
Source:
* “Americans Are Fleeing Los Angeles More Than Anywhere Else for First Time”, Suzanne Blake, Time, 12/29/23, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/americans-are-fleeing-los-angeles-more-than-anywhere-else-for-first-time/ar-AA1md8sC?ocid=msedgntp&pc=LCTS&cvid=483db5997a504d34a10fb00840ed94db&ei=52
The Trump slogan “Make America Great Again” is in my view a noble sentiment. America is a dispirited nation today. In some ways we have become a laughingstock on the international stage (Remember Kabul?). Our navy has fallen under 300 ships which means that a focus on saving Israel effectively could be an abandonment of Taiwan. Our defense industrial base is so emaciated that it can hardly support our peacetime military, let alone two stalwart allies like Ukraine and Israel willing to bleed in defense of the West. We eviscerate ourselves in masochistic eco self-flagellation and race/gender Marxism. This, for me, should be the impetus for a real campaign to Make America Great Again.
But inside that cluster of elements surrounding Trump comes a special definition for Great. “Great”, for them, is tantamount to isolationism: diplomatically, militarily, and economically. America for these folks becomes a better place when we abandon the world under the guise of our domestic problems. This won’t end well. MAGA has made itself into a funeral dirge for America.
Michael Ramirez is my go-to cartoonist for he captures our current moment so well. Ramirez harkens back to the conservatism of Reagan, Thatcher, Buckley, Goldwater, and back to a time when we had a 600-ship navy, and not to the Trump cult of personality with its infatuation for isolationism.
In the cartoon, Ramirez reminds us of the bloody future awaiting us when we let despots run wild on the continent of Europe. Trumpkins are oblivious. Dickens’s specter of Christmas Yet to Come stands before us.
During the Cold War, the Soviets in their efforts to harness to their side the so-called Third World – mostly poorer, developing and nominally nonaligned countries (at least officially not tied to the western or communist bloc) – created a “university” to train the next generation of Marxist revolutionaries. Modeled on Soviet “education”, the schooling is premised, straitjacketed, on the absolute truth of Karl Marx’s revolutionary dialectic. Deeply implanted is the alleged Marxist reality of systemic oppression, the same kind of thing now commonplace in our schools of higher ed, and lower.
The Soviet tactic was to hide the indoctrination behind the name of a popular “hero” like Patrice Lumumba. Officially titled Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow implanted Marxist thought in the next generation of revolutionaries and activists from around the world. Notable alumni include a long list of murderous malcontents such as the terrorist Carlos the Jackal, Iran’s totalitarian mullah Ali Khamenei, the Sandinista dictator Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, and the one-man-one-vote-one-time ruler Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority.
Students at Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, 1985Carlos the Jackal
The politicized heirs could include much of the college graduating classes in the U.S. going back at least a decade or two. The Marxist-thought concept is infectious and is now established ideological orthodoxy throughout the college landscape across America. Scholarship is bastardized by Marxist jargon, politically weighted vocabulary for which no one is allowed question. Thought begins with the boilerplate, ends with the boilerplate. This passes for learning in America (and elsewhere).
In a previous post, I wrote of the troubles at Bakersfield College, the Kern Community College District, and the Community College System in California. Clearly, the intellectual rot doesn’t begin or end there. The results are found in the polling of the under-24s. The recent Harvard/Harris poll shows 51% of the 18-to-24 cohort supported the ending of the state of Israel and turning it over “to Hamas and the Palestinians”. Increasingly, these people aren’t just liberal; they’re Marxist, having applied the Marxist rhetoric of oppressor and colonizer to Israel. It is what is meant by “not being liberal enough”. Translation: being Marxist. Welcome to America’s future.
We’d be much more honest with ourselves if we renamed all American higher ed Patrice Lumumba Universities because that is what they are. Parents, beware, you might be subsidizing the future authors of the next holocaust.
The bodies of people, some of them elderly, lie on a street after they were killed during a mass-infiltration by Hamas gunmen from the Gaza Strip, in Sderot, southern Israel, Oct. 7, 2023. (Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad)
RogerG
Sources:
* “Poll: Most young Americans think Israel should be ‘ended and given to Hamas’”, Toi Staff, The Times of Israel, 12/17/23, at https://www.timesofisrael.com/poll-most-young-americans-back-ending-israel-many-find-jewish-genocide-calls-okay/
How did we get to this place? In one of the last remaining conservative bastions in a state gone neo-Marxist, the area’s community college district – Kern County CCD – is at the vanguard of the same poisonous revolution engulfing Sacramento and the Left-happy denizens on the populous coastal plain. I left the state, and a near 30-year academic career in the county, because there’s no escaping the toxic governing philosophy that holds sway over the entire state. County boundaries are no protection. The lines don’t shelter your schools from being engines of state-sanctioned revolutionary indoctrination.
I got out. You too may be left with no other option.
The happenings in the District and its main Bakersfield College campus are a scandal. A few names and words typify the sickening situation. Sonya Christian (no “Dr.” designation because it is reserved for those who passed their medical boards; PhDs in Education don’t qualify), English instructor Paula Parks (no “Dr.” designation; ditto), John Corkins (radicalized president of the Kern Community College Board of Trustees), radical jargon like DEI, and faculty counterrevolutionaries such as Daymon Johnson, Matthew Garrett, and Erin Miller of The Renegade Institute for Liberty at Bakersfield College (see Facebook page below)
Sonya Christian
Karl Marx wrote and spoke of a “false consciousness” among the people that prevents the revolutionary uprising. “False consciousness” is reserved for those who simply disagree, the counterrevolutionaries. It must be overcome and control of the schools is essential to that end. In a recent meeting of the Board of Trustees, its president, John Corkins, reminiscent of Lenin before his Council of People’s Commissars, called for the extermination of faculty who dare to oppose the revolution’s DEI ideology. Corkins said in reference to the faculty critics of the revolution’s doctrines – in essence, those guilty of “false consciousness” – of the need to “cull the herd”. He said, “We put a rope on some of ’em and take ’em to the slaughterhouse”.
John Corkins
In 1918, a Bolshevik organ, Krasnaya Gazeta, in the midst of their revolution put it in similar terms: “Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands; let them drown themselves in their own blood . . . . let there be floods of the blood of the bourgeois – more blood, as much as possible.” Culling the herd, indeed.
More shocking were the reputed erudites seated to his right at the trustee table who were smiling, giggling, and nodding in approval. See for yourself in the video clip from the meeting. It was a monstrous display of revolutionary groupthink.
Corkins was caught in the fever of a revolutionary moment, like the editors of Krasnaya Gazeta, and subsequently apologized. Yet, it’s a window into the mind of a revolutionary. In that mind lies a modern manifestation of an old revolutionary dialectic in the form of DEI – “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion”, or more accurately, “Discrimination, Exclusion, Indoctrination” in the words of Wisconsin’s Robin Voss (R.), Speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly.
“Diversity” is code for a return to race-based hiring, promotions, and admissions. “Equity” is code for a spoils system for selected “protected classes” (synonymous with the Marxist “oppressed”). “Inclusion” is code for excising western civilization from instruction and replacing it with a litany of oppression by oppressors noted for their light pigmentation, male genitalia, and membership in wealthier societies. “Privilege” and “systemic” is more jargon to that end.
How any of this can pass the muster of the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and UNC decisions (2023) is difficult to imagine. Chief Justice John Roberts put it succinctly in an earlier case (2007) when he wrote in the majority opinion, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” DEI is illegal if the rule of law has any meaning today.
Some didn’t get the Roberts memo, or more accurately ignored it in a brazen flaunting of the rule of law. The state’s Leninist Attorney General, Rob Bonta, rushed to the defense of Sonya Christian, chancellor of the state’s community college system and past president of both the Kern Community College District and Bakersfield College, and the target of lawsuits filed by faculty victims of the purge and loyalty oaths to the revolution. Bonta tried to recast the DEI mandates as advice, suggestions, or general guidelines, or “competencies” in Christian’s words. DEI “competencies” (or whatever) “advising” descriptions of the ways that the faculty will implement the revolution’s doctrines into classroom management, instruction, and grading is ipso facto forced endorsement of the revolution. Orwell’s Ministry of Truth would be proud.
Rob Bonta, state Attorney General
Others have also noticed the discrepancy between the law and California’s zeal for neo-Marxist revolution in the upper reaches of its community colleges. In a matter related to the lawsuit filed by the Institute for Free Speech on behalf of BC history professor Daymon Johnson against the district’s forced fealty to “anti-racist” ideology, a U.S. magistrate judge ruled that the district was wrong for stepping into a spat between faculty members Johnson and English prof Andrew Bond. At issue was an incendiary Facebook post by Bond:
“Maybe Trump’s comment about sh**hole countries was a statement of projection because honestly, the US is a f***ing piece of sh** nation. Go ahead and quote me, conservatives.”
Andrew Bond, left-wing activist and BC English profMatthew Garrett, BC History profDaymon Johnson, BC History prof
Johnson responded by suggesting that Bond “move to China”. And for that, Bond filed an administrative complaint of bullying against Johnson. Hyper-sensitive academics unable to engage in discourse have no business instructing anyone’s student body. The magistrate’s ruling is advisory while the lawsuit is pending before the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of California.
But it was the case regarding history prof Matthew Garrett that drew the ire of Corkins in his infamous remarks that “bad actors” like Garrett needed to be “culled” to the slaughterhouse. What was Garrett’s great and unforgiveable sin? He presented a different point of view to the reigning DEI orthodoxy on campus. He had the temerity of defending on free speech grounds “Smash Cultural Marxism”, etc., bumper stickers. And he was hauled before an administrative tribunal for criticizing the controversial University of Southern California Race and Equity Center poll on campus racism; trying to host a conservative speaker in violation of the school’s COVID restrictions at a time of approved progressive events, a jazz festival, football banquet, and a Day of the Dead celebration; and chiding “safe spaces” for black students as “segregation”. If Andrew Bond’s “the US is a f***ing piece of sh** nation” earns nary a glance of concern, what to make of the administrative hammer bearing down on Garrett for presenting a coherent alternative point of view?
Sonya Christian’s influence on campus during her tenure has been anything but salutary. She’s a lightning rod; her allegiance to neo-Marxist dogmas is provocative because the dogmas are provocative. They goad reaction because revolutions of this nature are totalitarian. They repudiate the central tenets of liberty which is a cornerstone of our society. The revolutionary ends now justify the revolutionary means.
Take a look, Kern County residents, at what your Board of Trustees is doing in your name. Please watch the clip. In the meantime, resist or leave the state. Your choices are simple at this juncture. Good luck.
RogerG
Sources:
* “California college trustee is forced to apologize after he was recorded saying anyone opposing woke anti-racism and ‘equity’ measures should be ‘roped’ and taken to the SLAUGHTERHOUSE”, Melissa Koenig, Daily Mail, 1/3/23, at https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11596097/California-college-trustee-apologizes-saying-opposing-anti-racism-roped.html
* “California’s Troubled Community-College System Just Got Worse”, Will Swaim, National Review, 12/16/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/12/californias-troubled-community-college-system-just-got-worse/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=fifth
* Daymon Johnson’s lawsuit case filing: “Johnson v. Watkin”, Institute for Free Speech, 6/5/23, at https://www.ifs.org/cases/johnson-v-watkin/
* The Renegade Institute for Liberty at Bakersfield College Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100048586580019
* “LENIN AND THE USE OF TERROR: SOME IMPORTANT QUOTATIONS”, World Future Fund, at https://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Quotes/leninkeyquotes.htm#:~:text=We%20will%20let%20loose%20the%20floodgates%20of%20that,bourgeois%20-%20more%20blood%2C%20as%20much%20as%20possible.%E2%80%9D
ntiwar March outside Crisler Arena on the University of Michigan Campus, September 20, 1969. Courtesy of The Detroit News Collection, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University.
Stalwarts of America First (SAF) approved the following manifesto on July 24, 2022: “[SAF] advocates that the U.S. get out of [Ukraine] for the following reasons: (a) the war hurts the [Ukrainian] people; (b) the war hurts the American people; (c) [SAF] is concerned about the [Ukrainian] and American people.”
The above is a bit of fiction. Most of the manifesto wording, with the substitution of “SAF” and “Ukrainian” for “SDS” and “Vietnamese”, was originally the official demand of the overt socialist Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) for an immediate U.S. withdrawal from South Vietnam that was approved prior to their notorious March on Washington, April 17, 1965. Give it a few years and their wish would be fulfilled, and the demons turned loose. All of Indochina fell in reeducation camps, gulags, executions, a genocide of the Laotian Hmong people, the Khmer Rouge bloodlust in Cambodia, a quarter million boat people, the hammer-and-sickle red flag flying over all of Indochina.
This time, it’s Ukraine on the chopping block, and the appeasement is coming from the right in a fit of real pretzel logic. Could it be “He must be for it; therefore, I must be against it” at work? People who placed Black Lives Matter yard signs out front in 2020 are flying the flag of Ukraine in 2022. Democrats and Biden cheer Zelensky; therefore, Zelensky and Ukraine are suspect. Is it that infantile? Don’t underestimate the slipshod reasoning of our so-called “thought leaders”, whether of the left or right.
Yep, peaceniks on the right. Who would have thunk it? It’s pretty bad when a person must turn to the always-wrong left for at least a glimmer of sense. Tucker Carlson, now banished to the hinterlands of podcast world, displayed a dose of the Left’s unhinged quality on the eve of the Soviet, er, Russian, invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In language reminiscent of the 1960’s New Left, Carlson accused Ukraine of being “a pure client state of the United States State Department”. After the invasion, he kept it up, throwing mud on Zelensky. He accused Zelensky of being a dictator, a demagogue. He, Zelensky, is charged by Carlson of taking “the opportunity to turn Ukraine into effectively a one-party state, which it now is.” He’s oblivious to the attempted obliteration of Zelensky’s country, or the fact that the martial law measures were passed by the Ukrainian parliament, a parliament that was really elected.
I wonder how long would it be before Carlson starts calling for the shuttering of the New York Times after the Peoples Liberation Army comes pouring over the Sierra Nevada. George Washington marched at the head of a militia force in 1794 to put down resistance to a tax. Carlson: “Der Fuehrer Washington”? I shutter to think about Carlson’s contempt for Lincon’s suspension of habeas corpus when Lincoln was confronted with the dissolution of the Union. Overwhelming threats to national survival make opposition to national existence under the guise of freedom a dangerous luxury. You may not agree but at least it’s understandable.
Tucker’s bloviating has earned him the respect of the Putin regime, the same junta that murders opposition at home and abroad, even before Putin’s tanks embarked on their misbegotten invasion in February 2022. He’s the go-to for Putin propaganda to buoy Russian spirits in the midst of the catastrophic losses. One headline in official state media, Russia Today, says it all: “Tucker Carlson wonders why U.S. elites hate Putin. Biden will pay for ‘defending freedom’ of Ukraine out of your pocket, controversial Fox host warns Americans.”
His compatriot at Fox News, Laura Ingraham, has similar sycophantic tendencies. Zelensky’s admonition to Putin to not attack his country was turned into “a pathetic plea” by Ingraham. She characterized the bid for conquest as just a “border dispute”. According to her, we are conditioned to “hate Putin” by the Dems, our media, the “establishment”, or something. There’s nothing to worry about from dear old Vlad. Whenever aid to Ukraine comes up, you can expect an insult directed at Zelensky or Ukraine from her. She did it again last night (12/15/2022).
Not everyone at Fox News agrees. Brian Kilmeade wouldn’t let Senator J.D. Vance (R-Oh.), a favorite of the Carlson/Ingraham crowd, get away with it. Vance on more aid to Ukraine: “It feels sometimes to me like we’re just shoveling money over there without any clear plan for what it’s meant to accomplish.” The no-plan, no-objective canard didn’t sell for Kilmeade: “Think down the line, though. You let Russia take 20% of a country, what about the next country? Give them another 20?… You gotta play this out. What don’t you understand about that?” Precisely.
rian Kilmeade on the couch to the right on Fox and Friends; Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Oh.) to the left.
Other voices from the newly emerging isolationist right have jumped onto the pro-Putin bandwagon with gusto. Candace Owens is foremost, after she removes her foot from her mouth. In a full-throated endorsement of Putin propaganda, she refuted Ukraine’s right to exist. She said, “Obviously Ukraine wasn’t a thing until 1989. Further, “Ukraine was created by the Russians. They speak Russian.” Actually, according to their latest census before the invasion, 29% of Ukrainians speak Russian as their first language.
Candace Owens
She went further. The Left has claimed for years that the U.S. is at fault for provoking our international conflicts. From the right comes Candace Owens to blame America first. She tweeted, “As I’ve said for [a] month— NATO (under direction from the United States) is violating previous agreements and expanding eastward. WE are at fault.” In her fevered imagination, we upset Vlad and we ought not tinker with the delicate sensibilities of a despot. This is akin to the hazy “systemic racism”. Think of systemic America’s fault, equally as vague as the chants of Antifa.
The retort to Owens came from an imminent historian of Soviet atrocities (the gulags, the Holodomor), Anne Applebaum. She succinctly tweeted in reference to Owens, “Behold the face of pure ignorance.” Quite right.
Anne Applebaum
The symmetry of the peacenik left and peacenik right is evident in recent remarks by that aging paragon of the 60s New Left, Noam Chomsky. He praises Trump for opposing aid to Ukraine. His compatriots at left-wing publications such as “Jacobin”, “New Left Review”, and “Democracy Now!” blame, like Owens, the U.S. and NATO for Putin’s brutal invasion. Is the horseshoe theory of politics – when the political extremes come to take common positions – validated in our time? Mmmmm, something to think about.
Appeasement doesn’t normally go well, especially on the continent of Europe. 1939-40 brought us the America First movement, and Hitler’s and Japan’s rampages over Europe and Asia. The 1960s brought us the New Left’s Anti-War Movement, and the bloodbath in Indochina. The Age of Trump has horseshoed us back to the old isolationism, this time under MAGA. What is in store for us under this New Right?
RogerG
Sources:
* “On the eve of war, Tucker Carlson defended Putin. Now he’s backpedaling”, Lorraine Ali, LA Times, 2/24/22, at https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2022-02-24/ukraine-russia-vladimir-putin-tucker-carlson-laura-ingraham-fox-news
* “Why America’s Far Right and Far Left Have Aligned Against Helping Ukraine”, Jan Dutkiewicz and Dominik Stecuła, Foreign Policy, 7/4/22, at https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/07/04/us-politics-ukraine-russia-far-right-left-progressive-horseshoe-theory/
* “Fox News Host Confronts GOP Senator J.D. Vance on Opposition to Ukraine Aid”, Fatma Khaled, Newsweek, 1/27/23, at https://www.newsweek.com/fox-news-host-confronts-gop-senator-jd-vance-opposition-ukraine-aid-1777122
* “Resistance and Revolution: The Anti-Vietnam War Movement at the University of Michigan, 1965-1972”, “The March on Washington”, at https://michiganintheworld.history.lsa.umich.edu/antivietnamwar/exhibits/show/exhibit/the_teach_ins/national_teach_in_1965#:~:text=The%20SDS%20March%20on%20Washington%20to%20End%20the,college%20students%20and%20others%20to%20the%20nation%E2%80%99s%20capital.
* “Tucker Carlson wonders why US elites hate Putin”, Russia Today (RT), 2/23/22, at https://www.rt.com/russia/550320-tucker-carlson-putin-hate/
* “Candace Owens Blames America For Russian Invasion of Ukraine: ‘WE Are at Fault’”, Caleb Howe, Mediaite, 2/22/22, at https://www.mediaite.com/politics/candace-owens-blames-america-for-russian-invasion-of-ukraine-we-are-at-fault/
* “‘Behold the face of pure ignorance’: Candace Owens mocked by Pulitzer-winning historian for Ukraine comment”, Gino Spocchia, The Independent, 3/19/22, at https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/candace-owens-ukraine-anne-applebaum-b2039581.html
* “Is Ukraine a Democracy? Separating Fact From Fiction”, Darragh Roche, Newsweek, 3/22/22, at https://www.newsweek.com/ukraine-democracy-separating-fact-fiction-russia-1690505
* “Tucker Carlson, downplaying Russia-Ukraine conflict, urges Americans to ask, ‘Why do I hate Putin?’”, Timothy Bella, Washington Post, 2/23/22, at https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/02/23/tucker-carlson-putin-russia-ukraine/
* “Tucker Carlson Challenges Zelensky to Prove Ukraine Is a Democracy”, Aleks Phillips, Newsweek, 1/23/23, at https://www.newsweek.com/tucker-carlson-volodymyr-zelensky-ukraine-democracy-1809590
* “Candace Owens Says U.S., NATO to Blame for Russia’s Ukraine Invasion”, Patricia McKnight, Newsweek, 2/22/22, at https://www.newsweek.com/candace-owens-says-us-nato-blame-russias-ukraine-invasion-1681589
* “Candace Owens Backs Putin’s Claim Russia Created Ukraine”, Katherine Fung, Newsweek, 3/16/22, at https://www.newsweek.com/candace-owens-backs-putins-claim-russia-created-ukraine-1688700
