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.
Are we irreparably divided? When deeply divergent cultural assumptions lie at the root, we could very well be heading for disunion. The only question is, will it be “soft” (peaceful) or “hard” (violent)? Terry Teachout, drama critic of the Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary, comes down on the side of disunion, but it’ll be a “soft” one to him. I’m not so certain, but I hope he’s right if we are to have one.
Terry Teachout
At work are two radically different notions of human nature. On one side lies the near perfectibility of us and our socio-economic-political arrangements. Indeed, a fixed nature is far from their imaginations. This leads to an endlessly meddlesome state. Space is left open in their intellectual firmament for all kinds of socialism: aggressive and velvet glove. In this social scheme, at the top of the governing pyramid is situated people like them, people whose status stems from paper credentials like college degrees and certifications. Today, this crowd increasingly comes with these ontological beliefs in tow.
Obama’s “pajama boy” from the 2010 publicity campaign to pass Obamacare.Steelworkers on a shift change in Braddock, Pa., 2008. (photo: Damon Winter/The New York Times)
On the other side of the cultural divide, we find those more traditionally inclined and the belief that human flourishing requires self-reliance and virtue. Yet, human nature is punctuated with a dark side. Therefore, all-powerful directorates will be populated with agents of a flawed nature like the rest of us. Spending 17-19 years in classrooms won’t change our basic makeup. Lord Acton’s famous quip about the possession of great power accessing our darker side is very relevant here.
Well, some of you might minimize the disagreement as only a difference of opinion. You’d be wrong to trivialize the estrangement. It’s fundamental to the difference between gun confiscation and a Second Amendment, abortion as infanticide and limiting it to the first trimester, free college and personal responsibility for your career path, environmental totalitarianism and environmental prudence, economic growth and the “new normal” of stagnation, religious liberty and state invasions of the pulpit, education freedom and the government classroom monopoly as a lefty finishing school, identity favoritism and equal opportunity, etc. Hardly trivial, this is existential.
In October 2015, Houston’s progressive mayor, Annise Parker, ordered the city’s district attorney to subpoena the sermons of selected pastors whom she suspected of using the pulpit for political purposes.
How did we get to this impasse? I think that the growth of government and its dependencies has seriously eroded the basis for our civilization. But also state-love has seeped into the subconscious of our media-saturated metropolitan areas. It began as a pervasive ethos in our faculty lounges. From there, it was evangelized to succeeding generations. I know of its prevalence as a 30-year teaching veteran in our public schools.
Unexamined lefty assumptions in our citified blue dots have provoked the chasm. Don’t be a bit surprised when you learn that people outside the blue dots have noticed. They have, and are justifiably horrified.
Rush Limbaugh yesterday let out the “S” word: secession (see below).
Over the past few years, I have been ruminating on the topic of secession, and worried that we are essentially two different peoples heading toward it. The differences are so profound that for one to rule the public square, the other is suppressed. Our politics have become a matter of conquest as we have become so deeply divided. It’s natural for the conquered to seek separation.
How different are we? Metropolitan areas are enthralled by a relatively recent nanny-state zealotry. Everywhere else, tradition and self-reliance has a stronger grip on imaginations. It’s the difference between pleasure-seeking materialists and your local church, if you want avatars to encapsulate the two sides.
Mayor Muriel Bowser looks out over a Black Lives Matter sign that was painted on a street, during nationwide protests in Washington, D.C., U.S. June 5, 2020. (Khalid Naji-Allah Executive Office of the Mayor/Handout via REUTERS)
We see it more and more, and all around us. During the Trump presidency, Democrat/Lefty strongholds engaged in John C. Calhoun-style nullification of federal immigration law, which Calhoun was an 1830’s harbinger over a federal tariff.
Now, it’s the traditionalists’ turn. Licentious electoral systems in blue states, and metropolitan cores in red-leaning states, have imposed an executive branch with lefty evangelical zeal on the vast stretches outside the blue dots and the coasts. In 1860, George Templeton Strong put it succinctly when he said, “Get prepared for a hurricane!”
The simple fact is that the urban cores and urban-core dominated states has adopted an aggressive leftism in recent years. They have moved extreme left while the rest of the country has remained more true to our founding beliefs and traditions. This could be a secession sparked by a militant collectivism in like manner as the adoption of a grand theory in defense of race-based chattel slavery in the South in the middle of the 19th century would incite the first go-around. In opposition, the abolitionists were the inheritors of an emancipation that is traced back through Christianity to classical times.
Modern urban bohemiansBlue collar Americans
I am worried. The fundamentals are present for a repeat. Indeed, if wiser heads don’t stop the leftward lurch, “Get prepared for a hurricane!”
While listening to Amazon Music this morning, the playlist presented “I Need You Christmas” by the Jonas Brothers. The song is beautifully performed, and reminded me of all that we are missing as our life has been meaninglessly deformed by the mini-totalitarians in positions of power.
The lockdowns and mitigations have nearly expunged church, most of of our interactions with other people, and removed celebration and spontaneous enjoyment of friendship from our lives. Children are banned from the park and school. They are left to spend most of their lives behind walls and in front of a computer screen. Ours is a deformed existence and not a natural and reasonable response to the spread of illness. This song reminded me of what we are missing, and ought not to.
Christmas should be a time of joy, faith, family, and friends. To be honest, the song makes me melancholy. Still, it’s a wonderful song and beautifully performed. Pease enjoy. And merry Christmas . . . if you can.
If you have a hankerin’, go watch “The Plot Against the President” (trailer below) on Amazon Prime by Amanda Milius, daughter of legendary script writer, producer, and director John Milius. It lays out the scheme by Obama’s courtiers, and Obama himself, to undermine Trump from the moment he won the nomination to the failed impeachment on February 5, 2020. Trump had no traditional “honeymoon”, and neither is Biden deserving of one. There should be a peaceful transfer of power, but it doesn’t have to be a cooperative one.
The post-2016 Democrats were despicable in their embrace of reverse racism, a racial spoils system, turning a blind eye to rioters, and socialism here, there, and everywhere. Their behavior was disgraceful in almost all matters political. Biden’s people should be prohibited from executive branch offices till noon, January 20. A couple of briefings for Biden alone may be alright. Then, he can take the info back to his minions that are holed up in the Office of the President-elect.
Congressional Republicans, keep the heat on from day one. Senators, if you have the majority, take a few scalps, particularly those that belong to Democrats from the California snake pit. Protect Durham and anyone who might be appointed to investigate the Biden family’s influence peddling.
Is this merely a matter of “vengeance”? No. Consider it, to borrow from the romantic texts between the Strzok and Page love birds, an “insurance policy”. It’s insurance to keep the Democrats from turning America into Venezuela.
Will Biden be hampered from doing the people’s business? And what business is that? Going after your livelihood and your $45,000 SUV in your garage? Greasing the skids for the prosecution of police departments and individual officers? More lockdowns to make your kids dumber and dumber? Going after your suburban neighborhood because it is too middle class and too nice? Waking up to learn that tax-the-rich became tax-the-paycheck? More insults to Israel and fist bumps with the mullahs? Your children finding that their college application didn’t check the right genitalia and skin color boxes? Lefty ideology being taught to your kids as “equity”? DMV-style healthcare replacing your doctor? Making it more difficult for you to get a gun as they open the jails, budgetarily strangle your police, and refuse to prosecute the guy breaking into your home and car?
Considering all that the Biden regime plans to offer, gridlock sounds good to me. At least, we’ll be spared the woke and neo-socialist claptrap.
Solar panel array in Irwindale, California. (photo: Ringo Chiu/Zuma)
Here I am with another piece on the ongoing and grotesque burlesque show in my native state of California. This one is about the inevitability of oppressive central planning that grips the progressive mind in the state. There seems to be this fetish for the power to control everything and everyone to get to the ruling claque’s rapturous end state. They need a cataclysm to stampede the state’s hoi polloi into their arms. For them, nothing better fits the bill than their fixation on “climate change” and the companion thought that the Golden State and, if they capture DC, the US will lead the way to the nirvana of Sierra Club policy papers.
I was reading Kevin Williamson’s fairly balanced essay in National Review’s October issue, “The Heart of California’s Darkness”, and it dawned on me that the political power-hunger in the heart of every California progressive (or liberal, or leftist, or whatever) is, in some ways, more complete than anything that came out of the old Soviet Union. The USSR was a contraption that couldn’t run because it combined two incompatible things: complete equality in all things material and a prosperous life filled with conveniences. The former undercut the latter, and down it came after about 80 years. The crazies that run Sacramento are after something more sweeping.
Frankly, they don’t care so much about conveniences as they do about their religious-like adherence to an arbitrary sense of environmentalist purity best articulated by the immature utterances of people like 17-year-old Greta Thunberg and her ideological soulmate, Ocasio-Cortez. They won’t even make allowance for the desire for comfort in life. One of the greatest additions to comfort, alongside the automobile and balloon housing construction (makes the ‘burbs possible), was air conditioning. All of them are on the hit list for eventual elimination.
Ocasio-Cortez and Thunberg
The only problem is that the peasants would be seeking their pitch forks if the zealots shocked them with a huge and immediate dose of their vision. So, the fanatics seek to slowly strangulate our conveniences under think layers of regulations and edicts emanating from a politburo of the ruling party’s elders and the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC).
The Party has supportive cadres in affiliated institutions such as publicly-funded universities to help them invent new schemes to herd the masses in the desired direction. One such contributor in the achievement of the Party’s goal is comrade Severin Borenstein of UC Berkeley’s Energy Institute at the Haas Business School. He’s an enthusiast for tying electricity rates to the time of day when their most needed. If you don’t find ways to cut back on air conditioning, you’re deserving of bankruptcy in the fevered imaginations of people like Severin.
Severin Borenstein
And this comes at a time when the air is fouled by earlier escapades into environmentalist utopia that turned the forests into a blanket of matchsticks. So, if his wish comes to pass, you, my fair resident of the state, will have the privilege of coming home to a hot and stuffy house to sweat and bake in. That’s what you get for not desiring to live in a cramped and over-priced hovel in the narrow band of real estate hugging the coast. The abject inhumanity at the heart of the worldview is what’s so appalling.
The fact is, California’s version of Lenin’s vanguard elite is trying to shoehorn reality into an unreality. It won’t work any more than the Five-Year Plans of Lenin and his descendants. See, the sun and wind don’t cooperate so you must be made to cooperate. According to the California Energy Commission (another Party affiliate), energy capacity has indeed increased in the past 20 years as the activists in power shifted to renewables. But not so fast. “Capacity” – which could be another one of those statistical fairy tales – must not be confused with “generation”. Generation of electricity has been flat, even declining slightly in the face of population growth. Accepting energy from hydrocarbons from inside or outside the state to make up the difference between demand and supply gives the ruling class the willies, and nuclear power conjures visions of old monster movies. What you end up with is blackouts and/or personal bankruptcy – not exactly an open-arms invitation to move to the state.
This is no way to live. Not surprisingly, 800 businesses have jumped ship in one year from 2018 to 2019 to join thousands of others in the diaspora. California is not the future, so long as its goofy vision is quarantined within its borders. That’s an open question given the fact that California acolytes of central planning are auditioning for national promotions in the new Biden administration.
If left alone, California will suffer the same fate as the Soviet Union. One can only hope . . . and pray. The death of the hot mess is the only thing that’ll keep the rest of us safe and secure. Now that’s real herd immunity.
Rev. Al Sharpton speaks, center, flanked by La Raza President Janet Murguia, right, and Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, speaks to reporters about the Voting Rights Act, outside the West Wing of the White House in Washington, Monday, July 29, 2013, after a meeting with President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
If you have any doubts about the fact that Big Tech is seeded throughout their organizational pyramids with leftists, look at what happened to Eli and Shelby Steele’s film, “What Killed Michael Brown?”, on Amazon’s website (see the trailer below).
Shelby Steele. director and writer of “What Killed Michael Brown?”, being interviewed by Fox radio.
The film was initially cancelled. Why? The censors at Amazon rolled out drivel like the film wasn’t “eligible for publishing”, “doesn’t meet Prime Video’s content quality expectations”, and Amazon “will not be accepting resubmission of this title and this decision may not be appealed”. That’s a gobbledygook word salad, with the last phrase an attempt at commercial assassination.
For the incorrigibly naïve ready to believe Bezos’s underlings, go to Amazon Prime and take a look at the boat loads of stuff that shouldn’t be “eligible for publishing”. Who are these people trying to kid? The Steeles, pure and simple, challenge the Black Lives Matter dogma. That’s it! The Steeles’ take on race is too jarring to the straitjacketed minds in our chattering classes of legacy media, the academy, corporate boardrooms, Big Tech and its minions, and the Democratic Party. These socio-economic satraps are different legs of a monocultural centipede that can’t handle an opposing posture. If you have $19.99 to spare, buy it and watch it. You’ll quickly discover that “quality” was a PR word to hide an organizational attack on a different, well-founded point of view. Big Tech is working really hard to get a step on Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.
From left: Amazon Devices chief David Limp, SVP of corporate affairs Jay Carney, and CEO Jeff Bezos. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
Later, after an outcry, Amazon relented. If for no other reason, stick your thumb in their eye by purchasing the film on Prime. You’ll also be rewarded by the “quality” and a well-reasoned outlook on the issue of race in America. You’ll quickly come to see that Amazon’s ploy was a lie.
Now, to the film. The Steele perspective on race is analogous to a kind of digestive tract that goes from real historical oppression, to later white guilt/penance, to government coddling to assuage the guilt, to crippling dependency, and to the evolution of a mutually beneficial relationship between the providers and recipients of the largesse. At this last stage of digestion, we have a full-blown race hustling industry ready to treat incidents as if they were a resource – like yesteryear’s Carnegie Steel exploiting Minnesota’s Iron Range – but leaving the cultural landscape in black neighborhoods horribly scarred.
This race-hustling industry has made a new career path in race-hustling. As in most things, the new career is founded on a few presumptions. It begins with the busybody reflex in the progressive mindset: life and people would be better only if they – the self-anointed “expert” – had power to direct their lives. Where did that lead? It led to the War on Poverty and the wholesale demolition of black property ownership and, most terrifyingly, the loss of the full humanness that naturally accrues to all of us. Blacks were put into a special category reserved for people incapable of personal responsibility. A near complete annihilation of their civil society with its faith and family spilled out of this good-intentioned crusade.
And a new market in the penance for “white guilt” arose as white liberals sought exoneration and forgiveness and race-hustlers offer it for a price: wealth and power. In economics, no market can survive without mutual benefit, and indeed Al Sharpton and Democratic Party hegemons get wealth and power and whites earn remission after bending a knee before Black Lives Matter. It matures into a forever thing, a perpetual motion machine built around grievance and shallow identities.
Shelby Steele blows the cover on this hideous marionette show. See “What Killed Michael Brown?”. It might compensate for the deep disappointment after watching Mitt Romney join a horde of Black Lives Matter enthusiasts in the wake of another one of those resourceful incidents, George Floyd.
Photo: MICHELLE BOORSTEIN / THE WASHINGTON POST / GETTY
