How’s That EQUITY Working Out for You?

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Darrell Brooks’ SUV racing through the Waukesha Christmas parade.
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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”.

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Ibram X. Kendi
Alabama 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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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RogerG

Dem-lusions of Grandeur

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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.

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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.

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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’.

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RogerG

The Art of Lying

“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.

RogerG

Revolutionary Justice

Kyle Rittenhouse at trial

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.

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Loudon County parents protesting before their school board

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

AG Garland in testimony before Congress in October

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RogerG

The “Critical” of Today’s Marxism

Antifa mob in Portland, 2020

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

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

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

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

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

Paulo Freire, a godfather of critical pedagogy

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

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

RogerG

Veterans Day in a Time of Troubles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RogerG

Virginia, Progressivism, and CRT

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

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

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

Yamiche Alcindor

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

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

McAuliffe in debate with Youngkin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RogerG

The Electric Car Scam

Charging station in Fairfax, Va.

Our new god, The State, speaks: “Thou shalt drive an electric car.” When this god-imposter speaks, run!

Something normally left to individual choice, along with vacation destinations, is now the province of The State. Combine a neurotic over-reaction to unprovable threats (climate change hysterics) with a growing State impulse to engineer the person along the lines of the neurosis and the result will be a pure, unadulterated mess. The State is a hammer-for-everything when a shed full of tools is the actual necessity. Our lives will begin to look like the incessant and crude pummeling of a hammer. Translation: live less well.

And, God almighty, are they out to get the internal combustion engine. Gavin Newsom, governor of the looney bin formerly known as the State of California, and emboldened by his survival of the recall, signed the death warrant for the gasoline car in the state, the lethal injection to be performed by 2035. From DC, Biden’s Build Back Better – errrr Worse – has $13.5 billion for scarring the roads and interstates hither and yon with plug-ins for the things. To make sure that you use those plug-ins, the feds will bribe you with other people’s money – to the tune of $12,500 per purchase – to buy the contraption and junk your quite functional family sedan. That’s right, replace something that works for a will-‘o-the-wisp.

*Read about the EV and its heart and soul, the battery, here.

I equate the EV craze to gender reassignment surgery. Surgeons jettison the Hippocratic Oath by destroying perfectly healthy organs to align a person’s physique to their imagination. Ditto for Build Back so-called Better: mutilate the transportation grid to better fit the fancies of the half-witted representative from NY’s 14th congressional district.

And what are we going to get out of it, besides the will-‘o-the-wisp? A mess, a big mess. How much of a mess? Just think it through. Those holiday trips to grandma’s house will be measured in battery capacity. Don’t take too many long trips, commutes, or otherwise because the trip’s mandatory half-hour quick charges degrade the batteries. Don’t expect 100,000 miles out of the thing. And just think, you were forced to give up something that works very well for . . . God only knows what. Wait for this to percolate through the economy and into higher unemployment figures and higher grocery bills and poorer diets.

That’s a ticket for a return journey to the Middle Ages.

And what of those now-common California blackouts? After all, the greenie grid functions like the greenie car. The physics of the substitution of high-density energy with low-density doesn’t add up. The trillions spent on trying to make it work is an attempt to bend the laws of nature to the half-literate musings of The Squad. What will you do with an EV with no juice to its umbilical cord and plug? Commutes will be made more formidable, the suburbs will atrophy, and its back to cramped apartment life at the mercy of Lori Lightfoot’s or Bill de Blasio’s defund-the-police rantings. Is raising kids in decrepit schools and on streets filled with gangs, the homeless, needles, and feces supposed to be “Build Back Better”?

Homelessness in LA.

Remember, the trillions and trillions going into this bottomless pit is money not spent on other things. An adult, not the eco-fanatics in Congress, would recognize this as trade-offs. Our decaying military will make it possible for the Pacific to become a CCP lake. Try a supply chain under that regime. Reliance on more expensive and unstable energy and less functional vehicles means less productivity, and productivity is the name of the game for prosperity. More money going into greenie infatuations is less money for R&D for the next wave of world-impacting innovation. Add it up . . . and cringe.

Have we lost our minds? Our car fleet is more efficient and less polluting than nearly any outside the Anglosphere and Europe. We are now expected to dispense with the great strides in the use of fossil fuels and jump headlong into electricity-everything, just at the time when they plan to make the production of it more unstable and vulnerable. It’s crazy, absolutely crazy

Nearly empty shelves in an American Walmart.

So much pain for so little gain.

RogerG

A Disturbing Future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The burning of coal at a Chinese steel plant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RogerG

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

College classroom during the May 1968 uprising in France.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RogerG