Porgressivism – Page 33 – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

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

January 10, 2021January 11, 2021

“The Spirit of Resistance to Government”, Thomas Jefferson

If you of the revolutionary-Left persuasion are not too busy trashing Thomas Jefferson, or toppling his statue, you might take time to ponder his words. In the end, he’ll drive you crazy and into uncontrollable bouts of more rage. Check out these words.

In the wake of Shays’ Rebellion of 1786-7, Jefferson saw something benign in it. In a letter to Abigail Adams, later to James Madison, he wrote, “I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere”.

Armed farmers began appearing at courthouses shutting down proceedings to prevent foreclosures on their farms.

In a letter to John Adams’s son-in-law, “God forbid that we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion”. If the people remained quiet for too long, he claimed, “… it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty”. Jefferson wrote that if it should cost some lives it was still worth it: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure”.

Could these words be appropriated by Antifa or BLM? Well, they could if you possessed the mental sophistication of a child, which Antifa, BLM, race hustlers, and the barkers in the Democratic Party exhibit daily. Shays wasn’t fighting to create the collectivist tyranny of a Green New Deal, racial reparations, racial political exhibitionism, and a Constitutional order to keep themselves in power for a generation or more. He wanted relief from government.

There’s good reason, if you think about it, for the halfwits in The Squad, BLM, and Antifa to target Jefferson. He was a slaveholder, an identity that caused anguish for the rest of his life. He was also a proud exponent of liberty: the freedom of the individual to live a life of virtue and choose their own path of reward. The radical Left in whatever guise – socialism, communism, Antifa, BLM, the Democratic Party platform, etc. – is a movement to shackle one population through a powerful government of commissars to allegedly deliver benefits to another. The reality is a shackle for everybody. They’d be better off quoting Marx, not Jefferson.

UNSPECIFIED – CIRCA 1865: Karl Marx (1818-1883), philosopher and German politician. (Photo by Roger Viollet Collection/Getty Images)

I’m reminded of Jefferson’s words as I watched Wednesday’s mob storm the capitol. Honestly, I have as much trouble with his words pre-riot as I do post. But the event presents a clear warning for today’s power-hungry collectivists: the ghost of Daniel Shays is buried deep in the American psyche. Pushed too far, people will march on DC as they did on Springfield, Mass., in 1787.

Once again, I’m not advocating it. I’m predicting it. Pray to God that cooler heads prevail.

RogerG

January 9, 2021January 10, 2021

The Beginning of the End?

Events are moving fast. In the space of less than a year, the radical Left has moved from a few dark, dank alleys of American politics to the cusp of ramming their socialist wokeness down the throats of every American in every state and territory. Most frightening of all, this is coming as Red China is rising. How will this agenda sit with most sober Americans if it takes on the force of law? Accept, submit, or resist? Now, that’s hard to say, Wednesday’s events notwithstanding. The speed of it all is frightening to behold.

The dire straits that we find ourselves is unique, with the possible exception of the 1850’s. The federal legislature narrowly leans left; the Supreme Court tilts center-right; and the new executive will be the locus of much of the Left’s aggression. We’ve had these kinds of divisions before, but never before have we experienced an entire major political party leap so dramatically in the direction of the neo-revolutionary Left. This donkey party is no longer the place for a Truman, Adlai Stevenson, Eleanor Roosevelt’s originally-conceived Union for Democratic Action, Scoop Jackson, the anti-communist leaders of Big Labor (Walter Reuther, A. Philip Randolph, Philip Murray, et al), etc., if they were alive today.

Harry Truman, John Sparkman, and Adlai Stevenson August 12, 1952.

As it would turn out, organized socialism waned as a force in American political life not due to rejection of its beliefs, but because many of its beliefs would be resuscitated and eventually sucked into today’s Democratic Party under many guises: critical race theory, systemic racism, environmental extremism, “diversity”, and woke ideology. There’s no need for an official socialist revolutionary party. We’ve already got one in the form of the modern Democratic Party. This situation makes our divisions entirely new, much more serious, and not analogous to any previous period.

What’s coming down the pike? Already, HR 4, racial reparations, is ready to be dumped into the congressional hopper. In addition, if yesterday’s Biden/Harris press conference is any indication, a war on political opposition is in the offing. Political resistance will be branded “domestic terrorism”, a tactic remarkably similar to the Bolshevik hunts for “wreckers”, “terrorists”, and “kulaks”. The irony of all ironies is that these same people were silent as Antifa and BLM lit up cities across the country. This will be an ideological assault meant to enforce conformity.

A trial of “kulaks” during Stalin’s forced collectivization campaign, 1929.

That isn’t the end of it. The law enforcement and legal apparatus of the executive branch will be run by “diversity” zealots. That means that a campaign against nebulous “crimes” such as “hate crimes” will turn American life into a society of informers, with everyone everywhere looking over their shoulder to see if an oversensitive ear heard an innocuous but untoward remark and off they will be whisked to be questioned and fired, maybe prosecuted. Personnel is policy, so watch the names being put forward as our new commissars.

The newly empowered firebrands in Congress, and zealots under Biden and his sidekick, Harris, will be energetic in the erection of race-consciousness with force of law. It’s bad news if you’re white, male, Asian, or a “person of color” who can’t accept the Party program. If you’re young, on the margin of academic performance, and one of the disfavored, set your sights on a trade school, community college, or State U . . . if you’re lucky. The slots in the highly-prized institutions will be filled by the favored. The same will be true throughout Big Law, Big Business, Big Foundations, Big anything. Call it reverse Jim Crow.

That’s not the end of it. Central planning will migrate from the hapless and defunct Soviet Union to DC. To enforce the “diversity” decrees, a politically useful brand of “civil rights”, and to get you out of your car, job, suburban home, and live according to the dictates of the Squad, an all-encompassing state apparatus will be staffed with soulless die-hards – the hard face of utopia. The Green New Deal is Soviet central planning. Period.

And, just think, I haven’t got to the Electoral College, threats to the Supreme Court, or the neutering of the Second Amendment. With the demise of the Electoral College, red-state influence in the choice of chief executive will be shunted to the side as the presidency will come to reflect LA, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, Atlanta, Baltimore, Detroit, New York City, and the faculty lounges. An intimidated Court will not be a stopgap. FDR showed that threats can bend the Court to the president’s will. The crushing of the Second Amendment will prove that a disarmed citizenry is a very pliable one. No obstacle there. The path is laid bare for the full implementation of the revolution.

If any opposition remains to slip out into the public square, Big Media and Big Tech will be there to crush it. We’re already seeing it. “Deplatforming” is the new censorship. Young techie lefties who overwhelmingly man the monitors of Big Tech’s social media organs will be there to label disagreeable speech “violent” and thus be silenced. Google and Apple will squash any remaining outlets of free speech, as they are currently doing to Parler if it doesn’t play along. Try and get the Parler app on the Google and Apple app stores. Free speech is in the process of being flattened.

This is what happens when a monoculture dominates the cultural commanding heights of a nation. An excursion from today’s Big-anything all the way to the halls of academia is exhibiting a frightening sameness, a revolutionary-Left sameness.

It’s developing before our eyes. America is an idea nation. Other nations are for the most part ethno-national in nature. Their existence doesn’t hang from the fine thread of an idea. Once that idea is undermined – something the powerful and influential are in the process of doing – the glue of the nation is compromised. Our nation is a very delicate thing.

People will notice the threat and some will be motivated to take action. How far will they go? I hope not very, but my hopes may not be the reality. Right now, opposition to the monoculture is being boxed into a corner. Some will seek to stanch the danger by working within the system; others will seek remedies outside. Some states not so enthralled with the Party and its program may get organized to resist the monoculture’s DC behemoth. Sadly, violent eruptions and disunion may be in our future. Forces in the Democratic Party are trying to take the whole country to a place that parts of it will not and cannot accept. If the monoculture forces the issue, all bets are off.

Radical Left revolutions are ugly things. The rank and file in federal law enforcement and the armed forces may have a decision to make about whether they want to participate in the ugly thing. Do they want to be part of a radical Left revolution? Do they wish to be the secret police for a monoculture’s doctrines? Just as rapidly as a radical Left revolution is upon us, people may be forced to choose sides equally as rapid.

Democratic Party, please come to your senses. The country’s existence is at stake whether you realize it or not.

For me, my hope doesn’t lie with a change in heart of the revolutionaries. Our constitutional structure may save us. May. The revolutionary party’s hold is tenuous. Seven seats separate Kevin McCarthy from the speakership. The Senate Democrats need VP Harris and revolutionary unanimity to run roughshod. On such a narrow thread is the Court free from court-packing. The very thing that pissed off 19th and early 20th century progressives may save us: separation of powers . . . if the militants can be held at bay for two years.

The real threat comes from the zealots under Biden and his sidekick, Harris. The executive branch can do a lot of damage all by themselves. Let’s see if their actions will be enough to tear the country asunder and pave the way for Red Chinese hegemony.

I sincerely hope that my pessimism will be proven wrong.

RogerG

January 8, 2021January 8, 2021

The Law as an Ass (Idiot)

In Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Mr. Bumble, when informed that the law places him in charge of his wife, responded by saying, “If the law supposes that, the law is an ass–an idiot.”

While listening to yesterday’s Hugh Hewitt radio program on podcast, that thought came to mind. The whole show was rightfully focused on Wednesday’s mob assault on the capitol. Hewitt’s justified and unequivocal condemnation of the rioters is founded on a bedrock of our civilization: the rule of law. But what happens when the “’law is an ass”, like the recently contrived 2020 edicts governing our elections?

The fact is, law has not always been a bulwark against injustice. We are flawed – past and present and future – and it shows in our laws. In the 19th century, we had a Fugitive Slave Law. After federal troops withdrew from the former Confederacy in the 1870’s, we saw the imposition of other laws in the form of Jim Crow. Other laws are being proposed to advance abortion even after birth in some cases. We can have the “rule of law” and also have wholesale barbarity.

Incidentally, early 20th century Germany was fastidious about cloaking their actions in law. When their invasion of Belgium in 1914 faced scattered resistance among the Belgian population, the German general staff issued general orders to conduct reprisals. Almost 24,000 civilians were killed, many of them executed. Towns and cities were put to the torch such as the beautiful university town of Leuven. All were justified in German law. As long as there is a law, so they reasoned, all is excused as proper. It’s a concept that would reach full flower in the Holocaust.

The destruction of Leuven, Belgium, by the German army in late August 1914.

A depiction of German atrocities in Belgium in 1914, also known as the “Rape of Belgium”.

See, the law can be used to hide great evil. But that’s not the end of it.

Not all law should be lumped with those monstrosities. Laws clearly tied to the protection of life and property are absolutely required to avoid Hobbes’s warning of life outside the law being “solitary, nasty, brutish, and short”. Wednesday’s rioters should be pursued for prosecution, as should the Antifa and BLM mobs of this past summer.

Though, we must realize that there is an important difference between Wednesday’s and this past summer’s crimes. Wednesday was a singular incident; Antifa and BLM are long-running insurrectionary movements. Broad cynicism develops when powerful voices condemn one and excuse the other. Cynicism is a corrosive element for any republic, as it was for the Roman Republic of antiquity.

Portland Antifa rioter with raised clenched fist next to a dumpster fire from this past summer.

Cynicism about our basic institutions appears to be running at a fever pitch. The excuse-making for the summer’s riots, the blatant hypocrisy about them and the pandemic decrees, the wholesale destruction of many people’s futures in the lockdowns and school closures, and the pandemic being used to construct a third world-style election system contributed to the enflamed passions. Such elections engender disrespect for the results when the bulk are mail-in votes (over 60%, even more in certain states). It’s enough for an impulsive president to cry “foul” and his followers to storm the capitol building.

The election processes were an “ass”, and the “rule of law” provides cover for it. We should be able to condemn Wednesday’s thugs and admit that massive mail-in voting was a huge mistake. I suspect that the Dems will accept the former but push the latter (mail-in voting) into federal law. It’s part of their well-established campaign to nearly eliminate vote verification and election integrity. Expect more of this anger, or apathy as people drop out of the system because of a lack of faith in it. Either way, we would be in danger of repeating the demise of the Roman Republic.

Many of our laws are “asses”, and so might be the people authoring them.

RogerG

** Also on my Facebook page.

January 7, 2021January 7, 2021

Pray for America

Supporters of President Donald Trump climb the west wall of the the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

The pandemic gave us a death toll and a politically motivated overreaction that is actively mauling the foundations of America’s greatness. The consequences are frightening as yesterday’s troubling events indicated. My guess is that more disturbances are coming because some Americans will not be passive observers as others wreck their world. I’m not advocating it. I’m predicting it . . . if cooler heads don’t prevail.

From where came the time of troubles? It can be traced to the longstanding machinations of the donkey party and their cultural and institutional allies. The Democrats used the virus to nearly eliminate faith in the last vestige of free and independent citizen control of their government: the election. They’ve worked tirelessly to prevent ID verification, turn voter registration over to the DMV, push same-day registration, persist in maintaining sloppy voter lists, earlier and earlier voting, and now, with the pandemic, remove most remaining guardrails by shot gunning ballots through the mail and thereby throwing mud on the results, and all the while facetiously spouting “voter suppression” to silence opposition. Today, who can trust election processes that would make an Iraqi cringe? No refuge there.

Look at Georgia. How does a state go from reliably conservative to neo-Marxist without any transition? Something is afoot, and it ain’t a new pair of sneakers. Mail-in voting shifts the premium from the independent voter to the moron voter. You don’t have to know the candidates, their positions, and make sense of it all because a generic “D”, which today is a generic socialist, is all that is needed when you’re harvesting pre-packaged early votes in a well-funded processing operation. Interesting . . . and appalling.

Voters drop off their presidential primary mail-in ballots at a drop box at King County Elections in Renton, Washington on March 10, 2020. (Photo by Jason Redmond / AFP) (Photo by JASON REDMOND/AFP via Getty Images)

Now, all institutions of critical societal mass are organs and tools of the cultural left, which is a direct pathway to the political left. For instance, the schools, K to grad school, have indoctrinated your teachers and kids in material and moral relativism, the philosophical mainstay of the many socialisms at the heart of the Democratic Party. In essence, they are the finishing schools of the cultural/political left. No refuge there.

Using the metric of political donations, the corporate boardrooms from Silicon Valley to Wall Street are overwhelmingly populated with acolytes of the cultural/political left. Money poured into the coffers of the donkey party from these deep pockets, and made it possible to fund Stacey Abrams’s vast political mining operation that gave us two more neo-Marxists in the Senate. Corporate America is no longer a trustworthy bastion to defend American civilization. Their ads are increasingly endorsements of left-wing sloganeering and the collectivism of the super-state. The robber barons of today aren’t robbing your purse. They are stealing your country. No refuge there.

A war is brewing between Wall Street and Main Street.

And of course, there’s Big Media. The stuff creeping through your tv screen is resplendent in lefty values and causes. Big Tech reinforces the bias by acting as gatekeepers of “acceptable” thought. Big Entertainment and Big Information are channeled in only one cultural and political direction. Lefty groupthink is pervasive. The ChiComs would find much to like. No refuge there.

At this point, I’m beginning to wonder if, indeed, bigness is badness.

The pulpit is coming under increasing fire. For those denominations unwilling to submit – some mainline ones already have – the power of the state will be used to impose the agenda of coerced participation in abortion, transgenderism, and every other trendy surrender to the human will to come down the pike. If you are a church who takes seriously the mission to help the lost and the least, you are in the public square and subject to their gaze. Your church may remain something of a refuge if you remain locked in the sanctuary.

Boxing people into a corner with no outlet is not a prescription for civility. Some might resort to violence rather surrender to the central planning of the Green New Deal. Some might resist rather than submit to gun confiscation. Some might resist rather than see the path to prosperity for their children hampered by the color of their skin. Some might resist rather than accept the full emasculation of their state by a donkey party- and DC-engineered neutering of the Electoral College. Some might resist rather than submit to self-serving manipulation of the size of the Supreme Court, or accept the edicts of a cowed Court under constant threat of impeachment. These are dark times.

I hear the faint sounds of a militia in training. I hope and pray it never comes to that. My only recourse is prayer. Pray for America.

RogerG

January 6, 2021January 6, 2021

Watch Out, America! Here It comes.

Ossoff, Warnock, and Biden from earlier in the campaign.

How responsibly will the Democrats run the central government? Big question. I’m pessimistic. They are likely to win the two Georgia Senate seats. Georgia is quickly becoming a mess. Only a mess could produce two radical-left Senators. Now, America, await the coming storm.

A few observations about the post-Georgia state of play are in order: one is an observation about America in general; two concern causes for the result last night; and one a possible awful outcome. Taken together, 2021 could well be another disastrous year for the country.

First, America is sorting itself out geographically. There’s a flight from the coasts and metropolitan areas.

Major trends are slow in developing and carry a momentum of their own for quite some time. Once begun, they only reverse themselves slowly. The most recent one, the one that is waning, is increasing urbanization. It’s the one that helped flip Georgia as urban Atlanta swamped its surrounding counties. It flipped Virginia as Soviet-style centralization in DC made the city obese enough to smother the northern parts of the state. Today, COVID and disgust over the carnage of Left-Democrat policies is acting as a repellant to stop the older trend and begin the newer one. It’ll take a while for the new social current to establish itself. In the meantime, Atlanta and the other urban cores in states like Georgia will give radical left power-seekers to the country. Politics will be a lagging indicator for some time.

More about the possible awful consequence later.

A man waves a Black Lives Matter flag atop the CNN logo during a protest in response to the police killing of George Floyd outside the CNN Center on May 29, 2020 in Atlanta, Georgia. (photo: Elijah Nouvelage)

No doubt, the growth of urban centers like Atlanta provide rich mining for chic collectivist politics. Mail-in voting is just the ticket to mine the rich veins. It’ll bring out of the woodwork the kind of voter that could be dubbed “low-information” or a host of other related-but-accurate epithets. These voters have very little buy-in in the form of the investment in time and effort. They’ll only vote if you deliver the ballot to them on a silver platter, which was done by mailing the things to the wind. There was less of a need for the Democrats to resort to their time-honored Tammany Hall antics.

So, America, get ready for more of a low-information electorate giving us a low-information officeholder. Warnock and Ossoff are typical of the genre: heavy on ideology, low on knowledge and wisdom. The type is littered throughout the California legislature.

Into these urban-rich minefields of the low-information voter struts Trump. The post-election brought out the worst in him. His loss in an election festooned with low-information voters was seen through the narrow prism of . . . himself. He lost in Georgia’s contrived election process that should never have been run in this way to begin with, but was. He then goes out to lambast the process and everyone associated with it while asking the base to do it again. I don’t think it worked. People turned off by him will be more so, and his supporters will conclude, why bother? Combine a mob election with a provocateur-in-chief and we get crazies in office. What else did you expect?

Now, for the possible awful consequence. Red America will resist a radical left central government. The resistance will fester and intensify depending on how intent the Democrats are in trying to make the whole country look like California . . . or Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Minneapolis, Chicago, New York City, et al. The flight of middle-income demographics to safer red-state environs will heat up the divide. The fear of the migrants making red states purple is misplaced. The movers are overwhelmingly center-right. Thus, blue states become navy blue and red states become scarlet. If it happens, and it could very well, the nation will be irreconcilably split. Wait for some violent incident, or a few, over the next year or two to bring about the confrontation.

It all depends on whether the Democrats do what they said they’ll do. Even a watered-down version of their rhetoric would scare many people to the armories. The irony of it all is that the red states will be defending America and her Constitution; the Democrats will shred the country and its founding documents to get to a collectivist utopia. If the conflagration were to happen, the resisting states will be the Union in defending the country as it was conceived. The Democrats, in temporary control of the central government, will be intent on imposing their revolution. Make no mistake about it, it will be a real revolution. We’ll experience the intensity of 1850’s America but with the two sides relegated to revolution and counterrevolution.

I pray that cooler heads prevail. I pray that Trump returns to a happy retirement in Florida and leave the counterrevolution to more astute leaders. I pray for the many millions of victims across the country who will be laboring under neo-Marxist control. I pray for America. God help her.

RogerG

January 3, 2021January 4, 2021

The Party on New Year’s Day

Friday, New Year’s Day, I broke down and watched a couple of College Football Playoff games, the Rose and Sugar Bowls. I soon realized that I was taken into the world of Winston Smith of Orwell’s 1984. The parallels between 1984 and the telecasts are glaring. Oceania was governed by The Party – Ingsoc (English Socialism) – with Big Brother’s visage and voice everywhere from every bathroom’s two-way monitor to the daily and public Two Minutes of Hate. The message is the same and omnipresent for the denizens of Oceania. Ditto in the broadcast and on the field of the bowl games. Oceania and today’s media big brothers are obsessed with making a common mind no matter how ludicrous.

The message from Friday’s broadcast was that African-Americans are always oppressed by an enemy every bit as nebulous as the “enemy” engineered by Ingsoc and reified with names such as Emmanuel Goldstein (Orwell), or today’s “systemic racism”. Murky, ill-defined threats are perfect for mind control. They can’t be easily refuted because you can’t get your head or hands around a cloud.

I put up with it for about two-thirds of the second game and at that point I reached saturation. I changed the channel. What were they doing? Why, pay attention. All of Ohio State’s helmets had “Equality” stenciled on the back. This isn’t “equality of opportunity”, for The Party’s acolytes believe it to be code for – you guessed it – “systemic racism”. “Equality” has a more aggressive meaning to the zealots: equality of outcome. The players were ignorantly endorsing a pernicious revolutionary and totalitarian slogan.

If you didn’t get the message from the helmets, the leagues’ infomercials (example below) were resplendent with calls for an assault on the unstated and unproven “systemic racism”, like the imaginary threat of Emmanuel Goldstein in Oceania. It’s amazing how even respectable people get caught up in our own time’s Two Minutes of Hate.

For The Party’s activists, “systemic racism” must exist because of the statistical mirage of “disparate impact”. That’s the sole basis for its “truth”. In other words, if bad stats are larger than a group’s proportionality, everything must be turned upside down to make it “right”. It never crossed these geniuses’ minds that the numbers don’t jive because the causes are far removed from their racism hang-up. Lower incomes are more likely due to lower graduation rates, for instance.

Not content with pushing The Party’s line on “systemic racism”, Big Business – in this case Ford – chimed in with advocacy of The Party’s strangulations of the economy and social life.

Many of the measures pushed by the visuals and words, such as universal mask-wearing, social isolation, and a rubber-stamping of lockdowns, were excuse-mongering for Newsom, Cuomo, and the rest of the blue-state potentates. The commercials made no mention of the fact that last March’s draconian edicts did nothing to prevent the second surge. Flattening the curve meant flattening our lives. What side of deranged do we have to look to find a rationale for this lunacy? Not a word from Ford on the palpable incongruency.

The NCAA and corporate America are carrying water for lefty theatrics. They are trying to make unassailable what they cannot prove. Sounds like good old-fashioned propaganda to me, the kind that oozed out of Oceania’s Ministry of Truth.

RogerG

**Also on my Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/rgraf0829/.