One question about our current epidemic: Does previous exposure to MERS (2003) and SARS (H1N1, 2009) improve a person’s immunological response to COVID-19? I’m an absolute layman on these types of issues and I didn’t stay at a Holiday Inn. Personal experiences raise this query, however. Our brains don’t stop functioning if we don’t wear a lab coat.
I am and was a healthy and fit teacher during my 30-year career. During the time periods of the spread of MERS and SARS, I became so ill that I took 2-3 days of sick leave, something un-heard of in my long career. Later, after retirement, I came down with fatigue and a low-grade fever that lasted 2 days, actually overnight, in spring 2020. It came and went and life quickly returned to normal. Was it COVID-19? I can’t say, but I haven’t had a bout of illness since then in spite of frequent and broad exposure, no vaccine, and the fact that I’m in a vulnerable cohort (age 69) during this latest contagion.
The similarities of the three bugs are manifest (see below). All three are of the Coronaviridae family. They mostly show as respiratory illnesses. COVID-19 could be different in that it was a product of gain-of-function research in the Wuhan lab. Thus, it had a far more serious pathological footprint. Still, could their biological likenesses arm a person’s immune system against all three?
MERS virusSARS virusCOVID-19
If so, the swath of the population with natural immunity is larger than previously thought. Again, if so, the politicization of the pandemic can be turned down a notch or two. Threats, mandates, and the one-trick-pony of vaccination-only can be laid to rest.
When science is drafted to a political cause, nasty things happen. Science is no longer “science” and politics becomes authoritarian (if not totalitarian). Marxism and its theoretical cousin, critical theory, are attempts to make a “science” of history and ideological sophistry. Its results are laid bare on our cities’ streets and in the radical left turn of the Democratic Party. This political scientization of our life is creating havoc with our civilization.
I’m sure that many people can shed more light on my question than I. I eagerly await enlightenment.
Afghans at Kabul airport scrambling to get aboard a taxying US plane to escape the Taliban on August 16, 2021. 5 died in the attempt.
President Obama to prominent donors and Democratic Party operatives in 2020: “Don’t underestimate Joe’s [Biden] ability to f&#@ things up.”
Alas, Biden has, and what he left behind in the dust is the reputation of the USA and a green light to the world’s scoundrels. We’ll be feeling the foul repercussions for decades to come.
President Biden followed his repugnant decision to flee Afghanistan with a repugnant excuse. He dismissed complaints about his bugout with, “What interest do we have in Afghanistan at this point, with al-Qaeda gone?” It’s a question, unspoken, that similarly roiled the brain of President Trump. Trump dubbed it an “endless war” (Biden liked “forever”) and scheduled his bugout in his infamous Doha Agreement that set the withdrawal for May 1, 2021. Would Trump have delayed the skedaddle? Hard to say; in fact, it’s impossible to say for sure. A tantalizing clue stems from the fact that Trump wanted out from the moment he rode down the escalator in 2015. Any contrary and hypothetical action is rank speculation. In the end, we had a succession of two presidents who could think of nothing else but getting out. One formalized the bugout in a signing ceremony in Doha; the other pushed it through, damn the torpedoes.
We forget at our peril that the US is no ordinary country. We provide the guardrails for a civilized order on a planet beset with innumerable and unpredictable villains. Our world isn’t a Sesame Street stage set. The UN can’t function as the guardians because it is a vacuous debating society populated with the same villains. That leaves the US as the hall monitor of last resort, like it or not. We’re not the “world’s policeman”; we’re the Don that the vulnerable turn to in extremis. If we abdicate the responsibility, we’ll pay a heavy price at home and abroad.
Indeed, the rush to hide behind two oceans, following the inclinations of Tucker Carlson, Trump, and the mentally corrupted Biden, would result in a US under constant siege. The only other parallel is Israel. It’s a country on a near perpetual war footing, whose existence is guaranteed by the shadow of America’s big stick. What happens when the big stick is kept behind our oceanic walls?
In turn, try to have a prosperous free economy when we must forever fortify and man the walls as the oceans and lands beyond are a playground for those who hate us. History shows that autarky (the drive for complete national self-sufficiency) is the dream of halfwits and murderous thugs, and a ticket to a medieval way of life. Adam Smith laid out the case quite clearly. Go ahead, sell it to a family of four struggling to make the mortgage, whose life was made harder because our so-called populists were popular and in office to mess up their lives.
A great deal of American engagement in the world is good for a decent everybody, and most of all, us. So, to escape a repetition of the mistake, what are the lessons of the self-inflicted catastrophe? First, unilateral withdrawals aren’t much different in their effects from humiliating surrenders. Nobody trusts you; you lose strategic positioning and intelligence-gathering benefits on the flanks of your enemies; and your real and potential allies avoid you like the plague. It’s a lose-lose in every direction.
Second, we need to clean house of our sclerotic foreign policy/defense leadership. We should start with Biden but he’s got a four-year term. If we can’t fire Biden – short of a declaration of incapacity and invocation of the 25th Amendment (not out of the realm of possibility but ultimately culminating in no improvement in fitness looking at the replacements) – we should sweep through the NSA, CIA, State and Defense Departments, anyone with fingerprints on the debacle. The Pentagon is especially a nest of gross incompetence. Austin, Milley, and some senior service commanders are ripe for the axe. Worst of all, they are responsible for the insidious imposition of the horrendous and dispiriting neo-Marxist ideology of diversity-inclusion-equity (DEI) which emasculates esprit de corps and shrivels retention and recruitment. Who wants to join an armed force run by the rants of campus snowflakes? Biden is commander-in-chief but he’s a bozo without well-balanced and strong-minded advisers. This crowd doesn’t cut the mustard.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin (L) and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley (R) testify during a hearing before the House Committee on Armed Services on June 23, 2021, in Washington, D.C. (photo; Alex Wong)
For someone like Gen. Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, an illustrious career would be forever soiled by his own behavior in the runup to the calamity. Sad, so very sad.
Thirdly, we’d be less vulnerable to the dimwits in the executive branch if Congress would step up to exercise their Constitutional oversight and legislative powers in the war-making arena. Simply put, they won’t act since they’ve surrendered so much to the executive branch.
A good portion of the blame lies in the makeup of one of the major political parties. How do you get the 535 politicians in the Capitol building to act in anything like a commanding voice when one side, the Democrats, is so enthralled to a radical, neo-Marxist mindset? Bridging the gulf would only produce a semi-neo-Marxist conclusion, something highly unpalatable. The radical stridency of one party nearly rules out a cooperative coalition of both parties to defend Congressional prerogatives. The parties have so little in common. Where are the Scoop Jacksons? So long as the Democratic Party remains a revolutionary party, Congress will remain a joke.
Senator Scoop Jackson (D, Wa.), now deceased.
The Republicans, on their part, should steer clear of the American Firsters that were resuscitated in the wake of the Trump ascendancy. Firebrands, cranks, and cooks are not steady hands at the tiller of state.
Since the Article I branch is a cantankerous mess, finally, Congress is not in a position to stop the administration from swinging a wrecking ball to our delicate diplomatic and defense arrangements around the world. As such, the horrific scenes that unfolded at Kabul airport were cringing to our present and possible allies as it incited dreams of new possibilities in our adversaries. Russia and the CCP’s China have every reason to follow their lusts. It could spell doom to the Ukraine and Taiwan. American perfidy just downgraded American deterrence. The Kremlin and Beijing are neither as militarily crippled nor lacking in determined leadership as they were in the 1990’s. The Afghan retreat is a replay of the police stand-down orders in Portland, Minneapolis, Kenosha, Baltimore, New York City, et al. When the cat is gone, the mice play.
Massive quantities of Russian supplies and equipment on Ukranian border in recent satellite photo.
Hitler parallels have become a rhetorical banality, but some are noteworthy because the similarities are so striking. Of particular relevance is the Munich Agreement of 1938. At the time, America had taken itself off the table – in a Tucker Carlson stance – as Germany shredded the Versailles Treaty and performed the March 1938 Anschluss (forced unification of Austria and prohibited by Versailles) with only a diplomatic protest in response. The League of Nations was a nonentity. The Axis allies of Italy and Japan were molesting North Africa and China respectively. A demoralized France and a Britain in the grip of appeasement were left to check Hitler’s ambitions in Eastern Europe, notably Czechoslovakia. They retreated from a defense of the small country and it was sacrificed in the subsequent Munich concord only to have much worse follow. An appeal to the hearts and minds of thugs is dangerous; after all, they’re thugs.
Afghanistan is our Munich. Should we say goodbye to the Ukraine and Taiwan as the West said arrivederci to the Sudetenland in 1938? And what of a nuke-obsessed Iran and its terror proxies surrounding Israel? Will the band of rogues be satisfied with the vast steppe west of the Urals, Formosa, and a smoldering Tel Aviv? I suspect not. They are probably just the hors d’oeuvres.
Racialism can be easily overlooked if it is so commonplace. When it’s everywhere, it’s easy to become blasé about it. Yet, every now and then, we perk up when radicalism’s inanities poke through life’s hustle and bustle in the form of a Supreme Court justice like Sonia Sotomayor. Leaving aside the radicalism in her abortion views, her interrogations are absolutely nonsensical.
In her questioning of Scott Stewart, solicitor general of Mississippi defending the state’s law, she accused a possible majority of the justices of “politicizing” the Court if they should rule against her preferences. And I quote her highness:
“Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts? . . . . If people actually believe that it’s all political, how will we survive? How will the Court survive?”
It’s all political? Of course, it is. I reference Plato, Aristotle, Cicero. Before progressives expanded the government beyond its competence and forever tarred the word, “politics” was understood to be a community’s activity to decide what to do on matters before it. It’s about decision-making. In our constitutional system, the judiciary participates in quintessential decision-making. Have you noticed? Has she?
Was it only “politics” when the Court dealt a death blow to Jim Crow with Brown v. Board of Education? Was the Court only politicking when it invented a federal constitutional right to end the life of a fetus (abortion), the crux of the matter in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization before her Court? Take any case that would fit into her sacred canon of cases. Was the Court politicking in all of them? The Court is doing today what they did back then: make decisions.
Her apparent operating principle is that if the Court majority goes against her, it’s “politics”.
She has no observable ability to distinguish between proper and improper legal reasoning. Furthermore, she implicitly reserves for the Court the power to be a permanent constitutional convention, forever making up rules and rights as fits the fancies of bullying crowds from the campus and gaggle of Democratic Party allies.
Check out this gem of an excuse for the Court to do whatever it wants:
“. . . there’s so much that’s not in the Constitution, including the fact that we have the last word. Marbury versus Madison. There is not anything in the Constitution that says that the Court, the Supreme Court, is the last word on what the Constitution means. It was totally novel at that time. And yet, what the Court did was reason from the structure of the Constitution that that’s what was intended.
“They have all [newly minted rights such as abortion, gay marriage, contraception, etc.], like Marbury versus Madison, been discerned from the structure of the Constitution.”
Is there anything that can’t be drawn from “the structure of the Constitution” in the mind of Sotomayor? What’s her limiting principle? The Casey case of the 1990’s supplanted Roe regarding abortion and hung the right on “liberty”. “Liberty” becomes the license to do anything. All she would need is access “penumbras and emanations” (words from Casey) to invent a new constitution. This isn’t the rule of law; it’s the rule of men/women/whatever.
“Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.” P.J. O’Rourke
Intoxicated with Equity, people in the seat of power have handcuffed police – not criminals – and turned a blind eye to wanton violence. Convinced of their infallibility, they are foisting inflation and destroying our livelihoods stalking a greenie utopia. The four corners of our existence are being upended for a pure ideological fantasy.
There’s more in a blast from the past.
A young Anthony Fauci in the 1980’s.
Remember AIDS of the 1980’s? Doctors Fauci and Redfield, familiar apparatchiks of today, back then ignited an AIDS scare by peddling the idea of a “heterosexual breakout”. Life magazine crowed with a cover, “Now No One Is Safe from AIDS”. Later, researchers discovered the odds of transmission from vaginal intercourse to be 1 in 5 million. Intravenous drug use and male homosexual activity were the drivers of the disease. Bureaucrats Fauci and Redfield ignored their own epidemiologists to scare Congress into approving bigger budgets. The same culprits are, and were, in charge this time around. (Read about it here in a piece originally from the WSJ)
Life magazine cover from 1985.
The political realm is festooned with people who can warp history, science, and due process to advance rabid zealotry. Our latest case in point: COVID.
Throughout March and the rest of 2020 and into 2021, in the heat of the COVID panic, I condemned the lockdowns and threw aspersions at unbridled masking, school closures, and the decimation of small business. From the beginning, our federal government’s response was a clown car brimming with buffoons, the worst offenders in blue jurisdictions. They imposed the authoritarianism and the death toll continued to mount. Later, the virus receded, probably due to natural factors, the strangulations relaxed, and then the variants appeared, and what didn’t work the first time was brought back with a vengeance. First Delta, now Omicron.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo became embroiled in the controversy over nursing home COVID deaths due to his policies.
Biden took over the White House and the worst of California went national. Scapegoating of the unvaccinated is routine. The only thing missing is a yellow star on the lapel. If acts of public humiliation won’t bring them to heel, then mandates will threaten to take away their livelihoods, movements, religious fellowship, and the simplest human interaction. Is forced relocation to walled ghettos next? The administration is a one trick pony: get vaccinated or else.
80% of Americans over 12 are vaccinated with at least one dose. Getting to 100% is like reaching the speed of light in Einstein’s General Theory. The closer you get, the harder it is to go faster till you realize that you’ll never get there. 100% is pie in the sky. 80% is quite probably their max. So, why all the threats and abuse?
Could the answer lie in the totalitarian progressive’s reflexive refusal to accept disagreement? Are these aspiring tyrants so blinded with fury to admit of other approaches? Fact is, being vaccinated is neither a guarantee of not spreading the virus or getting it in any of its variants, unless the goal is to turn the people into 330 million voodoo dolls with needle jabs till kingdom come, not to mention the disordered emotional and cognitive development of our zoomed children.
Vaccines or no, where’s the therapies, i.e., treatments? If you get it in whatever form, we should be in the position to see our doctor, get a prescription, stay in bed, drink plenty of fluids (non-alcoholic), and watch old Law and Order reruns. You’re not going to get 100% of a nine-figure population to fall in line with your singular approach. Grow up, admit it. Treatments for everyone, vaccinated or unvaccinated. We are going to have to do it anyway as the virus spins off an endless chain of cellular cousins to outflank our jabs.
Demand the discovery of more and varied treatments. The vaccine moon shot should be equaled by one for treatments. Unlike the greenie junk and bloated giveaways, Operation Therapies is a real Build Back Better. Lest we forget, it has the additional advantage of making the overwhelming majority of us the incubators of the most powerful immunity, the natural kind.
Vaccines are good, the choking of social and economic life is not, and we should have more than one trick up our sleeves.
Darrell Brooks’ SUV racing through the Waukesha Christmas parade.Victims on the ground in the wake of his passage.
Why the 2020 summer of riots, the chronic indulgence of violence and behavioral ugliness in our cities, the Rittenhouse trial, Waukesha, et al? Equity, baby, Equity.
Ibram X. Kendi (Ibram Henry Rogers), a godfather of Equity lingo: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination”.
Ibram X. KendiAlabama Gov. George Wallace standing in the doorway of the University of Alabama defying a federal court order in 1963.
Is Kendi’s governing principle that much different from George Wallace’s in 1963 when Wallace said, “. . . segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever”? Segregation, discrimination, they both draw distinctions based on melanin count, genitalia, bed partner, and many combinations thereof. And put an end to equality before the law. Think of Kendi as a black John C. Calhoun, the figurehead of a new discrimination.
Kendi (born in 1982) is proof that the caricature of the muddle-headed millennial is more than a caricature, and an embarrassment to the generational many who aren’t. Kendi’s goof-thought is hidden behind the façade of Equity. It’s wordplay. To this guy and his fellow delusionals, Equity is code for anger over things not turning out equal across the demography. The Equity word is cover for forced equality of outcome through blatant discrimination.
Calhoun, an unacknowledged Kendi mentor, has his mental fingerprints all over Equity. It found its way into the bloodstream of the past and present Democratic Party, back to LBJ, and the Biden administration in the form of militant affirmative action executive orders and banal press briefings. Remember “affirmative action”? In case you forgot, it conferred advantages to a gaggle of new honorees, the hackneyed “historically oppressed”. The camel’s nose poked under the tent.
It remained somewhat innocuous so long as it was restricted to government employment, contracting, and college admissions. Certainly, it was grossly unfair for anyone falling on the wrong side of the genital/color divide, but the ill-effects didn’t end up threatening your life. Not true now.
The forced leveling spread to criminal justice. Since crime stats aren’t equal across the color spectrum, they must be made to be equal, like the effort in admissions and employment. So, gambits such as refusals to prosecute, passage of no-cash bail laws, approval of propositions to lower a plethora of crimes to misdemeanors (California’s Prop 47), etc., sent a green light to miscreants everywhere. Equity suddenly became dangerous.
Kyle Rittenhouse brought into court for his trial in 2021.
These Equity enthusiasts are really into profiles. Kyle Rittenhouse was tossed into the Equity meat grinder because he clicked the bigoted bullet-pointed traits reserved for the vile by the ladies on The View: he’s white, male, and carried an “assault” rifle. Equity demanded that the immense resources of the state of Wisconsin be thrown at a 17-year-old because he fit the Equity industry’s enemy sketch. Self-defense be damned, the industry’s brain trust will rebrand it racist. The goal isn’t justice; it’s Equity in the form of a conviction and hard time. Think of this new age of lynching as a morality play for the self-anointed with a white guy in the noose this time. Everyone is expected to feel better, except, of course, the white guy in the dock.
If Equity requires that we must get a white guy no matter what, it also demands that we rebrand riots as “mostly peaceful protests” to herd all of society kicking and screaming to Equity. Tell that to David Dorn in St. Louis who was murdered by “mostly peaceful protesters”. Public authorities ordered police to withdraw and stand down; bail funds were established for looters and arsonists; DA’s refused to prosecute the hoodlums; and governors rejected requests for national guardsmen to restore order.
The murderer of David Dorn during the St. Louis riots.Retired St. Louis police captain David Dorn.
Once more, riots and mayhem – er, “peaceful protests” – are rebranded as noble endeavors to instill Equity. Tell that to a local businessperson – many are of the “other” – who must now stand before their life’s work in smoldering ruins.
People flee, and not just from California, as Equity’s disorder reigns. Corporate retail giants such as Walgreens and Target – and other paragons of the corporate woke – suddenly realized that “woke” looting, boarded up doors and windows, and smash-and-grab mobs aren’t healthy for the bottom line. That model of Equity rule, San Francisco, and playground for mob-shoplifting, has seen Walgreens close 22 stores. Target and Safeway cut hours to limit their exposure to Equity’s rampant revenge. Need I mention the recent mob assaults on Nordstrom and Louis Vuitton? Equity carries costs way beyond the price tag for gauzy corporate rainbow ads.
The real-world effects of Equity cause capital to look for the exits. For goons and lowlifes, Equity also supplements a widened exit door with a revolving one in the criminal justice system. The Equity logic (or illogic) demands that we can’t have too many convictions of one color. Turn ‘em loose, but bloody incidents inconveniently arise. Prime example: Darrell Brooks of Waukesha Christmas parade fame. After plowing through the Dancing Grannies, bands, and spectators, it came to light that this guy made “career” a functioning modifier attached to “criminal”.
The Brooks rap sheet extends back to 1999 and through a variety of violent interactions with others. It includes a lust for underaged girls and an outstanding warrant for his arrest. His savage history and penchant for jumping bail didn’t stop the Milwaukee DA, John Chisholm, from lowering his bail to $1,000 for using his weapon of choice, his SUV, on his girlfriend. A couple of weeks later, he showed up at the Christmas parade.
John Chisholm, Milwaukee DA, reduced bail to $1,000 for Darrell Brooks (r) before Brooks drove his vehicle into the Waukesha Christmas parade.
Chisholm (D) is a unique piece of work. He’s the DA who went after Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) and his staff in 2010 for rumors of illegal campaign coordination between Walker’s campaign and supportive PAC’s. Ironically, the insinuation is equally at home with Democrats. The fishing expedition uncovered nothing and was only closed this year. (Read about the case here)
Apparently, not a word was raised about the cozy relationship between Chisholm and his teachers’ union activist wife. In the heady days of 2010, Walker was trying to bring to heel the uncontrollable teachers’ unions and succeeded – a necessity that should be on the front burner of parents in California and Loudon County. The whole affair stinks of politics and shows Chisholm to be a swimmer in the currents of fashionable Democratic Party belief. Brooks’ easy release fits neatly into the Party’s Equity zealotry. Anyway, Brooks was out in the public to commit a mass casualty event thanks to the indulgence of Chisholm’s office.
See, Equity is an amorphous concept that can cover everything from race-conscious hiring and admissions to giving multiple opportunities for thugs to destroy our livelihoods and kill us. Equity should join communism on the ash heap of history but, alas, it is thriving in blue America. If Equity comes to your state and locality, move!
Jon Meacham (r) and Biden in split screen on the night of Biden’s November victory speech, which Meacham helped compose. Meacham also organized the historian conclave in March.
Pedigreed historians congregated in the White House earlier this year to arouse the latent inner-FDR that resides in the heart of any Democrat who happens to land in the oval office. Certainly, these guests aren’t solely responsible for what followed but they goaded it. What followed was an end to energy independence, unenforced borders, eco-fanaticism, neo-Marxist racialism, and WWII-scale spending bills in the face of galloping inflation. Gird your loins; we’ve seen this before and it wasn’t pretty.
********************************
Politicians can be like football head coaches of prestigious teams. They are inflated with high expectations that seldom survive the first clash of shoulder pads. As a USC fan, oh how I know this. The players’ and coaches’ heads are filled with sycophantic praise by local big media. Then the indulged egos start to go bust by the first half of the first game.
Sounds like Biden and his social revolutionary inner-circle’s March meeting with politically sympathetic historians who were taking on the role of the lick-spittle sports media. In the room according to Axios were Doris Kearns Goodwin, and “Michael Beschloss, author Michael Eric Dyson, Yale’s Joanne Freeman, Princeton’s Eddie Glaude Jr., Harvard’s Annette Gordon-Reed and Walter Isaacson”. The Party revolutionaries don’t need much encouragement to upturn everything, but then in comes people with high reputation to incite them into doing what they are chomping at the bit to do anyway. Inevitably, they will face the truth of having no mandate in the paper-thin majorities in Congress and the 2020 presidential vote. Acting like they have one won’t change the reality.
If you want to know what’s wrong with your kids’ school, the answer walked into the White House on that 2021 March day. The history profession resembles what happened to the social sciences in general. They have become a vast apologia for fashionable and radical ideologies whose tentacles reach into a deep and abiding FDR-love. All history textbooks that I’m aware as a teacher (of almost 30 years) and Social Science Department chair worship FDR and the New Deal. None of them rate higher than a “C” – most are “D” or “F”; none are “A” or “B” – by the center-right Fordham Institute. Bluntly put, it’s indoctrination. The brainwashing makes it easy to fill the ranks of the activists in the Democratic Party and those burning Portland to the ground.
Antifa in Portland, 2020
In my role as a department chair and teachers union president, I pressed upon my superintendent the fact that we are making good little Democrats. Much like the blatherings of the revolutionaries in the current edition of the donkey party, none of the textbook Great Depression stories made any sense. Roosevelt gets elected and inaugurates feverish activity (the New Deals), and the Depression becomes Great, persisting for the rest of the 1930’s, then took a WWII hiatus as unemployment was cured by putting the jobless in uniform and employing them in making the weapons to destroy Germany and Imperial Japan (Italy was a nonentity by 1943), and was set to resume in 1946 after the wartime recess ended. After the surrenders, there’s not much of a demand for a Sherman tank in the garage or a Norton bombsite in the refrigerator’s spot. The ugly conditions were set to return but avoided by a relaxation of the wartime and New Deal taxes and controls.
Probably, the “illustrious” historians filled the heads of our mentally deficient president and his party’s big wheels with delusions of grandeur of being the next FDR, which will only produce the same miasma for the rest of us. Alongside a Fed currently greasing the skids of inflation through mismanagement of money supply (30% increase with more coming) and the raising of taxes and the reregulation of the economy, Biden and his Party promise another disaster.
Historians of many book deals should know better. But, sadly, they don’t. Don’t expect your kids’ school teachers to stand athwart the all-enveloping orthodoxy of falsehoods. In the end, we have tumult because a party with razor-thin majorities has been deluded into thinking that they can remake America like the earlier crowd around FDR. The only difference: FDR had a real mandate. This crowd doesn’t.
Overall, the lefty oldsters of the 1930’s made healthy exertions; they’re modern political progeny is trying again; and the American people will suffer . . . as in olden days. Same ol’ same ol’.
“Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.” H.L. Mencken
Are the people pushing “Build Back Better” (BBB) proving Mencken right? As if we need any further examples, we’ve already got the person who nosed across the finish line first in the 2020 presidential derby sounding grossly incoherent on most matters, and especially on his bigger-than-WWII lollapalooza — the “BBB”. He’s not alone. Listen to Psaki at pressers, and Pelosi, Schumer, and the rest of the big wheels running the show in Congress.
Here’s the head-scratcher: How can you have “costs nothing” and “paid for” in conjoining sentences? They’ve said it regularly, and with a straight face. If it costs nothing, it’s free. Right? If it’s “paid for”, somebody, probably many somebodies, paid for it. Reality sets in. It will be taken out of one group’s hide to fatten the financial accounts of others, least of all the beneficiary down-and-outs.
The Congressional Budget Office just scored the latest edition of BBB. Surprise, it comes up short, way short. The DC capos (as in mafia “captain”) invented a number – $400 billion – from various BBB empowerments to the IRS. The CBO awakened the conjurers from their wet dream by downgrading the number to $120 billion. And this may be an overestimate since the law of unintended consequences will be unleashed as it was for LBJ’s Great Society of the 1960’s.
The poster child of the failures of the Great Society: the east side of Detroit as seen in a recent video.
Bear in mind that the whole shebang is designed to turn your life upside down and give you wasteful government services that you don’t want and won’t like. That’s not the end of it.
Just think, if it fuels inflation, interest rates rise and interest payments of the accumulated debt jump to new levels. Financing “paid for” will eat up the budget, and say goodbye to our blue water navy and a sane dollar. Of course, we could be a banana republic and repudiate the debt. It’s easy, don’t pay it, and we’re off to oblivion.
How do politicians lie? This way. Yep, our recent edition of the clowns is making Mencken’s point.
Have you been paying attention to the Rittenhouse trial? A frightening prospect is presenting itself. “Justice” is quickly becoming a handmaiden to a radical cause. Justice doesn’t look like justice. It looks like political vengeance. That’s because it’s Revolutionary Justice and not anything like the kind that you or I would recognize as justice.
The die was cast in summer 2020. Riots flared in American cities without a word of condemnation from one of America’s major political institutions, the Democratic Party. The party’s power elite sided with goons and mobs as businesses were torched, a dozen people or more were murdered on the streets, and entire downtowns resembled Richmond in 1865.
Richmond, 1865
Some of the party’s shrillest voices sounded like cheerleaders for the violence and cut checks to the bail funds for the arrested hooligans. One happens to be our sitting Vice President.
Kamala Harris, then presidential candidate, contributed to “Minnesota Freedom Fund” that bailed out arrested rioters in Minneapolis during the George Floyd riots.
In juxtaposition, the sword of something officially titled as justice is enthusiastically unsheathed against the politically unfashionable. The uncouth is defined by a cloistered cultural elite isolated in blue bubbles. Throw the book at Sitting Bull and his Capitol trespassers on January 6th and seek murder convictions against a 17-year-old defending himself from the kind of thugs who turned Kenosha, Portland, Seattle, and Minneapolis into hellholes. Furthermore, if parents are unwilling to surrender their kids to the propaganda ministry’s commissars, the DOJ and its armed wing, the FBI, stand ready to force compliance.
Loudon County parents protesting before their school board
A counter-revolution is brewing. The National School Board Association’s letter to the DOJ alienated a good portion of their state affiliates. The group portrayed the protests of incensed parents to be the “the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes” in a letter to AG Garland. In coordination with the NSBA, Garland dutifully responded with an order to the FBI to coordinate a Parent Scare to rival A. Mitchell Palmer’s Red Scare of 1919-1920. That’s right, justice now means an enforced conformity to the party line.
AG Garland in testimony before Congress in October
*Update: The Garland memo to the FBI to investigate parent activities at local school board meetings was more than a response to the NSBA letter. Newly obtained documents indicate some level of coordination between the NSBA and the Biden White House in mid-September which was before the Garland/FBI memo in October. Read about it here.
It’s a bridge too far for many state school boards. 20 state associations have ended the relationship, suspended their dues payments, or in various ways are distancing themselves from the NSBA. The national group is taking on the same partisan branding as MLB, the NBA, the NFL, Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, and Big Tech’s lunchrooms in this period of radical political fervor. Buying a ticket or soft drink, and showing up at a school board meeting, is either a political act or will draw the gaze of the ever-watchful eyes of the commissars of state security.
Yesterday, the judge in the Rittenhouse trial was clearly fuming about prosecutorial misconduct. Prosecution witnesses sounded like defense witnesses. Wisconsin is an open-carry state; even the restrictions on minors is nebulous to say the least. Sum it up: regardless of the jury’s verdict under mob threat, obvious conditions of self-defense exonerate the kid under our time-honored rules of justice.
Astonishingly, knowing the shoddy nature of their case, prosecutors may be trying to incite the judge into ordering a mistrial without prejudice; meaning a retrial to torture the kid more. It’s scandalous.
We’ve had much experience with “revolutionary” justice. It came in the form of the Reign of Terror’s tribunals in the France of 1793-4. The guillotine was made a popular totem. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and lesser miscreants holding to the same creed left mounds of dead and archipelagos of gulags in service to it. One group of French scholars put the death toll at around 100 million in the 20th century’s long-running flirtation with Marx-inspired “justice”. Following their lead, the woke universe’s hitching of justice to their political crusade is leading us to a repetition of the nightmare.
Lavoisier’s trial. Historical artwork of the French chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794) being tried during the French Revolution by a radical, revolutionary tribunal. Lavoisier (standing, at left) was one of the leading French scientists and the father of modern chemistry. He was prosecuted because he had been a tax official, even though he had tried to introduce reforms. The president of the tribunal claimed that ‘the Republic has no need of scientists’. Lavoisier was guillotined on 8 May 1794.
Veterans, on this Veterans Day, is this what you were fighting for?
If you want to win a major public debate, first and foremost, mischaracterize the issue. This is actively being done by our self-anointed and overweening media custodians who don’t bother to explain critical race theory (CRT) in any meaningful way, especially its ideological heredity. The absence of a usable description is combined with an erroneous depiction of its opponents. Those standing athwart its injection into their children’s classrooms are portrayed as hostile to the teaching of slavery and racial discrimination in our history. So, we get a befuddled population with no understanding of what it is and the impression that the opposition must be a bunch of rubes, Bull Connors, and Klan sympathizers.
Frederick M. Hess, resident education scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, correctly states (read here), “… news accounts seem to suggest that the argument is really about whether ‘schools should teach slavery.’” As Hess poignantly presents, the argument over CRT has nothing to do with the teaching of slavery and Jim Crow. The contest is about whether the schools should be training grounds for Marxist revolutionaries. CRT is revolutionary indoctrination.
As I’ve written many times before, CRT is rooted in Marxist political theory. It traces nearly all disparities to racism, or any of the other filling-in-the-prefix phobias, and ultimately to a systematic oppression of the “outs” by the “ins”. Out of this percolates rhetoric like “systemic racism”, “white rage”, to the host of other theoretical oppressions in feminist theory, queer theory, postcolonial theory, postmodern theory, etc. It’s classic post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc lunacy – one thing (racism) is assumed to be the cause of what follows (modern disparities) without ever having made the evidentiary connection – but the illogic of it hasn’t stopped these over-paid consultants from spewing the nonsense, and scurrying down to the bank to deposit the fees. Scurrilous nonsense pays very well.
Two hucksters of critical race theory, Robin Diangelo (l) and Ibram X. Kendi at a seminar at Roger Williams University.
“Critical” is the key word. CRT is an offshoot of critical theory which blossomed into critical legal theory and critical pedagogy. See, there’s lots of “crits” out there, but they all owe their existence to Marx’s battle of groups (the dialectic). For those ill-informed journalists, CRT is being taught in its various ideological pieces in the classroom, and is the latest craze in teacher training colleges.
Paulo Freire, a godfather of critical pedagogy
In schools of education, it’s called critical pedagogy. Paulo Freire is the Mao figure in this movement. In his “little red book” of writings, like his 1968 “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, the purpose of teaching is to produce a “critical consciousness” in students. What’s that mean? Make radicals to go out and burn things, get elected to construct the mega-state to dictate the solutions, and for all practical purposes be the militant wing of the Democratic Party.
“Critical” everything shows up in the local DA office, the school staffs that have your kids 6 hours for 5 days a week, their textbooks, and anyone with a degree is exposed to it from the civil engineer to the underemployed barista who got elected to Congress. It’s everywhere. Remember, “critical” is just a pseudonym for Marxist. If you want to avert your children from joining an American Viet Cong, stand up, call it out, and insist that it stop being presented as a “truth”. Don’t be cowed into submission.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, at a press conference in July of 202021.
This is a no-brainer: honor our vets. The people who sacrificed a part of their lives, maybe their limbs and entire lives, deserve our highest respect. This is their day. I humbly salute all veterans.
And what better time to also bring to light a sickness that has entered the services? Nearly all corners of our society are subjected, including the ranks and service academies, to a noxious and radical neo-Marxist ideology. It comes under a number of monikers like Critical Race Theory, ESG (“Environment and social governance” in business), DEI (“Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”), “Anti-racism” training, and “The 1619 Project” pedagogy. It has penetrated the upper echelons of command. Who can forget Gen. Mark Milley’s infamous endorsement of this neo-Marxism, “I want to understand white rage, and I’m white”? The comment was more than a reaction to January 6 and any “extremism” in the ranks. The “white rage” in Milley’s blast was presented as a factual premise, not a call for analysis and debate. And now the officer corps is getting a steady dose of it in their academy coursework. That’s right, we are training officers to hate the country that they are expected to defend. Now, all of us in our fair land are in jeopardy.
The neo-Marxist, race-based radicalism shows up in theater commander reading lists and into academy classrooms. Former cadets have come forward to describe the insidious indoctrination (see below). As one recounted, “I found myself instead in the classroom learning about how to be more sensitive.” She continued, “And this woke ideology that had taken over West Point really surprised me.” As a tutor for some students, she recalled cadets writing essays sympathetic with critical race theory and socialism. The students exclaimed that’s what they thought their profs wanted.
It appears in guidance reports about “diversity” and “inclusion” plans for West Point (see report here). Favoritism in admissions to certain races, alt-genders (?), and orientations hides under the cloak of “inclusion” and “diversity” – all this because the numbskulls in the Pentagon think that this gibberish is what the younger generation wants. And I quote from one report: “We must create an environment that appeals to the aspirations of American’s younger generation.” How do they, or any of us, know that these are the “aspirations” of the youth? And should it matter? Come on, wokeness, like the fear of leaving home, needs to be broken to create the kind of person who can kill our enemies and destroy their things.
Where will this lead if not stopped in its tracks? History provides a lesson in the Russia of 1917. Much revolutionary trouble for the Czar came from the newly drafted reserves billeted and milling around the capitol, Petrograd (fully described in Solzhenitsyn’s Red Wheel series and the writings of the historian Richard Pipes) . Radical socialists and Bolshevik agitators frequented the barracks of these large masses of idle soldiers. The troops participated in strikes and demonstrations and on numerous occasions marched to the homes and offices of civil authorities threatening their lives and creating ferment and instability. The navy anchored offshore proved to be a special hotbed of revolutionary fervor. Many of these same individuals were later recruited into the ranks of Lenin’s secret police, the Cheka, and Red Army to conduct the Red Terror. We seem to be repeating the grievous error. Bolshevik-like activists have found a home at West Point, Annapolis, Colorado Springs, etc.
The radicalized Preobrazhensky regiment marching on Nevsky Prospect, St. Petersburg. It’s a main street in Petersburg and designed by Czar Peter the Great as the route south to Novgorod and Moscow
What better way to celebrate the sacrifices of our vets by cleaning house at the Pentagon, throughout the command structure, and our service academies? Our country deserves something better than a restive and neo-revolutionary armed forces, or one so dispirited that it will fold in the face of the People’s Liberation Army.
