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”.
A depiction of Daniel ShaysArmed 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.
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.The Squad.
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.
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.
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.
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?
No politician cares about me!
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.
Homeless encampment, San Francisco.Portland BLM riots from earlier 2020.
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.
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/.
No, I’m not spewing out a call for armed resistance if you’re fixated on the “powder dry” reference. Just watch out because the Biden circus is coming to town. Obama was right. Indeed, elections have consequences. So, on January 20, it’s Trump out, Biden in. After January 20, much bad governance is waiting to slither from Biden’s cabinet meetings and through an executive branch workforce of preexisting and deeply left-wing disposition.
Don’t expect much from Congress. The country is almost evenly split. No question about it. So is Congress, even if the Dems use their time-honored tactics of showering poll workers with counterfeit ballots (mail-in = counterfeit) and succeed in installing leftist radicals to represent Georgia and seize control of the Senate. What Democrat from a competitive state or district would risk the loss of their cushy sinecure by proving their Bolshevik bonafides? Sure, they just might be crazy enough to take the poison, but my money is on more meaningless grandstanding, bombastic patronization, and other repellant behavior, much of it for show. Most of the damage will come from our now-monarchical executive branch.
What does Biden and company have in store for us? They’ll try to have more sociology majors in squad cars and fewer people with the martial requisites to bring thugs into custody and protect victims. Expect a Green New Deal, Jr., and the emasculation of many of us to have livelihoods. Government-as-nanny will hair-trigger lock us down the next flu season. On guns, confiscation will be dubbed “buy-back” and the fed’s firearm Instacheck system will morph into insta-refusal. Race hustling will reach new heights up and down the red-tape ministries under the banner of “disparate impact”. Beware that your young and aspiring and deserving Ivy Leaguer night have to matriculate to a community college or State U if he or she fails the skin color and last name tests. You’ll notice that inked agreements will try to paper over Red China’s largest navy on the planet, its takeover of NATO ports, its extortion of more high tech from our muddled-headed CEO’s, its Belt and Road becoming a new Axis, and Iran’s mullahs pursuing their dream of annihilating Israel and becoming the region’s second nuclear power. In other words, America will be domestically enfeebled and our enemies stronger and emboldened. All courtesy of executive action.
“Affirmative action” chained to “disparate impact”.
Funny thing, bolshevism and its distant cousin, progressivism, don’t work. The 2020 electorate will be reintroduced to the functional definition of insanity: repeat the excursion into central planning, social engineering, and pacifism but magically expect bliss this time around.
The lunatics have retaken the asylum. And just think, a majority of the pieces of paper (ballots) were votes for it.
A caveat to begin with: I refuse to paint with a broad brush. I had the pleasure of working with some of the most wonderful and dedicated people on the planet in my 30 years as a public high school and community college teacher. Yet, over those many years, I also became aware of the cancerous rot that has penetrated almost every square inch of the system. It’s amazing that some teachers succeed in spite of the decay. Lately, their task has been made worse by the intensification of the putrefaction. I worry for the kids and many of my colleagues still in the system.
One of the most dreadful notions to fly under the radar is the idea that human relations can be tuned like an old-style carburetor with a turn of a screw. A carburetor is childishly simple when compared to the ultrafine mesh of a civilization. The attempt to adjust one set of connections unravels and distorts others. To the over-confident and over-credentialed “expert”, unknowingly wearing blinders, and many a government officeholder who began their rise to prominence in the same manner as the degreed master – with a college degree – the temptation for busybody interference is too great to resist. The schools are the principal purveyors of this facetiousness.
To be honest, the idea of a small and centralized group of henchmen running national affairs has been around for centuries. As a case in point, the notion was crystalized in economic terms in the 17th century by the equivalent of France’s Commerce/Treasury Secretary under King Louis XIV, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and called mercantilism. Mercantilism is so simplistically alluring: sell more than you buy as a nation and your nation will get rich. The fact is, any benefits are concentrated on a few while the costs are many and more broadly distributed. For any politician and most others in our ill-educated media, the glorious ribbon-cutting ceremony is more glamorous than the many other people up and down the economic food chain who gradually find their lives made more difficult. It’s a fool’s errand but one perpetuated by the belief in the omniscience of the degreed or credentialed “expert” to manage things. We’d be far better off if our culture and schools did more to esteem humility than mass-produce framed paper affixed to office or home walls.
Trump swallowed the idea of societal manipulator hook, line, and sinker in his affection for tariffs, but don’t think for a moment that the Democrats are off the hook. The foolishness is the heart of their progressivism. They believe in “industrial policy”, an idea that is akin to a people’s life being best managed by a class of social and economic technicians. Of course, the technocrats will be churned out by our degree mills, the colleges, and not surprisingly it has led to wisdom dilution, inflated tuitions, and soaring college debt. Amazingly, our grasping for societal betterment became a disaster to be “solved” by more national debt.
The Democrats want to manipulate the system for the benefit of anyone not white and male, no matter how you define the sexual divide. Genitalia and melanin matter much to them. If truth be told, though, a history of lefty activism would have to be added to their list of preferred traits. So, clearly, it’s lefty women and men in dark pigments who are the objects of their sympathies and cares.
The intersectionality of the superficial, and having little to do with character.
In contrast, Trump’s darlings are blue collar workers. If I had to choose, my sympathies lie with the working stiffs who keep things humming along. Regardless, though, such targeted sympathies do not ensure good policy for a nation.
No better example can be found than Trump’s tariff escapades on aluminum (see here). The on-again, off-again exactions wreaked havoc for aluminum users such as beer and soft drink producers. Given the peculiarities of the beer and soft drink markets – the industry’s consumers are highly sensitive to price changes – the tariffs made precarious the livelihoods of thousands beyond the few hundred who have an increased lock on job security among the few remaining domestic producers of aluminum sheet metal. Trump had more zeal for ribbon-cutting while others were left seething at Budweiser, Coca-Cola, etc. Many in the bigger economy might be able to connect the dots. The possibility may have been missed, or simply ignored, by Trump and his advisers.
Where were the schools in teaching basic economics to the millions who pass through their doors? Where were the “experts” in educating your sons and daughters? Either the lessons didn’t stick or were never taught. Maybe people were never held accountable for either learning the lessons or teaching them. Either way, there’s a vacant spot in many minds to be filled with socialist nonsense or the belief that a puppet master or grand vizier will manipulate our lives to paradise. Actually, both possibilities are mirror images of each other.
We’ve seen this picture before. The vacuous thinking was resplendent in the streets of ancient Athens to those of Weimar Germany to the avenues of today’s Seattle, Portland, LA, Chicago, New York City, and any place in America beyond a threshold of population density. The “science” and “experts” haven’t freed us from the turmoil and ignorance. In fact, they may be contributing to it.
Take for instance, our “experts” in epidemiology – especially those that fill government posts – a field of understandable media attention during a pandemic. They have set us on the road to lockdowns, mandatory and universal mask wearing, abolition of Christian fellowship, the end of Thanksgiving and Christmas, the destruction of much of our economy, and putting the kibosh to real education for our kids. Has our educational system given us the same breed of “expert” who foisted on us the 1960’s-and-beyond War on Poverty?
They came right out of college knowing a lot about microscopic organisms and very little about the Laffer Curve, creative destruction, supply and demand curves, or crowd-induced hysteria. It’s easy for them to say, “If it saves one life, it’s worth it.” In their isolated world of labs and microscopes, it might make sense. As a governing philosophy, it’s a disaster. Just think of all the salutary advances from the rule of law to artificial power (steam, natural gas, nuclear, et al) that came from someone somewhere gambling. We’d still be in tribes in constant war with each other or huddled in caves next to open fires if we decided all matters by “If it saves one life …”.
And we are slowly reverting back to that prehistory with the lockdowns, stay-at-home orders, mandates for donning semi-burkas at all times in all places, and everyone treating everyone else as an alien species with the unceasing entreaties for social distancing. The crazy orders are depriving people of producing sustenance – i.e., boundless business closings and zooming (no pun intended) unemployment.
You know, sustenance, the kind of thing that’s been around since hunting and gathering. Many in our ruling class have made a conscious decision to replicate primordial existence, or at least the Great Depression. Once you take a meat axe to capital – thank you, Gavin Newsom and the other would-be Napoleons – it’s hard to bring it back. According to the National Restaurant Association, 40 to 50 percent of eateries won’t, if ever.
An empty downtown street amid the Covid-19 lockdown in Chicago, March 21. (photo: KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE)
Guess who’ll suffer the most? To find the susceptible, you’ll have to move down the social status and income pyramid: small businesses and the social rungs below those in exclusive zip codes. Without a doubt, the not-so-privileged, in the lingo of the day, will be the most vulnerable, not just to get the virus but also to lose their livelihoods (see here). Guess what happens to the woke crowd’s much-esteemed goal of “equity” as Newsom and company smother their economies? Guess who’ll cry the loudest for a “bailout” for their draconian measures? Mensa membership isn’t necessary for an answer.
The service industry is decimated, and much of the 15 million middle-income jobs with it. What do you think happens to your average barista? Hello, AOC. The president of a leftist activist group, Diane Yentel of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, proclaimed, “The majority of the up to 17 million households at risk of losing their homes this winter are people of color.” The lockdowns are an assault on the much-ballyhooed “equity”.
Taking a page from the Weimar Germany book of 1923, the response is to shower the country with paper money, with the same result, and non-expulsion edicts. Paper money being shoveled into the economy while euthanizing much production isn’t an expression of sanity in public policy.
It’s all due to “If it saves one life …”. Thank you, our schools, for giving us a powerful cadre of small-minded but powerful people.
Arising out of our colleges is much more than blinkered, busybody “experts”. Insanity dressed up in arcane academic rhetoric emanates out of these gilded hot houses. For example, take equality and turn it into equality of outcome, mash it into ruminations about our electoral system, and out comes “vote reparations”, and out goes “one man, one vote”. You’ve got that right: a black vote should count twice, or some similar formulation. Really? Brandon Hasbrouck, law professor at Washington and Lee University, hatched the idea to address the fact that there aren’t enough blacks in Wyoming and Nebraska, and too many in Chicago, Detroit, and the urban dots on the mid-Atlantic coast (see here). Yeah, African-Americans aren’t evenly distributed enough, he says, or in large enough numbers to protect their interests in a constitutional republic. So, he demands to jerry rig the system to the advantage of 13% of the population and end the constitutional republic that we’ve come to know.
Brandon Hasbrouck
The possibilities would be endless for advocates. For instance, divide LA’s Watts, Compton, and Southcentral neighborhoods into 20 congressional districts. Let’s put Eldridge Gerry’s salamander, the Gerrymander, on fertility drugs.
Printed in March 1812, this political cartoon was made in reaction to the newly drawn state senate election district of South Essex created by the Massachusetts legislature to favor the Democratic-Republican Party. The caricature satirizes the bizarre shape of the district as a dragon-like “monster”, and Federalist newspaper editors and others at the time likened it to a salamander.
Crazy? You bet, but something that gets a serious hearing among those in padded cells and faculty lounges.
Our schools, now at all levels, are quickly becoming breeding grounds for the sort of deadly mental pathogens that spell doom to any healthy society. At the entrance to every school – grade school to college – the following caution should be required under the school’s name in an official font size: “Warning: The activity in this place is hazardous to your cognitive development and the health of your country”.
This configuration doesn’t capture the essence of our modern mode of government. The branch on the left is mostly superfluous. The subterranean one and the one on the right hold sway.
Ours is not a limited government founded upon popular sovereignty. It is something unmoored from any sensible reading of the Constitution. Congress, the legislative branch, is a pointless political soap opera, no longer deliberative and relevant for the most part. The real stuff of governance happens in an alliance between government workers in the executive branch and the courts. The same pattern is repeated in the states. The least democratic parts have the greatest effective power.
No better example of this disfigured mode of governance can be found than the actions of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on September 17 to nullify sections of the state’s election law signed by Democratic governor Tom Wolfe last year. The law stipulated that mail-in ballots had to be received by 8 p.m. on election day. The Court supplanted the plain language in the law with its own judgment of 3 days after the election. Why 3 days? Good question. I’m sure that there’s some rationale but I don’t think that it’s far removed from arbitrary.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court: the state’s second legislature.
On what did the narrow majority of four black-robed potentates hang their hat for their edict? Well, it’s the same tack as finding the right to abortion in emanations and penumbras (Griswold v. Conn. /Roe v. Wade). Find some language in the Constitution (state or federal) clearly meant for something else and stretch it to apply as needed. That way, they can legislate but hide it under “interpretation”.
These legal eagles invented an entirely new elastic clause in the state constitution. The relevant passage in the state constitution, now stretched to satisfy judicial whims, reads, “Elections shall be free and equal; and no power, civil or military, shall at any time interfere to prevent the free exercise of the right of suffrage.” Of course, if a deadline can be annulled by such reasoning, so can any standard to ensure a credible election. Shower the state with ballots – which was done – and let them come in by wind and clutches at times made fungible by judicial flights of fancy – which was also done.
The federal Constitution lays the power to establish the “manner” of elections with the state legislatures. If, as part of their “manner”, Pennsylvania’s powers-that-be are willing to tolerate the transfer of the legislative power to judges, we’re stuck with it.
What a sorry state of affairs. Legislatures legislate, courts legislate over them, and everyone who likes the result yawns “ho-hum”. No constitutional provision can prevent the reality of sorry governments producing sorry elections. What do you expect from a corrupt oligarchy?
The plutocrats of today: Gates, Bezos, Soros, Zuckerberg (l to r)
Abraham Lincoln on his dire warnings about the possible demise of the United States in his address before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, January 27, 1838 (read at http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/…/speeches/lyceum.htm):
A younger Abraham Lincoln at the time of the Lyceum address.
“At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? — Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! — All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.
At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
* * * * * * *
Is Lincoln right? Are we about to confirm his prediction of us being the author of our destruction? If so, the rot has begun among our elites and the institutions that they dominate and like gravity it will flow downhill. The rest of us get mindlessly pulled along or find ourselves powerless to resist. Pick any one of today’s fashionable issues – climate change, systemic racism, its cousin “social justice”, “equity”, the preeminence of self-professed identities, transnationalism – and we will drown in it.
Last Sunday, in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Bill Gates, tech billionaire par excellence, made statements about the pandemic that had me shouting at the tube (see below). My wife sought peace in another room. Now, I am no epidemiologist, and neither is he. Look at his bio. The much-abused word “privileged” applies to his upbringing. His father was a prominent lawyer and his mother was on the board of First Interstate BancSystem, Inc., her father being a national bank president. They were well-heeled enough for young Bill to attend Seattle’s exclusive Lakeside Prep School. “Silver spoon” doesn’t go far enough to explain his privilege.
And off to Harvard he went, dropping out after two years, taking mostly math and computer science courses. He made his well-deserved “bank” and retired, with his bank freeing him from the mundane matters of life so he could pursue his philanthropy hobby. In his mind, apparently, his lavish donations qualifies him to pass judgment on matters epidemiological. Tapper treated him as an “expert” . . . which he isn’t! A silver spoon and half a Harvard degree doesn’t qualify him to pontificate on the many ways to destroy our existence, but obviously not his. Yet, here he was at CNN having his ego stroked for his “wisdom”.
Gates’s advocacy of globalism/transnationalism, more lockdowns, and reluctance to give Trump’s Operation Warp Speed any credit for the record time in the development of a vaccine is both informative and disturbing. He twists himself into knots to give credit to others outside of Trump while completely ignoring Trump’s all-important gift of clearing the regulatory way for Big Pharma. Trump gave the keys to the researchers, and gets no recognition for the fact from the muddle-headed Gates.
Pres. Trump announced Operation Warp Speed on May 15, 2020.
What does the personage of Bill Gates say about the condition of our moneyed elites? Lots! This guy, and many others among the techie super-rich, has no real acquaintance with a coal miner, steel worker, grape picker, or anyone in the skilled trades, where and how they live, their values, and not much of anything about them, except as an order to an underling to call one of them to service the mansion’s plumbing. The lives of the average people are an abstraction to be treated abstractly. Lockdowns, compulsory mask wearing, school closings are pressed without the slightest appreciation of the impacts on the common people outside the walls of the gated estate. Their proclamations are easy for them, their wealth and influence being a shield for them and their children.
Not so for the masses of human beings underneath them in the status pyramid. This is an elite unlike any other before, a point made by Victor Davis Hanson in his piece “Where Did the New Mad Left Come From?”. They made their money in ways that insulated them from the earthy existence of manufacturing, mining, lumbering, construction, and the kind of retailing that requires you to meet and interact with customers. Theirs is an apartheid world of wealth where they go from their homogeneous wealthy suburb to the exclusive prep school to the Ivy League to high tech and high finance. In their chosen sector, a life with the hoi polloi isn’t necessary and not evident. They live a life mostly freed from the unwashed masses, except in acts of social penance that appear as gifts that draw the admiration of the Davos crowd.
Warren Buffett, chairman and chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., speaks during an event with Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, not pictured, at Sokol Auditorium in Omaha, Nebraska, U.S., on Wednesday, Dec. 16, 2015. Buffet said at the rally that he was supporting Clinton’s bid for president because they share a commitment to help the less affluent. (Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Take a look at another among the fabulously rich in the tech world, Mark Zuckerberg, or the Google patriarchs, or the money-changing George Soros and you’ll see the same monotone leftist ramblings. Manipulating currencies or a life that keeps you ensconced among others like you isn’t the experience that’ll keep you from flights of utopianism and a predilection for the left side of the political spectrum — which is the same thing. They are the big money behind the billion-dollar prestige-school endowments, collectivist crusades, and neo-socialist/neo-Marxist agitators of the moment. Their money flows from the indoctrination in the colleges to the mobs in the streets to the political adventures that empower the home of lefty America, the Democratic Party.
To be clear, lefty bromides are toxic. Assaults on personal responsibility and the guarantors of morality in a thriving Christianity, and extended adolescence in state dependency aren’t the makings of mental health or personal accomplishment. No society can long endure under this constant abuse. Lincoln could be right in that we nurture our own downfall, and it begins as a rotting head on our social body.
Jack Dorsey of Twitter
I think that I’d have more respect for Gates if he’d give up his castle keep, take up residence in public housing, forego the hired security, and force his kids and grandkids to zoom from a dilapidated computer without expensive tutors and the elite prep school. Furthermore, Bill, freeze access to your bountiful assets so you’ll have greater appreciation for those wondering where their next paycheck will come from after your lockdowns continue into 2021 and maybe onto 2022. My guess is that he won’t last the night.
