Porgressivism – Page 32 – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

February 11, 2021February 12, 2021

A Twisted Orthodoxy for Purges

A man appearing before a tribunal in the Soviet Union during the Stalinist purges against alleged Trotskyists and political opponents, 1935.

People, are you aware of what is being let loose on our lives and livelihoods? It begins as a thought in the higher status elevations of our society, in influential institutions, quickly gains traction, morphs into an elaborate belief system, ascends to power, and is imposed on us. It’s a familiar historical script.

If you think that you’re immune from its horrors, or deny its existence, prepare to try on the shoes of the average peasant and worker in 1917 Russia. Most had no clue in 1917, till the breadlines, requisition squads, thought-crime camps, disappearances, and evictions hit home. Over the following decades, careers and reputations were falsely ruined, and the population would soon acquire the nervous tick of constantly looking over their shoulder and self-censoring their speech.

A fresh batch of inmates, mostly peasants and workers, escorted into a Soviet gulag in the 1930’s.

What’s worse is that a mind-mold will be pressed upon your kids in their classrooms, as in Khmer Rouge and Soviet schools, and then your dinner-table conversation will be suddenly laced with hints of the new orthodoxy. You’ll be left wondering, “Where did that come from?”

Sound familiar? It’s happening.

The new revolutionary orthodoxy’s presence is signaled by rhetorical tags such as “white supremacy” or “systemic racism” or “social justice”. It’s encapsulated in politically useful academic-sounding labels like “critical race theory”. The recipe: take claptrap and add “theory” at the end. And it’s everywhere.

In a nutshell, it’s something borrowed from Marx’s practitioners: lying beneath the surface of a society is a web of evildoers and their supportive arrangements to oppress the weak and downtrodden. It’s the excuse for a campaign of inquisitions, a culling of the “extremist” – “extremist” being synonymous with the old “counter-revolutionary”.

The stories of these assaults on the conscience are becoming all-too-familiar. Academia has long been a source of thought-suppression. The business world is increasingly infected. But in particular, the gray lady, The New York Times, has been a fount of examples. Add to the list this one: the quasi-show trial and removal of one of its science writers, Donald McNeil, Jr.

The NYT’s Donald McNeil, Jr., a harsh critic of Pres. Trump who was forced to resign after running afoul of the woke mobs in the newsroom.

What’s his act of treason to “proper” thought? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. A conversation with a group of high school students on a trip to Peru came to light to informers in the newsroom. A student described her encounter with another student to McNeil by mentioning the use of a racial slur in the other student’s video presentation. The student asked McNeil about how to respond to the slur. He repeated the word in his response, not to validate its use but to more directly address the student’s question. And for this he is “canceled” – a nicer word for “eliminated”. No walk down a dark basement corridor that will end with a bullet in the back of the head and an erasure from history, as in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. Just the soiling of a reputation and a black mark on the résumé.

What follows is something reminiscent of Stalin’s 1930s show trials: the accuser’s proclamation of the thought crimes and the groveling of the accused. The mass-circulated email from the NYT’s overseers announcing the dismissal contains this fealty to the Party and the crimes of the accused:
“We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent. We are committed to building a news report and company that reflect our core values of integrity and respect, and will work with urgency to create clearer guidelines and enforcement about conduct in the workplace, including red-line issues on racist language.”

Then there is a vow of subservience to the place’s cadre of over-sensitive and over-politicized Party informers:
“Every person in leadership at The Times is dedicated to building a culture where each of our colleagues feels supported and respected. It’s vital that we get this right. To those of you who have reached out to us with your honest and sometimes painful feelings about this incident, we thank you.”

No suggestion to get over it. No suggestion for apologies and a group hug. No, just an occupational lynching. So, as one pundit put it, “What gets rewarded gets repeated.” The downhill-rolling snowball of denunciations grows into a frenzy that sweeps through our culture’s institutions. It’s now everywhere.

The accused, having lived a life of surrender to the zeitgeist, cowers before the whip-hand of the accusatory mob. He’s intellectually disarmed by a previous deep and abiding attachment to the Party’s doctrines. He begs for forgiveness and “rehabilitation”, preferring to slink off into the sunset. Here’s McNeil from his resignation letter:

“Originally, I thought the context in which I used this ugly word could be defended.
I now realize that it cannot. It is deeply offensive and hurtful. The fact that I even thought I could defend it itself showed extraordinarily bad judgement. For that I apologize.

To the students on the trip, I also extend my sincerest apology. But my apology needs to be broader than that.

My lapse of judgment has hurt my colleagues in Science, the hundreds of people who trusted me to work with them closely during this pandemic, the team at ‘The Daily’ that turned to me during this frightening year, and the whole institution, which put its confidence in me and expected better.

So for offending my colleagues — and for anything I’ve done to hurt The Times, which is an institution I love and whose mission I believe in and try to serve — I am sorry. I let you all down.”

Stalin (left) with fellow Bolshevik leaders Rykov, Zinoviev and Bukharin – all of whom he later had executed.

I’m reminded of the chief accuser in Stalin’s infamous 1938 show trial of Bukharin and Rykov, leading Bolsheviks from the time of Lenin and the Revolution. Years later, Soviet leaders in the 1980’s made an attempt to make amends for Stalin’s reign of terror by allowing an investigation into the corrupt proceedings. The accuser admitted to lying, and Bukharin and Rykov disappeared – probably the long walk down a basement corridor that ended with a bullet in the back of the head. When asked why he lied, the witness professed a complete fealty to the Party and its doctrines. It was the core of his identity, and therefore something that he would betray all, including morality, to defend. Want to talk about identity politics?

McNeil’s resignation letter has the flavor of the Bukharin accuser’s mea culpa, especially the zealot’s profession of fealty to the ruling orthodoxy.

If you’ve noticed, the McNeil incident closely parallels behavior in totalitarian regimes, regimes who seek to control everyone’s mind and body, thought and action. The 20th century’s escapades in totalitarianism are rich in more examples than just those in the Soviet Union.

Panchen Lama of Tibet during a Maoist struggle session, 1964

Even after telling a crowd he was “coming to grips with my own brokenness,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey was booed and asked to leave a demonstration for refusing to defund the Minneapolis Police Department, July 2020. (Getty Images)

The McNeil incident brings to mind Maoist “struggle sessions”. An intense propaganda push – like the BLM stuff that streamed through all our devices and enveloped all cultural institutions, the summer of Red Guard-like riots and protests, Party canonization of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, and the corruption of history in “The 1619 Project” – followed by “speaking bitterness sessions” to expose ideological malefactors (real or imagined) – such as McNeil – and culminating in the struggle sessions to ritually confront and pressure the accused and allow the “guilty” to debase themselves before the rabble – Sen. Romney’s march with BLM and the episodes of crowds kneeling to confess their “white guilt”. Frankly, it was disgusting.

McNeil quickly bowed before the enforcers of Party “truth”.

Are we in the midst of a purge to eliminate the last vestiges of free thought and pluralism? It seems so. We are in a very dangerous moment that’ll require courage on the part of the public to nip this slide into thought control in the bud. Rather than accept this state of affairs as a new normal, it needs to be challenged across the board in all forms of public pressure, and a march to the polls to punish the Party officialdom for this affront to decency and Constitutional order.

Whites kneel in forgiveness for “white privilege” during summer, 2020.

RogerG

February 6, 2021February 6, 2021

Provocation of the Worst Angels of Our Nature

Thousands of residents of Minden, Nv., ran BLM protesters out of town as soon as they showed up in the neighborhood and threatened to cause a scene, August 2020.

While reading this morning, I realized that I was listening to a musical piece entitled “Inequities in a Society” on XMRadio’s Symphony Hall. The online write-up for the piece goes as follows:
“The death of Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012 drives Julius P. Williams’ InEquities in a Society, a ‘political’ piece that laments this country’s tendency to crucify young men of color. The oboe carries us forward, merging with a string melodic line whose angularity will result in a full ‘confrontation’ with the repressive agents of ‘authority’.”

Now, I thought, it’s everywhere with no nook or cranny of life not infected with the dreaded specter of “inequities”, and a clarion call for an “equity” holy war. It’s as if a Ministry of Truth has suddenly planted itself into our society with its controlling tentacles everywhere. Some have noticed its appearance; some have warned of its baleful influence. Indeed, it is here, and provoking the worst angels of our nature.

What is the source of the provocation? I believe that one part of the country is in the grip of a shiny new and chic thing: the belief that racism must, absolutely must, exist despite its universal condemnation and six decades of public and private efforts to weed it out, with near-unanimous acclaim.

At root, Marx’s class-obsession is replaced by a Foucauldian race-obsession. Foucault was famous for announcing the existence of concealed forms of power. So, the way is cleared for claiming the presence of something that can’t be proven but nonetheless will be proclaimed. It’s what all the beautiful people take for granted in their stultifying conversations in their exclusive and tony east and west coast soirees.

To give the thought a patina of academic respectability, statistical contrivances are conjured to add an aura of confirmation. One such gimmick is “statistical disparity”. When a socio-economic number strays from the norm – the “norm” defined as a group’s percentage of the population – it’s time to jump to the conclusion of the alleged actuality of white/male power with its host of useful monikers (white supremacy, white privilege, systemic racism, patriarchal hegemony, etc.).

Don’t expect the people who should know better to know better – and by people who should “know better”, I mean the degreed people who populate Sociology Departments, et al. They should know better but don’t because their mind is surrendered to Foucault’s mind. When the stuff percolates down into the broader society, the beautiful and truly semi-literate people in their social circles, and in the complete absence of a skeptical mind, parrot the baloney. Thus, we get “Inequity” symphonies, corporate sponsorships of Marxist groups (BLM), NBA endorsements of Leftist propaganda, the Big Brother light-and-heavy censorship coming from Big Tech oligarchs, streamed entertainment to reinforce the party line, as ad-men and women insert the dogma in their commercials. Maybe Biden was wrong in an earlier carnation. His hope that China will become more like us must give way to the realization that we are becoming more like China.

Is this what we’re in for?

As in a strike-slip fault, when one tectonic plate moves while the adjoining one remains stationary, the great divide in America is between those who remain faithful to the Founder’s vision of a moral equality in law and government in addition to a supportive civil society, and those who have jumped with both feet into Foucault’s mental snake pit.

Most people may not be able to articulate the divide but they intuitively, as in Justice Potter Stewart’s famous words, “know it when [they] see it”. The average person recoils in horror at the antics of spoiled, fulminating snowflakes on our college campuses, the scorched-earth rampages through our cities, the indoctrination masquerading as scholarship, the swarming intimidations and threats on social media, and the mobs defacing the tributes to others who sacrificed so much for our freedoms and prosperity. People know barbarity and ingratitude when they see it.

Protesters wrecked a statue of Philadelphia abolitionist and philanthropist Matthias Baldwin, June 10, 2020.

Like two magnets that repel each other if touched by ends of identical polarity, so we increasingly find each other odious. Those who rejoice and those who find the revolution repellent are finding coexistence untenable. Terry Teachout predicted it in 2000, along with Gertrude Himmelfarb, as well as Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing in their 2004 book, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart. Traditionalists in blue-state red counties flock to red states. The blues stay pat in ignorance and denial. Blue becomes bluer and red redder. And some reds become purple as their cities emulate their blue-state cousins. Teachout predicts a soft civil war, or will it be occasionally hot? I hope not . . . to both, and most of all to the latter.

The real catalyst for the confrontation may lie in something more profound than Foucault’s intellectual hallucinations. Princeton’s Robert P. George thinks so. George, one of the few contrarians left in our over-priced and hubristic academies, sees the cultural emasculation of Judeo-Christianity as the accelerant. He’s onto something. Today, the restraint of the cross is replaced by the brute power of multiculturalism’s secular messiahs. The therapeutic restraint of Christianity on our worst instincts has been neutered leaving nothing behind but the exercise of naked power.

George refers back to Germany’s 18th-century Jewish-Christian poet, Heinrich Heine. Heine prophesied the dark clouds of brutalities in Germany’s future. To quote Heine,
“Christianity, and this is its greatest merit, has somewhat mitigated the brutal German love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which the Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame.”

The resuscitated “ancient warriors” need not be limited to jackbooted Nazis. Our would-be tyrants have no affection for jackboots, but wear penny loafers and suits and possess prestige indoctrination from prestigious Ivy League schools. Call them GQ tyrants. They operate with the same bumptiousness as SS-Brigadeführer Reinhard Heydrich in carrying out the 1934 bloody Nazi purge of the SA known as the Night of the Long Knives. You think that I exaggerate?

I do, but only slightly, to make a point. The federal government’s vast cadres of prosecutors and people with guns – the military and numerous law enforcement agencies – are about to be harnessed to a crusade against “domestic terrorism”. January 6’s capitol riot is yesteryear’s Reichstag Fire. The ground will be prepared by incessant talk of “extremism”. Do you actually think that they are looking both left and right for kooks? No, for them, “extremism” only comes from the right. Not to say that there aren’t kooks over there, but such talk greases the skids to ride out of the public square the last vestiges of opposition to the official wokeness. It will be the excuse to shame those who think differently. And Hollywood, Big Tech, and Big Media will enthusiastically join in the pogrom.

American newspaper stories of the Night of the Long Knives, 1934.

In the meantime, the breakdown of law and order, the incessant “equity” inquisitions, the catastrophe of socialism’s incursions into the economy, the attempt to reformulate our Constitutional order to embed them in power for a generation, a facile and inhuman culture-run-amok, the threat to livelihoods from the commissars of the Green New Deal, will take its toll on vast populations lacking in enthusiasm for the revolution. The passion for a woke future will still have an audience in urban America and faculty lounges. Everyone else will either be refugees or man the political ramparts to keep the revolution’s bacillus from penetrating their state’s borders.

Biden and powerful Democrat politicos are preparing a jam-down. Their mistake is to think that they’ll be able to get away with it. They’ll discover that they’ve provoked the worst angels of our nature . . . on both sides.

RogerG

February 3, 2021February 3, 2021

Lest We Forget

A British cartoon from the days of the French Revolution that portrayed the Sans-Culottes, “relaxing after the fatigues of their day”.

The day after one of the Minneapolis riots, May 2020.

Right now, the Left from their newly acquired bastions in the executive branch and Congress are empowered to embark on their long-desired jihad against inequality. These campaigns seldom go well. Indulging in fantasies of the kind that seriously ignore reality leave a path of desolation. How many times must we embark on the same crusade with the same excuses using the same means (government) and producing the same disastrous results?

Weaponizing language is the real and last refuge of the scoundrel, not patriotism. The revolutionaries utilize rhetorically useful euphemisms and creative pejoratives to hide their intentions and provide cover for their actions, thus the Bolsheviks’ widespread application of the word “kulak” (Russian for “fist”) to landowning peasants before they enunciated their war on the peasants, or today’s demagogues who employ “rich”, “top one percent”, “pay their fair share”, “white privilege”, “systemic racism”, or just plain “racism”. Our modern scoundrels don’t a take a back seat to the Bolshevik rabble rousers stirring up Petrograd factory workers or the thousands of reservists milling around the capital in the months before the 1917 coup.

Russian army reserve conscripts, heavily influenced by Bolshevik agitators, march in Petrograd in opposition to the Provisional Government, October 1917.

Add to the euphemism list “equity”. “Equity” is resplendent in the proclamations coming out of the Biden administration in its first few weeks. It’s a classic example of word as sword. What are they really up to? “Equity” simply means “impartial” or “fair”. No, no, no, not for this crowd! That isn’t good enough for our Jacobins. “Equity” is the veneer for racial vengeance. Throughout the Biden Leviathan, “equity” will provide cover for a return of Jim Crow with a different cast for the winners and losers. Race and the rest of the fashionably oppressed labels will make their return as the basis for distributing public goodies. Of course, what goes to one group is withheld from another. They make no bones about it. Their rhetorical repertoire includes “patriarchy”, “social justice”, “white privilege”, “systemic racism”, “white fragility”, and “Uncle Tom/Tío Taco” to dismiss complaints.

Without a doubt, this isn’t your normal lofty aspiration for “equality”. If it is, it is of a form that seeks to repeal nature. People are born with so many different gifts and qualities that divergent outcomes can only be suppressed by force, thus the holy war for “equity”. The long arm of the state is employed to forcibly flatten things. Who gets hurt, for many will be? How will the public good be advanced, for in many ways it will be retarded? What happens to the personality of a people raised on a steady diet of envy and the receipt of earnings that once belonged to others, for there will be an inflation in the numbers of the entitled? Think of it; it won’t be pretty.

Biden sits with the executive orders that he signed to repeal the Trump era and set the U.S. on a path to a reverse racism called “equity”, January 26, 2021.

Edmund Burke in England and John Adams in America saw its vile corruptions in the late 18th-century streets of Paris with its rampaging mobs and their vicious agitators in the seats of power. For Adams and Burke, physical inequality was in the nature of things. Inequality resulted and quickly became the political whipping boy for the demagogue. A moral equality – as in the equality of all souls – gave way to an equality in all things material, or Adams’s “false Notions of equality”. As Adams correctly predicted at the beginning, it would end in despotism.

It’s the same idea that animates Antifa and its cousin, Black Lives Matter, lest we forget. The abyss that consumes us is evident in the burned-out hulks in the business district, the flight of refugees from the “paradise”, the occasional beatings and killings (47 killings in June, July, and August), and the escalation of violence as permissiveness for one side’s rampages leads to complimentary fury from the other side. It is happening before our eyes.

Get prepared for a hurricane. Jacobinism, whether in the streets of 1789 Paris or 1917 Petrograd or downtown Portland or Biden’s “equity” crusade, isn’t a recipe for paradise. It’s a calamity. Lest we forget.

RogerG

** Also on my Facebook page.

January 29, 2021January 29, 2021

Seabiscuit, The Salve of Our Times

*If you need something to steel your spine in the face of progressive authoritarianism, watch “Seabiscuit”.

Last night, as I routinely do, I watched the nightly news by flipping between CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. The first two infuriate me and the third revs up the infuriation about the other two. I normally break away from it by seeking something else as food for the soul. Lo and behold, from our downstairs rec room came the sounds of my wife and son watching “Seabiscuit”. I thought what a great idea since I haven’t seen it for a long time. So, I streamed the film from the beginning. It’s a great movie.

It is a perfect accompaniment for an escape from the discontents of our time, and a perfect lesson for us in our troubled times. The arc of the story has the additional advantage of being true . . . for the most part. The New Deal hero-worship by historian David McCullough’s voice-over was a bit much. The fact is, the New Deal made many people feel better as it kept them in misery. But the story, the story. The script artfully blended the lives of three broken people – Tom Smith, Charles Howard, and Red Pollard – brought together by a broken horse.

Seabiscuit wasn’t so much broken as rejected. He didn’t fit the expected profile for a racehorse – like many of us who don’t fit the expected mental profile of our rich, fashionable, insulated, and lacking in self-awareness “social betters” by rejecting their chic and foolish ideas. He lacked, as they say among horseracing connoisseurs, “conformation”. He didn’t look like a racehorse. He was short, had awkward legs with knobby knees, and was gimpy in his walk. To boot, he was lazy, temperamental, unpredictable in performance, and hated training.

And he became a hero to the “forgotten man” in a decade of troubled times. The “forgotten man” isn’t the one exploited by FDR in the 1936 campaign for political purposes: the man, in Roosevelt’s words, “at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” The real “forgotten man”, according to economist Amity Schlaes, was the working men and women who ended up paying for the largesse that was distributed to the constituents of FDR’s New Deal coalition, and beginning the political practice of using taxpayer money to build political power. Actually, both versions flocked to a horse who bucked the preferred look of the privileged class, as most of his fans did.

The horse’s fan base is more like today’s “smelly Walmart shoppers” than the student bodies and alumni of prestige colleges with their fat trust funds. Princess Diana was garishly and undeservedly given the moniker of the “people’s princess”. In contrast, the “people’s horse” was a title rightfully earned by Seabiscuit. His following grew so much that by the time of his five-year-old season in 1938 he drew enormous crowds. In the seven years after his retirement to his death, he had 50,000 visitors.

Seabiscuit fans who came out to see him race.

The thing about Seabiscuit is that he had “fight”. It’s a word in disrepute among today’s self-appointed gatekeepers of thought after its use by their bogeyman Trump on January 6. The word simply means the well-spring to rise to a challenge. Some people call it grit; others associate it with courage and determination. Whatever it was, he had it, and it was admirable and inspirational. It’s something we’ll need to resist the hegemony of our malignant and politically-connected cultural elites.

Seabiscuit crossing the finish line ahead of War Admiral in the 1938 match race.

Trump is a special taste for a special political and social pallet. His ability to inspire didn’t reach beyond his tranche of the electorate. “Inspiration” isn’t a word that I can easily associate with him. “Dogged” and “fight”, yes. Seabiscuit had all three.

See the movie, even if it might be for the third time. It’s the perfect salve for those anxious about the gauntlet that the cultural left from their exclusive estates and seats of power are setting before us. Seabiscuit’s “fight” is a lesson for us 70 years later.

RogerG

January 28, 2021January 28, 2021

The Principal Cause of Our Discontents

Pro-life Democrats are beyond “endangered” on that official list of fading species. They are “critically endangered”. Soon, you’ll only be able to see a stuffed one in a musty museum exhibit.

At the start of 2020, there were four in the House. Now, there is one: Henry Cuellar of Texas. Two were taken down by Republicans in the general, and one, Dan Lipinski of Illinois, was primaried earlier by another one of those signature social justice warriors in vogue in the Party. The downfall of Democrats who show even the slightest squeamishness about abortion is the harbinger of the Party’s leap to the far left, which is the principal cause of the chasm in our national politics and culture.

Our split cannot be charitably described as both sides simultaneously moving in opposite directions – or even a by-product of a particularly boorish Republican president – but is a result of a leftward momentum in the Democratic Party that began long before the orange man came down the escalator. The Party absorbed the 60’s radical left and thereafter continued its transformation into the organizational agent of muscular eco-utopianism and the erection of a central-planning police state.

It’s happening before our eyes. And the Party’s minions aren’t alone in their mission in “transforming” America. Censorship is about to enjoy the full force of the central government, but the greater reach to blanket all of America is made possible with the cooperation of well-moneyed elites who speak in the mono-voice of the cultural left. The tenets of cancel-culture are found everywhere from the corporate boardroom, faculty lounge, Big Tech oligarchs, the entire world of entertainment to its branch in Big Sports. Super Bowl LV will be replete with subtle and not-so-subtle messages about a racist America. Watch that space.

Buffalo Bills players kneeling during the national anthem.

Big Money is fully on board. This isn’t a revolution of pitchfork-wielding peasants. It’s being imposed from the top down. Following the money, as they say, will show that Biden’s basement campaign and Stacey Abram’s antics in Georgia were amply funded from the deep pockets of Big Money. The poor Republicans weren’t the party of the rich zip codes, by a factor of three or four.

Don’t believe me? Comb the campaign finance reports.

Big Money made it possible to engineer an election ripe for exploitation by funding the political pressure for immense mail-in voting, registration drives for the uninterested and ill-informed, the army to hector the uninterested and ill-informed and harvest the things. The pandemic was the excuse; but with the fear-mongering no longer sustainable, they are working to chisel the scandalous regime in granite for all time in Pelosi’s much-loved HR1. If she has her way, America’s elections will have all the credibility of those in Maduro’s Venezuela.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has claimed victory for ‘the revolution’ in a controversial election a day after ten were killed in a wave of protests, July 2017.

The half-witted, semi-literate elites, and their underlings, at the commanding heights of our culture gave us a left-wing government and are seeking to complete the cycle by dictating a left-wing culture as well. Amazingly, though, enough word gets out to animate a counter revolution. Hats off to the folks at Fox News, et al, and people like Mike Lindell for swimming against the currents at the oxygen-starved financial elevations of Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey and Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos.

It’s a troubling trend: achieve a 9-zero portfolio and your brains are drained. They’re good at the narrow specialty that earned the bank, but it doesn’t qualify them for the post of philosopher-in-chief. But that hasn’t stopped them from claiming the mantle.

This crowd with their money beyond count, allied to a radical left party that sings their cultural tune, has enforced a new kind of Jim Crow, an imposed feudalism. They, with their values and political views in tow, have divorced themselves from the hordes of paycheck and mortgage-paying Americans. If they can engineer an election system like they do cell phones, they will be able to make America unrecognizable to your grandparents.

Sen Charles Schumer’s famous quip after the November 2020 elections.

Herein lies the crux of our dilemma: our moneyed elites have shamefully abandoned America and its traditions, culture, and institutions. Personally, I think that it’s a consequence of years of K-through-grad school indoctrination in UN-love and global citizenship.

Their alliance with a radical left Democratic Party has pushed the Party and its co-conspirators away from the rest of us. They are the principal cause of our discontents. Until the Party opens its doors to ideological and cultural diversity, and or moneyed elites show more practical sense, America will remain in the throes of a cold civil, and maybe not-so-civil, war.

At least 3 officers were injured after being attacked at a Black Lives Matter protest in July 2020. (Source: Screenshots from Twitter)

Meanwhile, I’m not certain about watching Super Bowl LV. I don’t have a taste for political sermons emanating from a Manhattan-based league monolith and the mouths of its multi-millionaire players. If I’m to have leftism splattered into my life, I prefer that it come from the usual miscreants: California’s Democratic Party, the Antifa and BLM street thugs, our increasingly decrepit colleges, and the urban and coastal mandarins in lifetime sinecures.

Politics on the playing field is like spitting in church.

RogerG

January 24, 2021January 24, 2021

A Few Prudent Suggestions for Biden; Most Are Pernicious

Politico reached out to the punditry class for suggestions on how to unite the country (see here). First, let me say, “unity” can be a very dangerous word. Totalitarian rulers seek unity, albeit through a police state and elimination of opposition in the form of a well-armed cancel culture, the antithesis of real rule-of-law democracies.

Visage of Big Brother on the Ministry of Truth from Orwell’s “1984″.

The overwhelming majority of the pieces in Politico fall into this trap like “Root out extremism in the military ranks” (Beirich/Singh), “A White House task force on white supremacy” (Miller-Idris), “Punish politicians who lie” (Uscinski), “Update national standards for U.S. history” (Cooter), “Rebuild a shared reality” (Enders), “A new voting rights act” (Albright), “A truth and reconciliation commission” (Shim), “Increase access to affordable housing” (Sugrue), “Investigate Trump’s treatment of immigrants” (Garcia-Rios), “Reparations for Black Americans” (Galea), etc. These authors’ partisanship leaves no doubt.

This advice is proof that the Overton window (a group’s range of acceptable thought) of the Democratic Party has leaped to the extreme Left toward state-sponsored indoctrination, coercion, and federal Soviet-style central planning. It is the attempt to manufacture unity through the barrel of the state’s metaphorical gun. If followed, don’t expect unity but await irreconcilable and deepening division.

There were a few in the batch deserving of honorable mention: “Reaffirm the First Amendment” (Bauerlein), “Call out new threats to freedom in America” (Eberstadt), and “A nonpartisan, no-nonsense virus strategy” (James).

The actual cause of our division – beyond the fact that it’s natural in a democracy – is the false and malignant campus cancel culture that has entered the public square’s mainstream through one of our two institutional political parties, the Democratic Party. To paraphrase Reagan, we didn’t leave the Party; the Party left us. By left us, I mean that they went off the left-wing cliff.

If we really want to remove the road blocks to calm, reasoned deliberation, we must expunge the toxicity at the root of our inability to dialogue. Yes, noxiousness can be found on the right, but it’s a coopting of the Left’s identity-mongering. The left-wing variety has all of the backing of our cultural commanding heights. The Left has all the wind in their sails. Tune into Netflix, the networks (except Fox News), and social media with their decidedly left-wing workforces and you’ll get the monotone voice of a leftist monoculture.

Our rancor won’t disappear with a rearming of the federal government with crusades for racial reparations or an “Investigate Trump . . .”. The enmity will fade once the donkey party opens its ranks to pro-life Democrats and people who could carry the mantle of Truman, Scoop Jackson, and Hubert Humphrey. No need to worry about the crazies on the right. They’ve already been ostracized. The donkey party needs to look in the mirror and excise the radical left inquisition in control of it.

Half the country not only disagrees with them. They are justifiably afraid of them.

RogerG

January 24, 2021January 24, 2021

‘Tis the Season for Lunacy

Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, was quoted recently as saying in a comparison of the skilled-labor pools in China and the U.S., “In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields.” Other than the usual crony-capitalist plea for more H1B visas and cheap labor, what is he actually saying about our education system and the broader American culture? I construe nothing positive. We should sit up and take notice, though.

Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks during an Apple event on Monday, March 9, 2015, in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)

Is he right? Is it fair to draw these implications? Mostly . . . yes and yes. For decades, from the commanding heights of our culture has come a corrupting message that has severely damaged our long-term prospects. We have incessantly advertised the idea that personal well-being is found in the possession of a piece of paper from an institution with a similarly questionable piece of accreditation paper, called a college. And this has simultaneously occurred as powerful political currents have demolished academic rigor and classroom decorum, and morphed our schools into indoctrination camps. The result is a growing class of opinionated dunces, a divorce from reality for many, and a country that has to import the brains that are capable of delivering the stuff on our Amazon wish lists.

The culture drives our problems, a culture from the individual to the family right up through the entire federal system. Human beings don’t just pop out of the ground as in Gimli’s joke about the birthing of dwarves in “The Lord of the Rings”. People are born and raised in a social setting, a setting of distracted or, at the other extreme, smothering parents who themselves were a product of the same social eco-system, as were their parents. It’s been around that long. The whole notion of practical realities is fading from the social memory. Nature abhors a vacuum and similarly our social and mental vacuum is being filled with drivel.

One of the worst ideas to come down the pike is the ethos of collectivism, or as Hillary was fond of saying: “the things we do together”. The personal accountability of the Genesis story, the prophets, and the Gospels is erased by an imperial group identity. Personal souls become group souls. Group guilt and rewards are the necessary by-product. Racial vengeance in the form of racial reparations and a check-the-box of “oppressed” identities for new hires and promotions are the expected norm. Social cohesion is the first casualty as some groups realize that they are screwed.

The past is contorted to fit the new reigning obsession, and when things go awry, as they inevitably will, more fallacies in thought and action will be implemented to cover the tracks. For instance, order in the classroom will come under attack as soon as it is discovered that suspensions by group don’t conform to neat proportionalities. The old justice for the individual turns into group justice – a noxious idea no matter where it has reared its ugly head in history, a history we are quickly forgetting. The classroom spirals downhill only to lead to more permissiveness, ad infinitum. The only operative principle to draw is never having to admit you’re wrong (from what movie?).

“Statistical disparity” enters the lexicon as the bogeyman to all things good and right. Now, we are no longer expected to look at the particular circumstances of each incident of mayhem. From the classroom to the street, some people who’ve shown the propensity to harm people and their things get essentially a free pass because any rightful application of justice trips the group’s proportionality.

Group oppression in the form of race and the ever-expanding number of phobias is the go-to explanation for the misalignment, the “statistical disparity”; thus, the rise of “systemic” racism, sexism, and the phobias to drive the left’s social engineering crusades. Using the airy adjective “systemic” makes it possible to say it without proving it. It’s impossible to prove an ill-defined abstraction. Just say it and that’s tantamount to proving it. Never entering the mind of these dunces is the possibility that social pathologies don’t conform to proportionality. But that’s roundly rejected as further proof of, you guessed it, “systemic” fill-in-the-blank. Is there something grossly absurd in this fever swamp of thinking?

Nonetheless, off we go to the land of fantasy where we find leprechauns and unicorns. And it shows in the people trashing Portland and manning (and womanning, or whatever) the Biden administration. Toppling the statues of people who established their right to believe in nonsense has been one of the miscreants’ highest priorities. Has the irony occurred to them?

Not stopping there, many coddle a fascination with socialism of almost every shade, from, once again, the people trashing Portland and manning (and womanning, or whatever) the Biden administration. Some deny it while still talking like it, like our new commander-in-chief. Has it occurred to these people that a society corseted by the overweening principle of government massively taking from one group to give to another is disruptive to national cohesion and prosperity? The coerced giver has little incentive to produce the means to give and the recipient of the largesse has little incentive to earn it. It doesn’t matter if you reclassify the waste as “investment”, a mere play on words. You’ll still end up with less of what you want – the stuff on our Amazon wish lists – and more of what you don’t – more people on the dole.

The self-styled progressives aren’t espousing Christian social teaching. Don’t fool yourself. This is social suicide. I don’t think that Thomas Aquinas had a suicide pact in mind.

What we are getting is less demanding of our people and more of a demanding people. The work ethic declines as we increasingly distance ourselves from the practical realities of life. An infatuation with leisure, individual license, a wallowing in falsehoods, and schools reflecting the morass is not likely to fill a stadium with mechanical engineers. China may not eat our lunch, but we are certainly making it possible for everybody else to do it.

Our only recourse to date would be to export the madness. Win by making others equally as corrupt. Beijing, how about taking in more of the faculty of our grad schools of education? Many of them are already with the Party program anyway.

RogerG

January 22, 2021January 22, 2021

The Lord of the Rings

Last night, I watched the first installment of The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring. It’s an entirely fitting thing to do given what has happened to us in the general election and what is about to happen to us thereafter, whether you voted for the guy or not. Joe Biden and his coterie have the ring of power.

The movie opens with Galadriel’s haunting premonition of evil tidings and a recitation of the past that led to this new and ominous dark time.

“The world has changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost. For none now live who remember it. It began with the forging of the great rings [to the rulers of the three races of Middle Earth].

But they were all of them deceived for another ring was made. In the land of Mordor, in the fires of Mount Doom, the dark Lord Sauron forged in secret a master ring, to control all others and into this ring, he poured his cruelty, his malice, and his will to dominate all life. One ring to rule them all.”

I can’t think of anything that better captures the awful sense of foreboding that dominates the mind of many Americans today. Nothing that Biden said in his speeches allayed those fears. He exacerbated them.

His inaugural speech was replete with calls for unity and an end to the “uncivil war”. Good, as far as it goes. But “a more perfect union” has a different ring coming out of the mouth of the leader of a party whose Overton window has lurched in the direction of Marx. “Racial justice” is tantamount to witch hunts against an ill-defined “white supremacy” which may mean a crusade against political opposition. “The cry of survival from the planet” is code for the enhanced central planning of the Green New Deal.

Back to “unity”. What kind of “unity” was it? “Unity” was the rhetorical device to express the portentous power of the ring. Biden used “unity” innumerable times to the point that it suffered from a Weimar level of value debasement. If anything, it was the “unity” of capitulation. “Shared values” meant their values.

Inauguration Day was more than the speech. Yesterday, something like the discovery of the ring of power was encapsulated in other parts of an otherwordly ceremony. Watching the COVID inaugural festivities was another one of those surreal experiences that goes right alongside the scenes from the COVID election, COVID anti-socialization in quarantined homes, the COVID anti-learning in COVID “distance learning”, the COVID shuttering of economic life, and COVID anti-romance for those seeking a mate – something hard to do with two-thirds of the face hiding behind a mask. COVID mangled life and now gave us an expensively-produced infomercial masquerading as an inaugural ceremony that could have come right out of the History Channel’s “Life After People”. There were few, very few hominids around, with the exception of the speech itself.

“Virtual reality” must be expanded to include “virtual inauguration”. Ceremonies and celebrations without people leave the impression that people aren’t necessary, and the first step toward inhumanity.

It was an inauguration signaling the rise of new power in the east. It had nothing to do with a transference of a ring of power since the losing party is less about power – therefore no need for the ring – than it is about the restraining and channeling of power to allow a free people to function freely. The winning party in its current manifestation is almost purely about power, the power to bring about an eschaton that is founded upon a set of fallacies. This end state has to be imposed by force since few in their right mind would freely accept it. It’s as if Sauron gained possession of the ring.

An inkling of where things are going is evident in Biden’s inaugural 17 executive orders. Globalism replaced nationalism as he will hogtie us back into the CCP-dominated World Health Organization and CCP-favored Paris Climate Accord. American health and economic policy will be laboring to breath under an UN and CCP wet blanket.

Uighur concentration camp in Xinjiang, Red China.

The chaos at the southern border is set to return. The first step in scotching the wall was made. Legislating from the Resolution desk was endorsed with a rechristening of DACA. It’s the very thing that helped sanction a new approach to gain illegal entry: grab a kid. The signal was sent that the possession of a kid necessitates favored treatment.

Making asylum really mean asylum and not just another means to make “poor” the unofficial-but-real criteria for access to the U.S. will be obliterated in present and future proclamations in Biden’s orders. Be prepared for the play-acting that countries who are known to germinate terrorists aren’t, and that vetting asylum-seekers from these places can actually occur. These countries don’t even have reliable birth certificates. How can anybody be traced from these places? I don’t think that Al Qaeda or ISIS operates on the principle of ID cards. Still, we’re going down this moral and rational dead-end.

Immigrants try to swarm the border wall near San Diego, April 2018.

Instead, we are going to be showered with announcements on the “real” threat of “domestic terrorism”. We will be told that the real danger does not lie with Islamic fanatics who would behead a teacher for showing Muhammed cartoons in a lesson on free speech, as what recently happened in France. No, Biden and company say that we’ve got to hunt down people who might have strong reservations about the donkey party’s socialist revolution. Will the rank and file of the FBI allow itself to be used as the Biden administration’s NKVD (Stalin’s secret police)? The worry is not out of the realm of possibility given the Comey/McCabe/Brennan/Clapper/Obama shenanigans of recent memory.

Biden ordered a return to the shackling of the US energy industry in a Don Quixote tilting at global greenhouse-gas windmills. No more Keystone/XL pipeline. Federal emissions standards will follow the lead of California’s eco-socialists. Federal taxpayer-owned lands and continental shelf will fall under the gaze of Biden’s own eco-socialist commissars. Thousands will be given their last paycheck and back to the union hall they will go seeking work from a vastly depleted list of opportunities.

Buttigieg’s comments on the repeal of the permits for the Keystone/XL pipeline at his Senate confirmation hearing had all the compassion of a NKVD requisition officer dispossessing a farmer and his family (“kulaks”) of their land, home, and last bit of food in the heady days of Stalin’s collectivization campaign. Chilling, absolutely chilling.

Buttigeig at his confirmation hearing for the post of Secretary of Transportation.

The expropriation of a Ukrainian Farmer’s land and home by a NKVD requisition squad in the 1930’s as part of Stalin’s collectivization campaign.

If that’s not enough, out goes Trump’s 1776 Commission and in comes the dangerous and facetious 1619 Project. The former would instill a sense of thankfulness for our country while the latter is meant to foment disgust. The latter is about to be force-fed to the kiddies on a grander scale now that the federal Leviathan is gearing up to cram it into the schools. Our schools may come to mirror Red China’s Uighur reeducation camps or Cuba’s schoolhouses.

The “be prepareds” are in order. Be prepared for a taxpayer-funded shaming campaign for owning a SUV. Be prepared for the whole graph of fuel-price gyrations to be shifted upward. Meaning, starting up the car might become a family budget-busting activity. Be prepared for an economy that’ll be expected to run on wind gusts and solar farms the size of a western state. Be prepared for the hosing of taxpayer dollars in the direction of any claque of eco rent-seekers with their snouts fully buried in the public trough. These people are bound and determined to make the impossible possible with your money.

More “be prepareds” are in order. Be prepared for the march of woke authoritarianism. Out goes the First Amendment amid the reclassification of unwelcome speech into hate speech. Racism will reappear as “equity”, “equity” being the official sanction of racial vengeance. The approved melanin count, genitalia, self-diagnosed gender, and any combination thereof will be the new privileged Boston Brahmins. The longstanding Boston Brahmins will continue their inside track to status and fame. The ones on the outs will be the children of Asians, blue collars and the working middle class of paler complexions.

Power is the necessary ingredient for this revolution. It must be forced. If Biden didn’t gain possession of the ring of power, he certainly is acting like it. The Lord of the Rings is the perfect accompaniment to his new revitalization of Mordor.

The totalitarian N.I.C.E. from CS Lewis’s That Hideous Strength.

Or maybe the more accurate parallel is the totalitarian N.I.C.E. in C.S. Lewis’s The Hideous Strength. It’s a tale of science without morality and in the service of totalitarian social engineering. Either way, “The Lord of the Rings” will do for now in getting you in the proper mood for what’s coming.

RogerG

January 19, 2021January 19, 2021

Playing with Words, Playing with Minds, Playing with Fire

Insurrection: noun; an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government. It is a violent revolt against an oppressive authority. Insurrection is different from riots and offenses connected with mob violence. (USLegal Dictionary at definitions.uslegal.com)

Miriam-Webster definition of “insurrection”: noun; an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government. Synonyms include rebellion, revolution, uprising, revolt, mutiny.

The word “insurrection” is crossing the lips and keyboards of more and more of the entrenched and telegenic punditry in the increasingly and ideologically monolithic chattering classes. Why? Why this particular word choice? One possible answer lies with the desire to expunge dissent without having to deal with the heretics to the emerging group mind. It’s happening as I write.

Add government power to monolithic control over expression and you come close to the adjective “Orwellian” (as in George Orwell, as in “1984”). Orwell’s dystopia could quickly become ours.

Speaking of “triggering”, the January 6 event is the trip wire for using “insurrection” in a form of word manipulation to enforce ideological conformity. A mob breaks into the capitol and suddenly it’s an attempted coup. A “mob” is instantly translated into “insurrectionists”; “riot” is consonant with “revolt”; and “mayhem” is converted into “treason” – and this after a summer of BLM and Antifa rioting in cities across America. None of the word pairings connote anything nice but they are useful if the goal is to advance a monopoly of power to ram an unpopular agenda down the throats of the American people.

If it was anything, the January 6 episode was a brawl and not an attempted overthrow of the U.S. government. The malefactors were not anything like the Bolsheviks planning their October 1917 coup in Petrograd’s Smolny Institute. There was little if any orchestration, even though a few were clearly bent on violence. There was more coordination among BLM and Antifa hoodlums in Seattle, Portland, Kenosha, Minneapolis, New York City, and LA than the followers of chief war paint (Jake Angeli) in his buffalo headdress milling around the Senate chambers. He’ll get the book thrown at him while BLM thugs get kneeling gestures, incoherent defenses, and donations to their defense funds. It’s preposterous.

Democrats, let’s drop the preening on a contrived moral high ground. The duplicity and hypocrisy among our so-called “social betters” are rancidly resplendent for all to see. Cutting to the quick, the guilty deserve a fair punishment . . . and leave the rest of us alone.

Something more insidious is afoot. The concentration of troops in the capitol resembles Gen. Schwarzkopf’s massing of forces for his famous “left hook” to decimate the Iraqi army in Kuwait in Gulf War I. Why the show of force for an inauguration? I suspect that it’s much more than protection. It’s a visible reminder in order to paint the millions of dissenting Americans as moral outlaws. Some of the troops showing up in DC were indoctrinated with fears of “white supremacists” in scenes reminiscent of the brainwashing given to Red Chinese troops before they stormed Tiananmen Square in 1989. Will the National Guardsmen be given live ammunition also? And all this after the ruling party issued broad stand-down orders this summer in many of our major cities so they could be left to burn. The duplicity and hypocrisy among our so-called “social betters” are rancidly resplendent for all to see.

Is this appropriate in a citizen republic?

If you’ll recall, Inauguration Day 2017 was treated remarkably different by our media oligarchs. Remember the Women’s March and the cries of “Me Too”, some speakers describing dreams of blowing up the White House? The next three years treated America to disclosures of a similarly aligned administrative state conniving to deprive a candidate of the office that he fairly won, and then embroil his presidency in stonewalling and impeachment. Some donkey party mouths, like Maxine Waters, called for public abuse and incivility for officeholders of the other party. Where was the outrage back then?

The Democrats of today’s social-revolutionary Democratic Party are sitting atop a pile of kerosene-soaked kindling. Their agenda is simply too repugnant to a huge block of the American public. The situation has gone beyond a mere difference of opinion. When one side sees the other side as a threat, all bets are off. The ruling party’s platform is so extreme that a softening of the edges will placate few. I’m very fearful that an already unhinged fringe will resort to more extreme forms of opposition as an answer to an extreme agenda.

So, playing with words is playing with minds, but it also is playing with fire. Please, Biden and company, don’t stoke it. Please, the unhinged among the dissenters, don’t head to the arsenals. Find other means to express your discord. For the rest of us in the opposition party, get organized to do to Schumer/Pelosi/Biden and company what they did to McConnel/Trump and company for all of Trump’s term. And by all means, exploit the scandalous mail-in voting system to the hilt.

Come to think of it, we’d all be better off if the social-revolutionary party scrapped the revolutionary laundry list and for cooler heads to prevail. Sounds good to me. Anyway, I wonder how many people actually voted for a socialist revolution? I suspect few, very few.

RogerG

January 12, 2021January 12, 2021

The Monoculture’s “Triumph of the Will”

Leni Riefenstahl at work in the filming of “Triumph of the Will”.

Apple commercial that appeared on Jan. 11, 2021 during the NCAA College Football championship telecast,

*monoculture: noun; in agriculture, monoculture is the practice where a single crop, livestock species, or plant of one species that are genetically uniform at a time.

The term “monoculture” need not be limited to agriculture. It accurately applies to us and our time. It also has regurgitated throughout history. 1935 was the year of release for Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will”, a propaganda film commissioned by the Nazi Party about the 1934 Nuremburg rally (see it here with some commentary). Modern tyrannies seek to impose a uniform mind, a monoculture of thought if you will, and they have a plethora of media technologies to assist them like film and today’s Big Tech media tentacles. In 1935, the Party sought to implant the purity of the “kulture” of the German “volk”, and the Party and its Leader as the embodiment of it, as a pretext for mammoth social engineering that would lead, among other things, to the squashing of all dissent and eventually the Holocaust. Riefenstahl’s film was part of the program to further the goal of creating a Teutonic version of Rousseau’s General Will, a “will” that will not tolerate opposing views. It is happening to us, as I write, across a broad front of armies of sycophants under the command of powerful corporate boardrooms, ad agencies, Big Tech, Big Media, Big Entertainment, Big Sports (NCAA, NFL, NBA, MLB), etc.

We see the singular message everywhere from athletes’ helmets to streaming services, the networks, and commercials (like the one below). It’s a simple message: America is an oppressive society. It’s a very pernicious idea that has nothing behind it but rank repetition in our media-saturated world. The idea lies around like a loaded gun on a table in the memorable words of Justice Robert Jackson in his famous dissent in Korematsu, the 1944 Court decision that sanctioned the internment of Japanese-Americans during the WWII. He wrote that the Court in its majority opinion had “for all time…validated the principle of racial discrimination … The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.” Today, the monoculture that dominates our cultural commanding heights is the “hand” ready to inflict on the country the loaded gun of a racial jihad and reverse Jim Crow.

Japanese-American internment camp, WWII.

Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, one of 3 dissenters in Korematsu v. United States, 1944.

The real targets of the monoculture’s purveyors are anyone who doesn’t accept the idea. Those enemies of the monoculture’s “will” were neatly summed up in Hillary Clinton’s words from 2016: “… you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it.” The tactic involves permanently branding your opponents through control of the media and endlessly repeating the slander. It’s happening right now.

It occurs when Big Tech “depltaforms” people and goes after Parler. Everyone else gets the message after a few scalps.

Look at the not-so-subtle messaging in the Apple commercial from last night’s college football telecast (see below). With a driving beat in the background, the voice-over childishly opines that “There’s a certain kind of person who won’t take no for an answer. They don’t walk in quietly. They parade in . . . status-quo breaking.” And what status quo are they breaking? Look to the placards on the wall or on a t-shirt. “Racism” and “Me Too” define that status quo: America, the racist and sexist pig. The whole ad was an incitement to bellow against “systemic” . . . anything, like the contrived-but-useful -isms or -phobias.

This is rank mental conditioning from a shallow crust at the top of our societal pyramid. The crust is not just socially shallow – a small percentage of the population living in exclusive isolation from the rest of us – but cognitively. All that they complain about are singular incidents that may or may not reflect an evil -ism, or is reliant on the numerical hocus-pocus of “statistical disparity”. The numbers may shed light on a problem, but they say next to nothing about causation. Why do African-Americans disproportionately show up in violent crime statistics? Is it because an entire system of police officers – black, white, Asian, Latino, men, women, et al – have it in for blacks? Or could it be the disproportionate presence of certain social conditions in our black communities that explain the disparity? Well, if your mental reflex is to hate America, then the “system” is your target of choice. Now, that’s a tall order – to tinker with an entire way of life – but it’s the one robust enough to justify great power for our power-seeking utopian busybodies.

Will half the country acquiesce to Big Brother’s message? Will they accept the grand social engineering crusade that will be in store for them? My guess is “No”. Deep cultural fissures already exist and the monoculture’s efforts to smash dissent will only exacerbate them. No amount of woke proselytizing by Big Tech and Big Media in their own versions of the “Triumph of the Will” will make dissenters conform.

Two brothers from Ohio at a 2018 Trump rally wearing t-shirts that said, “I’d Rather Be A Russian Than A Democrat.”

A cold civil war seems likely. I just hope and pray it won’t turn hot. It all depends on how provocative the cultural Left pushes their project of smothering those who demur. Beware Big Business, Big Tech, and Big Media, you may find yourself deplatformed by half the country.

RogerG