At the risk of violating the third commandment, good God, what is California thinking? In a recently introduced bill (AB 2223), California could be on the verge legalizing the killing of newborns. I’m pro-life but also aware of the political complexities of the abortion issue and the need for compromise. But this is madness! Absolutists can be demented, and these abortion Robespierres are proving the point.
Yes, the Democrats are quickly turning into abortion Jacobins. Instead of marching political moderates and monarchists off to the guillotine in days of yore, it’s the youngest of our children, the most helpless among us. The DC Democrats, hiding behind their euphemistic Women’s Health Protection Act, want to strip the parents out of the picture by federal statute when it comes to abortion and their minor children. Now, in the deep blue state of California, it is proposed that the abortion “right” be extended to those babies who successfully exited the womb. This ghastly act is decriminalized by an explicit prohibition of any legal action (investigation or prosecution) against anyone regarding a “pregnancy outcome” and “perinatal” and “postpartum care”. What’s that mean? If a baby ends up dead, there’s no way to determine the reason. All that’s left is to cart off the little lifeless body. The super majority in the California legislature is working overtime to earn a spot next to Josef Mengele and his Auschwitz medical staff in the deepest level of Hell in Dante’s Inferno.
We already know that Governor Newsom is a booster of abortion tourism as the state’s next big hospitality industry to add to Disneyland and Knox Berry Farm. Yet, the killing of babies to replace the hit to the state’s coffers from business and middle-class flight seems like a bit of a moral stretch. No, it’s too hideous to even think, let alone legislate.
There’s too much at stake in today’s omni-powerful Supreme Court to let resumés be the gateway to a lifetime appointment. The narrow emphasis on “qualifications” has led to the domination of a cramped, elite clique from Harvard and Yale – eight of the nine went to the two Ivy Leaguers. This alone is immensely troubling. The Court has garnered unto itself too much power to allow only two insular academic monasteries to potentially take away our property and ruin our public spaces with needles, feces, and violence.
Today, Sen. Collins announced her support for Ketanji Brown Jackson (KBJ), the possible latest addition to the ever-growing Harvard faction on the Court. Here’s the mental trap of Sen. Collins and many others in the Senate who have embraced a rationale that results in the monopoly status of the two east coast campuses, in her own words:
“In my view, the role under the Constitution assigned to the Senate is to look at the credentials, experience and qualifications of the nominee. It is not to assess whether a nominee reflects the individual ideology of a senator or would vote exactly as an individual senator would want.”
Ever since the American Bar Association (ABA) was given a back channel in approving Court nominees (since the 1940s or 50s), a few ideological zealots of the kind that spill out onto our streets as raging mobs and into comfortable socio-political sinecures get the power to dictate to us who shares a locker room with our daughter, so long as they show the “prestige” of an Ivy League pedigree. Wallowing in the exclusive socio-political world of the Acela corridor is no longer considered a weakness but a strength for a majority in the Senate and the cadre running the ABA show.
Au contraire, Sen. Collins, ideology now matters a great deal. The battle lines are between originalists and the Living Constitution devotees. Making the Constitution a living thing means a form of interpretive evolution defined by the Left, the ethos of our campuses. A living Constitution is an anti-Constitution, no need for amendments, a legislature, or executive action – you know, the popular sovereignty arenas. KBJ is fully marinated in this anti-law version of law.
Don’t blame me for the oxymoron. Ideological acolytes like KBJ actively try to press it on us.
For the citizenry, we are reduced to quietly waiting for another ruling to stretch “equal protection” to cover who shares a school’s bathroom with our young daughters.
It’s gotten that bad. If the NCAA can betray our daughters, so can the courts. Both of them are a reflection of the college campus, and increasingly only two of them.
Please watch the CSPAN interview of Benjamin Barton, author of The Credentialed Court (click on the image). He adds the concern about an expertocratic groupthink on the most undemocratic, authoritarian branch in our government. In the program, watch for the near-uniform experience of having lived and worked as an adult almost exclusively in the geographic isolation of Washington, D.C., on today’s Court. For a lighter note of real diversity of experience on an earlier Court, listen for the description of Justice Byron White (JFK appointee). Fascinating, absolutely fascinating.
But let’s not forget, diversity of life experience as advocated by Professor Barton is secondary to ideology since one of the philosophical contenders, the living constitution, is such a grave threat to our way of life.
Porfessor Benjamin Barton, U. of Tennessee, and author of The Credentialed Court.
Please watch the clip of political sloganeering in March Madness:
I love March Madness . . . until this year. Today, the c-suites managing the tournament from their metropolitan lairs gave us a steady diet of messaging, or what is often called “virtue-signaling”. It’s simply revolting to find almost everything polluted with not-so-thinly-disguised political messaging. With the tournament as a backdrop, you can see it on everything from the team warm-ups to the litany of ads punctuating every broadcast. This isn’t basketball. It’s the same monotonous, droning sermon in the church of the woke revolution.
We are pummeled by “Black Lives Matter” (and its companion, “Stop Racism”) which, by the way, was worn by the players of the tournament’s “Cinderella” team, St. Peters. Nothing new here. The banality has been with us since neo-Marxist hooligans started chanting “Pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon” in 2014. What does the slogan mean? Simple, and it’s not the obvious. If we were limited to the direct meaning of the words, it would be the equivalent of “Breathe” on the St. Peters’ t-shirts. The slogan is the crowd favorite of revolutionaries for a reason. It pushes the same tired, worn-out oppressor/oppressed gag. The real meaning: a state takeover of life by us (Antifa, BLM, Inc., snotty upper-middle-class whites, college ASB’s) is essential to make “Black Lives Matter”, and the lives of all the other identity clients in our sloganeering repertoire. It’s revolutionary theater.
Not content with that, we get walloped by ads from the NCAA, Buick, and Adidas. The point in the NCAA commercial is a pure inanity. They are committed to “opportunity” for “all of us”. Well, if they weren’t, they’d be sued. What’s new here? Virtue-signaling. The NCAA’s corporate bigs are saying that they aren’t like those yahoos at Trump rallies. They don’t discriminate . . . in sports that have to discriminate, as in distinguish between winners and losers. To get around the reality that not everyone gets a trophy, they inundate us with images of the Supreme Court’s “protected classes”, as if there is a shortage of black players on basketball teams. Do we really have to be constantly reminded, going back decades, that Title IX commands equality in sports, that there exist women basketball players?
They do the “opportunity” schtick to such an extent that they’ve created real opportunities for men to compete on women’s teams. Can’t make a go of it on the men’s team, jump over to the woman’s pool after pumping up on estrogen and announcing that you feel like a woman today, thanks to the NCAA. So much for opportunities for women . . . while expanding opportunities for men.
Car companies juice-up their commitment to the revolution by playing the statistical-disparity game. Going to a break during a timeout, Buick prints across your tv screen, “Over 40% of athletes are women, but they get 10% of the media coverage”. The ad continues, “Buick is committed to raising that percentage.” In actuality, they mean, shame on you, the viewers, for finding men’s basketball more interesting than women’s hoops. Bluntly put, that’s the rub. They, of all people, should know that ad exposure and expenditures closely track Nielsen ratings. Dah!
As for “raising that percentage”, Buick apparently believes that the natural human preference for watching excellence in greater physicality in speed, strength, and agility can be reshaped by c-suite decisions to spend more of the shareholders money on social engineering. Is Buick selling cars or militant affirmative action? Could the money on that ad campaign be better spent on improving Buick’s competitiveness with Toyota? Shareholders are indicted for letting them get away this.
And then we got Adidas’ ditzy ad offering (see below). They’re all-in for the trans agenda, the freedom of trans women to compete. And shame on you for not relishing the thought of your daughter sharing swimming lanes and a locker room with a woman with male genitalia. Are these folks selling shoes or gaslighting us into ignoring our lyin’ eyes?
For once, can’t we just sit down and enjoy the performance of exquisitely trained athletes and great coaches without the constant clamor of how committed the c-suite is to lefty politics? We need a separation of politics from athletics in much the same manner as some have constructed an impenetrable wall separating church and state. If we can ban the post-game prayers of football players and coaches, we ought to be able to keep the inane political opinions of billionaire athletes and c-suite execs from spoiling the fans’ experience.
For me, once again, I’m done with the whole sordid mess. They just made my time better spent in my garage working on the MGB and reloading cartridges for sport shooting. Please, stop the politics in everything, literally everything.
Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, on July 6, 2021: “Let’s be clear: critical race theory is not taught in elementary schools or high schools.” Not only is this statement not true. It borders on a lie. CRT and its ideological home in critical theory are ingrained throughout teacher training programs and much of the college curriculum. No “CRT 101”, but it’s everywhere in college instruction and course syllabi. Young adults come out of the colleges marinated in the stuff and into your child’s classroom.
Pease read a study on CRT in teacher prep programs by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal (JMC).
In the late 1970s when I went through teacher training at UC, Santa Barbara, John Dewey’s “child-centeredness” – synonymous with the inmates running the asylum, make no mistake about it – was all the rage with “democracy in the classroom” and “values clarification”. Forget about the nuts and bolts of delivering curriculum and maintaining order. Instead, we got expositions on message therapy and hypnosis in helping us to discover our “true teaching selves”.
Turning to the 1980s, the field of education was polluted with “cooperative learning” (Marxism as pedagogy) and Howard Gardner’s “multiple intelligences” (a falsehood to make people believe that everyone is equally smart). Today, it’s another neo-Marxism in full flower.
Randi Weingarten, AFT head, vows legal action against parents for challenging CRT in schools at press conference in July of 2021.
The JMC study found, low and behold, topping the course reading lists Gloria Ladson-Billings, who pioneered back in 1995 the injection of the neo-Marxist CRT into pedagogy. She’s an Ed prof’s favorite. Also, right alongside her as another crowd favorite in the faculty lounge is Paulo Freire and his unabashed “critical pedagogy”. It’s a scandal, and a profoundly neo-Marxist worldview.
As a teacher of almost 30 years, I’ve been there as these corrosive ideologies wash over the teacher candidate. Unless you are inoculated by a rock-solid set of beliefs, the poison will creep into your mental framework, lying there as a lurking suspicion that the “system” is rigged against the “oppressed”. The whole theoretical mishmash is great if your goal is revolution. What better way to train little Lenins for a new Bolshevik Revolution?
Don’t kid yourself in hoping that private, parochial, and a better neighborhood makes a difference. I’ve seen the same colleagues teaching out of the same textbooks with the same approaches in all three settings. The students might be more well-mannered and better dressed, but it’s the same crap washing over them as it washed over their teachers in all-too-many instances.
Parents, don’t be cowed by the lies. There’s a reason for many of our schools’ mediocrity. It began in college and is everywhere from the administrative office to the classroom. Get real.
KBJ before the Senate Judiciary Committee considering her nomination for the Supreme Court.
We have reached the point of personal ideology being a disqualification for office. Progressivism has long been subversive of the rule of law. One commentator of recent memory called the progressive’s “living constitution” an ongoing, never-ending constitutional convention. Jurists under its sway can make and enforce law at will. No longer content with simply applying the law in court cases, they’ll force us back into the jungle of the rule of men (or women, or . . .), and away from the rule of law. We don’t need any more judges as potentates. That means a healthy “No” to KBJ.
KBJ is an embodiment of the threat to our civilizational order. It’s more than her refusal to define a woman when asked. Some of her rulings are just way out there, as in contortions to ignore the restraints in the job description in order to achieve long-sought lefty ends. She’s more of a revolutionary than a judge.
One example of the radical’s monstrous rationale came to the fore in committee hearings considering her nomination. Sen. Grassley (R, Iowa) brought to light her ruling as a DC District Court judge in Make the Road New York v. McAleenan, (2019). She, with a stroke of her pen, made a ruling in violation of the law. At issue is the power of the AG or Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS) to exercise “unreviewable” (by the courts) discretion to determine the classes of aliens eligible for expedited removal from the country (Immigration and Naturalization Act, section 1225). So, what did she do? She went ahead and “reviewed” the DHS decision.
She tried to hang her hat on the Administrative Procedures Act (APA), as if it was the wormhole to make reviewable what was clearly not reviewable. So astounded was the normally liberal DC Circuit Court of Appeals that a panel of the Court reversed and admonished her by ruling that,
“There could hardly be a more definitive expression of congressional intent to leave the decision about the scope of expedited removal, within statutory bounds, to the Secretary’s independent judgment.”
She was so intent on bashing the Trump administration’s immigration policies that she violated the law when making a decision on the law. Try to make sense of that. Some could try, given that many are completely unaware that Article III of the Constitution gives to Congress the power to set the federal courts’ appellate jurisdiction. In other words, by statute, “unreviewable” means “unreviewable” by KBJ, et al.
The APA is not to be confused, as she apparently did, with the Constitution. This person is a radical, an unhinged progressive, or maybe even a revolutionary. As such, her nomination should be rejected, if not setting her to face impeachment.
Changing prices at a Shell station in Southern California, March 22, 2022.
Economic inelasticity: a measure of an economic activity’s responsiveness to price changes. Inelastic supply is production made unresponsive to price fluctuations.
Market: the spontaneous arrangements that brings buyers and sellers together. Markets can be constrained by natural barriers (geography, availability of resources, etc.) and interventions (government).
*************
Some elements of the Right are deserving of condemnation for their forays into imbecilic isolationism. Their tariff nationalism and sophomoric hostility to our present and natural allies stagger the mind. That said, the biggest and most persistent threat to the welfare of the nation by far is the Democratic Party and its congregation of the Left.
Nuttery has little effect without powerful, organizational patrons. The donkey party has turned itself into the institutional home of the Left; the faculty lounge is the home seminary of the Left; and the seminary’s gospel is a fanciful, semi-religious, but material and messianic apocalyptism. Don’t mistake this for the traditional Second Coming. This endtime arises from glib Gaia-worship, a faith that angles to translate prophesies of doom into power. Its doctrine is in actuality an ideology and the attendant politics amounts to a missionary zeal for conversion, forcible or voluntary.
Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) introduces her Green New Deal, translating alarmism into policy, 2019.
But the appeal of this new faith is limited. Unlike Christianity that has a natural allure to all groups – the equality of all souls – this substitute creed is most attractive to the demographic product of its seminaries (college graduates), who are most prominently, but not solely, the degreed halfwits in the super zips (codes). Their half-wittedness is the fruit of the degraded and narrow education in the tenets of this debased secular faith. These people aren’t trained to question their assumptions. They are zealots that occupy the cultural commanding heights to influence and obtain office to force their form of salvation on the reluctant.
Church/state separation be damned, they declare war on prosperity, independent consumer choices, entire industries, and the Constitution while they herd the population into cramped dwellings, ev’s, and mass transit. Freedom is the freedom to live only their way. I’m reminded of Orwell’s 1984:
“War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.”
And so the zealots march off and into elected office, the staffs of the elected, government employment, techie enterprises, the corporate boardroom, ad agencies, the press, law firms, Hollywood, and into the teacher corps of our schools – what G.K. Chesterton called the “chattering classes”.
The fruit of their endeavors, among other things, is a disfigured economic life, and more misery than what would occur without them running the show. Supply and demand get malformed, made inflexible to the unexpected twists and turns of existence. A pandemic hits and, voilà, we have empty store shelves, supply chain disruptions, inflation, a suppressed work ethic, fiscal insolvency, and the doldrums’ persistence into the foreseeable future.
That’s the thing, it doesn’t take much to maul the gears of an economy and hamper recovery. Demand remains pretty consistent (inelastic) for things like fossil fuels, rising with growth, and only declining when a recession hits, with its lost jobs and business closures. Not good. Supply is hamstrung (made inelastic) to respond to the demands of prosperity after the imposition of utopia. Not good.
And utopia is what it’s all about. Wherever the Dems hold sway in the halls of power – local, state, federal – they are running full speed toward their mirage of eco-nirvana. Democrat state-level fiefdoms are famous for it. The grid is target numero uno. California concocted its 100 Percent Clean Energy Act to command the state’s electricity to be carbon-free by 2045. Washington State’s Clean Energy Transformation Act commands its utilities to be carbon neutral in eight years. New York passed the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act that commands a net-zero economy by 2050. Hawaii jumps into the fray with its House Bill 623 that commands a 100% renewable energy grid by California’s year. They are declarations of war on fossil fuels, and the energy supply gets bulldozed.
Gov. Jerry Brown signs SB 100, mandating 100 percent renewable energy in California by 2045, on Sept. 10, 2018.
Notice the use of the word “command”, as in “command economy”? Karl Marx would be proud.
These lords of the state capital have jerry-rigged all manner of means to achieve the desired end. All of them, however, take the same tack of regulating traditional energy to death. Jerry Brown (as in jerry-rigged) and Gavin Newsom of the not-so-golden state are gung-ho. Brown, after signing the previously mentioned ukase, boasted, “California is committed to doing whatever is necessary to meet the existential threat of climate change.” There you have it: semi-theological apocalyptics combined with a newly inaugurated command economy.
Not to be outdone, Governors Cuomo and Hochul of New York read from the same prayer book. They, like the suzerains of the San Diego-to-San Francisco corridor (the rest of the state has little political pull), are enthusiasts for bans and regulatory dead weights. No fracking, no new permits, no new gas hookups for homes, and no pipelines. Thus, the residents of New York and anybody east of them get the privilege of paying six times more for natural gas than, say, the lucky folks of Texas or Louisiana. No pipelines are allowed across the empire state to possibly carry the fuel the 400 miles from the Marcellus Shale. Instead, it must be shipped from distant kleptocracies.
Protest against the fossil fuel industry – pipelines, et al – in New York in 2012.
The same price penalty applies to everyone living in California. Like everything else in the state – housing, electricity, food, cars, you name it – gasoline runs at a buck-and-half clip above the national average ($5.85 vs. $4.33/gal.) for the commuters on Newsom’s roads, which happen to be among the worst in the nation. What a deal? The “bargain” combines a doom-premium (“existential threat of climate change”) in the form of high taxes and exorbitantly priced energy with crappy pavement. No wonder it’s hard to find a U-Haul to flee the state. Demand has outstripped supply.
If it’s obviously such a great deal for the country, with the utopians professing to be on the same team with the angels, why do they have to wallow in falsehoods? In Biden-speak, he said on March 14, “Make no mistake, the current spike in gas prices is largely the fault of Vladimir Putin — it has nothing to do with the American Rescue Plan.” Translation: It ain’t me! But it is . . . to a great degree. He’s doing his best to make energy supplies inelastic and prone to shocks, whether it be a virus run amok or Putin’s dream of a Greater Russia.
Biden blames Putin and the Ukraine War for high gas prices, March 2022.
The only truism in his corner is cause-and-delayed-effect. Societies don’t operate like toggle switches – instant-on/instant-off. It takes time for policy changes to translate into behavior and effects, both positive and negative. Time is necessary for people to get their act together in the form of land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship. Since California is his model, the complete effect of Biden’s pummeling of the energy sector will take years for the whole country to fully feel California’s chronically high energy rates, blackouts, shortages, stagflation, deteriorating roads, trains to nowhere, and bottomless spending on expensive-but-decrepit mass transit, and, lest we forget, the brewing campaign against homes with yards (single-family residential). No space privacy for you and your kids, peasants!
Likewise, it took a number of years for the widespread use of fracking beginning around 2011 and the repeal of the ban on the export of domestic crude in 2015 to turn into Trump’s bluster about energy independence and the US as net exporter. Sometimes, occupying the seat of power at the moment of good times is sufficient to enjoy the afterglow of public adulation.
But Trump and Congressional Republicans are actually deserving of praise because they greased the economic skids instead of throwing sand in the gears as Biden and the donkey party are currently doing. The thinking of Republicans is in the right place. For the R’s, pipelines (XL, Dakota Access) are a good deal. For the R’s, drilling on public lands is a great thing for supply and cheap prices. For the R’s, subsidy briberies for solar and wind and the purchase of Teslas are viewed correctly as an assault on freedom and the public purse, and move us closer to a grid that operates with all the reliability of a utility in Lagos, Nigeria, or California. Not good.
Rolling blackout in California, 2021.
You can only get so much out of wind and solar. It’s called low energy density, an inherent characteristic of the two. As a result, low density must be compensated by the construction of vast plantations of panels and forests of huge propeller towers marring the earth’s surface. Lurking behind the scenes is natural-gas peaker plants to deal with the erratic production (the wind and sun are variable). The whole mammoth charade demands colossal sunk costs in redesigning the grid and the development of a storage system to make the massive contraption the complete energy source for your Netflix streaming addiction. Wouldn’t it be much easier with fewer lost opportunities (i.e., opportunity cost, the real meaning of the word “cost”) to clean up fossil fuels?
Certainly, Biden and the episcopate of the Church of Climate Change are aware of the monstrous costs and disruptions. It’s just that they don’t care. When you’re a believer, you’re a believer. And so, when American voters let Biden and company into command of the executive branch, they are going to get the full effect of the reunion of church and state, California style. It’s Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy all over again.
He didn’t disappoint the faithful from the get-go. Fresh from the chilly inauguration on the west front of the Capitol, Biden ordered an assault on domestic crude oil production by halting new leases, permits, and mining on federal lands, onshore, offshore, anywhere under federal control. Chad Padgett, former senior executive for BLM in Alaska, put it succinctly when he described an Interior Department memo, pursuant to Biden’s ukase, barring the issuance of “any onshore or offshore fossil fuel authorization, including but not limited to a lease, amendment to a lease, affirmative extension of a lease, contract, or other agreement, or permit to drill.” Half the 23 million acres of the Alaska National Petroleum Preserve was made off-limits. Authority over the process was centralized in the hands of Commissar Laura Daniel Davis, then-acting assistant secretary for Lands and Minerals at BLM, creating industrial death from bureaucratic atherosclerosis. Now, inelasticity applies to bureaucracy’s arteries as well as energy supplies.
Operating well in ANPR.
Biden’s recent blame-Putin schtick to avoid responsibility for his stake in the mess rings hollow. Having spent his entire career in demagoguery and electoral pandering, the guy exhibits little understanding of enterprise of the free variety. People in the real world of business look over the horizon before they sink big bank on a venture. What they see into the near future, and maybe beyond, is Biden’s declaration in a 2020 debate:
“No more drilling on federal lands. No more drilling, including offshore. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period. Ends.”
Biden announces his opposition to fossil fuels in 2020 debate.
Can’t get much plainer than that. The delay normally accompanying a policy is reduced when demagogic hostility is combined with the accelerant of pandemic-inspired cuts in production at a time of quick recovery from the nightmare. Why invest in an industry that the donkey party and its administration declared to be the equivalent of kiddie porn?
That’s not all. We’ll enjoy the benefits of California’s sclerotic supplies alongside California’s high-priced everything. All of this will be wrapped in an increasingly feudal way of life. As in the old Soviet Union, a new aristocracy of the party and its nomenklatura will ride on top of a beleaguered class of commoners. Thank you, Democrats.
Eau Claire Area School District Administration Building, Eau Claire, Wisconsin.Naval War College, Newport, R.I., and near Barrington, R.I.
What are they doing to our soldiers? Indeed, what are they doing to our children? The “they”? They go by various titles: “cultural curators (Salena Zito), “cultural commanding heights” (mine), “elites”, “limousine liberals”, “establishment”, “progressives”, “blue-check Twitter”, alongside a host of disparaging terms for anyone outside these tightly-packed super zip codes in the cartography of America. A tell-tale sign is glaringly evident in almost any place with a college of extortionate social and economic (and by extension political) influence. Three recent incidents are case studies of their baleful clout.
Who’s educating our children? It might be the same people like the staff of University of Wisconsin Eau Claire’s Gender & Sexuality Research Center (GSRC) who conducted a teacher training session for the Eau Claire Area School District in late February on the whole gamut of woke ideology. Safe spaces, the evils of heteronormativity and meritocracy and systemic racism and white privilege, and the need to freeze parents out of their children’s gender identity issues were taught as unassailable truths to the government employees who have the residents’ children under their control for 6-8 hours per weekday. The whole thing might have flown under the residents’ radar, pre-pandemic, but parent groups, post-pandemic, were tipped off.
Thankfully, word got out. Parents learned that teachers were told in power-point slides,
“. . . parents are not entitled to know their kids’ identities. That knowledge must be earned. Teachers are often straddling this complex situation. In ECASD, our priority is supporting the student.”
In essence, the area’s children were treated as property of the school district. The arrogance is startling. Chris Jorgenson, the director of the GSRC, was impertinent enough to declare to the throng of teachers, “But much like we wouldn’t act as stand-ins for abuse in other circumstances, we cannot let parents’ rejection of their children guide teachers’ reactions and actions and advocacy for our students.” If you can make sense of the word salad, the presentation of gender-identity ideology – sometimes referred to as transgenderism – makes an enemy of parents who understandably reject the ideology by calling the repudiation parental “child abuse”. The whole falderol was sanctioned by the district’s superintendent, Michael Johnson, in classic bureaucratese when he said the district “prides itself on being a school district that makes all students feel welcome and safe in our schools.” The effrontery of our cultural curators was on full display.
Culprit #1: Chris Jorgenson, director of UW Eau Claire’s Gender & Sexuality Research Center
It doesn’t end there. Barrington, R.I., is home for many veterans and staff of the Naval War College (NWC), and what we see in the faculty lounge of UW Eau Claire is clearly evident among its professoriate, and it spills over into the town of Barrington. Don’t forget, the NWC educates the officer corps of one of the institutions that is assigned the sole task of protecting us from foreign aggressors who wish to inflict abject harm on us. The first decades of this century have made the threat abundantly clear.
Instead, like the teachers and children of Eau Claire, Marine and Naval officers are being indoctrinated with the same ideology of self-flagellation. Think about it: what effect will it have on morale in the ranks? General George C. Marshal warned us in the tumultuous days of World War II, “It is not enough to fight. It is the spirit we bring to the fight that decides the issue. It is morale that wins the victory.” Who would want to defend a nation that has been characterized barely this side of Nazi Germany?
At issue in Barrington is the sponsorship of this year’s Memorial Day activities. For the past number of years, it was the Barrington United Veterans Coalition (BUVC). Well, not this year. The town’s Master of Ceremonies will not be the head of BUVC but the role will be turned over to a NWC professor, Frank Douglas, who previously spoke in favor of flying the Black Lives Matter flag at city hall. The Veterans Coalition had opposed the proposal to grant BLM the same honor as the POW-MIA banner. Douglas, according to town council minutes, played the trite “diversity” card when he said, “… there is diversity in the veteran community because they [BUVC] do not speak for all veterans.”
Culprit #2: Frank Douglas, Naval War College professor
Our intrepid NWC prof, Frank Douglas, is probably confusing the neologism BLM as a concept with the group. But flying a flag is quite different from simply endorsing the obvious truth that black lives matter. A flag denotes a group, and the BLM group is a scandal in belief and practice. A person who isn’t aware of the group’s neo-Marxist program has been living in a closet. Ditto for the bookkeeping shenanigans. Flying the BLM flag isn’t much different from flying the Viet Cong flag.
I’m not surprised. Douglas’s resume’ reads like a travelogue through academic bubbles – Georgetown U. (BSFS, Int. Affairs, 1993), Johns Hopkins U. (MA, Int. Relations, 1997), Harriman Institute (M.Phil., PoliSci, 2001), and Columbia U. (PhD, PoliSci, 2005). Clearly, this guy has the impression that some form of wisdom and competence is granted to someone with a litany of letters after their name . . . or it simply could be the desire for a cushy job.
As for his uniformed experience – he’s a commissioned officer in the Naval Reserve – his bio on the NWC’s website lists staff jobs in and out of theater from 2004 to 2018. Actual combat experience isn’t evident. I could be wrong but he appears to be a desk jockey. He might be the military’s version of a teacher quickly transitioning to administration. The old saying in education has a ring of truth: If you can’t teach, administrate. In the social ecosystem of the Pentagon, if you find the life of the grunt personally repellant, cram your resume’ with academic honors and be above the grime of actual combat, and, while you’re at it, engorge yourself on the thought-fads of academia.
If I’ve got it wrong, Douglas, please tell me.
The staff overhead of the Pentagon and its academic appurtenances frequently show the very same neo-Marxist influence as in Eau Claire Area School District’s headquarters. Who can forget General Mark Milley’s (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) statement before the House Armed Services Committee in June of 2021: “I want to understand white rage, and I’m white”? The pinning of “white rage” on the January 6 rioters and protesters sounds like The Squad’s camera-hogging howls. The lunch room at the Pentagon may not be much different from the UW Eau Claire’s faculty lounge.
Culprit #3: Pauline Shanks Kaurin, Naval War College professor
Back to the NWC, another prof, Pauline Shanks Kaurin, delivered a lecture to sailors in June of 2021 that treated Meghan Markle’s fully unsubstantiated accusations of racism in the royal family as analogous to the alleged systemic racism in American society. She went further in slamming classical liberalism in its focus on the individual. If you want more of the mental gobbledygook, she continued to ineptly wax as follows:
“… [racism] is not a case of a few bad apples. This is, as the Duchess of Sussex said, she said, racism, racist is not rude….
This is not a matter of people who are being mean or rude or ignorant individuals. We tend to think of racism or sexism as, ‘this is a problem with individuals’. It’s not a problem with individuals. It’s not a problem with individuals only, it’s a problem of individuals within a structure, within a society, within a system.”
This is the stuff promulgated to the people trained to kill. Those in charge should be held accountable for wrongly presenting this bombast. And if they won’t be responsible, keep it out entirely. The nonsense should be treated as the bone of contention that it is. That means that you don’t deliver it from a lectern, as from a pulpit, even if discussion is permitted. The setting grants to the presenter the power to frame the discussion. Rather, it only deserves the full debate treatment: two sides cognitively armed to argue the merits, or lack thereof.
If not, keep it away from our troops, and keep it away from our children. It’s noxious neo-Marxism whether flying under the BLM banner or anti-racism ideology in teacher training, and needs to be confronted, and not in any way presented as truth. Our men and women in uniform and school-age children merit better. Schooling should not be a national suicide pill.
Ask yourself a couple of simple questions. How could a governor coldly announce the end of the internal combustion in 15 years without any recognition of the upheaval – i.e., human cost – that it’ll create? In September of 2020, Governor Newson of California did:
“In the next 15 years we will eliminate in the state of California the sales of internal combustion engines. We will move forward to green and decarbonize our vehicle fleet … substantially reducing greenhouse gas emissions as well as oxide nitrogen, in so doing, we’ll improve air quality and improve the economic climate here in the state of California.”
Governor Gavin Newsom announces an end to the sale of the cars with internal combustion engines.
How could Black Lives Matter declare economic war on white-owned businesses? Oh, but they did on Twitter in December 2021:
“Time to: #BuildBlack – Support Black-led-Black-serving organizations. #BuyBlack – Skip the Black Friday sales and buy exclusively from Black-owned businesses. #BankBlack – Move your money out of white-corporate banks that finance our oppression and open accounts with Black-owned banks. . . . White-supremacist-capitalism uses policing to protect profits and steal Black life. . . . Let’s use every tool in our toolbox…including our dollars…to end white-supremacist-capitalism.”
When not announcing an end to the traditional family, calling for the death of cops (“fry ‘em like bacon”), or excusing riots and murder in our cities, they applied the same old tired rhetoric in declaring their own version of apartheid nirvana.
Businesses torched in downtown Minneapolis during the George Floyd riots of 2020.
What’s happening? Well, it’s what happens when a person becomes incapable of examining their own assumptions. They blindly accept a set of propositions and then act upon them.
Something is missing from their mental comportment. The thing that is absent is the life of the personal. The life of the personal – also referred to as interiority – involves reflection, comprehension, and the private space to do it. For these avatars of a new world order, no time for that. That private space is to be treated as suspicious pods of conspiracy to stop them. The personal life is branded “counterrevolutionary”. For them, it’s time to light up the Molotov cocktails and torch the entire civilization and end the life of the personal.
However, it’s out of the life of the personal that arises all those things that we call private. You know, the private sector, private property, civil society, church. The life of the personal is more than emotions and the arts, even though it certainly encompasses them. It incorporates our tendency to gravitate to form family, a deeper form of intimacy than mere eroticism can satisfy. It includes our personal choices to make a living, whether to follow in the footsteps of mom and dad or not. It encompasses the natural inclination to acquire things unto ourselves – private property, private enterprise. It embraces the grappling to understand the nature of things, which includes the spiritual. Thus, churches arise.
All these things lie outside the revolution, because revolution is what these people are all about. They’re not into deep private reflection. They are consumed by ends (a complete revolution) sanctioning means (unbridled callousness). They desire to let loose an eruption to overturn nearly everything to make life conform to their unexamined vision.
No better illustration can be found than in a clip from director David Lean’s film from 1965, “Dr. Zhivago”, based on Boris Pasternak’s novel. In the scene, Dr. Yuri Zhivago is brought before the revolutionary commander Strelnikov in the heady days of the Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War (Whites vs. Reds). They met earlier before the Revolution but only briefly. The exchange is enlightening. Please watch the clip.
Lest we find ourselves distracted by all things Ukraine at the moment, we should not suffer temporary blindness to the ongoing threats closer to home. If you’ll recall, we are engaged in a wholesale demolition of our cultural inheritance under the guise of a landslide of hackneyed buzzwords: diversity, equity, inclusion (curiously in that order to avoid the acronym DIE), social justice, systemic racism, white supremacy, et al. An older but truer meaning of the word stewardship comes to mind.
See 1 Peter 4:10:
“As every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same one to another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.”
See Genisis 2:15:
“The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.”
The ransacking of the legacy flies in the face of the obvious meaning of stewardship. Throughout the Bible it is used to remind us that God is the ultimate source of all gifts (broadly defined) and His expectation that we are to wisely use these favors. It is not a cover for political enthusiasms such as recycling regimes, anti-plastic crusades, climate-change manias, the assault on fossil fuels, government handouts for windmills and solar panels, the punishment of workers in certain commodity industries, the promotion of guilt-trips for owning an SUV, the policies of herding families en masse into cramped apartments, the demonization of single-family-residential, and the relegation of the public lands to mere hikers’ paradises and no one else need enter. God’s gifts are conferred on a businessman exercising property rights to extract mineral wealth from the earth as they are for white collar public employees wealthy and organized enough to politically force everyone else to live according to their preferences. At present, there the mutilated corpse of stewardship lies.
If I hear another clergyman spout from the pulpit stewardship as the guise for greenie agendas, I’ll scream.
The insipid mangling of stewardship has manifested beyond Green New Deals and into a frenzy for an inflated race-consciousness. Hyper-sensitive race-awareness tars everything to the point of a wholesale dismantlement of our grand cultural inheritance. Statue-toppling, the insidious doctrines of race-obsessiveness in instruction to the young, the rantings and bullying in social media, the loud advocacy of the extinction of personal freedoms in free markets, and the espousal of life under massively intrusive government commands will mean the death knell for God’s gifts. “Stewardship” undermining stewardship. Go figure.
A rereading of the writings of Zora Neale Hurston are the antidote to what she referred to as the “race man”, the carnival barkers for perpetual race-victimhood, people like the barely coherent Ibram X. Kendi or the insufferable Maxine Waters.
Ibram X. KendiMaxine Waters
Check out this gem from Hurston’s essay “Art and Such”, wherein she decries the tendency of the “race man” to reduce the entire black experience to oppression and sorrow:
“Can the black poet sing a song to the morning? Upsprings the song to his lips but it is fought back. He says to himself, . . . ‘Ought I not to be singing of our sorrows? That is what is expected of me and . . . if I do not some will even call me a coward. The one subject for a Negro is the Race and its sufferings and so the song of the morning must be choked back. I will write of a lynching instead.’ So the same old theme, the same old phrases get done again. . . . The writer thinks that he has been brave in following in the groove of the Race champions, when the truth is, it is the line of least resistance and least originality.”
Zora sets the record straight. This latest campaign to ravage our inheritance is absolutely mind-numbing. The soul-destroying dogmas reduce thought to mindless chants. These people aren’t capable of originality and can add nothing to our inheritance. They only pillage. A painter’s palette is replaced by a sledge hammer.
In 2001, upon meeting Russia’s Vladimir Putin for the first time in Slovenia, Pres. George W. Bush famously said that he looked into Putin’s eyes and “was able to get a sense of his soul.” Apparently, Bush was bromanced by a heartrending Putin tale from his youth of his mother giving him a cross that survived a fire at the family dacha. Later, Vice-President Cheney chortled that when he saw Putin, “I think KGB, KGB, KGB”. Bush’s outpourings of sympathy were corrected by Cheney’s blunt realism.
We need more of Cheney’s therapeutic realism regarding all sorts of misguided beliefs that are eviscerating our country. One such assemblage of mind-junk running amok is environmentalism. This thing is an “ism” and not to be confused with its root, the environment. It’s a vast social engineering project that rivals anything bursting forth from the mind of Karl Marx, for whom it is related. After decades of persistent persuasion throughout the culture, it has settled into our myopic but comfortable middle class. We are willing our own demise, and the historical corrective in the form of a sober middle class has checked out of prudence and into folly, or so it seems.
Though, be mindful of the universal caveat: to be certain, not all of the middle class, but a sizeable chunk in varying degrees. One must avoid the sophistry of the woke in assuming a homogeneity of thought in a group arbitrarily defined by some external, physical factor (income, race, ethnicity, gender, etc., etc.).
The ”ism” is an example of a belief system every bit as straitjacketing as anything found in The Communist Manifesto, a kind of theology without an afterlife. Instead, the surrogate afterlife is a materialist utopia, a pie in the sky. The grand scheme begins with the acolytes’ favorite diagnosis of what ails us in the form of human eco-disruptions that have allegedly damaged our entire existence, us personally, and all our surroundings. The prescription requires the true believers to take control of the state to engineer a better human being for a better world. Devastation, though, is history’s likeliest verdict.
Climate change doctrines are the latest infatuation which has been used, for instance, to wreck our domestic energy industry and begin the coercive reengineering of our existence. Fact: no reliable energy, welcome to the stone age. And solar panels and windmills won’t cut it, so don’t go there. The eco-fanatics’ dream, however, will translate into the reality of dependence on Saudi monarchs, Iran’s mullahs, Putin, and Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro. Welcome to national subservience to imperial thugs and welcome to chronic retreat and defeat. President Biden is the latest figurehead trying to lead us into this new catastrophe.
Events in Eastern Europe – Ukraine in particular – have exposed the problem. We are in the midst of a massive federal, state, and local effort, led by the feds, to turn topsy-turvy our way of life in pursuit of almost anything labeled “sustainable” in 2,000-page Green New Deals (GND) while at the same time we are beset with the aggressions of Russia and Red China who are threatening to tear apart our alliances and trade relationships. We are pulled toward the amateurish visions of AOC as we are stretched in the opposite direction to stand up to tyrannical aggressions. It’s a two-fer for a beating. Lincoln’s “house divided against itself cannot stand” should ring in our ears.
The fact that the middle class, mostly white collar, has largely bought into this secular faith is evident everywhere. It can be heard from the pulpit to the classroom.
Groups who are the zealous spearhead of the movement notice their narrow demographic appeal in the white collar, urban/suburban/exurban, middle to super-rich cluster. The Sierra Club, Wisconsin chapter, admits it: “The lack of diversity and inclusion amongst staff and members of environmental organizations is a key component to their difficulty in effectively combating environmental justice issues.” In 2015, the group’s national governing body felt compelled to kneel before the cliché of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” to paper over the obvious truth of the group’s cramped attractiveness (sierra club 2015 diversity equity and inclusion pdf).
Pew Research points to the same constricted demography. Using Dem/Rep breakdowns as the metric – since GNDs aren’t in the Republican playbook – we get a sense of who’s rallying to the flag of the firebrands. The Democratic Party is, after all, their institutional home. Democrat strength has been rising in the same demographic wherein eco-activists draw their legions: white, college educated, and urban/suburban. These aren’t any kind of Caucasoids; they are whites of the other two characteristics.
For blue collars to join, they must either be confused or suicidal.
This isn’t your grandpa’s middle class. For a sizeable portion of them, they see the world as an urban park due to their unfamiliarity with anything else. Ensconced in their suburban bungalow, or coastal dwelling, or exclusive condo, or gentrified brownstone, they are far removed from the kind of people who make the stuff of their life possible. Distance culturally, morally, socially, geographically, and economically, sometimes over multiple generations, colors both their perspectives and profound ignorance. It’s easy for them to complain of the high price of housing but then support environmental policies that jack up the price of construction materials and strangle the supply of homes. To them, the national forests are a park, not a possible source of 2X4 studs, and the more land under the control of the Nature Conservancy the better in their mind. The monumental incongruency is startling.
Environmental activists protest outside of the Harvard Club where Trump’s EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt was scheduled to speak, June 20, 2017 in New York City.
Do you think the nations who wish us harm – yes, we do have them – are oblivious to the presence of a demographic fifth column in our midst? As Biden would say, “Come on, man!” In the 1970s and 80s, we called Soviet morale-busting campaigns disinformation. They called it dezinformatsiya which The Great Soviet Dictionary of the era defined as “false information with the intention to deceive public opinion.” The 1980’s Operation Infektion attempted to convince the world and us that our government invented HIV/AIDS in order to sap our will to resist them. President Reagan got a full blast of it when he countered a Soviet military buildup in Europe and resisted Soviet adventurism around the world.
Today’s Kremlin wouldn’t be continuing the practice if there wasn’t an audience for it, as there was for the Nuclear Freeze and peace movements 40 years ago. Former Soviet KGB apparatchik Vladimir Putin would be very familiar with this staple of Soviet war-by-other-means and is evidently using it. One of the biggest foreign boosters of John Kerry’s climate change hucksterism is Nikolai Patrushev, the head of Russia’s Security Council. Patrushev goes further in hawking American woke capitalism. Is he doing it out of pure altruism? Quoting Biden again, “Come on, man!” He knows, and we should know, that climate-change apocalyptics and social justice flimflammery only cripples us. What better way to advance Putin’s national interests than to cheer John Kerry’s galivanting escapades and The Squad’s congressional agenda? Weaken your adversary and warm up the tanks is a well-worn tactic.
Nikolai Patrushev
The Kremlin gets traction with the hooey because many white collars are habitually open to the jive. When will these urbanistas realize that they can’t have a safe and prosperous country alongside blackouts and escalating utility bills? Electric cars, or electric anything, isn’t going to deliver 45,000 pounds of produce to their favorite Whole Foods outlet. Their Beemers and Subarus can’t be made without the liquid residue of primordial jungles. The stuff of fossil fuels surrounds them at a time when they are trying to kill it off. It’s one of the purest examples of economic self-negation imaginable.
We have more than a Left problem. We have a middle-class problem. The two intersect at environmentalism and ensure the atrophy of our economy, our national resolve, and compromise the defense of our national interests. No better word is available than “betrayal” . . . or maybe stupidity.
