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A Time of “Repressive Tolerance” and a Broad Depravity

Marx on the beach: the forgotten story of Yugoslavia’s rebel communist summer school — The ...
Philosopher Herbert Marcuse makes a speech at the Praxis Summer School, 1968

“Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.” —- Herbert Marcuse in “Repressive Tolerance”, 1965 (see below)

Let’s face it, the above quote from Herbert Marcuse (an acolyte of Antonio Gramsci) is emblematic of the rise of the Left’s totalitarian thought control that plagues our times.  You know, you’ve seen its fruits in the neo-Marxist critical theory littered in your child’s school curriculum, our teachers’ training, and the campus anarchy spawned by “restorative justice” disciplinary policies.  Even casual attention to the news during the 2020 summer of mayhem would expose you to the wholesale defacing of monuments and memorials and urban centers being set ablaze.  The gray lady, The New York Times, jumped into the fray with a neo-Marxist rewrite of our history in “The 1619 Project”, which is inserted in bits and pieces in the instruction in many of our classrooms.  And let’s not forget the campus mob beatdowns of contrarian voices to the zeitgeist in higher ed from Middlebury to Stanford.  Speaking of repressive tolerance (?).

Herbert Marcuse in a heated exchange with a student, from the 1960’s. Practicing a little “repressive tolerance”?

Taking apart the above witticism from Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance” essay, it’s a call for intolerance by hiding it in oxymorons.  Repressive tolerance? Liberation by repression?  But it is convincing to minds heavily marinated in the intellectual mush.

These young minds are immersed in “woke” thought, and “woke” thought is critical theory, and critical theory is obeisance to the claim of systemic oppression.  You see, the whole civilization, its society and culture, according to critical theory are oriented to oppress the “other”, or so-called outgroups as defined by characteristics such as race, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, etc.  Everything about the civilization, its law, principles, institutions, are cynically appraised for their supposed malevolent impact on the “other”.  The basic rights of free speech, association, conscience, religion must be reinterpreted as part of the system of oppression.  The effort is a very longwinded way of saying that we, the self-appointed spokesmen of the oppressed, have the power to silence you.  Welcome to the college campus of today.

Something is afoot, and it ain’t pleasant.  Our culture and nearly all our institutions are being hijacked by this neo-Marxist junk-thought.  And as happens with a radicalization of the Left, there is a commensurate radicalization of the Right, which oddly takes the form of a cult of personality and performance art politics.  Trump and dramatic displays of bellicosity replace strategic and reasoned confrontation to the nonsense.  Fringe extremes they may be, but we still are in a hell of a mess.

Neo-Marxism is now the prevailing doctrine of the Democratic Party.  It comes in the form of “diversity, equity, inclusion” (DEI — or DIE if you will) and furtherance of ESG (environment, social, governance) in the c-suite.  It’s a combination of a neo-Jim Crow (race/gender/sexuality-based favoritism) and a dismantlement of western civilization in private sector venues.  As for the Right, they have the utterances of Fox News primetime and some talk radio hosts.  These venues are deathly afraid of the personality cult in their audiences.

Hugh Hewitt on his radio show regularly declares himself to be in Switzerland (neutral) in the coming Republican presidential primary fight.  All contestants will be treated as moral equivalents, probably in a bid to avoid angering the large Trumper listener base for talk radio.  The fear is certainly evident at Fox News.  The Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News unearthed a treasure trove of duplicity and alarm on the part of Fox News’s celebrity pundits and execs.  In released emails and tweets, the channel’s stars spitefully attack the news division over its coverage of the 2020 election and aftermath.  The vitriol is lathered in ample dollops of hubris – “we have the power”.

The anxiety in Fox News headquarters in the wake of the 2020 election was palpable.  Execs and producers noticed the absence of evidence to support the election-was-stolen angle.  Tommy Firth, Laura Ingraham’s producer, is exasperated with the storyline of Dominion rigging the vote for Biden: “This Dominion shit is going to give me an aneurysm – as many times as I’ve told Laura [sic] it’s bs, she sees shit posters and trump [sic] tweeting about it.”

Laura Ingraham: Trump voters didn't riot, they rallied [Video]

The call of Arizona for Biden was particularly galling to Fox’s commentariat.  Laura Ingraham blames exec Irena Briganti for the call: “She is coordinating this.”  To which Tucker Carlson responds, “Without question. She hates us.”  Sean Hannity chimes in, “Why would anyone defend that call [the Arizona call] [sic].”  Later, Laura noticed a ratings fall after the announcement and concludes, “Friday numbers aren’t that surprising with Trump impending loss – but how much of the bleed is due to anger at the news channel [division]”.  She levels her distaste for the news division: “My anger at the news channel [division] is pronounced”.

"Every Institution Is Run By People Who Will Use Any Means to Disclude Them" - Tucker Carlson on ...

Tucker’s response is telling because he predicts ratings damage by angering the channel’s Trump-laced audience:

“It should be [sic] We devote our lives to building an audience and they [the execs] let Chris Wallace and Leland fucking Vittert [host, reporter] wreck it.  Too much.”

After asking, “What can we do?”, Laura answers her own question in a series of tweets: “I think the three of us have enormous power” – “We have more power than we know or exercise” – “Together”.  Hubris follows from immense power, the power to craft the story to appease an audience?  I can’t say at this point, but the communications are suggestive.

Hannity Sows Doubt in Election Results, Suggests PA Do-Over

Sean Hannity cuts to the chase in a tweet exchange with Steve Doocy: “You don’t piss off the base”.

So, the Left’s cancel culture joins the Right’s reluctance to aggravate its base to produce either indoctrination through censorship or information that conforms to only blatant confirmation bias.  Either way, dangerous fairy tales take root to mangle the public discussion.

Both sides are pandered by only information and stories congenial to their sensibilities.  The effect on the young is shocking.  They are the ones who are immersed in a Marcusian cognitive hellscape.  Herbert Marcuse and his colleagues at the Marxist Frankfurt School – aka Institute for Social Research at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany – scattered like rats on a sinking ship when the Nazis seized Germany.  Many came to the U.S. and joined faculties at prestigious American universities such as Harvard, Columbia, UC Berkeley, etc.  Therein spread the mental straitjacket of neo-Marxism for our young.

Marcuse’s “repressive tolerance” intolerance became deeply embedded in campus culture.  Most recently, on March 9, it was on full display at Stanford when the school’s Federalist Society invited Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan to speak.  The essence of Marcuse’s logic to stifle speech from the Right came out of the mouth of the school’s Dean of DEI, Tirien Steinbach, when she took to the lectern after students prevented Duncan from speaking and lectured him on how “hurtful” his opinions and rulings were to the “community”.  She and the bullying students claimed the total power to determine what was “hurtful” and prevent any further discussion.  It’s classic Marcuse; repressive tolerance in operation.

See video below.  Watch Stanford’s DEI dean takeover the lectern from Judge Duncan.

Marcuse ended his academic career at UC, San Diego. For academics braying against capitalism and western civilization, they clearly flock to western civ’s most comfortable, well-paid sinecures in the most pleasant spots on earth.

Herbert Marcuse enjoying the good life at UC San Diego, the 1960’s.

Check this out: they even had a “summer school”, the Korčula (Praxis) Summer School, or camp, on Croatia’s soothing Adriatic coast from 1963 to 1974 when the Marxist Yugoslav dictator Josip Broz Tito shut it down.  Some participants referred to it as “Marx on the beach”; others called it a gathering for “dionysaic socialism” (see below).  Tenure, hobnobbing with similarly privileged fellow Marxists, adequate incomes, and academic freedom work to insulate them from having to live in the consequences of their detached ruminations.  It makes for a very special caste of Brahmins, one that will produce a living hell for everyone not so privileged to be among the revolution’s vanguard elite.

Come to think of it, this is a time of “repressive tolerance” intolerance and a broad depravity on both the Left and a slice of the Right.  The Left tries to set themselves up as commissars of daily life, allowing only what conforms to their sensibilities.  Some on the Right want to be cradled only in the pronouncements of the chief priest of the Trump cult.  The reality is that we need to seize back control of K-grad school from this brewing totalitarianism, and Trump-the-drama-queen should hang up the MAGA hat and enjoy retirement.

tma_sierrahills: Ramirez Cartoon: "Tolerance" Protester v Freedom of Speech

RogerG

Read more here:

* “Repressive Tolerance (full text)”, Herbert Marcuse, 1969, at https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1965-repressive-tolerance-fulltext.html

* “Texts from the Dominion lawsuit reveal the real Fox News”, Bent D. Griffiths and Rebecca Zisser, Insider, 3/22/2023, at https://www.businessinsider.com/texts-from-the-dominion-lawsuit-reveal-the-real-fox-news-2023-3

* “Marx on the beach: the forgotten story of Yugoslavia’s rebel communist summer school”, Jonathan Bousfield, The Calvert Journal, 8/21/2021, at https://www.calvertjournal.com/articles/show/13038/marx-on-the-beach-the-forgotten-story-of-yugoslavias-rebel-communist-summer-school

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The Cause of Our Discontents

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Trump supporter and Antifa member confront each other, 2017.

“We are divorced, North from South, because we have hated each other so.” — Mary Boykin Chestnut from her diary at the onset of the American Civil War.

Today, one could substitute “urban from rural” for “North from South”.  Please be cautioned, though, that some blowhards will manage to warp the nature of the divide.  Marjorie Taylor Greene, that grand dame of unhinged hyperbole on the right, recently tweeted and repeated on Sean Hannity, “We need a national divorce.”  She added, “We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government.”  Her national divorce is incomprehensible since her blue/red dividing lines don’t neatly conform to state boundaries.  It is more intrastate than anything, between a plethora of blue freckles against a sea of red across the entire national domain.  That reality captures the essence of the current impasse.  The root of our disjunction is cultural.  A fundamental difference of ethos separates the blue dots from the red swaths.

The split consists of mutually incompatible mindsets with one being revolutionary and the other defensive of America’s founding.  Both sides didn’t mutually move way from each other.  One leaped from the other as if it had the plague.  The key precipitating factor is the adoption of a radical cultural revolution by social, commercial and political elites in concentrated urban and academic nodes.  Ronald Reagan once said, “I didn’t leave the Democratic party, the Democratic Party left me.”  Well, America didn’t leave rural areas, but it certainly was kicked out of these nodes of concentrated power and influence.  The separation is the logical outgrowth of the radicalization of our cultural elites.

The radicalization of the blue dots – what today makes them blue (actually red in its historical meaning) – consists in the adoption of a particular Marxist’s ideas on how to advance the revolution in spite of popular resistance to it.  Antonio Gramsci in the 1930’s penciled out his grand strategy to advance the worldwide revolution.  Karl Marx’s original idea was the organic development of a worker class consciousness which would culminate in the seizure of the means of production and set the world on the path to utopia.  Others, including Lenin and Gramsci, noticed that it wasn’t happening as predicted.  Lenin’s solution was a vanguard elite to precipitate the overthrow of the existing order.  For his part, Gramsci advocated a “long march” through cultural institutions and civil society, the social elements that lie mostly between the people and government (civil society: churches, charities, social organizations, schools, businesses).

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Antonio Gramsci

Lenin’s coup d’état expired with the implosion of the USSR in 1991 – speaking of internal contradictions that culminate in revolution (typical Marxist rhetoric).  Gramsci, who died before he was set to be released from Mussolini’s jail in 1937, would posthumously succeed beyond his wildest dreams.  He became the darling of the 1960’s New Left that would quickly morph into today’s progressivism.  A hive of intertwined Gramsci acolytes dominates many of our important institutions such as the schools, the Fortune 500 c-suite, media, entertainment, foundations, charities, mainline churches, the administrative state, the Democratic Party, and of course higher ed.

The danger of this new Gramscian upper class to the rest of the country, so isolated as they are, was best expressed by Charles Murray in his book, Coming Apart:

“Many of the members of the new upper class are balkanized. Furthermore, their ignorance about other Americans is more problematic than the ignorance of other Americans about them.  It is not a problem if truck drivers cannot empathize with the priorities of Yale professors.  It is a problem if Yale professors, or producers of network news programs, or CEOs of great corporations, or presidential advisers cannot empathize with the priorities of truck drivers.  It is inevitable that people have large areas of ignorance about how others live, but that makes it all the more important that the members of the new upper class be aware of the breadth and depth of their ignorance.”

Truckers Shutting Down DC To Protest The Federal Government And Its "Bulls**t"
Truckers descend on DC in 2022.

So ubiquitous are Gramsci’s ideas that you at least know them intuitively.  They are everywhere. The notorious CRT is just the application of Gramsci’s Critical Theory to racial matters.  It’s the same formula when considering gender, ethnicity, or mixtures of the host of identities (intersectionality) encompassed within the “other”, the so-called oppressed.  Favoritism and oppression in the Gramscian hivemind are embedded in the culture, even if it has been superficially expunged from government.  It’s systemic in the culture, they say.  Real revolution won’t happen if the broader culture isn’t enlisted in the effort.  Today, they succeeded for the most part.

The influence of the hivemind may be what John O’Sullivan had in mind in his law of organizational behavior: all organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.  The prevalent hivemind is too powerful to ignore.  The evidence is all around.  TV commercials are replete with representations of the “other” far beyond any reasonable relationship to their portion of the population.  Those same ads are boosters for the ideology’s favorite products such as ev’s, as well as campaigns against the hated plastics and fossil fuels, alongside a push for the stakeholder corporate-management nonsense that threatens the health of my pension.  MLB moved the Allstar Game; the NFL diluted the national anthem with the addition of an identity anthem; the kneelings; the black power fist thrusts.  Popular entertainment and their awards extravaganzas are not without their ritual display of the putative threat of systemic racism and illusory attacks on the “other”.  DEI and CRT are everywhere in curriculums, hiring, and admissions, with a baleful effect on standards and morale.

An entire industry has appeared overnight to cater and push the agenda on adults and their children.  All of it is meant to bend the mind to accept the advantaging of one group at the expense of another, all of it based on race, gender, and ethnicity identity.  We’re back to a new Jim Crow.

May be an image of 1 person and text that says 'SRENIEW "I have dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.' -Martin Luther King WRONG! MODNN WOKE @Ramireztoons michaelpramirez.com'

The assault on the minds of children is the most outrageous.  Outright pornography is introduced to adolescents under the guise of furthering tolerance for the sexual “other” (transgendered, etc.).  The distinction between mere tolerance and ideological recruitment won’t be fully appreciated on the part of the teacher-as-propagandist or obviously an impressionable high school sophomore, thereby artificially swelling the ranks of this new “other” in a social contagion.  Behavior and language – if presented on radio or television, they would be eligible for a fine or loss of license – is now part of school and training curriculums, and the inventories of school libraries, for 8-year-olds in some places.  Child abuse laws in states like California have been warped to shield children from parental interference in a minor’s choice to engage in essentially experimental sex-change interventions.

California has gone so far as declared itself to be the newest kind of sanctuary: a haven for a minor’s decision to break free of their parents’ influence, from any place, state, or country of origin.  An underground railroad to the golden state for legally protected child sexual mutilation will soon follow.

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A child’s newfound identity as a gender “other” will be reinforced by an absence of countervailing views, opposing opinions having been quashed by entrenched activists dominating society’s institutions.  The struggle in the newsroom at the NY Times is instructive.  Prior to 2021, the paper treated the issue of trans ideology as if there was only one side, the trans activists’ side.  You know, it’s the same one given to your kids in their school: sex isn’t binary; denial of gender identity is bigotry; refusals to affirm a child’s self-diagnosis are akin to murder by suicide; a medical consensus exists in support of all things trans; the recent increase in teen trans self-identity isn’t evidence of a social contagion.  Truth be told, a defensible counterpoint can be made to each one of these contentions, but it didn’t appear on the pages of the Times.  Then, dissenters found other outlets like Bari Weiss’s Substack page.

After activists in the newsroom got opinion editor James Bennet to resign for approving a Tom Cotton op-ed, his replacements began to show some spine in not kowtowing to the radicals in their midst.  Some opinion pieces questioning the newsroom orthodoxy began to appear.  The hive was riled about having to face an opposing point of view.  LGBTQ+ activist groups penned a letter to the paper condemning the openness.  A group of contributors sent one railing against the simple recognition of another side in the debate.  For them, there is no debate.

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Their mind is closed and want to see everyone’s mind similarly clamped shut.  In one of the letters, they declared, “. . . stop questioning science that is SETTLED.”  Where have we heard that before?  End a debate by simply issuing the fatwah of “SETTLED” without stooping so low as to prove their position.

The censorship makes the unproven and untrue seem plausible.  At this point, the Gramscian “long march” sheds its cloak of tolerance to expose its true totalitarian nature.  The philosopher Robert P. George has an eloquent description of the difference between an authoritarian and totalitarian:

“Ordinary authoritarians are content to forbid people from speaking truths.  Totalitarians insist on forcing people to speak untruths.”

Cancel culture is forcing the gullible to speak untruths.  We are running the danger of an entire generation being coaxed into believing contestable ideas are uncontestable.  That’s dangerous.  It’s one sure way for humaneness to disappear from humanity.  People are frog-marched out of their jobs and free speech and conscience are suppressed.  Public intellectuals, academics, and people of professional accomplishment who disagree are dismissed as “deniers”, “. . . phobics”, haters, and blocked from outlets.

The reigning neo-Marxists have, maybe forever, mutilated the meaning of words such as “consensus”.  Their “consensus” – “the science is SETTLED” – is the wedge that is driving rural from urban.  The blue nodes are the nexus of this Gramscian cultural revolution.  Pardon people in the countryside for noticing this lurch into insanity.  A good portion of the country doesn’t want to go where DEI consultants want to lead it.

Previously travelled routes to the socialist hyper-state have only led to misery.  Now, will I be “cancelled” for saying it?

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RogerG

Read more here:

* Charles Murray’s book “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010” is an excellent place to start research into our current predicament.

* “Biography of Antonio Gramsci”, Nicki Lia Cole, PHD, ThoughtCo.com, 8/14/2019, at https://www.thoughtco.com/antonio-gramsci-3026471

* An additional concise survey of the life and influence of Antonio Gramsci can be found here: “The Long March Back”, Nate Hochman, National Review Online, 2/16/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-long-march-back/

* A brief account of the philosophy of Princeton’s Robert P. George can be found here: “The Georgian Way”, Andrew T. Walker, fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, National Review Magazine, 3/6/2023

* The struggle in the NY Times newsroom is captured here: “All the News That’s Fit to Debate”, Madeine Kearns, National Review Magazine, 3/20/2023

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The Cultural Commanding Heights Do Not Like the Hinterlands

A mural by street artist PBOY depicting yellow vest protesters inspired by Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People. (photo: Philippe Lopez/AFP)

“The green dreams of urbanites spark outrage in rural areas.” – Joel Klotkin, executive director of the Urban Reform Institute, and respectively Presidential and Washington Fellow at Chapman and Claremont Universities

Joel Klotkin’s newest piece on the urban/rural divide would be a revelation for those comfortable in their biases and lifestyle in their insulated, well-to-do urban enclaves (see below).

Joel Kotkin quoted in NYTimes OpEd About 2020 Election - Joel Kotkin
Joel Klotkin

They control urban-dominated states like California and are conducting a Sherman-esque scorched-earth march through the hinterlands to make them “howl” in forced conformity to a dubious enviro ideology.  Their William Tecumseh Sherman flanking strategy involves the annihilation of vast stretches of flyover country in windmill forests and blankets of solar panels in conjunction with attacks on the farmers’ products and production inputs.  Make no mistake about it, it’s at least a cold war, and occasionally a hot one, on those who feed the world’s hungry and provide the material backbone for the cultural commissariat’s own luxurious lifestyle.

Ironically, it’s an attack on themselves if they only thought deeper than a star-struck Davos groupie totally consumed in enviro agitprop.  Anyway, they’re relaxed because it’ll bankrupt others further down the wealth pyramid first.  They’re like Rome’s patricians laughing at Nero fiddling as the flames slowly approach their villas.

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It’s an ideological crusade centering on climate change and should not be mistaken for real science.  Leaps of faith are required to overcome huge holes in logic and fact.  Here’s some “What’s” to ponder.  What’s the degree of human impact on climate to ascertain urgency?  What’s the level of positive effect on climate from a sudden shackling of the U.S. population to unreliable and expensive energy?  What’s the influence on other countries, or will it be ignored?  No amount of computer modeling can overcome these holes in the train of logic since software has always been susceptible to GIGO – garbage in, garbage out.  The model is only as good as its designer.  Artificial intelligence isn’t immune.  On this topic, ideology trumps scientific objectivity all too often.

One fact constantly escapes the synapses of this secular faith’s upscale adherents: energy density.  No amount of “we’ll innovate our way through the problem” can mask this ugly reality.  Their favorite sources for energy “sustainability” are the feebly dense wind and solar – they need an awful lot of space to be practical.  These contraptions require vast state-sized stretches of landscape on the order of magnitude of Tennessee to Texas, depending on how close you want to get to “net zero” in carbon emissions.  What does that mean?  It means the consumption of huge swaths of open space, wilderness, and land devoted to food and fiber.  A dystopian future awaits in the nerve-rending and constant hum of wind turbines and a consigning of small town and rural residents to a hellish view of much of their surroundings under expansive pavements of solar panels or intimidating chorus lines of giant towers extending over the horizon.  Watch real estate values and quality of life plummet for rural, small town, exurban residents.

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A wind project in Michigan farm area in 2013.
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A sea of solar panels in Portugal.

And guess what?  You still need fossil fuel backup which adds to the cost misery of the whole scheme.  If batteries are to be your lifeline around the problem of blackouts and having to fire up backup gas-powered steam turbines, remember, the law of tradeoffs isn’t suspended.  More resources pumped into this black hole translates into lost investment in medicine, manufacturing technology, food production and distribution, water, etc.  The alternatives sacrificed are too numerous to mention.

That’s the glory of free markets, though; the voluntary choices of thousands, if not millions, sort this out.  The rule of bureaucrats and pandering demagogues in elective office, when given billions and trillions of dollars to play with, are more famous for boondoggles.  Remember Solyndra or California’s train to nowhere, parts languishing and graffitied like a LA Stonehenge in the Central Valley?  I don’t expect Millennials, Gen Z’ers, and those following to have an inkling of life in the old USSR under a vast bureaucracy’s central planning, given the sorry state of our schools.  California is chugging full speed into this fog of ignorance.

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California’s upper crust may be the most visibly intoxicated by the eco-jihad but the mania is evident worldwide.  Farmers and rural and small-town residents around the world are about to be engulfed in a plundering of their spaces by the half-witted infatuations of zealots with money and influence.  But a counterrevolution is kicking in.  In Europe, French truckdrivers and farmers rose up in the “gilets jaunes” (yellow vests) protests in November 2018 against the new greenie fuel taxes.  Dutch farmers were brimming with hostility over crippling emissions and fertilizer regulations just last year.  So devastating are the potential impacts of the new rules that a projected 3,000 Dutch farms may be lost in the next few decades.

Europe isn’t alone.  African countries like Nigeria, Senegal, and South Africa have registered similar protests to Davos flights of fancy.  The path to the ecotopia is lined with appropriated farmland, farmers, and everyone else who provide the hands, backs, and brains for the jet set to live in luxurious isolation.

Yep, ecomania among the insular well-to-do is poison to blue collars and everyone outside a country’s super zips.  Joel Klotkin is right to use the world “colonize” in describing the imperial designs of cultural power brokers for the areas of the country who don’t vote and live like them.  Occasionally, colonists rise up.  Does Lexington and Concord remind you of anything?

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The yellow vest protests in Paris, November 2018.
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Farmers gather with their vehicles next to a Germany/Netherlands border sign during a protest on the A1 highway near Rijssen, Netherlands, June 29. They are protesting the Dutch Government’s nitrogen plans, which would eliminate a sizable number of farms. (photo: Vincent Jannink / AFP via Getty Images)

Please read Joel Klotkin’s piece below.

RogerG

Read more here:

* Much thanks to Joel Klotkin for his research in “Energy Colonialism Will Worsen the Urban-Rural Divide”, Joel Klotkin, National Review Online, 3/3/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/03/energy-colonialism-will-worsen-the-urban-rural-divide/

* “’Yellow Vests’: The elites talk about the end of the world, when we talk about the end of the month”, Le Monde, 11/24/2018, at https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2018/11/24/gilets-jaunes-les-elites-parlent-de-fin-du-monde-quand-nous-on-parle-de-fin-du-mois_5387968_823448.html

* “Farmers’ Protest in Netherlands Reflects Rise of Popular Revolts in Europe”, National Catholic Register, 7/29/2022, at https://www.ncregister.com/news/farmers-protest-in-netherlands-reflects-rise-of-popular-revolts-in-europe

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The GOP Needs to Get Its House in Order

May be an image of one or more people, people standing and text that says 'Thank You, Lord JESUS, PRES PRESIDENT TRUMP TRUMG © Getty Images North America'

The ancients had much to say about hypocrisy and willful blindness in respect to problems.  The prophet Isaiah admonished King Hezekiah on his deathbed (2Kings 20:1, NIV), “Put your house in order, because you are going to die; you will not recover.”  And then there is this famous line against pretense from Luke’s gospel (6:42, NIV):

“How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

The Left – meaning today’s progressives and liberals – is nearly beyond redemption, philosophically and in many cases behaviorally.  Its neo-Marxist collectivism is a national suicide pact. But a sizeable element of the Right is similarly proving itself unworthy.  It is immersed in a performative style of politics, a politics as therapy – “Stick it to the libs, I feel better” – that lacks direction other than the desire to humiliate the other side in staged mini-dramas.  They may get an emotional rush from the rhetoric and theatrical antics but it is repulsive to large swaths of the nation’s electorate.  Principally for this reason, the last three election cycles have proven to be disappointments for those of a more conservative disposition.

Call it the Trump contagion.  It entered the GOP’s bloodstream in 2015 and is proving resistant to cure.  Trump still conjures a 43% plurality, 15 points better than second-place DeSantis, among Republican voters in the latest Fox News poll (see below).  43% are hungry for a four-peat of disappointment – to add to 2018, 2020, and 2022.  Einstein’s famous insanity formulation keeps coming to mind.  This large faction of Republicans remains oblivious to the fact that a candidate that survives them may not, and increasingly will not, survive the general electorate if the party’s base continues to choose candidates based on theatrics and their longings for an emotional release in their politics.  The hardheaded on the Right need to understand one inescapable fact: first, as a party, to accomplish anything, you’ve got to win . . . the general!  The stalwarts might celebrate victory in the intraparty feud in spring but after the dust settles in November, the donkey-party Left will still be making policy in the seats of power.

The contagion has overtaken the official GOP apparatus in some red/purple states.  The effect of the takeover is turning some purple states blue.  In places where it is deeply embedded, the infected exhibit the tendencies of those immersed in the blue bubbles, only this time, in a red one.  Secure in the cloister of others like them, they are awkward when forced to confront people who disagree and promptly jump to condemnation.  It’s true for both silos.  Remember Obama’s “bitter clingers”, Hillary’s “deplorables”, and ritual abuse of the word “establishment” and “elites” by Fox News’s primetime “populists”, and Trump’s litany of juvenile insults?

Professor Alberto Coll of DePaul University School of Law, and an astute critic of today’s defunct civic education, is concerned about the decline of the republican civic virtues of prudence, deliberation, and moderation (see below).  They are most fundamentally missing from K-12 and have been drummed out of higher ed, increasingly replaced by habitual Marxist oppressor-shaming.  It’s an ideology more at home as a bankrupt theology with its unexaminable assumptions and heaven-on-earth end state.  Not surprisingly, they behave much like jihadis with their statue-toppling, silencings on campuses, itinerant mobs, and the forcible injection of their ideology into all facets of the culture.

The Left’s inhumanity has elicited an analogous reaction on the Right.  Gone is any semblance of prudence.  Prudence dictates the recognition of complexities, consequences, and trade-offs.  Instead, everything seems so simple in a constant branding of everyone as either evil (them) or good (us).

The Left’s infantilism shows as an attempt to facetiously adduce cause from correlation: socio-economic stats are unequal among identity groups therefore bigotry is at fault, or so they assume.  If they can’t find sufficient numbers of bigots, they’ll make it airily “systemic”, which leads them right into the strawman fallacy.  It’s ludicrous.

The Right sometimes stumbles into the “systemic” quicksand.  They have a vocabulary of vague pejoratives to feed their obsessions such as the aforementioned “establishment” and “elites”.  Anyone who has been around too long in the public arena is automatically suspect by that logic, especially if previously identified as one by the movement’s carnival barkers (Hello, primetime Fox News.).  The terms encourage an instant distrust of credentials so academics, scholars, people in the professions, political figures, and leaders in business and civil society that disagree with them are summarily rejected.  It’s another form of bigotry, something familiar to Antifa and Biden, Schumer, Pelosi, and The Squad in their usual hivemind.

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Deliberation goes the way of prudence.  Adults don’t display it. It begins with listening which is clearly absent from the halls of Congress.  Have you seen the expansive number of empty seats on C-SPAN during speeches on the House and Senate floors?  People talk past each other in party-approved talking points.  The kids don’t see it modeled by adults in their media, or in their schools’ curriculums that refuse to establish a good grounding in language, the best of Western literature (Bible, Shakespeare), history, philosophy, and logic. They’ve been turned into vehicles for the voguish neo-Marxist orthodoxy.

I must admit that it’s hard on deliberation when one party – the Democrats – is committed to a revolution as complete as anything begun in 1917 Petrograd (see below about Antonio Gramsci).

As for moderation, what do you think after prudence and deliberation have been kicked to the wayside?  The socialism of AOC becomes mainstream Democrat, and the kookery of the Marjorie Taylor Greene/Gaetz/Boebert/Trump clique seizes the reins of a Republican House caucus with the narrowest of majorities.  43% of the Republican base and the nearly entire elected Democratic Party, and maybe three-quarters of the Dem base, stand athwart each other separated with firehoses spewing rhetorical slime.

Since 57% of the Republican base retains some attachment to reality, the country’s hopes for a functioning republic reside with them.  A pushback may have begun with Georgia’s Governor Brian Kemp.  He courageously stood against the Georgia state GOP that backed his opponent in the primary and went on to thump the Trump-backed shill in the primary and the odious Stacey Abrams in the general by 7.5 points.  The victory means that the guy has street cred.

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp makes remarks during a visit to Adventure Outdoors gun shop in Smyrna, Ga., January 5, 2022. (photo: Alyssa Pointer/Reuters)

He warned big donors in the Georgians First Leadership Committee at a recent luncheon, “. . . we can no longer rely on the traditional party infrastructure to win in the future.”  “Infrastructure” is a $10 word for a Trump-crazed state central committee.  The state party’s chairman, David Shafer, was so humiliated by the defeat of the committee/Trump-endorsed choices up and down the ballot in the party’s primary that he’s given up pursuing another term.  The state committee’s stance was stupid on steroids.  Shafer and his endorsements may be simpatico with Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene but not to a huge majority of registered Republicans, let alone the general electorate.  Successful politics is about addition, and not subtraction and performance-art politics. It means that the public wants good and safe schools, the potholes to be filled, crime to be defeated, and the sewers and garbage collection to function as billed.  “Owning the libs” won’t suffice.

The same is true for the Trump fanatics officially running the GOP in states like Arizona.  The writer Dan McLaughlin put it succinctly when he wrote, “It’s time to take the party back from the party.” Kemp is doing his part (see below).

The fallout from the 2022 elections is a siren-call warning to the GOP.  Of course, the country appears evenly divided when one of the parties weakens its standing with choices lathered in the general odium of Trump and sloganeering psychodramas.  The Democrats’ problem is the neo-Marxist Democratic Party and a hash that they’ve made of parts of the country under their control.  The Republicans have the Trump millstone around their neck. Given that dynamic, of course we have parity . . . of foolishness.

A few examples illustrate the reflexive Republican foot-shooting that makes it easier on the neo-Marxist Democrats thereby levelling the playing field in a country overwhelmingly not fond of the hammer and sickle.  In one heavily Republican Ohio congressional district, the Trump-endorsed/Q-Anon-dabbling J. R. Majewski lost in the general.  Moving over to a Michigan House race, Joe Gibbs beat incumbent Peter Meijir in a Republican primary campaign wallowing on Meijir’s vote to impeach Trump, only to lose in the general by double digits.  In Washington State, the Republican incumbent Jaime Herrera Beutler narrowly lost to Joe Kent in the primary with her vote to impeach Trump a key factor.  Kent, saddled with ties to white nationalists and other elements of the unhinged right, and fully immersed in the hyperbolic language of the Trump caucus, lost in the general.  No wonder that the expected red wave turned into scattered rain drops.

Republicans, if you don’t like rule by a commissariat, field better candidates with an eye to winning elections.  Try that.  Dah!  Send Trump packing, and for his cadre of groupies, grow up and follow Mick Jagger’s advice: “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need.”

May be a cartoon of indoor

RogerG

Read more here:

* “Young Americans Are Increasingly Ungrateful. Here’s What to Do about It”, Alberto Coll, National Review Online, 2/26/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/02/young-americans-are-increasingly-ungrateful-heres-what-to-do-about-it/

* “Fox News Poll: Trump, DeSantis top 2024 Republican preference”, Dana Blanton, Fox News, 2/26/23, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/fox-news-poll-trump-desantis-top-2024-republican-preference/ar-AA17X7hn

* “Brian Kemp: Time for the Georgia GOP to Leave the Georgia GOP”, Dan McLaughlin, National Review Online, 2/23/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/brian-kemp-time-for-the-georgia-gop-to-leave-the-georgia-gop/

* “Kemp moves to take command of GOP, leaving state party behind”, Greg Bluestein, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 2/23/23, at https://www.ajc.com/politics/politics-blog/kemp-moves-to-take-command-of-gop-leaving-state-party-behind/H6EYBMRZDFFCXBYNPPP3PY4WQA/

* An excellent summary of the influence of the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci of the 1920’s and 30’s on today’s neo-Marxism in the Democratic Party and the commanding heights of the culture can be read here: “The Long March Back”, Nate Hochman, National Review Online, 2/16/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-long-march-back/

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Sanctimonious Me, Me, Me

Chelsea Handler poses with sandwiches, after denying CBS gig rumours | Daily Mail Online
Chelsea Handler

Chelsea Handler came to mind, curiously, as I viewed Sheila E’s “The Glamorous Life” (1984) music video (below).  Handler patronized herself in a recent Twitter video, “Day in the Life of a Childless Woman” (below).  At least she knows herself to be a woman, something Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Jackson couldn’t – or wouldn’t – define.  Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R, Tenn.) asked Jackson at her confirmation hearing, “Can you provide a definition for the word woman?”  Jackson replied, “Can I provide a definition?  No.  I can’t.”  Then added, “Not in this context, I’m not a biologist [see below].”  Apparently, it’s not enough for Jackson to check herself while bathing.  She needs somebody with a certificate to tell her.  Bizarre.

Chelsea Handler’s “Day in the Life of a Childless Woman”:

Sheila E’s “The Glamorous Life”:

Childlessness is not inherently either a virtue or failing.  For some, it’s a matter of physical impairment or emotional comportment.  For most, today, it’s a choice.  Yet, simple common sense would demand the overriding importance of having another generation.  The legacy of a civilization dies without youngins.  Somebody must be having babies or else we’re stuck with collapsing entitlements and the soaring needs of the mounting aged as they descend into senility.  Thank God somebody has made the sacrifice to provide the people who’ll change the bedpans for the doddering Chelsea Handler, childless, wrinkled, and alone.

Handler’s little clip includes the freedom to text a “hot guy” from some online dating app, “Wanna f%#*?”  She’s free, but is she happy?  Isn’t this behavior a bit dangerous?  I’m reminded of the 1977 film, “Looking for Mr. Goodbar”, of a young woman who descends into the bar, casual hookup, and drug scene of the late 1970’s.  It doesn’t end well for her: she’s murdered in her last hookup.  The movie isn’t for the faint of heart.

Just Screenshots: Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977)

And neither is Handler’s libertine jeremiad on Twitter.  The thing that’s missing from her Twitter romp is love – not the platonic or sexual gratification kind, but the deeper intimacy that frequently leads to marriage and children.  Prince, who composed “The Glamorous Life”, a man known for his own licentiousness, nonetheless contains the chorus:

“She wants to lead the glamorous life
But without love, it ain’t much”

If you understand the lyrics, the Chelsea lifestyle is “without love, [but] it ain’t much”.  Love requires commitment, and no better commitment than marriage and the raising of children.  On that score, Prince is right: without love, it ain’t much.

Check out the Handler Twitter clip, research “Looking for Mr. Goodbar”, and watch Sheila E’s “The Glamorous Life” music video and reference the lyrics as you do.  How’s that for some cultural homework?

Here’s the full lyrics to “The Glamorous Life”:

She wears a long fur coat of mink
Even in the summer time
Everybody knows from the coy little wink
The girl’s got a lot on her mind
She’s got big thoughts, big dreams
And a big brown Mercedes sedan
What I think this girl
She really wants is to be in love with a man
She wants to lead the glamorous life
She don’t need a man’s touch
She wants to lead the glamorous life
But without love, it ain’t much

She saw him standing in the section marked
If you have to ask you can’t afford it lingerie
She threw him bread and said make me scream
In the dark what could he say
Boys with small talk and small minds
Really don’t impress me in bed
She said I need a man’s man baby
Diamonds and furs
Love would only conquer my head
She wants to lead the glamorous life
She don’t need a man’s touch
She wants to lead the glamorous life
Without love, it ain’t much

They made haste in the brown sedan
They drove to 55 Secret street
They made love by the seventh wave
She knew she had a problem
She thought real love is real scary
Money only pays the rent
Love is forever that’s all your life
Love is heaven sent, it’s glamorous
Lead the glamorous life
She don’t need a man’s touch
She wants to lead the glamorous life
Without love it ain’t much

She wants to lead the glamorous life
She don’t need a man’s touch
She wants to lead the glamorous life
Without love it ain’t much, it ain’t much
Lead the glamorous life
She don’t need a man’s touch
She wants to lead the glamorous life
Without love it ain’t much, it ain’t much

She wants to lead the glamorous life
She don’t need a man’s touch
She wants to lead the glamorous life
Without love it ain’t much, it ain’t much
Lead the glamorous life
She don’t need a man’s touch
She wants to lead the glamorous life
Without love it ain’t much, it ain’t much
Woo-ooh oo-ooh

She wants to lead the glamorous life
She don’t need a man’s touch
She wants to lead the glamorous life
Without love it ain’t much, it ain’t much
Oooh oo-ooh ohhh

(Songwriter: Prince Rogers Nelson)
(From: Musixmatch)

RogerG

Read more here:

* Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Jackson’s strange inability, or unwillingness, to define a woman can be found here: “Biden Supreme Court pick says she can’t define what a ‘woman’ is when asked at confirmation hearings”, 3/23/2022, at https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/i-cant-define-what-a-woman-is-supreme-court-nominee-says/

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The Sudden Crusade Against Disinformation; Drought; and the Inner Totalitarian

Lake Mead near the Hoover dam, seen from the Arizona side of the dam near Boulder City, Nev., July 19, 2022. (photo: David Becker/Reuters)
David Mikkelson, founder of Snopes, the site that tracks fakery on the web. He’s in his home office in a nearly 100-year old home in Tacoma. (Greg Gilbert / The Seattle Times, 2018)
David Mikkelson, founder of Snopes, the site that tracks fakery on the web. He’s in his home office in a nearly 100-year old home in Tacoma, Wa. (photo: Greg Gilbert / The Seattle Times, 2018)

Why the sudden crusade against “disinformation”?  Is our time plagued by a singular onrush of lying and deceit?  Really?  According to today’s referees of language – who themselves could be mired in modern cultural/political manias – disinformation is “false information that is spread deliberately and often covertly to influence public opinion or obscure the truth” (Merriam-Webster).  Slanting the truth or even outright falsehoods has been the stuff of “How to Win Friends and Influence People” (a little Dale Carnegie lingo) since people discovered other people.  Moses’s biblical admonition against “bearing false witness” covers the topic quite nicely.

For years, some people insisted that taxing the rich at towering rates leads to more revenue, as if people blindly and willingly, like lemmings, lay themselves prostrate before the IRS.  Does the British “brain drain” from high-tax Britain to elsewhere in the Anglosphere of the 1950’s to 1970’s remind you of anything?  Tax havens in the Bahamas?  For years, even today, some continue to persist in the belief that socialism leads to prosperity despite its long record of failure.  Eugenics, at one time, was all the craze even as it treated people as if they were draft animals.  I could go on.  So, where’s the sudden crisis in bad information?  Dis- and its cousin misinformation have been around as long as humans had the capacity for speech.  Now the Southwest is in the midst of a harrowing drought.  Watch the “disinformation” smears muddy the waters in how to deal with it.

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Honestly, cut to the chase, this jihad against “disinformation” is actually a massive censorship campaign.  By what standard are the Cassandras of disinformation labeling some opinions or factual claims fraudulent?  As it turns out, these arbiters of truth are partisans who rely on partisans.  It’s mental gunk relying on mental gunk to produce more mental gunk in order to control what people say.  GIGO – garbage in, garbage out.

GIGO case in point: Valerie Wirtschafter of Brookings and her piece, “Audible reckoning: How top political podcasters spread unsubstantiated and false claims” (see below), where she proclaims that the podcast world is too free, with much too much “disinformation”.  Where’s she been?  The advertising industry would never have been around to launch so many successful Madison Avenue careers without exaggerations and falsehoods.  Coke and Pepsi lambasted each other for years with disinformation.  Watch any Superbowl’s commercial breaks for your daily diet of disinformation.  Joe McCarthy (Sen, Wisc., 1950’s) and the Socialist International would be minor footnotes in history without mis- and disinformation.  It’s been the motivation for wars and invasions and the rhetorical bedrock for politicians in their climb up the greasy pole . . . forever.  And, all of a sudden, “Dr.” Wirtschafter discovered it’s a problem.

Summer Institute in Computational Social Science
Valerie Wirtschafter

Come on, these are biased people who don’t like what other people have to say.  People like Wirtschafter hide behind the aura of other people’s credentials, their government positions, or undeserved media respectability to engineer a “study” to silence still others.  To her, the government is always right, and so are the scribblers and mouths that populate the Big Media newsrooms, anyone mentally messaged in endless lecture halls like hers all the way to her “PhD”, and the millennials and Gen-Z’ers filling the cubicles of Snopes and PolitiFact.

Snopes and PolitiFact have been scandalous in their interventions in our political brawls.  If it was up to them, we’d never know that there is a strong possibility that COVID-19 came out of a Communist Chinese lab.  We’d continue to shutter the schools not knowing that children face a near non-existent threat while ignoring the long-term damage to their emotional and mental development.  We’d still be suffocating behind masks, not knowing that masking has little effect in stopping the spread of a respiratory virus.  We’d never know that the vaccines don’t stop the spread of the bug or that natural immunity is just as good (see below).  Much that we now know to be true about the pandemic would have been strangled in the crib.

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Thanks to the people whom Wirtschafter trusts, businesses would still be closed and a couple of adult generations would continue to be nurtured on the idea that they shouldn’t have to go to work.  Snopes and PolitiFact would paste as “true” any mention of the low unemployment rate, leaving a below-average labor participation rate lying on the cutting room floor.  The low unemployment rate talk is empty absent any discussion of the emaciated labor pool from which the number is calculated.  The high portion of employed (and conversely the low number unemployed, hence the low unemployment rate) is drawn from a worker pool that shrunk after the federal government started bribing a good portion of current and potential worker force out of the labor pool with extended pandemic benefits.  The money spigot wasn’t shut off till the damage was done.  Often referred to as the Great Resignation, quiet quitting, and I Quit Movement, Gen-Z’ers and others have discovered that living in Dad’s basement and receiving a government check (er, debit card) ain’t so bad (see below).  Bringing it up might incur the wrath of the self-deputized disinformation bounty hunters.

Should we pay for pajama boy’s college?

Partisan-laced industries abound in this age of institutionalized political correctness.  Stifling voices is the name of the game in the anti-disinformation industry.  Though, how can we see our way clearly on existential threats such as the drought in the Southwest when discussion is monitored by the disinformation police?  Having long experience with the lefty tendencies of the classroom and faculty lounge, the kinds of people admired by Wirtschafter, there exists among this group a psychomotor tick for totalitarian lifestyle control.  That’s the reason for the affection for the buzzword “conservation” and the knee-jerk suspicion about individual freedom.  Any talk of increasing the general water supply so people can be free in their daily lives will be met with a smirk.

Let me send Wirtschafter, Snopes and PolitiFact into a tizzy by mentioning a piece by Ed Ring of the California Policy Center, “How California Can Solve the Colorado Water Deficit” (see below).  He lays out the practical possibility that more than conservation is necessary to stave off disaster for states like California: the supply of water has to be increased.  But don’t bring that up at the next Sierra Club confab or among the chattering classes attending a Wirtschafter soiree.

Ring points out a number of options to increase supply, even while taking into account the climate-change bugaboo.  Climate change doesn’t mean that California will be the newest Sahara Desert in a century.  Precipitation will still fluctuate in a wet season and over time and present opportunities to expand supply.  One is the installation of French drains underneath the subsurface gravel beds of the San Joaquin/Sacramento Delta’s natural channels.  It would capture a portion of the excess flows (flood waters) that flush into SF Bay.  The water could then be stored in off-stream reservoirs and delivered to users and/or utilized to recharge the depleted aquifers of California’s Great Central Valley.  French drains, think about it.

Expanding and upgrading wastewater reclamation could be an additional route to take.  Even if only for non-potable uses such as landscaping or ag irrigation, it would free large quantities of potable sources for human consumption.  Of course, that would require budgetary restraint in not wasting money on zany efforts to kill off the next generation in unbridled and subsidized abortions, or turn the state into a parent-free sanctuary for teen sexual mutilation (transgenderism), or find new ways to ladle cash to new and old “oppressed” classes, or drive businesses out of the state in hyper-regulation and -taxation, or sink more public and private money into the thankless task of making unsustainable “sustainable” energy “sustainable”.  Keep it simple: just try to maintain water pressure at the faucet.

Desalination is another option if the state can keep its militant eco-utopians and NIMBY’s at bay.  It’s expensive, like any of the other options, but, honestly, can you think of a wiser use of taxpayer moneys than the provision of something so important that three days without it brings death?  However, I suspect that the inner totalitarian of the conservation-only legion has too great a grip on the minds in Sacramento.  These busybodies are just too obsessed with telling other people how to live, and conservation fits the bill.  Yep, the inner totalitarian has a grip on power in the state.

Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant protests organized by Abalone Alliance Demonstrators blockade and police arrest at the front gate Photos dated 9/-/1981
1981 Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant protests in California organized by Abalone Alliance Demonstrators blockade and police arrest at the front gate. (Photo: Steve Ringman/The Chronicle)

California has an aged 20-million-person water delivery system in a 39-million-person state.  Granted, people are leaving so, who knows, maybe its population will eventually come to match its outdated supply.  Still, if opportunities aren’t grasped, it’ll be a bumpy ride of brown lawns, metered restrictions and fines, and more of the Great Central Valley resembling the Sudan.  Droughts should be anticipated in dry-summer climates but California would rather play the role of woke crusader.  With the disinformation inquisition in full swing, you’ll never know that the anguish could have been avoided.

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RogerG

Read more here:

* “Audible reckoning: How top political podcasters spread unsubstantiated and false claims”, Dr. Valerie Wirtschafter, Brookings Institute, 2/2023, at https://www.brookings.edu/essay/audible-reckoning-how-top-political-podcasters-spread-unsubstantiated-and-false-claims/

* A critique of the Wirtschafter study can be found here: “The ‘Disinformation Industry’ Is Only One Part of a Larger Scandal”, Jeffrey Blehar, National Review Online, 2/23/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-disinformation-industry-is-only-one-part-of-a-far-larger-media-scandal/

* Dr. Fauci admits to limited effectiveness of the vaccine in stopping the spread of respiratory viruses: “Fauci Changes His Public Tune on Covid Vaccines”, Joel Zinberg, director of Paragon Health Institute’s Public Health and American Well-being Initiative, National Review Online, 2/16/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/02/fauci-changes-his-public-tune-on-covid-vaccines/

* Excellent piece on unemployment and the labor participation rate: “Unemployment Is Low, But So Is The Labor Force Participation Rate — What’s Going On In The U.S. Labor Market?”, Q.ai, Forbes, 1/23/23, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/qai/2023/01/25/unemployment-is-low-but-so-is-the-labor-force-participation-rate—whats-going-on-in-the-us-labor-market/?sh=5ad8aff1244e

* “Inside the rise of ‘antiwork,’ a worker’s strike that wants to turn the labor shortage into a new American Dream”, Juliana Kaplan and Andy Kiersz, Insider, 11/25/21, at https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-antiwork-workers-quit-dont-work-strike-better-conditions-2021-11#:~:text=1%20The%20%22antiwork%22%20movement%20is%20rapidly%20growing%2C%20as,and%20what%20it%20means%20about%20the%20American%20Dream.

* “How California Can Solve the Colorado Water Deficit”, Ed Ring, California Policy Center, in National Review Online, 2/13/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/02/how-california-can-solve-the-colorado-water-deficit/

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The California Housing Crisis: The Intersectionality of Hypocrisy and Central Planning

A professional basketball player in a jersey that says Golden State Warriors.
Golden State Warriors guard Steph Curry, in an April 21, 2022, game in Denver, has voiced his opposition to townhomes near his San Francisco Bay Area mansion. (David Zalubowski / Associated Press)

Have you heard this?  Steph Curry of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors doesn’t want a 1.5 acre, 16-unit “affordable” townhouse development near his $30 million mansion in the exclusive Bay Area community of Atherton (see below).  It’s too easy to expose the obvious hypocrisy given the guy’s outspoken progressive views.  Rich people of lefty inclinations seem to run away from their lefty beliefs as soon as the consequences get too close.  But Curry has legitimate concerns of safety and privacy for a celebrity like himself and his family.  The bigger issue, though, isn’t affordable housing in a state woefully deficient of it.  It’s the central planning that inherently comes with lefty/progressive thinking of the type running the show in California.

It’s borrowed from Stalin, a fellow lefty.  He abandoned his orthodox seminary as a young man and radicalized himself into an atheist revolutionary.  Off went the priestly frock and traditional beliefs and on came the drive to build the utopia on totalitarianism in league with a clique of fellow bomb throwers and statue topplers.  Sound familiar?  Portland?  Almost any urban complex or campus in the so-called golden state?  Central planning is one of the quintessential expressions of totalitarianism.

Stalin 5 Year Plan poster | Year plan, Propaganda posters, Travel posters
Soviet poster proclaiming the Five-Year Plan of industrialization.

Now in control, to Stalin, the utopia means industrialization at breakneck speed no matter the cost and turmoil to people’s lives.  Sound similar to “zero carbon”, the Green New Deal, Biden announcing the end of fossil fuels, Newson and his one-party state destroying energy production and herding the entire population of the state into ev’s?  As for Stalin, he ordered more steel from his politburo to Gosplan (state economic planning agency) who then gets the furnaces billowing at full blast to produce more of something that few can and want to use.  It piles in heaps outside the foundries.

Ditto for Governor Newsom and housing.  Not enough affordable housing?  He ordered the regional governments in the state (like SoCal Area Governments – SCAG – for instance) to create precise plans for more “affordable housing”.  Atherton, within ABAG (Assoc. of Bay Area Governments), did its part with 348 new housing units – 16 of which are to be plunked down next to the Curry estate.

Aerial Photography Atherton - Airview Online
Aerial view of Atherton, Ca.
Atherton Homes | Floor plans, Atherton, House styles
New home development in Atherton with bungalows starting from between a stripped-down $620,000 to three-quarters of a million.
Steph and Ayesha Curry are selling their Mediterranean-style estate in Walnut Creek for $3.2 million.
The $3.2 million mansion sold by Steph Curry and wife.
Il campione della Nba Stephen Curry acquista una villa da 31 milioni in California — idealista/news
Rear view of Curry’s new $31 million mansion in Atherton, Ca

That’s how central planning works.  Need something like cheaper housing? Well, just order it as Stalin did steel, while ignoring the Russian realities of the absence of a trained workforce, the infrastructure for a supply chain, whether the stuff is any good, the absence of contingent enterprises that could use it.  Equally oblivious as Newsom is, the land in question in Atherton probably goes for $8 million per acre. Do the math: $12 million for the land and sixteen “affordable” units at $250,000 each will bring in . . . wait for it . . . $4 million.  Oops, it doesn’t add up.

Watch “affordable housing” turn into “unaffordable housing”.  To cover just land costs, each unit will have to go for $750,000.  Add other incidentals like labor, engineering, materials, energy (fuel, electricity, etc.), the inevitable California delays, fees, taxes, and approvals, and you’re back to California’s housing crisis.  Stalin ended up with the world’s largest steel ingot and crappy tractors.  Newsom commands cheaper housing and ends up with fewer units and a huge subsidy bill to fund from the depleted state, county, and municipal treasuries and the state’s beleaguered taxpayers.  My bet: the units don’t get built.

Don’t worry, Steph.  The state’s buffoonish central planning and incompetence will protect you.

The housing situation won’t improve because the political eco-system for development in the state hasn’t changed.  It’s the same one that caused the problem.  Layer upon layer of bureaucracy smothers the housing industry. Powerful interest groups perch like vultures waiting to pounce.  EIR’s and EIS’s and related “public” hearings filled with NIMBY’s and the state’s militant eco-utopians make a mockery of the process.  CEQA, the Coastal Commission, the planning agencies in every jurisdiction in the state, the overlay of air quality management districts throughout the state, Cal. Fish and Game, USFWS, and their endangered species lists are poised to tear their claws into the project.

Critically Endangered Insects Make History at San Diego Zoo - Times of San Diego
The endangered Lord Howe Island stick insect (female). Photo Courtesy San Diego Zoo.

May be a cartoon of text

California NIMBYs don't love their children | OC Housing News

To tell the truth, the state has a housing crisis because it wants one.  They must want it, or they’re insane.  Anyone with an ounce of common sense must know that punishing a behavior, like building more housing, will mean less of the behavior.  It’s been the reality since the eco-industrial complex discovered the Delta Smelt, the Tipton Kangaroo Rat, and the evil of humans attempting to live better.

It gets worse.  Newsom’s affordable housing imperial decree is ready to clash with a recent California court’s decree extending California Endangered Species Act protections to invertebrates – i.e., insects (see below).  Californios will quickly learn that bumble bees count more than anything affordable in the state.  Karl Marx was wrong about much, but he got one thing right: “. . . history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

Stalin’s central planning created the Holodomor and dekulakization which devastated the Ukraine, the Donbas, the Russian peasantry and agriculture, and created the stirrings of the bloody purges in the hunt for “wreckers”.  Newsom thinks that he can wave the magic wand of an imperial decree and, voilà, “affordable housing” appears.  Just announce it and it will be so.  Forget about Marx’s tragedy stage; the state quickly jumped to farce.

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RogerG

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* “NBA’s Steph Curry joins neighbors in opposing affordable-housing plan for ritzy Atherton”, Howard Blume, LA Times, 2/3/23, at https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-02-03/nba-star-steph-curry-fights-affordable-housing-atherton

* “California court ruling opens door for protection of insects as endangered species”, Liz Kimbrough, Mongabay, 6/2/22, at https://news.mongabay.com/2022/06/california-court-ruling-opens-door-for-protection-of-insects-as-endangered-species/

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California, From Bright Promise to Malignancy

Editorial: California can’t afford neighborhood opposition to homeless housing - SFChronicle.com
Scene of San Fransisco homelessness in 2021.

* The following is my reaction to “Laurel Canyon” and “Helter Skelter” now showing on Amazon Prime.  I recommend them but not in ways intended by the creators.

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Upon preparing our transition to Montana, some very dear Montana friends advised us to replace our California vehicle plates asap.  We did.  It was probably the same guidance offered to any Golden State resident making a move to Oregon, Washington, Texas, Colorado, or practically anywhere.  Why is the word “California” so disconcerting to our fellow Americans beyond the Sierras?  No doubt, the state has a bad reputation.  To be blunt, it got it after the Sixties settled in, stayed, and took over the state.  Other people see the results, want no part of it, and wish to quarantine the virus.

The Sixties was a utopian cultural revolution with strong political implications that cast a dark shadow expanding up and down the coast and entrenching itself in metropolitan and academic nodes nationwide.  What came to be called “the Sixties” set in motion a full-scale assault on traditions and institutions while advancing license with a heavy expansion of state interventions, taxes, and regulations to clean up the concomitant mess and make society conform to a now-discredited utopian vision.  The government is by nature ill-equipped to be the cleanup brigade and only compounds the problems.  California is thought by many across the nation to be the birthing center of the horror.  Daily, the impression is confirmed.

'Laurel Canyon' series showcases unseen footage of '60s era music | Entertainment News | abc10.com
A scene from one of the many residences of rock performers that came to congregate in Laurel Canyon.LA. It looks like Stephen Still (l) of the Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young sitting atop a car with what looks like Peter Tork of Monkees fame.

The march of the Sixties went from San Francisco, Berkeley, Haight-Asbury, LA, Topanga Canyon, Laurel Canyon, Sunset Blvd., through the coastal plain, up and down Highway 1, to the halls of power in Sacramento; all resplendently displayed in “Laurel Canyon” and “Helter Skelter”.  Later, bare feet and Levi’s gave way to the tweed of tenured faculty positions and the current legislative supermajorities and a lock on the governor’s mansion and every other statewide elective office in California.

PHOTOS: Another Summer Of Love? | * SUMMER OF OUR DISCONTENT 67' * | Pinterest | Summer of love ...
Haight-Ashbury during the so-called Summer of Love.

Surprisingly, I came away from viewing the two episodes of “Laurel Canyon” and the six of “Helter Skelter” on Amazon Prime with these thoughts in mind.  They were a reminder of the times but not necessarily a discovery.  I’m a Boomer, having entered junior high in 1964.  I’m aware.  The films illustrate that the Sixties cultural influence lurks in the background of the great folk-rock of the Laurel Canyon scene of the Sixties and the Manson murders.

Though, don’t be fooled.  The Sixties didn’t cause the Manson murders.  Manson and his troupe of sycophants are responsible.  Yet, the Sixties set the stage for what happened and for what California became.

25 Photographs of the Murderous Manson Family That Shocked the Nation
Charles Manson in one of many photos taken during his 1970 trial.
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Some of Manson’s “family” on the Spahn Ranch property, 1969.
//Charles manson dead crime scene photos sharon tate with sebering
The bodies of Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring, two of the five victims at the Polanski/Tate residence.

The Sixties (actually from 1965 to the early Seventies), the word, came to refer to a wholesale rejection of convention.  Restraint is gone, anything goes, and moral anarchy reigns.  The earlier insidiousness of drug use – euphorics, psychedelics – was supplanted by a view of them as a shortcut to genius and God. Psychologist Timothy Leary at a 1966 Golden Gate Park “Human Be-In” set the tone with “Turn on, tune in, drop out”.  People caught up in the whirlwind found themselves beset by addictions, sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies, and the underbelly of the drug culture.  Today, the phenomena have spread far beyond the confines of Haight-Ashbury.

At least 30 cannabis farms destroyed in Northern California wildfires - The Cannifornian
California pot farm

The anti-convention of the Sixties ultimately became the convention of today. It’s everywhere but most intense in California, its epicenter.  Just take a stroll through a Denver park to smell the spread of the zeitgeist, or travel the epicenter to experience a LA homeless encampment, the filth of the downtowns, the homelessness parked and tented along Highway 1, the growing pot dispensaries dotting the landscape, the legal and illegal pot plantations that make a hike in the California woods dangerous, and sex as recreation with an allied abortion industry to dispose of the consequences.

Belief in traditional Christianity and church attendance is taking a hit and a buttress of civility is crumbling (nationwide numbers below).

In U.S., smaller share of adults identify as Christians, while religious 'nones' have grown

Narcissism and a short-term time horizon were other byproducts.  Take away something higher and that leaves the self and an obsession with the present.  The future, a fruitful legacy, and personal responsibility be damned.  The Sixties-inspired absolute rule of the self overpowers everything to the point that even biological restraints are subjected to the will with enough chemicals and surgeries.  Fabricated girls – formerly boys – are free to invade female spaces.  The dating scene, already fraught with many uncertainties, will have a few more to contend with.

Socialism is a nice fit for the ongoing fight against convention.  It, by definition, is an invasion into the conventionally protected private sphere: private property, home, family, faith, your kids’ schooling, personal economic initiative, and a person’s accumulated earnings.  Free love became free-a-lot covering a gamut from healthcare, abortions, racial reparations, an expanding list of other monetary giveaways, and all of it bankrolled by one of the most onerous taxation regimes this side of North Korea.  California wants to approximate a hippie commune as close as is humanly possible . . . by dictat.

Environmentalism is the state’s unofficial religion and it’s a two-fer: it’s a cover for more socialism and assists in dismantling the old conventions, their institutions and standards.  Eco-fanaticism dictates your choice of car, constructs an unreliable and costly grid that sets the hillsides aflame, inflates energy prices to astronomical levels, stands by as the state’s infrastructure crumbles, and all of it managed by a state government that can’t even manage its lavish unemployment benefits (much of it illegally landed in the hands of the miscreants in the state’s prisons, see below).

And you wonder why a California license plate on a car in a Missoula WinCo parking lot is viewed with a slight undercurrent of contempt by locals?  People beyond the Sierras get a daily media dose of the California malignancy.  They know.  Many areas of the country are only getting redder as a result.  The Democratic Party is seen by many people as being under the hypnotic spell of what California has become, so much so that the House Democrat delegation almost split evenly on a resolution on Thursday (2/2/23) to condemn socialism (109 for, 100 against/present, see below).  The opponents have their reasons, but they exhibit obfuscation or ignorance of socialism.

The resolution reads in part, “. . . socialist ideology necessitates a concentration of power that has time and time again collapsed into Communist regimes, totalitarian rule, and brutal dictatorships.”  Some of the foes trotted out their old stand-by claim that an attack on socialism is a not-so-subtle design to eliminate Social Security and Medicare.  However, all serious reforms call for a transition to a more sustainable program, one in line with our time-honored values of personal responsibility, private property, and greater returns.  Demagoguing the issue hides an affection for top-down government control and the entrapment of the population into the status of serfs to the state, hallmarks of socialism.

Democratic Socialists of America endorse Maduro’s policies
The Squad in Congress, American marchers for socialism, and the socialist dictator Nicholas Maduro of Venezuela.

Many voting no/present disfigured the meaning of socialism in order to cover an affection for it.  Clouding their judgment is a version of socialism coming out of the Sixties love-ins in California.  For them, it is a cutesy sharing of everything, whether it be belongings or bed partners.  Manson demanded the surrender of all of a person’s possessions, including clothes, before acceptance into the clan.  It’s a sentiment familiar to the crowd before Timothy Leary in the Human Be-In of 1966, and morphed into the Democratic Party platform of today.

The red states’ desire to contain the virus may gain strength with more refugees . . . but only to a point.  Up to now, the vast majority of California refugees are the low-hanging fruit of people equally disgusted by the turn of events in their home state.  They add to the red tendencies of their adopted states.  Yet, when others of progressive orientations discover to their joy the availability of progressive culture in burgeoning urban settings like Nashville or Austin, without the onerous taxes, some of these red states might shift to more of a purple hue.  Watch out for Colorado-ization.

And so it goes. California wasn’t confined. It took over the culture, one of our two political parties, and is shedding population like my dogs do fur. Why are they fleeing? You know, most have come to dislike California for the same reasons as you might.

More importantly, California is the sheep’s clothing covering the Sixties wolf.  The Sixties was a disaster.  To say otherwise is smearing lipstick on a pig, er wolf.  Watch “Laurel Canyon” and “Helter Skelter” on Amazon Prime and don’t be fooled by the lipstick.  If viewed with a jaundiced eye, the films show much more than what their creators intended.

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RogerG

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* “California sent coronavirus relief money to inmates living in multiple states”, Bethany Blankley, The Center Square, 1/7/2021, at https://www.thecentersquare.com/california/california-sent-coronavirus-relief-money-to-inmates-living-in-multiple-states/article_dfb87e08-5080-11eb-8fd2-5f361329774e.html#:~:text=%28The%20Center%20Square%29%20%E2%80%93%20More%20than%20%2442%20million,prison%20and%20jail%20inmates%2C%20a%20recent%20report%20found.

* More on California’s unemployment insurance scandal: “California’s Unemployment Insurance System in Crisis, Needs a Fix.”, Orange County Register, 1/18/2023, at https://www.ocregister.com/2023/01/18/unemployment-insurance-in-crisis-needs-a-fix/

* “House passes resolution denouncing socialism, vote splits Democrats”, Michael Schnell, The Hill, 2/2/23, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/house-passes-resolution-denouncing-socialism-vote-splits-democrats/ar-AA172Gvv

* “In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace”, Pew Research Center, 10/17/2019, at https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decline-of-christianity-continues-at-rapid-pace/

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A Culture of Lying

Reporter David Lightman | Idaho Statesman
Gov. Newsom of California makes claim that Texans pay more in taxes in recent news conference.

Mehmet Murat ildan, Turkish writer and economist, once quipped for good reason, “One of the greatest responsibilities for the people of our time is to accept everything that he hears in the pro-government media as a lie and to investigate the truth from independent sources personally!” Good advice in this age of serial falsehoods from our self-anointed “betters”.

Mehmet’s point is to keep one’s wits about them. For instance, ask a few questions. Like, what is “government” in “pro-government media”? Former representative and Democratic Party poohbah Barney Frank tried to put an anodyne spin on the term: “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.”

Is it really? Mehmet might beg to differ. Today, our western media, the other part of the Mehmet’s phrase, are more than organs of communication. They are part of an incestuous nexus of the college faculty lounge, corporate boardroom, legacy media, Hollywood, government down into its bowels, and a smattering of non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) – a class of people peering from the top of the social pyramid and overwhelmingly leaning left. Indeed, be leery enough to personally “investigate the truth from independent sources”.

In today’s news roundup are two items that touches upon our “betters” malign influence: Gavin Newsom on taxes and the chicanery of Hamilton 68. Both stories are indicative of our modern culture of lying.

In the first one, the serial prevaricator Gov. Gavin Newsom of California mangles the truth about Texas taxes. He has to do it because he’s the used car salesman trying to unload a clunker on a weary costumer, the jalopy being the state of California. Thus, he blurted out this whopper: “95% of Texans pay higher taxes than Californians.” What? Texas has no state income tax and California has the highest one in the nation and taxes everything under the sun (and within Hubbel’s expanding universe, Hubble’s Law: v = H*r). The poor folks of California are pummeled with them.

May be an image of text that says 'RAIRZ 2017 CREATORS. COM COMMON SENSE and COMPETENT GOVERNMENT The ENDANGERED SPECIES on the VERGE of EXTINCTION im CALIFORNIA. @Ramireztoons michaelpramirez.com'

It bodes well for DeMeco Ryans, 49er defensive coordinator, who looks like he’ll take the head coaching gig with the Houston Texans. He’ll get a leap in his salary and be allowed to keep more of it by simply making the move.

What is the basis for Newsom’s attempt at making the implausible plausible? Surely, there must be some grounding for the shocking claim. Well, the guy’s staff rooted through the publications of the left-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy in the not-so-illustrious state. They cited a 2018 study from the group that doesn’t support the bombast. Even more embarrassing, a spokesperson for the group refuted Newsom by saying, “We do not compute a specific percentage of Californians who pay less/more tax than Texans.” Instead, the focus of the Institute’s study was to illustrate California’s “fairer” tax system, not that it was cheaper. Newsom: liar, liar, pants on fire!

To clear the air, the more reasonable Tax Foundation went through the numbers comparing Texas and California, just looking at income, property, and sales taxes, and avoiding California’s morass of regulatory and business taxes. Here’s the results using a $100,000 income in both states: the person in Texas pays $6,335 and the poor Californio’s burden almost doubled to $11,946. The biggest reason for the gap is that Texans pay $0 in state income taxes because Texas doesn’t have one. Add a lighter tax burden to the cheaper cost of living and a sensible person can understand the attraction of Texas to a California middle-class family of four or Elon Musk.

Plus, one doesn’t have to put up with the eco-nuttery, crazed and infanticidal abortion, being locked into abysmal public schools, the widespread urban decay, and their daughters having to share with boys the girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms, and running and swimming lanes. There’s a lot to be said for loading up a U-Haul.

Newsom has to gaslight us to cover up his mounting mess. Hamilton 68 lies to maintain its death grip on power. What is it? It’s another one of those transnational groupies of the well-heeled and people accustomed to power and influence. It’s a Who’s Who of powerful insiders. It was birthed by an entity called the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD) which in turn was created by the German Marshall Fund, which is bankrolled by European and the US governments. Got that? It sounds like an old fashioned, meandering money laundering scheme, like much of today’s politics when the powerful want to hide their machinations.

Former FBI counterintelligence agent and “disinformation” expert Clint Watts, the spokesman for Hamilton

Their key obsession is “misinformation”. So, they fight so-called “misinformation” with “disinformation”. It was all uncovered by Elon Musk’s clean-up crew at Twitter. Hamilton 68 was part of the cabal to tar the 2016 election as a product of a Russian skullduggery. They stuck around to be the source for the wild claims of Russia collusion for MSNBC, legacy media, and the disreputable fact-checking operations of Snopes and Politifact.

Hamilton purported to find hundreds (644) of Russian bots actively at work since 2015-16. In reality, according to Twitter execs at the time in their Musk-released emails, the Hamilton’s hundreds shrunk to the reality of 34, most of them related to RT (Russia Times). Swept up in the tarring were conservatives such as Michael Horowitz, and others with much fewer Twitter followers, for merely expressing a point of view contrary to the center-left’s transnational zeitgeist.

Apparently, they’ve been snooping Twitter accounts, not unusual since they are joined at the hip with the “intel community” and Silicon Valley muckety-mucks. Many of Hamilton’s members are well-connected to the amorphous glob. And just think, US taxpayers are forced to bankroll an operation (the German Marshall Fund) targeting themselves. Hamilton 68 is a huge con job that besmirched the 2016 election with lies and was bent on libeling anyone aligned with the result. It’s outrageous.

With Hamilton 68 and Newsom’s falsehoods, one has to wonder about the legitimacy of those preening and peering from the top of the social pyramid. Their culture of lies is smothering us.

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RogerG

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* Mehmet Murat ildan’s quote from Goodreads, “Lies Politics Quotes” at https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/lies-politics , and more on Mehmet at https://mehmetmuratildanresmiwebsitesi.wordpress.com/

* Barney Frank quote from “The Intolerant State”, Matt Welch, Reason Magazine, Dec. 2013, at https://reason.com/2013/11/11/the-intolerant-state/#:~:text=%22Government%20is%20simply%20the%20name%20we%20give%20to,to%20opposite%20sides%20of%20America%27s%20bitter%20ideological%20divide.

* “Newsom says 95% of Texans pay more than Californians in taxes. But is he correct?”, David Lightman, The Sacramento Bee, 1/18/23, at https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article271288017.html#storylink=cpy

* “Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New King of Media Fraud”, Matt Taibbi, Racket, 1/27/23, at https://www.racket.news/p/move-over-jayson-blair-meet-hamilton

* More on Hamilton 68 at “The Right Underreacts”, Michael Brandon Dougherty, National Review Online, 1/31/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-right-underreacts/

* Also on my website at libertatevirtute.com
* Also in my Substack feed, The Golden Mean, at https://rogerlgraf.substack.com/

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A Time of Political Insanity

Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene won't commit to Capitol rally in support of Jan. 6 rioters ...
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R, Fla.) and Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene (R, Ga.)
Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) and Pres. Joe Biden at the microphone

When does just being wrong cross over into insanity?  Einstein had an answer during his debate with the proponents of quantum theory (mechanics) in the 1920’s.  The quantum theory presented the possibility of unpredictability in the atomic and subatomic world: identical circumstances can produce different results.  Flippantly, Einstein threw off the one-line response, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”  Thus, according to Einstein, quantum theory proponents such as Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg were engaging in folly.

Black and white photo showing Bohr and Einstein sitting side by side in conversation.
Niels Bohr (left) with Albert Einstein in the late 1920s, when quantum mechanics was in its infancy. (Photo credit: Emilio Segre Visual Archives/AIP/SPL)

Today, we have good reason to know better.  Micro reality behaves differently than macro.  Einstein’s explanation of the cosmos (macro) can’t account for activity in the atomic and subatomic realm (micro).

However, applying Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle to human affairs would be an invitation to chaos.  Out the window would go any universal principles like deductive/inductive reasoning, equal protection of the laws, rules of due process, standards of decency, human rights, anything regarding the proper regulation of human conduct in a society, the scientific method itself if taken to an extreme.  Yet, that is where we are going.  We are heading back into places that were known to be thickets of danger and malevolence.

Passion and bias overwhelm good sense.  Indeed, that happenstance may be the only true constant in human conduct through the ages, down to the present, and into the future.

We pride ourselves in being better than our ancestors, progressives being the most hubristic.  Their entire belief system is based on it.  Yet, an earlier incarnation of today’s progressives produced improvements in how a democracy registers the will of the people, advances that modern progressives are busy dismantling.  Is this “progress” or a return to an atavistic past, one that their ideological ancestors were trying to escape?

Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall cartoon by Thomas Nast | American History | Pinterest | Tammany hall ...
Thomas Nast cartoon of Boss Tweed of the Tammany Hall Democrat political machine of NYC.

Einstein’s insanity definition is fully operational when it comes to the Democratic Party’s efforts to shred the accomplishments of 19th century progressives.  Back then, progressives were aghast at the corruption of a powerful few in smoke-filled backrooms.  Their efforts at broad political, economic, and social reform were thwarted by a clique with the power to manipulate elections.  Before they could accomplish anything, elections must be cleaned up.  The process must be professionalized with nonpartisan administration of elections, clean voter rolls, the secret ballot, and diligent prosecution of fraud.  Only then, they believed, could they circumvent the self-serving few stuffing the ballot boxes.

Professor Richard T. Ely of Johns Hopkins U. and the U. of Wisconsin, influenced Woodrow Wilson, Rober La Follette, Theodore Roosevelt, etc. (photo: public domain/via Wikimedia)

After, other election reforms would kick in: the popular election of Senators, popular vote primaries, the referendum, initiative, and recall.  More democratization, but first in clean elections, was thought to be the cure.  Now, it’s back to stuffing the ballot box.  Democrats resist efforts to make voter rolls match the actual eligible warm bodies in a precinct, like removal of the dead and noncitizens or those who moved.  They thwart voter ID initiatives, whose purpose is to ensure that the person showing up to vote is actually the person on the list.  And they are enthusiastic proponents of mail-in balloting, unmonitored drop boxes, the third party harvesting of ballots, same-day registration, voting beyond election day, the kinds of proposals that place a huge question mark over election integrity.  What could go wrong?  Is it completely unreasonable to find these ideas at least troubling?

Not for Democrats.  They don’t have misgivings, blinded as they are by the rhetorical device of “disenfranchisement”, the bogeyman of systemic racism, a zeal to win elections at all costs, and making it so easy to vote that the insentient, uninterested, and those desiring to vote and vote often have an open field.  Public faith in the result is sacrificed in the fury of everyone, dead or alive, having a ballot(s) in their hand.  My sons still receive California absentee ballots years after ID and registration in Montana.

The New York Times in a brief moment of sanity declared, “Voting by mail is now common enough and problematic enough that election experts say there have been multiple elections in which no one can say with confidence which candidate was the deserved winner” (see below).  My faith in elections has taken a hit since easy-to-voting/easy-to-cheat has become the official doctrine of the Party and in jurisdictions under its control.

Their whole scheme was encapsulated in the Democrats’ Senate Bill 1 of 2021, the horribly misnamed “For the People Act”.  All of the above would be imposed on the entire country if a couple of Democrat Senators had decided to follow the rest of the lemmings over the cliff.

Far from leaving the Democrats’ Tammany Hall past in the dust, they are now embracing it.  The single biggest threat to election integrity is the mail-in ballot.  Think about it: instead of a ballot given to a confirmed eligible voter in front of many witnesses, and the person is observed going to a booth to secretly mark it, and it is dropped into the box under the eye of a nonpartisan official, the Democrats want to shotgun ballots in the mail.  Yes, participation will increase . . . but by whom?

Mail-in ballots on the floor at the Park East Terrace Apartments.
Absentee ballots below the mailboxes at a Paterson, NJ, apartment complex, May 2020.

The ballots lie on the floor in piles in apartment mailrooms.  Multiple ballots are delivered to a single residence and what happens to them once taken inside is anyone’s guess.  The sole bow to authentication is a Boy-Scout-oath signature on a perjury line.  So much for the single ballot reflecting the conscience of a single person.  It doesn’t take the imagination of Lewis Carroll to picture what might be happening beyond the domicile’s door.  Add the likelihood of a partisan activist delivering and collecting the things (ballot harvesting) – and who knows what else they’re doing – and no wonder I’m ready to throw up my hands and be done with voting.

The Democrats forestall any steps to allay concerns.  They glibly point to the rarity of voter fraud prosecutions.  Get real, they’ve created a system that makes it hard to identify fraud.  The signature on a mail-in ballot is no guarantee of authenticity because it was produced in the same manner as the marked ballot – behind a closed door.  Once the things are collected and delivered, they are shorn of their envelopes and placed in piles.  Authentication is gone, gone forever.

How can fraud be uncovered at this point?  People have to be extremely stupid to be caught.  Prosecutions are a measure of stupidity and not election integrity.  The secret ballot is dead, dead!

Slipshod voting is as bad as slipshod policing. In the latter, you may get killed, pistol-whipped, or face wrongful prosecution. With the former, you will be ruined by political hucksters. Come to think about it, what’s the difference?

Under the skin of today’s Democratic Party progressives is an old-fashioned and venal Tammany Hall ward heeler.  They are back to a deeply rooted behavior that progressives of an earlier incarnation would find abhorrent and a bit insane.

The other party, the current Republican Party, hews even more closely to Einstein’s definition.  A significant block of the Party can’t shake its fetish for Donald Trump no matter how many times he embarrasses the Party and its electoral chances.  This influential chunk of the Party’s base would rather die on the hill of confrontation than make room for the part of the electorate who are 70% with them but can’t take the juvenile boorishness.  This blinkered part of the party can’t get their heads around the fact that politics is about addition and not subtraction.  Reliance on the cult-of-personality cohort in the party’s base to choose nominees will only guarantee more Democrat inaugurals.

2022 Midterms: Dr. Mehmet Oz calls John Fetterman to concede Pennsylvania's US Senate race
Mehmet Oz concedes to John Fetterman, Nov. 9, 2022.

You’d think that the November 2022 midterms would wake them up.  No such luck.  Back then, in many key primary races when a more experienced and more popular candidate in relation to the Democrat frontrunner squared off against a Trump-endorsed one for statewide offices (Senator for example), the Trumpist won and then proceeded to lose the general.  The current Democrat majority in the Senate owes much to Trump’s endorsement of untested and “anti-establishment” candidates.

Einstein’s insanity still afflicts a majority of the party’s base.  They are proving it weekly.  A spate of polls in January 2023 exhibits the same tendency. Emerson, Morning Consult, and Harvard Harris show Trump besting DeSantis by 26, 19, and 20 points respectively for the nomination.  Public opinion is fluid with polls providing only a snapshot, albeit a fuzzy one.  Still, Republicans show that they can’t seem to kick their Trump fix.

May be an illustration of one or more people, people standing, suit and text

Trump’s stature with the general electorate is more troubling.  A deep dive into the Harris poll shows him besting Biden by 5 points.  DeSantis does so by 3. Good news for Trump?  Not so fast.  Biden is standing atop a wrecked economy, border, culture, schools, and public safety – underwater by 14 in his favorables.  Yet, Trump only looks marginally better than a wholly discredited Biden.  Among possible Republican challengers, Trump shares negative likeability numbers (-3) with Ted Cruz (-2) and Mike Pompeo (-4).  DeSantis beams brightly, up by 13 in the sunny uplands of likeability.  Amazingly, Republicans in the poll still favored the one with the higher negatives, and therefore with weaker prospects.  At this juncture, they are poised to do to America what Arizona and Pennsylvania Republicans did to their states.  Knowingly choosing weakness might be an additional definition of insanity.

It won’t require much donor cash from the Democrats’ cadre of billionaire smear merchants to remind people of Trump’s vulgarity.  The guy daily confirms the worst about him: occasionally cavorting with the lunatic fringe and incessant recourse to worn out narcissisms.

May be a cartoon of 1 person and text

He opens his mouth and middle-class suburbanites cringe.  The schtick leaves only the diehards who revel in politics as performance art – “owning the libs”, “Trump being Trump”.  Thus, the Trump following is starting to resemble Grateful Dead groupies: bellicose, aging, and regularly depleted by admissions to nursing homes and funeral parlors.  Don’t look here for a winning coalition.

 

With Democrats professing affection for Marxist folly (in CRT, systemic oppression, the too-numerous …phobias, eat the rich), and resorting to Tammany Hall electoral tactics, one has to wonder about their grip on sanity, or honesty, or at least good sense.

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Republicans are proving themselves to be no better.  Shockingly, many, maybe a majority, have come to fondle crassness and crudity as some kind of winner.  Combine those bestialities with inexperience and naivete in candidate choice and we end up with Democrats getting a Mulligan (second chance) to make more hash of our lives.  Republicans don’t have a grip on the first rule of politics: first, you’ve got to win elections.  Republicans hitching their wagon to Trump, and candidates like him, will only guarantee another wild ride over the cliff.

We can’t even discuss these matters sanely, intelligently.  Our vocabulary is riddled with empty generalities.  Mostly they are straw-man figures of hate.  A good portion of the chattering classes on the right lambast the “establishment” and “RHINOS” without much definition beyond somebody who might have governing experienced and lacks a hair-trigger Defcon 3 personality.  Democrats are straitjacketed by a paranoia about a fascist under every rug, “systemic” racism when you can’t find real racism, Gaia-worship in climate-change mania, and an ever-expanding list of “protective classes” in need of their paternalistic care . . . at our expense.  Listening to Tucker Carlson or Matt Gaetz on the right is as shrill to the ears as Biden, MSNBC, or AOC on the left.  If they aren’t insane, why do they talk like it?

Whew, woe be to the American republic at this degenerate phase in its life cycle. We appear to be so insane.

RogerG

Read more here:
* “Trio of polls show Trump clawing back momentum from DeSantis”, Zachary Basu, Axios, 1/24/23, at https://www.axios.com/2023/01/24/trump-desantis-polls-2024-presidential-election
* Harvard-Harris Poll, January 18-19, 2024, at https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/HHP_Jan2023_KeyResults.pdf
* NYT skepticism of mail-in voting can be found in “It Takes a Superspreader to Know a Superspreader: Whether Sturgis, BLM, or voting by mail, the media chooses narrative over facts every time.”, Gerald Baker, Wall Street Journal, 9/14/2020, at https://www.wsj.com/articles/it-takes-a-superspreader-to-know-a-superspreader-11600097758
* Additionally, NYT’s skepticism can be found here: “Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises” at https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-by-mail-faulty-ballots-could-impact-elections.html
* The differences between modern progressives and their 19th century cousins can be found here: “Modern Vs. 19th-Century Progressives”, Jason Merchey, 11/22/2017, at https://valuesofthewise.com/modern-vs-19th-century-progressives/