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The Pot Calling the Kettle Black

“If a fact comes in that doesn’t fit into our frame, you’ll either not notice it, or ignore it, or ridicule it, or be puzzled by it – or attack it if it’s threatening. ”  — George Lakoff, cognitive linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, as quoted in National Geographic Magazine, June 2017 issue. (1)

One of my main reasons for maintaining a National Geographic Magazine subscription is to keep tabs on the animating infatuations in that part of America politically colored “blue”.  The magazine seldom fails to disappoint, perhaps unwittingly and unknowingly.  The infatuations are a product of a favoritism, encoded into blue-America’s urban and academic “betters”, arising from a pervasive  mix of social tastes and a grand ideo-philosophy.   It operates as a kind of mental impairment for its devotees.

Susan Goldberg, Editor in Chief, National Geographic Magazine.

The above quote from page p. 50 of the magazine was meant to describe others not so enlightened according to the author of the piece from which it was taken.  It could just as easily apply to the author, editors, and staff of the magazine in their Washington, D.C., bubble.

“The pot calling the kettle black”: A phrase from at least the 1600s meant to convey hypocrisy. It would be better understood if we experienced life in a medieval kitchen.

On the “affective filter”

Are the publication’s content producers immune to the presence of half-baked assumptions and prejudices that they assign to others?  I think not.  The affective filter concept of learning theory comes to mind.  The filter functions as an emotional Polaroid lens as we consciously try to attain new knowledge.  Our emotions, the theory asserts, are said to make learning difficult, and, by implication, operates to facilitate passage of those stimuli and facts that comport with our previously entrenched hunches about how the world works.  If true, it is universally operable beyond the “bitter clingers” of Pres. Obama’s famous characterization.

The affective filter theory was devised to explain student second language acquisition.

The magazine’s staff could benefit from a mirror.

There is a strong emotional attachment to our deep, unquestioned, and strongly held beliefs.  While we may convince ourselves that we are paragons of scientific inquiry, the reality may be quite different.

On materialism

So, what are the basal beliefs pervading the upper reaches of the status hierarchy in our urban and academic clusters?  One attachment is a broad conviction for the philosophy of materialism.  No, I’m not referring to materialism as a synonym for greed.  Alternatively, materialism as accepted wisdom attempts to explain everything as a product of matter and material forces.  Modern practitioners of science could be weaned into this line of thought by the very nature of their preoccupation.  Science is focused on the physical world.  The temptation is to reduce wisdom to an understanding of matter, its forces and processes.

The stage is set for a full-throated assault on anything seemingly not in tune with the current state of scientific understanding as presumed by some practitioners momentarily at the top of the science popularity pyramid.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, a popular pied-piper of science-as-wisdom.

A death sentence for tradition and rise of subjectivism

To no great surprise, nearly anything old – morals, traditions, institutions, established religion – will sooner or later fall under the crosshairs.  If its antique, it can be explained away as something not worthy of our “enlightened” age.  For these acolytes, it’s become like a reflex, as in the blinking of the eyes.

The old sexual morality is a victim of this popular turn of mind, a bent very popular in metropolitan and academic surroundings, and anywhere else under their sway – which means almost everywhere.  Cohabitation is up; virginity is down; chaos in the home is up; and genital compatibility (heterosexuality) no longer necessary.

In fact, genital diversity (again, heterosexuality) is made irrelevant.  Since an orgasm is the penultimate in this brave new world, sodomy is to be sanctified alongside the Church’s preferred option.  Anything is okay if the desired end is achieved.  Such is the logic of the mind unmoored from anything higher.

In these stunted minds, a belief in something higher is as expendable as a zipper that won’t zip.  God?  What god?  Morality?  Whose morality?  These questions are regurgitated as readily as terns vomiting for their young.

“Nothing is written in stone.” — the quintessence of moral relativism when taken to an extreme.

The result, though, is a confusion of knowledge with wisdom.  While we have the knowledge to expeditiously abort a late-term fetus, “ought” we?  Even though we have the ability to euthanize the momentarily depressed, “ought” we?  While we can treat people as livestock for their stem cells, “ought” we?  Should we use our knowledge of genetics to manufacture custom-made human beings?  Many of the most profound questions in life cannot be answered by a sole reliance on the knowledge of synapses and molecules.  The reference point for such decisions must lie in something other than ourselves. Some would call it “wisdom”.  A scientist may have the knowledge but be completely lacking in the wisdom.

The absence of anything higher, something outside of us, elevates each person into the the role of Creator of our own personal standards.  The subjective, and relative, reigns supreme.  The love of an unbounded individualism – the uninhibited self –  lies here.  The combination of science, materialism, and now subjectivism pushes the mind toward unlimited possibilities, a benign concept if kept abstract; a pernicious one if allowed to undermine limits.

On transgenderism, the gay agenda, and the uninhibited self

Seemingly, now even the physical limits of chromosomes can be discarded.  We are in the age of transgenderism and 40 or so genders.  We have come full circle when the individual as emperor of reality is liberated from science, chromosomes and all.  Have we entered an epochal  phase when subjectivism has put a gun to the head of science?  If an idea or feeling gets locked into our head, even our physical bodies must be made to give way.

This heap of notions is so taken for granted in the confines of academia and among our self-styled cultural elites that counter-ideas are hubristically dismissed as ignorance.  The 3,000 years of Judeo-Christianity and Greek philosophy must bend a knee to a new god and faith: the uninhibited self and its modern priesthood of shortsighted PhD’s and media mandarins.

The ladies of the View, 2017.

Their arrogance is astounding.  They claim a monopoly ownership of science, while unintentionally dismantling it.  In fact, it’s a semi-science that functions as a cover for their biases … or, more accurately, prejudices.  For instance, National Geographic Magazine devoted its January 2017 issue to the “Gender Revolution” (as was covered in a previous blog post).

While reading the article, I was struck, when you cut through the excess verbiage, by the gullibility of a cluster of academics to accept a person’s claims in interviews as proof of the existence of a condition (gender dysphoria) on a par with schizophrenia and diabetes.  When it involves children, the psuedo-diagnosis is very disturbing.  Common adolescent confusion now can lead to permanent genital and bodily disfigurement.  Efforts  to less drastically treat the internal turmoil through therapy are made criminal acts in some jurisdictions.

In the same issue was a piece about female genital mutilation (FGM).  The practice is resurrected in the West under the guise of “gender reassignment surgery”.  Board certification and a scalpel doesn’t make the practice any less horrifying.

Is this the new wisdom?

Using their position at the commanding heights of contemporary culture, the socio-political nomenklatura seek to rub out opposing views on other subjects as well.  A defense of traditional marriage – a viewpoint not very well articulated as of late – is pounded into submission by an alliance of our cultural aristocracy and the fashionable victims’ group du jour: the L-G-B-T-Q …. movement (The presence of 40 or so genders makes an acronym difficult).

One of their signature issues is gay marriage.  Yet, we can only get to the idea of same-sex matrimonials if we skip over some obvious questions.  Like, what is marriage?  Is it simply a union of adults?  Gayness, by its very nature, makes their unions only about the adults.  It can be about nothing else.  Last time I checked, sodomy can’t produce offspring.  So, childbearing is out of the question.  Yes, yes, gays can adopt, but the simple existence of those children is ipso facto proof of a heterosexual coupling.  If marriage exists for the purpose of family formation, it’s incoherent to sanction as “marriage” a genus of union that can never do it (produce children).

What of the heterosexual unions who either can’t, or won’t, produce children?  Are they marriages?  Most emphatically … Yes!  Heterosexuality is the essential condition, not the decision to have children.  As for infertile couples, medical interventions are a tacit recognition of the absolute necessity of the very essence of heterosexuality: sperm meeting egg, in one way or another.  Being childless doesn’t repeal the legitimacy of a marriage; and holding a ceremony and exchanging rings, by itself, can’t make one.  Heterosexuality is written all over the institution.

Marriage as a mixing of the only 2 genders having any basis in chromosomes – leaving aside the unusual, but not unexpected, chromosomal abnormality – was remarkably obvious to our ancestors who lived at a time when they couldn’t be afflicted, as we are, with the hectoring of our cultural “betters”.  The idea of marital bliss applying to 2 men was so outside the pale that it never came to mind to anyone coming before Justice Kennedy’s term on the Supreme Court.  Marriage of the 2 genders is all that we find mentioned in the historical record.  While scanning historical documents, I ran into this juicy bit from Emperor Justinian’s reforms of Roman law, Institutes, Title II, “Of The Law of Nature, the Law of Nations, and the Civil Law”:

“The law of nature is that which she has taught all animals; a law not peculiar to the human race, but shared by all living creatures, whether denizens of the air, the dry land, or the sea. Hence comes the union of male and female, which we call marriage; hence the procreation and rearing of children, for this is a law by the knowledge of which we see even the lower animals are distinguished.” (Emphasis added)  (8)

Gay marriage is an inanity to logic and to our predecessors.

On Hegel, “progress”, and historicism

G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), rector and holder of the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin.

The growing acceptance of same-sex unions is a testament to the wrongheadedness of Hegel’s 19th century view of history as the unfolding of increasing rationality – i.e., “progress” (sometimes referred as “historicism”).  We aren’t getting smarter, or more rational, or more contented.  Instead, we’re proving that history has no arc.  It’s filled with unexpected zigzags and stumbles, and chic journeys into nonsense.

In castigating historicism  and any other form of determinism in the manipulation of history, the philosopher Karl Popper had it right when he said that there are no “inexorable laws of historical destiny”. (6,7)  Marx/Engels (meaning the present converts of the pair), Obama, Hillary, Thomas Piketty, Robert Reich, and all self-styled Progressives please take note.

“Trend is not destiny”, Karl Popper. The old saying, “crap happens”, is the roadblock to any universal trend in history. It’s something Obama should keep in mind before he lectures us about being on the “right side of history”.

On “climate change”

For our brethren at the top of our urban and academic status pyramid, maybe the thought that they could be wrong never occurred to them.  Maybe they’re blinded by their own arrogance.  Well, sadly for us, their arrogance isn’t limited to the LGBTQ … wishlist.  A favorite in their panoply of causes, when they aren’t yammering against homophobia, is “climate change”.

If left alone as a two-word phrase and without any of the ideological baggage that so often attends it, it’s rather innocuous and acceptable to most people.  Though, our haughty “betters” couldn’t leave it alone.  It’s freighted with “apocalyptic”, “catastrophic”, “solely anthropogenic”, and with sub-agenda terms like “green”, “sustainable”, etc., etc.

Al Gore as the climate change Jeremiah.

With their ever-present faith in “progress”, they’re fully on-board with upending the settled arrangements of a free people.  Their confidence in politicized “experts” knows no bounds.  Indubitably, government – with themselves at the helm, of course – is expected to have free reign to bring about the “green” world.  The crusade has breathed new life into the disaster that is socialism.  It also bequeathed to us the juiced-up social engineer.

The social engineer of the progressives’ imagination, appropriately papered with degrees and certificates, will be ensconced in administrative bureaus with sweeping and unconstitutional powers to legislate, execute, and adjudicate.  It’s government by papal bull and czarist ukase.  What would James Madison think?

If Madison was reanimated into today’s world, he might be struck by more than a sovereign people’s willingness to surrender their sovereignty over to Harvard’s graduating class.  He’d be smacked with the glaring hypocrisy of the situation’s cheerleaders.

My blue-America barometer – National Geographic Magazine – unconsciously revels in the duplicity.  Going back to the “Why We Lie” cover story (June 2017 issue), I found this gem:

“Researchers have shown that we are especially prone to accept lies that affirm our worldview.  Memes that claim Obama was not born in the United States, deny climate change … and spread other ‘alternative facts’, as a Trump adviser called his Inauguration crowd claims, have thrived on the Internet and social media because of this vulnerability.”

“Deny climate change” as a lie?  Is it a lie or simply a disagreement?  “Lie” is used to cover a difference of opinion with our cultural suzerains.  Grand prognostications in science, if its real science, should be met with a “Yes, but ….” or a “No, but ….”.  Qualifiers abound in a field for which there is much unknown, and definitely so regarding those grand prognostications.

The resort to cocksure “lie” labeling is heartily exhibited by those with the least expertise in science.  Al Gore is no scientist; he’s a politician/lawyer.  Leonardo DiCaprio is an actor.  The author of the NGM piece, Yudhijhit Bhattacharjee, is a “writer” according to the bio on his website.  And since scientists, like everyone else, aren’t resistant to the surrounding cultural zeitgeist, and since politicized government largesse is widely available, today’s science can be easily hijacked by its celebrity and political non-practitioners possessing huge megaphones.

Leonardo DiCaprio as Democratic Party booster, from the 2004 campaign.

Here’s the hypocrisy: opposition to the crusade is fitted with the “liar” label while a concerted campaign in 2009 of lying was uncovered in spirited emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, Houston Control for the “climate change” enterprise.  Maybe intimidation to suppress is more accurate.  Still, the episode exposed the effort to misrepresent the truth.  Do we dare call it “lying”? (9)

The scandal involved partisan scientists bound-and-determined to shoehorn data into a prefab outcome: climate change is apocalyptic .  It included efforts at hiding data and methods from scrutiny outside a narrow, mutually reinforcing group.  Further, the emails bring to light the attempts at manipulation of their models to produce their preferred results, and the frustration when they don’t.  In addition to hiding and statistical messaging, intimidation and excommunication of critics from the field is plotted among the climate change clerisy’s brethren.

Putting the best face on the scandal would be to recognize the emails were taken out of context and only blunt expressions among close-knit colleagues.  However, the exculpation is only limited.  At a minimum, it illustrates the behavior of a highly partisan claque of scientists.  It’s an example of what happens when science becomes a partisan movement and then a political industry.

Is any of this to be seriously considered – even if made aware – among the lords in their Hollywood/west Los Angeles/Manhattan/campus castles?  I think that we now know the answer to that question.

Why even have a magazine issue devoted to “Why We Lie”?  Why now?  Why did the topic come up and demand so much of the magazine’s resources and time?  I suspect a political motive.  The subject of “lying” is a particular obsession in the hot nodes of lefty political activism.  Blue-America’s most prominent inhabitants are busy trying to delegitimize the shocking result of the 2016 election.

I’m reminded of one of the historian Henry Adams’s witticisms from his book, The Education of Henry Adams.

“Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”

The organization of hatred can occur with or without a patina of science.  Susan Goldberg, chief editor of National Geographic Magazine, please take note.

RogerG

Bibliography and references:

  1. “Why We Lie”, Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, National Geographic Magazine, June 2017, pp. 30-51.
  2. “Fox Says It Won’t Interfere With National Geographic’s Editorial Content”, Andrew Beaujon, Washingtonian, 9/9/2015,   https://www.washingtonian.com/2015/09/09/fox-wont-interfere-with-national-geographic-editorial-content/
  3. “The End of Identity Liberalism”, Mark Lilla, New York Times: Sunday Review, 11/18/2016,   https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html
  4. “Input hypothesis”, Wikipedia,   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis.  The affective filter concept arose from Stephen Krashen’s research into second language acquisition and is part of his broader “input hypothesis”, first published in 1977.
  5. “Gender Revolution”, National Geographic Magazine, June 2017 issue.
  6. A brief summary of Karl Popper’s critique of Hegel’s “historicism” can be found in wikipedia under the article “Historicism”,   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicism
  7. A fuller description of Popper’s critique of historicism can be found here : “The Central Mistake of Historicism: Karl Popper on Why Trend is Not Destiny”,  Farnam Street, https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2016/03/karl-popper-mistake-of-historicism/
  8. As a pdf file: “Justinian, Institutes“,   http://amesfoundation.law.harvard.edu/digital/CJCiv/JInst.pdf
  9. An interesting op-ed about the U. of East Anglia email scandal can be found here: “Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation”, Christopher Booker, The Daily Telegraph, 11/28/2009,   http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6679082/Climate-change-this-is-the-worst-scientific-scandal-of-our-generation.html
  10. The Education of Henry Adams, Chapter 1, Henry Brooks Adams, 1907.
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Pouring SALT Into Open Wounds

Salt as sodium chloride is a necessity.  SALT as the State and Local Tax deduction is a luxury, and an irritating one at that — like pouring salt into open wounds if you live anywhere that didn’t give Hillary 60% of the vote.

One need not stroll into the culture war to be smacked with evidence of our great political and social divide.  The tax code is a lively arena for conflict. It is a monstrous affair, littered with baubles and beads, overlapping into almost all human activity,  and encrusted with boundless perks for politically privileged courtesans.  Not all tax code gimmes, though, are equal.  One – the deduction for state and local taxes (SALT) – has evolved into an icon of worship in blue state jurisdictions with a penchant for taxing and spending their way to heaven.  Take it away and they behave like alcoholics being forced into cold turkey treatment.

For low-tax locales,  they receive little or no benefit for their reluctance to turn their state tax offices into Soviet Lubyankas.  Their sole compensation is the exasperation of knowing that their self-restraint makes the subsidy more “affordable” to the public servants in hyper-taxed, Democrat-friendly environs.  People outside and between the urban and bi-coastal romper rooms know it.  It’s galling for them to know that the federal tax code incentivizes tax promiscuity.

SALT was born of the Civil War’s 1862 Revenue Act and the 19th century’s infatuation with sticking it to the super rich. (4)  Common terms  for the fat-cats that stretches across the last couple of centuries are “buccaneer capitalists” or “robber barons”.  It’s easy to find antique characterizations that align with the modern left’s preconceptions.

Cyrus Field, Jay Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Russell Sage on bags of millions, “Puck” magazine, 1883.
John D. Rockefeller as “king”, 1901.

The excitement led to the passage of the 16th Amendment in 1913, which legalized the fed’s tax on income.  The federal tax on income was reified into the Revenue Act of 1913, and the state and local tax deduction (SALT) tagged along.

The archaic justification for SALT was the fear of the federal government swallowing up all tax revenue, leaving little for streets and public safety.  SALT was thought to preserve a slice of the cash cow for city hall.  How quaint.

A more modern pretext is the avoidance of double taxation.  You know, the same dollar of income being slammed by the locals and then hit by the feds.  But what isn’t subjected to double/triple/quadruple taxation in our own tax Leviathan according to this logic?  Think about it.  For today, the excuse becomes less than a pointless gesture.

Look below at the growth of our federal tax monster by page volume.  (5)

Does anyone claim that multiple taxation isn’t at work here?  There are so many ways to tax income, and, when you’re done, tax the things that were purchased with that taxed dollar.  We don’t even need the income to be from human beings.  We extract the pound of flesh from ghosts in the form of businesses.  The requirement of breathing isn’t necessary.

Let me count the ways beyond the tax on personal income.

  • Estate taxes, assessments on your assets after you’ve left the land of the living.  Please remember, that stuff was most likely purchased with already taxed dollars.
  • Corporate income taxes, the tax on a business as if it were real human being.  These taxes are layered on top of all the income taxes generated by all of the buying and selling involved in doing business.
  • Tariffs and duties, the products being taxed at point of entry.  After facing this hit, these products will generate income to be taxed once again as estate, corporate, and income taxes.
  • Sales and excise taxes.  These extractions are mostly generated from spending originating in previously taxed income.
  • Ditto for property taxes.

Our whole tax system is a series of overlays of double/triple/quadruple taxation.  What’s the relevance of attempting to excuse state and local taxes from something that is so generic to our, or any, tax code?

If you believe the existence of “double taxation” is hyped – which some people do – the case for SALT teeters further.  A good portion of tax dollars to different levels of government goes to pay for different services.  Tax dollars to the feds for national defense aren’t the same dollars as those going to the state to fulfill a state’s policy of equalizing budgets among a state’s school districts.  It’s only when services overlap between layers of government do we run the risk of a taxed dollar being hit again.  The deduction purports to dodge something that doesn’t really happen in the first place.

Even more convoluted contentions have been summoned to keep SALT.  One mind-boggling claim is the belief, absent the deduction, state and local spending would be “sub-optimal”.  Wrap your head around that one.  Here’s the concoction: stir into the witch’s cauldron tax incentives to pay for more or less public services and add someone’s ideological preferences, and out comes the right amount of local spending.  Allegedly, SALT is the ingredient to go “optimal”.

Is it making any sense?  Only if you believe in magic.  The thing rides on the mystical power to glean SALT’s ability to encourage the funding of more local government services, services that might increasingly benefit non-residents.  Is that “optimal”?  I don’t know, though it smells fishy.  Strip away “optimal” and, in reality, you are left with a simple local decision to fund a service.  Nothing more.  Whether it aligns with a pundit’s conception of “optimal” is  meaningless.  In reality, SALT is the noise in the calculation to finance a park.

If the mystical sound of “optimal” doesn’t sound convincing, a second line of trenches in defense of SALT is thrown up by blue-state advocates when they contend that they get fleeced more by the federal government and, therefore, are more deserving of a bigger break.  They trot out such crude numbers as the return on federal taxes paid  – i.e., residents’ taxes paid out and federal spending coming in, as in this chart appearing in a 2015 issue of The Atlantic (7):

Deep blue, Hillary/Bernie-loving sanctuaries as New York and California reside at the bottom of the chart.  They get less than a $1.00 for every one sent to the feds.  In contrast, redder-than-red South Carolina gets a whopping $7.87 back. (7)  Are some states riding on the federal teat as they keep their tax burdens low?  Are red states hypocrites?  Are blue state victims and therefore deserving of SALT?

The numbers in the “return on federal investment” chart are too raw to be of much value.  Local circumstances muddy the picture.  Number one on the list of federal contributors is military installations.  Northeast states aren’t likely to be the source of cheap real estate for sprawling tank exercises and bombing runs.  A state like California ironically is (Does the Mojave Desert remind you of anything?), and so are states populated by now-posthumous “yellow dog Democrats”and represented by long since gone-to-room-temperature congressional mandarins: South/North Carolina, Texas, etc.

Marine armored vehicles at Twentynine Palms, Ca.

The presence of federal defense spending in a state has much to do with historical inertia.  Those states long in the game have the advantage.  It’s a mixture of red and blue states.  Of the top ten receiving the lion’s share of the defense pie, 4 are solid blue states (California, Maryland, Washington, and Massachusetts);  2 are purple (Virginia and Pennsylvania); 4 are red (Texas, Florida, Georgia, and Alabama).  (9)  Nothing remarkable here since the federal pipeline was long established before the current progressive/left mania came to make blue states “blue”. (10)

Hampton Roads with Newport News, Norfolk, and Portsmouth. It’s the location for major military installations as the Norfolk Naval Shipyard.
USS John Kennedy at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard, 1983.

Looking at it from the perspective of the importance of the federal defense spending on a state’s economy (GDP), 4 of the top jurisdictions are solidly blue (Hawaii, DC, Maryland, and Maine) and the rest are purple or red (Va., Alabama, Alaska, Miss., Kentucky, Arizona).  (9)   Once again, a blend.  Regardless of a state’s political hue, Pentagon dollars mostly go to facilities that predate ’41 Pearl Harbor. (10)

So, what do we have?  We have some blue states with a large infusion of federal defense money, coexisting with a tax-spend-regulation frenzy, all the while screeching about the loss of SALT.  Suddenly, the picture ain’t so clear.

Anyway, the scramble by localities for bases resembles the hustle for the next Google server farm, and should be viewed in that light – not as a “federal handout”.  Defense is an industry, and like any industry, it brings paychecks to be spent in the state.    It works the same as an Amazon distribution center.  If it adds to the state’s coffers in the same way as a Google or Amazon facility, so what.  A state can’t present itself as a victim of the federal tax monster as it shuns, or is incapable of attracting, industry – federal or private.

A growing state economy from expanding industries means a growing state tax base and a decreasing bite for each taxpaying resident … under normal mathematical rules.  Hence, low tax states.  High tax states punish economic activity, restrict the role of business/industry taxes to the state’s balance sheet, and create a greater reliance on personal tax extractions.  Up goes their state-driven personal tax load, up goes the desire to hide the gouging through SALT, and down goes the federal dollar influx.  The result is the funky calculation called the “return on taxpayer investment”.

And what about a state’s inflationary character that drives incomes and tax receipts?  That’s the other side of the “return on taxpayer investment” equation: the money that flows out of the state.  Yes, there is such a thing as a cost-of-living and income feedback loop.  As a state’s cost of living rises, so does the income to keep up; and as incomes rise, so does the cost of living.  Are state policies compelling an increase in the cost of living, and necessitating a higher income to maintain residence?

To no surprise, according to one measure, mega-blue and high tax states like California and New York nowhere appear on the list of the cheapest states to live.  Pride of place goes to 9 red states (Texas, et al) and 1 purple (Michigan).  (11)

On the flip side, blue states occupy near the top in the necessity for its people to shell out lots of cash to continue to live there.  (13) Two of the big stimulants are housing and energy costs.  Both are highly sensitive to a state’s public policies.  Environmental, land use, and growth control measures wreak havoc on the cost of living.  Add “prevailing wage” inflators to the mix and you have a recipe for escalating wage demands.  Plug those inflated income numbers into a progressive tax code and a river of money flows to the state capital and DC.

Californios, take a look at your electricity bill for a familiar inflator.  All that  “green” energy is expensive, and it shows.  See below. (12)

Utility rates are one of the favorite social engineering tools of the green lobby.  In many blue states, the presence of an all-powerful green lobby defines what it means to be blue.  Living in a 3 bedroom/2 bath house in the Central Valley of California means a $400/mo. electricity tab, unless you knuckle under to the state’s commissars and load your roof with solar panels.

The price of everything inexorably climbs.  An inflated utility bill component is factored into everything you buy.  No wonder a comfortable existence in these locales requires more green of the kind with presidents on them.

Democrat bastions don’t seem to be aware of the trap that they created.  It begins with an infatuation for progressive tax codes.  Then, greenie fascinations raise the price of existence.  Lump onto the process the attempt to raise wages by ukase (minimum and prevailing wage law), add a plethora of regulations to assuage any chic cause that comes down the pike, and the pitchfork-wielding peasants end up demanding more in their paychecks.  As they do so, they’ll be trapped into higher tax rates to artificially inflate the flow of cash to the feds.  At this juncture, there will be no shortage of number-crunchers to produce a kind of mathematical demagoguery to justify a special perk for the victims.

What started out as an honest gesture in the dawn of income taxation is a higher mountain of contradictions today.  The old pretext, along with these more modern ones, is baloney.  CPA status isn’t required to figure it out.  The real reason is something more simple.  After 104 years, people have grown attached to SALT, whether it makes sense or not.  In this sense, SALT is like today’s opioid epidemic.  An addict begins with raiding the medicine cabinet, a dependency develops and grows, and the person ends up as a client of the drug cartels.  Like an addiction, entire financial lives become wrapped around ages-old tax provisions.  Threats to take it away lead to the political equivalent of withdrawals.

Heebie-jeebies can erupt at any time from a blue-state anybody.  D’s we expect to be afflicted, but R’s aren’t immune from the spasms brought on by the threat to take away the perk.  It’s simply a blue or purple state thing – aka tax-happy jurisdictions – no matter the partisan color of their advocates.

Rep.’s Peter King (R-NY) and Tom MacArthur (R-NJ) threaten opposition to tax reform that includes the elimination of SALT.

Yesterday’s absurdity has morphed into today’s “necessity”.  As such, the inmates of tax-happy jurisdictions haven’t limited their defense to now-discredited claims.  They’ve invented additional arguments based on prudence.  Come to think of it, really, it’s the prudence of the addict.

The abolition of SALT, it is asserted, would wreak havoc on a state’s bond rating.  In essence, blue-state defenders are admitting that without the sweetener of SALT their residents would seek to be residents elsewhere.  Probably true.  Without SALT, residents would be exposed to the full effect of their blue-state’s tax mania.  The logic: out flows an alarming amount of the tax base, down goes the ability to make good on their bonds.  Elementary, my dear Watson.

Understandable, probably true, but as a defense, it’s bunkum.  The blue-state perk shields a state’s residents from the full effect of sky-high taxation while simultaneously making it easier for the state’s tax collectors to have a crowd to fleece.  The image recurs of a vampire with a herd of human livestock to feed upon.  Drugging the victims with SALT to make the experience more tolerable isn’t a valid justification for bleeding them white.  If they were sober, they’d flee like hell.  The argument for medicating the victims is an argument for exsanguination (sever loss of blood), without the slightest recognition about whether they should have their hemoglobin stolen in the first place.

Instead, sticking with the metaphor, wouldn’t it be wiser to start a campaign to eradicate vampires by recruiting an army of priests armed with wooden stakes?  In our case, cloning an army of Arthur Laffers would do the trick.  The effort would be expedited by a clear-headed confrontation with the horror among the patsies.  Eliminating SALT might produce outcomes such as an exodus (and a run on U-Haul rentals), mob exterminations of blue-state Republicans, and/or the patrons of Starbucks turning into icon-smashing peasants as they march to the homes and offices of the state’s revenuers and their abettors.  Maybe all three.

Number 2 on the probabilities list is a very real possibility: the extermination of blue-state Republicans.  Blue-state Republicans are already an endangered species.  SALT might make them go the way of Martha, the last known passenger pigeon who died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.

The fate awaiting blue-state Republicans if SALT is repealed?

Or so it is argued.  That might be the short term effect.  Beyond one election cycle, after the hypothetical  wipeout, the residents would be accosted with more tax-crazed “public servants”, further intensifying the state’s slide.  Don’t forget, your most likely choice on the ballot is between a tax lunatic (a “D”)  or  a now dispirited R.  After multiple waves of tax bingeing, an alcoholic’s bottom would be reached.  Then there’d be sobriety and a cleaning up – i.e., a return to tax sanity.  A short term loss might be acceptable if it results in a long term fiscal clean-and-sober.

But try selling the logic to a soon-to-be-unemployed Republican legislator in a hostile state.  Yet, is the preservation of his job a sufficient justification for keeping an iniquitous tax perk?  The rationale worked to keep the antebellum South married to slavery.  The South’s entire way of life , they cried, couldn’t survive the loss of their human property.  The argument was as dubious then as it is today in its latest incarnation for SALT.  The only difference in the 2 scenarios is the object of veneration and preservation.

While the tax perk may preserve a few “R” politicos, it continues to do violence to equity among the our sovereign states.  States that prudently restrain their state Leviathans also have modest tax regimes.  They receive little, if any, benefit from the perk.  There’s just too little to deduct to reduce a taxpayer’s overall burden.

The calculus is reversed in most blue states.  Nanny states are expensive, and so is their tax bite.  The deduction is a salve to a gaping wound.  Not surprisingly, it is coveted by tax hells and viewed contemptuously by places not located anywhere along Dante’s descent through tax “Inferno”.

There you have it: love of SALT is synonymous with jurisdictions defined by words such as spendthrift, irresponsible, gouging, and excessive.  For those locales not so enamored by SALT, words like prudence, modest, and limited apply.  Put the two sentences together.  SALT enables all that should be avoided in a universe with a reasonable relationship to reality.

It is, literally and figuratively, pouring salt into the open wound between the states.  It has no rationale other than to make the consequences of  irresponsibility less felt.  But that isn’t reasonable, is it?

RogerG

 

Bibliography and sources:

  1. “Congress might eliminate California state and local tax deductions. Here’s a look at the numbers”, Kurt Snibbe, Orange County Register, 10/27/2017,   http://www.ocregister.com/2017/10/27/congress-might-eliminate-california-state-and-local-tax-deductions-heres-a-look-at-the-numbers/
  2. “Which Places Benefit Most From State and Local Tax Deductions?”, Alan Coe, Tax Foundation, 4/27/2017,   https://taxfoundation.org/map-state-and-local-deductions/
  3. “The State and Local Tax Deduction: A Primer”, Jared Walczak, Tax Foundation, 3/15/2017,  https://taxfoundation.org/state-and-local-tax-deduction-primer/
  4. For a modern leftist rendition of the demographic, see: “Michael Novak’s Ethics of Buccaneer Capitalism”, Frank Cocozelli, 10/1/2007, Daily Kos,  https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2007/10/1/392711/-
  5. “Look at how many pages are in the federal tax code”, Jason Russell, Washington Examiner, 4/15/2016,   http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/look-at-how-many-pages-are-in-the-federal-tax-code/article/2563032
  6. “Which States Rely the Most on Federal Aid?”, Morgan Scarboro, Tax Foundation, 1/11/17,  https://taxfoundation.org/states-rely-most-federal-aid/
  7. “Which States Are Givers and Which Are Takers?”, John Tierney, 5/5/2014, The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/which-states-are-givers-and-which-are-takers/361668/
  8. This article was cited in the above piece: “2017’s Most & Least Federally Dependent States”, John S Kiernan, Senior Writer & Editor, 4/21/2017, WalletHub,   https://wallethub.com/edu/states-most-least-dependent-on-the-federal-government/2700/  .
  9. “MILITARY’S IMPACT ON STATE ECONOMIES”, National Conference of State Legislatures, 2/21/2017,  http://www.ncsl.org/research/military-and-veterans-affairs/military-s-impact-on-state-economies.aspx
  10. Virginia’s Hampton Roads has 20 military facilities, many date back to the Civil War and before.  For one compilation refer to wikipedia, “Hampton Roads”,  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampton_Roads#U.S._military
  11. “Top 10 States With the Lowest Cost of Living”, Rick LeBlanc, The Balance, 5/16/2017,  https://www.thebalance.com/states-with-lowest-cost-of-living-4137935
  12. “Electricity Prices Rise for 30 States, But Some State Leaders Want Them Even Higher”, Heath Knakmuhs, Senior Director, Policy for the Global Energy Institute, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 4/8/2016,   https://www.uschamber.com/above-the-fold/electricity-prices-rise-30-states-some-state-leaders-want-them-even-higher
  13. “See how your state scores for living costs”, Natasha Sporn, MSN: Money, 12/22/2016,  https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/personalfinance/see-how-your-state-scores-for-living-costs/ss-AAlEaoG#image=31
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Ban-o-mania

A current  incarnation of the urban sophisticate is the “hipster”. If I may be excused for engaging in a loose generalization, like other versions of the breed, they are equal parts confident, media-savvy, and clueless.  Prime examples of the cross-fertilization of fashion and politics, they are susceptible to pleas to prohibit almost anything presented as irritating and outside of their lifestyle experience.  They are one for the constituencies for ban-o-mania.

Don’t like something?  Ban it!  Why ban it?  Simple: it’s too jarring to the mind of your average urban and self-anointed sophisticate.   That mind is riddled with the prejudices, half-baked ideas, and unexamined assumptions of a person limited to the secular equivalent of a mountaintop monastery … without the serious study of real monks (“echo chamber” keeps popping into my mind).  Ban-o-mania reigns supreme as the preferred option for anyone within the materialist abbey, while adversely affecting everyone  not so mentally and geographically insulated.

The locations for the secular monasteries generally matches the 2016 election map.  Below is a precinct-by-precinct rendering of the 2016 election results. (1)

2016 election results by precinct. Blue is for the Democratic candidate, red for the Republican.

The blue dots on the map are outposts serving as the intersection of radical chic in culture (some might call it “lifestyle”) and politics.  The journalist and essayist Tom Wolfe had a great time back in 1970 with an exposé of cosmopolitan affections for radical left politics of the time. (2)

New York Magazine cover, 1970, with Wolfe’s “Radical Chic” essay.
Leonard Bernstein (seated at center), his wife Felicia Montealegre (left) and Don Cox (standing), Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party in the Bernsteins’ 13 room penthouse on Park Avenue in Manhattan, January 14, 1970

I won’t speak to the map’s much rarer blue blobs – I suspect these to be mostly concentrations of post-1965 Immigration Act ethnic and racial minorities and Indian reservations- but today’s metropolitan islands have persisted in the habit exemplified in Leonard Bernstein’s fête to the Black Panther Party.

Though, a vocabulary update to “radical chic” is in order.  Yesterday’s “radical chic” is today’s “cosmocialist”, a marriage of “cosmopolitan” and “left-liberal”, typically among our tech elites but also littered throughout most of our corporate and academic boardrooms (hosannas to Reihan Salam for bringing the term to my attention [3]).  The “left-liberal” side of the equation is an infatuation with imperial environmentalism, high taxes, and almost anything “anti-poverty”.  “Cosmopolitan” is a reference to suspicion about regulation (except, of course, of the enviro variety, a huge contradiction), big labor (even though the teachers’ unions are 100% socially and 80% politically aligned) , and a fondness for open borders and multicultural everything.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg (left) with California AG Kamala Harris in 2015. (Reuters photo: Robert Galbraith)

Oh, let’s not forget their contempt for traditional institutions.  The Bible as the Word of God, Christianity as understood for millennia, marriage, and morality don’t stand a chance in these micro-universes.  Currently, transgenderism has pride of place.  As a matter of fact, they have conjured “equality” into behavioral license.  Any coupling and self-concept among and within humans must be granted sanction by the state.  Those who disagree face ostracization, loss of livelihood, and censorship.  Is confinement next?  Has it already started?

Now we are well on our way to ban-o-mania – the frenzy to prohibit counter-thought, and counter-things.  If only Orwell was here to see it.

It’s become next to impossible to talk about these kinds of things without mentioning California, ground zero for cosmocialist social and political tinkering.  Bans on things previously considered innocuous are becoming increasingly common in this political zoo.  Examples are many.  The state couldn’t refrain from an assault on, of all things … free plastic shopping bags.  The usual suspects crafted Prop 67 – the always fashionable environmental lobby – and the always fashionable electorate, dominated by its always fashionable coast, approved it in 2016.

Grocery shopping in the not-so-golden state instantly changed from this:

to this:

Bring your own bags: filthy, torn, too small,  not enough, or spill out cash to buy some more.  People in the zoo will adapt, no doubt.  But grocery shopping instantly became a bit more of an annoying experience.

Another example, this time from the elected “geniuses” in the state’s madhouse, called a “legislature”: marketed as an animal welfare measure, the inmates passed AB 485.  It would ban the sale of dogs, cats, and rabbits if they didn’t come from shelters.  In essence, due to the way the law is written and it’s probably effects, say “bye, bye” to the ritual of taking the daughter down to the pet store to buy a puppy.  For Patrick O’Donnel (D-Long Beach), the bill’s author, pet militants like him can’t envision themselves doing it, so ban anyone else from doing it.  Such is the auto-reflex of the ban-o-maniac.  The legislation’s fate is in the lap of Gov. Jerry Brown, another cosmocialist. (4)

Assemblyman Patrick O’Donnell, D-Long Beach, and rescue dogs.

For the cosmocialist, dogs are cute; Christian fundamentalists are not.  The progressive fatwa against them has already begun.  With dim-witted sleight of hand, Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher (D-San Diego) sought to impose her social opinions on the entire faith community in California.  Through legislation, she tried to nullify the Supreme Court’s Hosanna-Tabor decision that buttressed a church’s religious freedom exemptions to government’s contraceptive and abortion mandates. (5)  She preposterously claimed that the Court didn’t say what it said.  For the Court, religious freedom reaches out to longstanding church functions beyond the sanctuary.  She didn’t get the message.  Fletcher’s logic is the equivalent of a child’s attempt to make a parent’s admonishment of “no” into “yes”.

Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher (D-San Diego)

If mangling the Court didn’t convince, she tried the gender equality angle.  For her, the moral code in the Torah, Quran, and the Old and New Testaments must be sacrificed because a woman can show the results of a sleepover with her boyfriend.  Since women get pregnant, and men can’t (there’s no place to put the fetus), scripture must now go into the garbage disposal.  The minister can preach God’s law from the pulpit – I think – but, according to her, he shouldn’t be able to do anything about single moms and womanizers staffing his school (Was she trying to improve the job prospects for Bill Clinton?).  And this passes for serious thought in the California legislature?

A reprieve for Baptists was granted by Gov. Brown’s veto of Fletcher’s abortion to logic.  Don’t think for a moment that she and her compatriots have given up.

The Old Testament, evangelicals, pet stores, and traditional institutions are verboten to the tin-eared metro-chic.  Similarly verboten is a healthy skepticism about wild-eyed climate-change apocalyptics.  They won’t shrink from criminalizing, or subjecting to civil forfeiture, anyone who happens to make the mistake of conjoining a position of authority with cynicism about enviro end-times.  Metroplex electorates appear to have affection for Maduro-type (of Venezuela fame) DA’s and AG’s to accomplish the desired end.

Former California Attorney General Kamala Harris in September 2015.

Not wishing to leave California out of the scrum, former AG Kamala Harris (now Senator) joined the AG’s of New York, Eric Schneiderman, and Virgin Islands, Claude Walker, and Massachusetts, Maura Healey, to form an Inquisition to ferret out “counter-revolutionaries” to Al Gore’s fashionable doctrine.  It’s the latest craze sweeping the blue-dot jurisdictions: spend millions of dollars to haul into court the petroleum industry for questioning the supreme leader.  (6)  Ban-o-mania encompasses the campaign to silence opinions.

For everyone else without a corporate lawyer, loss of tenure, livelihood, or excommunication awaits.  It’s a reincarnation of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.  They’re making Mao proud … if the old bloody tyrant was alive today.

Public humiliation by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).
Cultural Revolution poster. Smashing the old to make way for the new.

The same is true for guns.  Guns are as gauche to the chic denizens of metropolis as the climate views of anyone not in tune with the fashionable orthodoxy.  Not surprisingly, respect for the 2nd Amendment fades as fewer and fewer people among the self-described “betters” in urban America have knowledge and experience with the things.  This is their mental picture of gun owners, a product of too much late-night tv viewing (late-night comedians, SNL).

Yes, it’s a plain old prejudice, but it matches their ignorance.  They live a life without firearms and so conclude nobody needs them.  It’s easy for urban electorates to grant the state’s vast prosecutorial powers to AG’s giddy with the prospect of hanging a few gun manufacturers.  The aforementioned Maura Healey of Massachusetts set her sights on Glock.

Massachusetts AG Maura Healey with Eric Schneiderman, NY AG, 2016.

Whatever their rationale, come on, it boils down to, “We don’t own them; therefore, you can’t either”.  Really, lifestyle is their governing north star.

The corporate boardroom is as populated with hyper-sensitive ban-o-maniacs as deep blue state attorney general offices.  The tekkie industry is particularly infected with them.  “Caution” is the watchword for any true free-thinker in these occupational habitats.  Just as Brendan Eich, co-founder of Mozilla, learned in 2014.  He was run out of his own company when it came to light that he contributed $1,000 to the California Prop 8 campaign to defend traditional marriage in 2008.  The lefty hive in Mozilla and Silicon Valley swarmed at the knowledge.

Brendan Eich

Ideological cleansing targets anyone outside the metro groupthink.  In Eich’s case, he cavorted with those who think that marriage is by nature heterosexual, and can only be homosexual if sodomy is accepted as the act of consummation.  Of course, consummation could be dispensed with, but then marriage is reduced to a state-sanctioned friendship pact with the option of wide open conjugal behavior.  The whole concept of “gay marriage” enters the grammatical territory of “non-sequitur”.  Such thinking, though, is assigned to the Klan in the blinkered imaginations of cosmocialists.

The lefty piranha weren’t satisfied with the corpse of Brendan Eich.  They will always need to feed on anyone with the temerity to express a different point of view.  James Damore fell into the infected waters at Google when he sought to explain the small presence of women in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) industries in words different from the politically correct orthodoxy. (8)

James Damore and Google

He presented the proposition that women are underrepresented due to the fact that fewer girls have inclinations for STEM, not because of some overhanging pall of misogyny. (9)   The snowflakes erupted and the impromptu inquisitors at Google went on a rampage.  Damore found himself out of a job, fired by Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

Steve Jobs juxtaposed to Google’s Sundar Pichai amid the Damore firing, by LA street artist Sabo.

The “diversity” police went into action mode to defend the sanctity of the party doctrine.  Every one of the tech biggies has a Ministry of Diversity Truth.  They sprang in defense of Google.  At Google, its commissar is Danielle Brown.  Intel has commissar Barbara Whye.  Maxine Williams is installed at Facebook’s commissariat.  Helping the biggies is a nomenklatura of consultants.   Paradigm’s Joelle Emerson is an example.  All of them are the keepers of the diversity holy grail.

Paradigm Consultancy’s Joelle Emerson

The whole diversity shtick is profoundly open to question.  Yet, it is accepted as the closest thing to a self-evident truth among a class of people who have long ago rejected such truth when Thomas Jefferson in 1776 tried using the concept.  Their’s is a pseudo-science meant to perform an ideological function: widely propagate the dogma while simultaneously swamping disagreement.  They are the practitioners of the ban-o-mania of thought.

The tennis aficionado John McEnroe recently stepped in it when he declared what is obviously true.  Men and women aren’t physical equals on the tennis court.  For that, this time it was the equality police that leapt into action.

John McEnroe appearing before the press about controversial remarks.

McEnroe offhandedly stated in response to a question that Serena Williams would be ranked 700 among professional men’s tennis players. (10)  Boy did that get the ant hill all abuzz.  But for the equality commissariat, there was the disconcerting face-off in 1998 with a 203rd ranked men’s player, Karsten Braasch of Germany.  The Williams sisters were teenagerly brash and over-confident, bragging in the ATP men’s office that they could whip any tour player ranked in the top 200.

Karsten Braasch (center) and the Williams sisters at the 1998 Australian Open.

Braasch, ranked 203 at the time, overheard the remark and took up the challenge in a lark.  After playing a round of morning golf, Braasch arrived to play each sister one set.  The event attracted quite a crowd.  During changeovers, he smoked a cigarette and drank a beer.  He bested Serena 6-1 and Venus 6-2.  The Williams’ points had all the appearance of gifts. (11)

Was McEnroe all that wrong?

There is a sense of unreality in the blue-dot world.  The here-and-now must be made to conform to ideological fantasies.  In movies, women punch out burly men with skeletal and muscle structures that would collapse on contact if it didn’t occur before cameras and with the assistance of computer assisted graphics.  We might be able to accept these illusions since, after all, it’s the movies.  But the fantasies don’t dissipate after leaving the theater.  There’s legions of prosecutors, politicians, consultants, and academics devoted to making the movie unreality a real life reality.

To make it happen, massive mind control and social engineering are required.  All the tools of ban-o-mania are enlisted in the effort.  Ostracize, prosecute, legislate, fire, and propagandize (the Bolsheviks called it “reeducation”) anyone not in conformance with the cosmocialist zeitgeist.  The sad part is their push to take the campaign national.  Their appetites won’t be satiated with dominance over metropolis.

Watch out red America.  You’re one election away from being forced into living and thinking like a Greenwich Village hipster.  You may not know it, but you have a metaphorical bulls-eye planted on your forehead.

RogerG

Bibliography and sources:

  1. The 2016 precinct map was garnered from “Creating a National Precinct Map”, 4/30/2017,  https://decisiondeskhq.com/data-dives/creating-a-national-precinct-map/
  2. “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s”, Tom Wolfe, New York Magazine, June 8, 1970, http://nymag.com/news/features/46170/
  3. Reihan Salam is executive editor of National Review, contributing editor of National Affairs, advisor to the Energy Innovation Reform Project and Niskanen Institute.  “Cosmocialist” first came to my attention in his article, “Democrats and Plutocrats”, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/451463/democrats-silicon-valley-rich-entrepreneurs-changing-partys-working-class-image
  4. “California pet stores may be required to only sell rescue animals if this bill passes”, Courtney Tompkins, The Los Angeles Daily News, 9/15/2017,   http://www.dailynews.com/2017/09/15/california-pet-stores-may-be-required-to-only-sell-rescue-animals-if-this-bill-passes/
  5. “Anti-discrimination measure or blow to religious freedom? California bill sparks debate on employer codes of conduct”, Melanie Mason, Los Angeles Times, 3/29/2017,   http://www.latimes.com/politics/essential/la-pol-ca-essential-politics-updates-an-anti-discrimination-measure-or-blow-1490826757-htmlstory.html
  6. “Left-Wing AGs Are Playing Politics with the Law”, Jim Copeland and Rafael A. Mangual, National Review Online, 9/29/2016,  http://www.nationalreview.com/article/440542/state-attorneys-general-political-abuses-power
  7. “Mozilla CEO resignation raises free-speech issues”, USA Today, 4/4/2014,  https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/04/mozilla-ceo-resignation-free-speech/7328759/
  8. “Google Episode Sends a Message: Diversity Is a Tough Sell in Silicon Valley”, Georgia Wells and Yoree Koh, WSJ, 8/10/17, https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-episode-sends-a-message-diversity-is-a-tough-sell-in-silicon-valley-1502383625; also at http://www.4-traders.com/INTEL-CORPORATION-4829/news/Google-Episode-Sends-a-Message-Diversity-Is-a-Tough-Sell-in-Silicon-Valley-24924773/.
  9. The complete text of James Damore’s offending email can be found here:  “Here’s the Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google [Updated]”, Kate Conger, Gizmodo, 8/5/2017,  http://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320/amp
  10. “John McEnroe: Serena Williams world’s best female tennis player but would rank ‘like 700’ among men”, Scott Allen, The Chicago Tribune, 6/25/2017,   http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/breaking/ct-john-mcenroe-serena-williams-tennis-20170625-story.html
  11. The episode is recounted here: “Serena Williams once challenged men’s player at Australian Open”, Sandra Harwitt, USA Today, 1/21/2017, https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/tennis/aus/2017/01/21/serena-williams-nicole-gibbs-australian-open/96876832/
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The Disease That Knows No “Red” Or “Blue” Boundaries

 

Unsurprisingly and generally speaking, parents strive to grease the skids for their kids’  future success.  Particularly, middle class parents will drive themselves to near bankruptcy in order to guarantee their offspring’s advancement.  Yet, when they buy into a nicer neighborhood to enroll junior in a “better” school, are they really getting a “better” school?  There’s good reason to doubt that proposition.  Much of the corruption in our schools has deep tentacles, and is no respecter of “red” vs. “blue” states, public or private schools, inner city or suburban schools, parochial or secular, and even reaches down into home-schooling.   It’s equal-opportunity corruption.

I suppose that the issue hinges on what is meant by “better”.

Sure, avoidance of gang rape in the school’s bathroom, classrooms-as-battlefields, and the accidental straying beyond the school’s chain link fence into feral environs are legitimate parental concerns.  Many parents would assign “better” to any school without these traits.

Under the belief that a geographic relocation might improve things for the munchkins, many parents can’t wait to hook up the U-haul and move to a richer zip code.

A moving truck is shown at a house that was sold in Palo Alto, Calif., Tuesday, June 19, 2012. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)

However, zip codes of the affluent present their own problems, leaving aside the schools.  Websites catering to the school-conscious parent have sprung up in places afflicted with a cost of living commensurate with Warren Buffett’s investment portfolio but many people possessing a net worth more in line with the denizens of 1950’s Levittown.  California is a hotbed for these conversations.  One site for Bay Area moms and dads,  berkeleyparentsnetwork.org, is filled with advice such as “Of course, if you can afford to buy in a place with good schools then by all means buy.” (12)  Though for most Californios, being able to make the rent, or mortgage, hangs overhead like the sword of Damocles.

Some have opted to jump ship and leave the state.  For many, housing costs are just too big an obstacle to overcome in the quest for better family environs, including schools.  From 2000 to 2009, the SF Bay Area  registered a net outflow of 600,000 domestic migrants (mostly citizens, not immigrants).  After a 5-year pause due to falling house prices from the Great Recession, the exodus resumed as shelter resumed  its eye-popping California norm (house prices returning to 6x’s income, beyond the acceptable 3x’s).  The 2016 losses for the whole state were on the order of 110,000, most of it from the heavily populated but very expensive coastal enclaves. (9)

Those “domestic migrants” – residents of one state moving to another – seem to be emerging from states with uniform ID: those with the adjective “high” before cost-of-living, taxes, crime, and regulation, and “low” for upward mobility and successful business formation.  The usual suspects are California, Illinois, New York, et al.

Destinations are South and West — EXCLUDING CALIFORNIA!  Look at the top and bottom of the chart below.  The top is reserved for the welcoming states and the bottom for states that shed people like my dog does hair. (15)

Interestingly, the combination of escalating house prices and California’s hostility to suburban living is making for a return of feudal manorialism.  A fleeing middle class, sensitive to rising prices for a family hearth, in combination with foreign immigration into the state (2.7 million “undocumented” live in the state – see 13 below), is resurrecting something resembling a lord/serf society.  Two researchers characterized the situation like this: “Essentially, the model [for California] is that of a gated community, with a convenient servant base nearby.” (9)

“Convenient servant base”?  Sounds much like “serf”, or maybe peasant, to me.  “Gated community”?  Sounds like “castle”, or chateau.

Is this a French manor from the Middle Ages or contemporary California?
Gated development, Carlsbad, California.
East Los Angeles neighborhood.

For many, moving for better schools and a more affordable roof most likely means leapfrogging the state entirely.  But don’t delude yourself into equating a middle or upper class student body in a new state with a high quality education.  Housing is cheaper but the vast majority of schools are likely, at best, to be only marginally better.  The only real difference between the middle class kid and inner-city one is the poor kid’s path to mediocrity is a lot rockier.  Yes, a mediocre curriculum and poor teacher training awaits all irrespective of better cars in the student parking lot or a student enrollment that’ll do the homework.

Students listening to Ernest Jenkins III in his Manhood Development class at Oakland High School. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Suburban school in school uniforms.

All schools draw from the same pool of teacher candidates and curricular resources.  You’ll find the same textbooks on a home-schooler’s kitchen table as you will find in a Catholic school classroom and a suburban or inner-city public school.  The vast majority of teachers are given a remarkably homogeneous college education and teacher training centering on the mind-numbing writings of John Dewey.  The sameness is quite remarkable.

30 years worth of experience  as a public high school and community college teacher has made me aware of the phenomenal uniformity of what is taught, how it is taught, and who is teaching it.

Two textbooks that were a staple of 20 years of high school instruction and widely adopted are displayed below.

A widely-adopted World History textbook.
Ditto U.S. History text.

Over the years, textbooks have declined in narrative with a surge in graphics.  Technical, thought-provoking theory has disappeared.  Identity politics is amply displayed: for instance, out goes Henry Bessemer and in comes Mary Wollstonecraft.  Much space is reserved for our historical sins as these crowd out the richness of debate over the nature of our federal system.  Labor history is reduced to a Marxist distillation; excluded is the role  of violent anarcho-socialists in some of that history.  Immigration and immigrants, of course, are always saintly.  The 1960’s reads as if it was cleansed through the censors of the radical left.  I could go on.

For pedagogy, teacher trainees are immersed in the mind of John Dewey.  Who’s John Dewey?  He’s a turn-of-the-century socialist who wanted to turn the schools into factories for making socialists.

Prof. John Dewey at Columbia University.

He’s famous for such arcane mumbo-jumbo as “constructivism” and seemingly commonsensical “child-centered learning”.  The “construction” in “constructivism” is simply the matter of raising (or constructing) the child’s receptivity to socialism.  “Child-centered” is an assault on the established canon of western civilization.  The child’s wants are the guide to instruction, not Plato, the Apostle Paul, or the Founders.  The teacher as the adult in the room is to be replaced by the chaos of adolescent urges.

Howard Gardner dispensing his gospel in India.

On this foundation is built the everyone-wins-a-trophy philosophy of “multiple intelligences” via Howard Gardner.  Everybody is assumed to be smart, but in reality nobody is smart … if you think about it.  The whole thing is a levelling of all students.  From this we get the dilution of the curricular core to include excursions into all the “intelligences” to the detriment of a traditional core.  It’s conducive to “heterogeneity” and grouping in almost everything.

About that “grouping”, “cooperative learning” are watchwords.  Kids are thrust together into groups of varying abilities – the “heterogeneity” thing – and responsibility is socialistically distributed.  What better way to “construct” the new child for the socialist future?  Keep this in mind as your kid comes home with stories of his or her classroom group.

Don’t think for a moment that AP courses are immune to these influences.  AP Literature guidelines now reflect Dewey’s “child-centered” nonsense.  AP US History deemphasizes a mastery of historical facts and their connections.  They demand mature judgments from immature minds.  Across the curriculum, we’re creating opinionated ignoramuses.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that our professional goal wasn’t Jefferson’s ideal of an educated citizenry.  It’s about making good little Democrats — by Democrats, I mean the Democratic Party as part of the consortium of the world’s Social Democratic Parties.  Read “socialist” for Social Democrat … mostly of the mild sort.

The kids’ minds have long been pried open to being college snowflakes and Antifa recruits.  Intolerant and propagandized since shortly after becoming bipedal, many of them are now subjecting us to their partisan and ideologically-laced rhetoric.  The rhetoric supplants mature thinking.

Listen to this exchange between a taxi driver and his youthful customer over a hula doll on his dashboard.  Count the number of times political boilerplate and the word “offensive” is used by the female rider.

We are reaping the whirlwind as tantrums and thuggishness displace reasoned debate.

We are witnessing the results of 4-5 decades of a blinkered and tendentious instruction.  It has penetrated nearly everywhere.  Buying a home in a better neighborhood will buy you a preppy student body; it won’t guarantee you a education free of the bacillus.  Fleeing a blue state to a red one won’t change the dynamic.  A private or parochial school might only provide a safer and more accomplished route to mediocrity.  Home schooling might be an option if the curriculum can be kept free of the college ed schools and government’s embrace of identity politics, an unlikely occurrence.

Education reformers are everywhere, and have been arising zombie-like throughout my career.  Yet, reform seems to always originate from the same worn out premises.  We’ve reached the point that real education reform may require us to ignore the reformers.  Unless it happens, we had all better keep an eye on Tommy (see below).

RogerG

Bibliography and sources:

  1. Interesting and brief account of treating inner city school students: “An Inner City School Social Worker Shares Two of His Cases”, Howard Honigsfeld, Psychotherapy Networker,  7/28/2015, https://www.psychotherapynetworker.org/blog/details/607/therapy-strategies-for-working-with-underprivileged.
  2. An account of the challenges in an Oklahoma urban school: “A look inside an inner city school struggling with multiple challenges, including ‘needing improvement’ sanctions”, Danniel Parker, The City Sentinel,  5/15/2011, http://city-sentinel.com/2011/05/a-look-inside-an-inner-city-school-struggling-with-multiple-challenges-including-%E2%80%9Cneeding-improvement%E2%80%9D-sanctions/.
  3. Interesting advice in teaching inner city students: “4 Tips to Being a Good Teacher in the Inner-City”, The Libertarian Republic, 11/11/2014,   http://thelibertarianrepublic.com/4-tips-good-teacher-inner-city/
  4. Excellent maps showing  a changing Los Angeles ethnic demography from 1940 to 2000: “Los Angeles County Ethnic/Racial Breakdown 1940-2000”,   http://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=169073.0.
  5. “White Flight Never Ended”, Alana Semuels, The Atlantic, 7/30/2015,  https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/white-flight-alive-and-well/399980/.
  6. “Data shows how major U.S. cities are slowly re-segregating”, Kenya Downs, 3/7/2016, PBS NewsHour,  http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/major-u-s-cities-may-seem-integrated-but-not-for-long/.
  7. A synopsis of John Dewey’s harmful impact on American education can be found in this critical review of Henry Edmondson’s book, John Dewey and the Decline of American Education, Dennis Attick, PhD candidate in Social Foundations of Education at Georgia State University,  http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1061&context=eandc. The author is clearly supportive of the major tenets of Dewey’s education philosophy.
  8. For an account of the most widely adopted textbooks in today’s America go here: “Widely Adopted History Textbooks”, American Textbook Council,  http://historytextbooks.net/adopted.htm.
  9. A summary of recent migration trends for California can be found here: “Leaving California? After slowing, the trend intensifies”, Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox, The Orange County Register, 4/23/2017,  http://www.ocregister.com/2017/04/23/leaving-california-after-slowing-the-trend-intensifies/.
  10. Metrics of school quality don’t vary that much for schools within the same school district is asserted here: “Do Better Neighborhoods for
    MTO Families Mean Better Schools?”, Brief No. 3; Kadija S. Ferryman, Xavier de Souza Briggs, Susan J. Popkin, and María Rendón; The Urban Institute, March 2008,   https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/31596/411639-Do-Better-Neighborhoods-for-MTO-Families-Mean-Better-Schools-.PDF.  ** The metrics for measuring school quality were performance on state exams, the school’s poverty rate, and exposure to white classmates and students with limited English proficiency.
  11. ** “Our kids are still in early elementary school too but I think you will find the answer varies widely. Obviously… not ”everyone” can go to private school! I know some parents who have had their kids just tough it out at a not-so-great middle school, then get a scholarship for private high school. Others with more resources opt to start private school earlier on. And, even some high earning families I know chose Oakland public high schools including Skyline, Oakland Tech, and charter schools. Ultimately it’s hard to say before your child starts school, what type of high school will work for your family. That said, we chose our home based on both elementary and middle schools we liked, at least ”on paper” as you say, figuring high school was too far off to gauge.”; from “Moving for the Schools”, Berkeley Parents Network, August 2012,  https://www.berkeleyparentsnetwork.org/recommend/housing/schools.
  12. Ibid. From the segment “Moving vs. private school – how to make the decision?”.
  13. “II. Where Do They Live?”, Jeffrey S. Passel and D’Vera Cohn, Pew Research Center, 4/14/2009,  http://www.pewhispanic.org/2009/04/14/ii-where-do-they-live/.
  14. “5 facts about illegal immigration in the U.S.”, FactTank: News in the Numbers, Pew Research Center, 4/27/2017,  http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/27/5-facts-about-illegal-immigration-in-the-u-s/.
  15. “California, Illinois, and New York Keep Losing People to Other States”, Ryan McMaken, Mises Wire, 5/10/2017, Mises Institute,  https://mises.org/blog/california-illinois-and-new-york-keep-losing-people-other-states
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Substituting Their Judgment: Lesson 2 from “The Earth is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West”

The Progressives’ zeal to mold people to fit an ideologically-driven stereotype is abundantly evident today as it was in the latter 19th century.  Back then, the recipient of their benignly intended efforts – but with malign results – was the American Indian.  Today, the target is the entire American population, if not the world’s.  The modern Progressives’ gaze became vastly more panoramic as they substitute their judgment for the wishes of anyone directly impacted.

Connecting Progressivism’s dots between the 19th and 21st centuries isn’t hard.  Progressivism wasn’t a product of spontaneous combustion.  It’s got a lineage – or, if you will, a trail of tears.  Its 19th century roots became evident just as one expansive civilization began to swamp a nomadic one.  The Progressives of the era – call them “reformers” with their Obama-esque “arc of history” rhetoric – planned a quick transformation of the American Indian into rural gentry.  The tinkering with humanity ensued and misery erupted.

Nathan C. Meeker, previously mentioned in another post, was one example of an archetype littered about the civilian branches of the U.S. government.  Many were utopian, and near utopian, in outlook with a powerful confidence in their ability to engineer better human beings.  The American Indian seemed to be the preferred guinea pig in their social laboratory.

Vincent Colyer

Another scion in the Progressive line was Vincent Colyer, the Indian Board of Commissioners secretary.  In a 1871 “peacemaking” tour of New Mexico and Arizona reservations, he upset a happy arrangement for the Chihenne band of Apaches and all others concerned.  They were ordered from their much-loved Canada Alamosa reservation (sometimes called Ojo Caliente) in the New Mexico territory to the more inhospitable Tularosa valley, a hundred miles northwest.  Colyer simply substituted his judgment for the Chihennes.  He would set off an Apache/US conflagration that would sputter on and off for 15 years and only ended with the capture of Geronimo in 1886 and decimation of half the Chiricahua Apache population.

Chiricahua Apaches, 1880s.
Apaches on the San Carlos Reservation waiting in line for government rations, 1870s.
Chiricahua prisoners, including Geronimo (front row, 3rd from right) being transported to Ft. Marion, Fla., 1886.

“Substituting their judgment” is a common trait of those consumed with the self-perception of possessing superior wisdom.  It is the blind spot of the Progressive.  Their unquestioning faith in the “expert” is without limit.  Jump forward to the middle of the 20th century and we have “urban renewal”.

What started out as “slum clearance” ended up as slum intensification.  Social planners – an established squadron in the ranks of the nomenklatura – substituted the haphazard arrangements of neighborhood residents for Sovietized housing monoliths and called it “urban renewal”.  In 1954, they gave us Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis.

Pruitt-Igoe (actually Wendell O. Pruitt Homes and William Igoe Apartments) just before completion and its first occupancy in 1954.

It didn’t last 20 years.  By the end of the 1960s, it was uninhabitable and a massive eyesore.  Its chief architect, Minuro Yamasaki, exclaimed, “I never thought people were that destructive”.  The thing was demolished in 1972.

Pruitt-Igoe, 1970.
Pruitt-Igoe, 1969.
The demolition of Pruitt-Igoe in 1972.

If there was a FBI most-wanted list for such things, the following grandiose public housing projects would join Pruitt-Igoe (see 7 below):

  • Queens Bridge Houses, Queens, NYC.  It was raided in 2005 as the home of the “Dream Team” drug syndicate.
  • Robert Taylor Homes, Chicago, Il.  In an already crime-plagued city, Robert Taylor displays some of the highest rates of violent crime and gang activity in the city.
  • Jordan Downs, Watts, Ca.  Crime and gang violence are its watchwords for today.
  • Magnolia Projects, or “Da Wild Magnolia”, New Orleans, La.  Let’s just say that the place’s reputation isn’t conducive to raising kids.
  • Marcy Projects, Brooklyn, NYC.  Rapper Jay-Z, a former resident, wrote the rap “Murder Marcyville” as an anthem to its atmosphere.  Need I say more?
  • Cabrini Green, Chicago, Il.  No list of the infamous should go without this lovely specimen.  Prior to its closing in 2010, USA Today called the place a “virtual war zone, the kind of place where little boys were gunned down on their way to school and little girls were sexually assaulted and left for dead in stairwells.”

The benighted gaze of the “expert” isn’t limited to housing.  They’ve destroyed entire swaths of cities in the name of “redevelopment”.  A similar roster of the infamous could be constructed for this imperial march of eminent domain’s elimination of private property (see 5 and 6).  Lost in the imbroglio is the unique character of a place, evolved over many years of human interaction, only to see it replaced by a modern sterility.  This is devolution, not evolution, thanks to the Progressives’ “experts”.

Not happy with fiddling with the cities, under the guise of “climate change”, the “experts” want to bring to all of society what they brought to the urban landscape.  Climate change is so protean of a concept that it will abet almost any government meddling in our existence.  Now here’s a mandate for the know-it-alls.

California is the epicenter for this latest craze among Progressives.  “Climate change” enthusiasms have made the place almost unlivable for anyone aspiring to the middle class.  Utility bills and fuel prices are exorbitant.  Solar panels are everywhere but that is only possible with a ponzi scheme of subsidies and utility rate manipulation.

The place is so regulated that even getting a plastic bag to carry your groceries to the car demands another purchase … or, alternatively, bring your own filthy things from home.  Owning and maintaining a car is now a grueling experience.  Illegality might await if you buy a water heater outside your air district.  Expressing the desire to start a business could be justifiable grounds for an insanity declaration and commitment to a state institution.

And, of course, the tax burden is back-breaking.  No surprise here since the expert-driven paradise is an expensive proposition.

The invisible hand of Adam Smith becomes a deadening hand if it is attached to a Progressive “expert”.  In their wake, we have the plight of the American Indian, the inner-city poor, and the California middle class.  If success is measured by failure, a place like Sacramento – or any blue dot on the 2016 election map – should have a hall of fame, or shame, dedicated to the Progressive “expert”.

RogerG

Bibliography and sources:

  1. For a history of Apache resistance, read The Earth Is
    Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West    , Peter Cozzens, hardback edition, pp. 358-415.
  2. A good survey of early urban renewal efforts can be found in “The History of Hamlin Park Part VII: Early Housing Acts and Start of Urban Renewal”, Mike Puma, Buffalo Rising, 9/23/2013,  https://www.buffalorising.com/2013/09/the-history-of-hamlin-park-part-vii-early-housing-acts-and-the-start-of-urban-renewal/
  3. More on Pruitt-Igoe in wikipedia, “Pruitt-Igoe”,  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe
  4. An early criticism of “urban renewal” from 1965 can be found here: “The Failure of Urban Renewal”, Herbert J. Ganns, Commentary, 4/1/1965,  https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-failure-of-urban-renewal/
  5. More on “urban renewal” failures: “5 Disastrous Urban Renewal Failures”, Modern Cities, 3/10/2016,  http://www.moderncities.com/article/2016-mar-5-disastrous-urban-renewal-failures-/page/1
  6. More on “urban renewal” failures: “Redevelopment Wrecks: 20 failed Projects Involving Eminent Domain Abuse”, Castle Coalition,  http://castlecoalition.org/pdf/publications/Redevelopment%20Wrecks.pdf
  7. “The 7 Most Infamous U.S. Public Housing Projects”, Newsone staff, Newsone,  https://newsone.com/1555245/most-infamous-public-housing-projects/
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The Democrats’ “Deplorable” Conundrum

Please read this article by Kay S. Hymowitz, contributing editor for City Journal: “Can Democrats Make Nice with Deplorables?”, https://www.city-journal.org/…/can-democrats-make-nice-depl… .

In the article, she outlines the conflicting demands facing the Democratic Party. On the one hand, the party needs to recapture the middle-America working class. On the other, they are the party of coastal, urban, media, and academic populations for an obvious reason: it is the social orientation of the activist base and party elites. The people that man the phone banks, attend the rallies, donate money, and run the party are socially so far removed from the lives of ordinary working-class Americans. The core of the party has views to match the obsessions from these quarters. Which way to go – reach out to the neglected and despised, or stay glued to the base?

Some want the party to become more appealing to the working-class-without-college-degrees. Others, like Frank Rich, the party’s chief apologist and favorite economist, say, “Forget about ’em”. Read his piece “No Sympathy for the Hillbilly” in New York Magazine, http://nymag.com/…/frank-rich-no-sympathy-for-the-hillbilly… .

I don’t know how the Democrats can square this circle. There’s no way to make transgender bathrooms, the drumbeat of rampant misogyny and racism, climate-change hysteria, unrestrained immigration, a bullying multiculturalism, and socialism here/there/everywhere the key to an outreach program to anyone outside the Dems’ isolated demographic echo chambers.

They’ve got the wrong message and reputation for the wrong crowd. Good luck in reversing that.

RogerG

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It’s Not My Fault!

Watch Neil Cavuto of the Fox Business Channel interview one of the student leaders, Keeley Mullen,  of the Million Student March in November of 2015.  Pay attention to her list of demands and her reasoning … for what there was of it.

There’s the familiar clamor for money: $15/hr. student minimum wage, free college education, and vanquishing all student loan debt.  When asked who’s going to pay for the largesse, Keeley’s train of logic goes off the tracks. She clearly sets her sites on the usual suspects of the “1%” and the “corporate model” of education.  The rich and an abstraction  are either at fault or to be looted.  The incoherency is astounding.

Next, look at the furor faced by Yale’s Prof. Nicholas Christakis in November 2015 for asking students to lighten up and accept some semblance of free speech on campus (see Sources for a full account).  Look for the crowd’s regimented mannerisms of finger clicking and turning one’s back with arms elevated and crossed above the head.  And, of course, listen for the self-anointed victim’s insistence of an apology for ethereal hurts and accommodations to recover from the hard-to-pin-down harms.

The screams and assertions-without-proof come from an assumption that the power to control lies with the self-identified victim.  The fingered and generalized “perp” is to have no defense.  Those who disagree with the mob enter into discourse at great peril.

Speaking of mobs, view this scene at UC Berkeley in October of 2016 as student activists blocked white students from entering Sather Gate.  Prominent on the barricades were LGBTQ firebrands.

The chant “Go Around” was aimed at white students for their purported “privilege”.  Again, the stench of victimhood surrounds the event.

Or, rocket forward to January 2017 and the Women’s March.  Here Ashley Judd strays into the Hitler cliché in a Trump diatribe along with the laundry list of bogeymen including a variety of “isms” and misogyny.

This is not one of Ashley’s finer moments.

Alicia Keys stepped to the mike with a syncopated chant of “We’re on fire”.  By now, the March’s bellicosity has become quite trite (to borrow the phonetic rhythm of the Keys’ style of speechifying).

Scarlett Johanssen took her turn on stage to carry on with the misogyny angle and elevate Planned Parenthood (PP) to the Godhead.  Did it occur to her that the debate about PP in public policy revolves around the question of making others pay for it?  She could donate her annual salary – all tax deductible –  for the next number of years to keep the thing afloat, so long as PP avoids the Auschwitz model of body parts marketing.

What do the above clips have in common, besides the fact that they’re all examples of Lefty activism?  They project the alluring facade of group persecution.  No single individual is responsible for anything.  Groups carry a ready-made pardon for any and all conduct, if you’re so lucky as to land in the right cluster of fashionable victims.  Their absolution can be reduced to the refrain, “It’s not my fault”.

Lately, the Right hasn’t been immune to the intoxicant.  The manic-Right steps in it as they bemoan anything foreign, differently pigmented, and the wispy “establishment”.  Railing against affirmative action has become an easy crutch to explain away a lack of industriousness by some – even though, in the case of affirmative action, it must be admitted that we have a program to benefit victims that creates victims.  The effort is a walking contradiction.

Our modern fixation with blaming others has a pedigree going back to Genesis, if you’re a fundamentalist – if not, then figuratively speaking.  Blaming others is first on the checklist to escape responsibility reaching back to Eve’s appetite for fruit.

We’ve become very ingenious in inventing schemes to dodge personal guilt.  Our imaginations run wild in dreaming of social and political systems, and the philosophies to go with them, to circumvent individual accountability by subsuming difficulties in mysterious evildoers.  Today’s campus snowflake has the same train of thought as yesterday’s Parisian mob parading around the streets with the heads of the Bastille’s guards on pikes.

The Paris mob with the heads of the guards on pikes after the guards ventured out of the fortress to negotiate their own surrender.
Mostly college students in the downtown area of Los Angeles to protest the election of Donald Trump, Nov. 8-9, 2016.

Surely there were many in the Paris crowd who found the behavior revolting, just as there probably were “safe space” activists who objected to the recent muscling of Charles Murray as goons also set about inflicting a concussion on his professorial escort at Middlebury College.  Still, group guiltlessness, no matter the moment in history, provides cover for barbarity.  Indeed, it’s the lubricant.

Students disrupt Charles Murray during his presentation at Middlebury College, March 2, 2017.

Denouncing others for your problems has been the principle incubator of government’s ruination of their own people.  Take 2 examples from the 20th century: Argentina’s slide into Peronism and Weimar Germany’s inter-war dance with hyperinflation.

You could say that Germany’s affliction with hyper-inflation in the 1920’s was baked in the cake.  Many Germans at the time liked to blame the Versailles Treaty and its reparations burden for its problems.  More correctly, Germany’s government flooded the country with Treasury bills that were translated into money in order to finance the war.  A money glut already existed by the time the guns fell silent on 11-11-11-1918.

Then, after the war, the monetary fire hose was yanked wide open by Germany’s elected government because it suited popular interests.  Public debt shot up as spending expanded on things like generous public employee compensation while tax revenues stagnated from massive tax evasion.  Inflation was welcomed by German exporters – it made German products cheaper in overseas markets – and government officials and their supporters as a way to injure the Allies and their reparations’ bill with worthless script.

The witches’ brew culminated in 4.97 x 1020 marks circulating about the country.  The annual inflation rate reached its zenith at 182 billion percent by the end of 1923.  Those on inflexible incomes as in salaried workers, pensioners, and depositors were wrecked.

A billion mark note, November, 1923. Large denominations were necessary to conduct transactions.
Worthless marks, 1923. Sweeping them off the streets as litter and a woman lighting a fire with it.

In all of it, lurking deep in the German pscyhe, was an unwillingness to accept their defeat.  As ex-Harvard and Stanford professor Niall Ferguson concludes in his The Ascent of Money (p. 105),

“… a combination of internal gridlock and external defiance – rooted in the refusal of many Germans to accept that their empire had been fairly beaten – led to the worst of all possible outcomes: a complete collapse of the currency and of the economy itself.”

Germany’s cavalier treatment of fiscal and monetary matters has its tentacles in a widespread psychological predisposition to reject the war’s outcome, and in a reflex to blame others.  The skids were greased for the rise of the then nascent NSDAP (Nazi Party).  More about that later.

Juan Peron drinking coffee between 1945 and 1955.

It just so happens that travelling around Italy well into the rule of il Duce (Mussolini) was an Argentinian military officer, Juan Peron.  On assignment by the War Ministry in 1939 to study mountain warfare in the Alps, attend the University of Turin, and perform as military observer in Europe, he became acquainted with Italian Fascism.  The experience would leave an impression.

His valuable assistance in a couple of military coups, and a deepening partnership with powerful labor unions, would ensure his rise to power.  The political marriage of Peron and Argentina’s mega-unions was made possible by his championing of their power, benefits, and perks in his his role as Labor Minister and later as Vice-President.   The well-traveled route to ruination is programmed in the GPS: sympathies turned into extravagant giveaways to powerful special interests.

Peron as Vice President (r) and his political benefactor, Pres. Edelmiro Farrell, 1945.

The distinction in popular American conversation between fascism and the Left is more of a naked prejudice than a reality.  It shows in the career of Juan Peron.  In 1945, Peron is running for president as the Labor Party’s candidate, having previously established himself as the champion of their cause for years.  The unions, and his wife’s (Evita) demagoguery, rescued him from jail so he could run as president.   He ran as the unions’ protector and bulwark against Yanqui (U.S.) interference, a familiar leftist trope.  His fascist sympathies were apparent to American officials during the war, raising concerns about Argentina’s intentions in the latter stages of the war.

His fascist connections would bear fruit in a kind of underground railroad to Argentina for Nazi war criminals.  Such is the ideological mish-mash of Peronism.

So, what is Peronism?  It’s a disparate collection of ideas and beliefs that can be boiled down to “It’s not my fault”.  The first gambit of professed guiltlessness is to throw aspersions at the Left’s favorite foil, the rich.  In 1948, Peron spelled it out in a speech.

“… economic policy which maintained that this was a permanent and perfect school of capitalist exploitation should be replaced by a doctrine of social economy under which the distribution of our wealth, which we force the earth to yield up to us and which furthermore we are elaborating, may be shared out fairly among all those who have contributed by their efforts to amass it.” [my emphasis]

This kind of thing might just as easily come out of the mouths of today’s social justice warriors.  In fact, it did.  I refer you to Keeley Mullen at the beginning.

Peron put a label on his gambit, “Justicialism”.  Anyway, it’s the same old victim/victimizer dualism at work in a set of different geographical coordinates.  Peron condensed the oppressed down to the “workers”.  Point #4 of his “Twenty Truths” says, “There is only one class of men for the Perónist cause: the workers”.

Practically speaking, what did this secular sermonizing mean for the fortunes of the country?  The economy was politicized and the nation became a basket case of bailouts, national defaults, and international financial interventions.  Per capita (per person) GDP was the same in 1988 as it was 1959.  The economy didn’t grow – a complete reversal of the situation from around the turn of the century (1870-1913).  Argentina would be overtaken by the “Asian tigers” (Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea).

Inflation, that ‘ol government-engineered bugaboo, would flair up in double digits between 1945-1952, 1956-1968, 1970-1974; and reach new heights of ferocity by trebling and quadrupling in 1975-1990.  The crescendo was 5,000% in 1989.

In 1989, the country couldn’t even turn on the lights with daily blackouts averaging 5 hours.  The government ran out of money – not because it spent it, but because it ran out of paper and the printers went on strike.  A riot erupted in a Buenos Aires supermarket when a 30% on-the-spot price increase was announced over the store’s loudspeaker.  Pandering to self-anointed victims with the usual blame in tow has very unpleasant side-effects.

It hasn’t gotten much better: 2002 “Price Watch” price increase in a Buenos Aires supermarket. It could occur hourly.

Where inflation leads, default follows.  It happened in 1982, 1989, 2002, and 2004.  If victim/victimizer blame-game mythology was a drug awaiting FDA approval, it would not only be proven to be not efficacious (the legal approval standard), but found poisonous.  There’d be a run on law firm ads on cable tv if it got past the regulators.

Peron certainly wasn’t running the show during the whole period of Argentina’s slide into insolvency.  His main contribution was showing the country how to do it.  Thanks Juan and Evita.

Juan and Evita waving to the crowd in 1950.

Entire political groups are wallowing in a blame-game belief system.  These ideological movements are nothing but outsized masquerade balls for “It’s not my fault”.  Many would turn out to be e quite lethal.  Reaching down into history’s nightmares we find Mussolini’s Fascist Party, the inspiration for Peronism.

Mussolini next to a bronze Caesar outside Fascist Party headquarters, 1943.

If one didn’t know better, Mussolini could be easily confused with Lenin if a stranger was limited to listening to him on the radio.  His political dogma was a grab bag of international socialism’s platitudes with “international” replaced by “national”.  We’d hear the same worn out pronouncements of “exploitation” and sympathy for the “oppressed”.  Naturally, the victim requires a victimizer, or some such sort.  It’s a necessary ingredient for the “exploitation” gambit.  Often, cast for the role are the “privileged” or, better yet, the “rich”.

It’s too easy to prove the point.  Take a look at these samples, in chronological order:

  • In 1910, still in his old incarnation as an “international” socialist, he said, “There are only two fatherlands in the world: that of the exploited and that of the exploiters”.
  • Jump forward to 1919, now as full-fledged socialist of the “national” variety – a Fascist – he blathers, “This is what we propose now to the Treasury: either the property owners expropriate themselves, or we summon the masses of war veterans to march against these obstacles and overthrow them”. The list of “victims” is expanded to war veterans.
  • In 1921, he announced, “When the war is over, in the world’s social revolution that will be followed by a more equitable distribution of the earth’s riches, due account must be kept of the sacrifices and of the discipline maintained by the Italian workers. The Fascist revolution will make another decisive step to shorten social distances.”
  • In 1933 he declares war on “laissez-faire” and “capitalism”: “To-day we can affirm that the capitalistic method of production is out of date. So is the doctrine of laissez-faire, the theoretical basis of capitalism… To-day we are taking a new and decisive step in the path of revolution. A revolution, in order to be great, must be a social revolution.”
  • As an aside, in the 1930’s, after FDR’s ascendancy in the U.S., Mussolini recognized his affinity with the New Deal and its intellectual godfather, John Maynard Keynes: “You want to know what fascism is like? It is like your New Deal!”
  • Further, “Fascism entirely agrees with Mr. Maynard Keynes, despite the latter’s prominent position as a Liberal. In fact, Mr. Keynes’ excellent little book, The End of Laissez-Faire (l926) might, so far as it goes, serve as a useful introduction to fascist economics. There is scarcely anything to object to in it and there is much to applaud.”

I could go on, if one was convinced that the quotes were out of context.  They aren’t.  They were typical and commonplace for him.  Our social justice warriors of today should be careful when they throw about the charge of “fascist”.  They unknowingly have a more intense fondness for Mussolini’s beliefs than the Federalist Society.

And while I’m at it, what about that frothy, toxic brew fermenting in Germany at the time of Mussolini’s heyday?  Once again, those old stalking horses of “exploitation” and “oppression” appear under the guise of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) doctrines.  For these folks, the Allies, their degenerate and corrupting civilization (in their words), the Jews, Jewry’s capitalist lapdogs (in their words), and opposing street-gang socialists of the “international” variety fulfill the role of victimizer or oppressor.

Hitler in the early 1920s.

Sometimes a catchy slogan can encapsulate all of the purported horribles.  For many Germans at the time, it was the “stab-in-the-back” myth.  Germany’s war effort, it was said, was undermined by traitorous acts at home.  The zeal to blame others will be injected with too much caffeine.

The origin of the fable could be traced to a 1919 conversation between German Gen. Erich Ludendorff and British Gen. sir Neill Malcom.

Sir Neill Malcolm, 1931
Gen. Erich Ludendorff

Malcolm asked Ludendorff for his opinion of the major reason for Germany’s defeat.  Ludendorff responded with the lack of home front support for the war.  Malcolm clarified with the question: “Do you mean, General, that you were stabbed in the back?”  Ludendorff jumped at the suggestion, “Stabbed in the back?  Yes, that’s it, exactly; we were stabbed in the back”.  Thus was born a rationale to blame others rather than Germany’s reckless prosecution of the war … authored by people like Ludendorff.

Subsequently, Jews became an easy target to assign blame.  Alfred Rosenberg – NSDAP ideologist and later to be hung as a war criminal – spelled it out: “In theory the majority decides, but in reality it is the international Jew that stands behind it [all the evils that befell Germany].”

Alfred Rosenberg in London, 1933.
Alfred Rosenberg, on the left with hands crossed, at a party meeting in Munich, 1925.

To give a flavor of this version of the noxious scapegoat,  here’s a quote from a pamphlet, “The Jew as World Parasite”:

“In this war for the very existence of the German people, we must daily remind ourselves that Jewry unleashed this war against us. It makes no difference if the Jew conceals himself as a Bolshevist or a plutocrat, a Freemason or uses some other form of concealment, or even appears without any mask at all: he always remains the same. He is the one who so agitated and spiritually influenced the peoples that stand against us today such that they have become more or less spineless tools of International Jewry.”

The comment could be penned by any of the Nazi usual suspects.  Regardless, it’s a replay of the same old monotonous blame-game.

The Jew in Nazi propaganda as an evil force lurking behind the Allies.

Need I go into Marx and Lenin’s overwrought costuming of blame as elaborate political theory?  The oppressed/oppressor jig is the heart of the program.  Focusing on Lenin for brevity’s sake, he castigates the “bourgeois” (i.e. capitalist) state as “the most powerful, economically dominant class, which, through the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class, and thus acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class”.  Marx’s dull verbosity is of the same vein.

Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao during Labor Day demonstration, 2016, the Philippines.

“It’s Not My Fault”, if history is any guide, is a real crowd-pleaser.  All-too-often, it’s a scheme to bilk others – usually a select few – and gravitate power to a politically enterprising cadre.  The scenario is a zombie that won’t stay down.  We are seeing it play before our eyes.

As was stated before, the so-called “alt-right” has fashioned for itself a nice little corner in the who’s who of oppressors.  They like to talk of the predations of the “establishment”.  Like all such iterations, the more airy and vague the oppressor, the better and more useful.   Lenin would be comfortable with the language.  The term was a favorite of some rallying to the Trump bandwagon.

Not to be outdone, the modern Left in its post-election incarnation is targeting Republican lawmakers as the corporeal symbol of their laundry list of oppressors.  Their recent behavior at townhalls isn’t bi-partisan, directed at both Republicans and Democrats.  It targets Republicans.  It is not reflective of the general American electorate.  It’s a coordinated, well-financed operation … of the Left.

What unites the Left’s partisans is an ideology rooted in a view of the world of those without “privilege” in need of a powerful state to even out the results of an unfair existence.  The rationale is tailored to demand the creation and expansion of entitlements, like Obama’s ACA.  The environment-as-victim, with its climate change dogma hitched, is ready-made for use on the barricades. Any attempts to roll back the administrative state – except when it comes to restraint on sexual license –  is a carte blanche excuse to gin up the hive.  Efforts to lower taxes on the upper-income brackets is always and forever seen as an assault on government’s sacred duty to equalize life’s results.

It’s like a video on perpetual rewind.  More correctly, it’s like those present-day renditions of Shakespeare’s plays in modern garb.  The stage set and costumes may be different, but it is still the play, “It’s Not My Fault!”

RogerG

 

Sources:

“The moment Yale students encircled and shouted down professor who told them to just ‘look away’ if they were offended by Halloween costumes”, The Daily Mail, Nov. 7, 2015,  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3308422/Students-rage-professor-sent-email-telling-students-just-look-away-offended-Halloween-costumes.html#ixzz4fITFzT6l

The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson, 2008.  Weimar Germany’s hyper-inflationary crisis is described in pp. 101-107; Argentina’s economic collapse under Peron is described in pp. 109-116.

“Document #24: “What is Peronism?” by Juan Domingo Perón (1948) || “The Twenty Truths of the Perónist Justicialism,” Juan Domingo Perón (1950)”, Brown Univ. Library,  https://library.brown.edu/create/modernlatinamerica/chapters/chapter-9-argentina/primary-documents-w-accompanying-discussion-questions/what-is-peronism-by-juan-domingo-peron-1948-the-twenty-truths-of-the-peronist-justicialism-juan-domingo-peron-1950/

A variety of Mussolini quotes are available at “Benito Mussolini”, wikiquote.org,  https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benito_Mussolini

The conversation between Sir Neill Malcolm and Erich Ludendorff can be found in Wheeler-Bennett, John W. (Spring 1938), “Ludendorff: The Soldier and the Politician”, Virginia Quarterly Review. 14 (2): 187–202.

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Book Recommendation: “That Hideous Strength” by C.S. Lewis

I was led to this book after listening to a podcast of an interview with a scholar who uses “1984”, “Brave New World”, “Darkness at Noon”, and this book in teaching the nature of 20th century totalitarianism. Originating back in 1945, the book sheds light on the frame of mind leading to statism, particularly of the progressive variety.

It explores, through fantasy, the smothering materialist dogmas that dominate academia and excuse the attempted expansion of the state into every crevice of life. Materialism reduces all of existence to material factors. It is activated in the social engineering of a cadre of all-knowing “experts”, the seed of totalitarianism.

The conflict that erupts in the book between the reigning materialism and traditional metaphysics is the essence of the current division of America into “red” and “blue” precincts. The state religion of blue-America is materialism. Any space left for “spirituality” is of the undemanding sort, and conveniently fashioned for personal eccentricities.

In the parlance of the book, the N.I.C.E. (National Institute of Coordinated Experiments) and the progressive bloc at Bracton College are synonymous with the bastions of blue-America. Art imitates life, eh?

RogerG

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The Left’s Hive in Action: The Modern Edition

Wasp nest and furious swarm

Politics can exhibit “Eusociability”.  The term refers to the highest level of community-building among some animals, such as the hives of the hymenoptera class of insects – wasps, bees, etc.  Political eusociability is becoming increasingly evident among the Left since the election of Trump.

As in a wasps’ hive in an agitated state, the activists of the Left are swarming.  The Left’s fury isn’t the spontaneous activity of scattered individuals – or “organic” as some would say – but behave as a horde neurally connected through the bio-chemicals of past activism and social media,  triggered with the seed money of donors.

Consider the financial backers to be the  “angel investors” of the hive.  An example would be Democracy Alliance.

An example of today’s left-wing angel investors: the “Democracy Alliance”
Prominent donors to the “Democracy Alliance” are George Soros (l) and Tom Steyer (r)

Hive-funding can go through a circuitous route, almost like money-laundering.  One such example would be Alliance for Global Justice, headquartered in Tucson, Az.  An examination of its 503(c) IRS form 990 reveals a list of wealthy donors that includes The Bridgewater Fund, The Tides Foundation, Ben & Jerry Foundation, etc.  It, in turn, ladles the money out.  Crowdrise’s page for a fundraiser for Alliance for Global Justice (AGJ) describes refusefascism.org as a project of AGJ.  Money moves about.

The phenomena of hive-building can  be traced back to the early labor organizing of the late 18th century into the more sophisticated 19th/20th century efforts of Eugene Debs, Big Bill Haywood, Samuel Gompers, John L. Lewis, and Marry Harris Jones (“Mother Jones”).

From “Solidarity”, publication of the IWW, 1917

Modern iterations of the activity include “Occupy….(fill in the blank)”, “the Resistance” (to Trump), “Fight Fascism”, and “Indivisible”.

“Occupy Wall Street” protest, Zuccotti Park, 2011
“The Resistance”, a collection of groups for defeating Trump, 2017
“Fight Fascism” in one of its forms, San Diego protest, 2017
‘Indivisible’ movement grips St. Johns County, Fla., January 2017.

It’s simply hive activity, without splitting academic hairs over the fine distinctions between “community organizing”, mere “activism”, or “mobilizing”.  It’s also not a conspiracy in the same vein as the Comintern (Communist International), which had a Moscow address.  The organization’s constituent national communist parties were appendages of the Soviet Politburo.

No central commissariat exists for the hive.  It is a web of scattered individuals and groups, united by compatible beliefs, a tendency to activism, most lacking permanence, and interconnected by social media and loose funding streams.  They spring up as events warrant and vary to local circumstances.  They can appear spasmodic, and frequently are.

The tie that binds is a remarkably consistent set of beliefs.  You know, the litany of “isms” and “phobias” are prominent: racism, sexism, Islamaphobia, homophobia, etc., etc., etc.  The list is notably fungible according to the fads-of-thought of the moment.  For them, America is reduced to a collection of group victims.  Their cure is Fabianism-with-an-edge.

Fabianism is a form of  socialism without the violent overthrow of Marx and Lenin.  It’s socialism with a human face – i.e., democracy.  This form has been called “social democracy”.  It favors human rights broadly defined and greater government control of the “commanding heights” of society, to borrow from Lenin.   In Britain, it led to the  formation of the Labour Party.  In Europe, many national social democratic parties sprang up.  In today’s America, it has found a home in the Democratic Party.

Early logo of Britain’s Fabian Society as a turtle. It displays the group’s desire for gradualism in bringing about a socialist country.
Another common emblem of the Fabian Society as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, as seen in a stained glass window. It would later be dropped for its negative connotation.

The modern Democratic Party has given the movement an institutional form.  However, the plodding nature of a national political party is ill-suited to a base agitated by immediate events.  The desire for respectability of a national party restrains the emotional explosion which has led some partisans to break away seeking the “Bern”, or “StopFascism”, or “Black Lives Matter”, or “Occupy” (the universe?), or ……..  That’s the “edge” part of Fabianism-with-an-edge.  Yet, party activists are still littered throughout the constellation of groups.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow holding up a copy of Indivisible’s Practical Guide to organizing against Trump

Taking a closer look into one these groups, Indivisible, will bring to light the interconnected nature of the hive.  From their “Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda”, the authors parrot the hive’s party line on the threat posed by Trump:

“…[Trump] will attempt to use his congressional majority to reshape America in his own racist, authoritarian, and corrupt image.”

Three of the four individuals listed as authors of the “Guide” – Ezra Levin, Adam Padilla, and Jeremy Haile – were ex-staffers of Democrat representatives. Levin and Haile were staffers for Lloyd Doggett (D-Tx).  Padilla was a legislative assistant for Luis Gutierrez (D-IL).  The fourth, Leah Greenberg, wife of Ezra Levin, is listed as the young policy director for the Tom Perriello gubernatorial campaign along with involvement in various “social justice” private and non-profit organizations according to her LinkedIn page.

Perriello is another interesting specimen.  He served as representative in Virginia’s 5th congressional district from 2009-11, but was defeated in 2010 by Republican Robert Hurt.  He is mentioned as the founder of Avaaz, ” a U.S. based civic organization launched in January 2007 that promotes global activism on issues such as climate change, human rights, animal rights, corruption, poverty, and conflict.”  It’s a mission statement for the “social justice warrior” (SJW).

The “Guide” asserts that they are emulating the Tea Party circa 2009.  But the Tea Party wasn’t organized by Hill staffers, or anyone representing the “establishment”.  More believably, the kinship of the “the resistance” points to the “Occupy” factions of 2011 and the more recent campus SJW outbursts, not the Tea Party.

Below is an “Occupy Wall Street” demonstration from October 2011.  It’s 6:46 in length.

Compare the above to the disruption of Charles Murray’s attempt to speak to students at Middlebury College.

When the above attempt at a lecture failed, Murray and Prof. Allison Stanger, professor of International Politics and Economics, went to a room to live stream their conversation.  The disruptions continued in the auditorium, and when Murray and Prof. Stanger attempted to exit to her car, they were assaulted.  Stanger required hospitalization.

Now, let’s take a look at a congressional townhall, the kind of thing that Greenberg, et al, are encouraging.

Or this one.

Or the harassment of Tom McClintock after leaving his townhall.

The townhall crowds appear to be older versions of the campus SJW’s .  Five decades ago many of them might have been at home on Haight-Ashbury – at least spiritually.

The outbursts, cries, and incriminations aren’t spontaneous in the literal meaning of the word.  I suspect that the swarms are people – local and transported – already active in the party, agitated by the election’s results, neurally connected by social media, loosely directed by certain websites, and reflective of blue-America, even if they might live in red-America.  Rather than an inter-cultural phenomena spanning the cultural divide, quite the opposite, they emulate the deep cultural division in the country.  The hive’s views have no home in red-America.

What does this portend for the country?  Blue-America is still geographically stuck in blue-America.  Their behavior has just become more rabid.  The beliefs of identity politics, assaults on traditional Christianity, the blind faith in the omni-competent state, and hyper-environmentalism has no more credence today in “fly-over” country than it did before the election.

The danger for Republicans lies in the appearance of a groundswell.  Such a thing could have an effect on impressionable “independents” and lukewarm Republicans.  The Republicans could experience a dip in passion while independents fall away leaving the field open for the Fabians-with-an-edge in the Democratic Party.

If Republicans don’t counter-organize, the next couple of election cycles could pave the way for boys-in-dresses in the girls’ lockeroom and on the girls’ field hockey team.  Be prepared for a sovietized EPA.  The professions of Christian faith in the economy will be criminalized.  Just take the California template and press it onto the country.

It’s time for red-America to get organized to challenge the hive.  You might call it red-America’s “counter-swarm”.

RogerG

Sources:

Wikipedia – Fabian Society – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabian_Society

“Indivisible: The Liberal Group Putting Pressure On Republicans In Order To Destroy Trump’s Agenda”, Matt Vespa, Townhall, 2/13/17, https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2017/02/13/indivisible-the-liberal-group-putting-pressure-on-republicans-in-order-to-destroy-trumps-agenda-n2284442

“A gift and a challenge for Democrats: A restive, active and aggressive base”, David Weigel & Karen Tumulty, Wash Post, 2/11/17, https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/a-gift-and-a-challenge-for-democrats-a-restive-active-and-aggressive-base/2017/02/11/e265dd44-efef-11e6-b4ff-ac2cf509efe5_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_resistance-7pm:homepage/story&utm_term=.db5527d18253

“Democratic Super PAC Launches Ad Campaign To Promote Town Halls”, Daniel Marans, the Huffington Post, 2/17/17, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/priorities-usa-ad-campaign-indivisible_us_58a716bce4b045cd34c0ed35

“Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda – Former congressional staffers reveal best practices for making Congress listen.”, https://www.indivisibleguide.com/

“Rules for Radicals” – synopsis of Saul Alinsky’s tactics, http://www.vcn.bc.ca/citizens-handbook/rules.html

“Ex-Hill Staffers Put A Spin On The Tea Party Playbook In Anti-Trump Guide”, Allegra Kirkland, TPM, 12/15/16, http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/former-hill-staffers-guide-resisting-trump-administration-indivisible

“READ: Ex-Congressional Staffers Write Anti-Trump Resistance Guide”, Daniel J. Solomon,  Fast Forward: Quick reads through a Jewish lens, 2/15/17, http://forward.com/fast-forward/363247/read-ex-congressional-staffers-write-anti-trump-resistance-guide/

https://twitter.com/leahgreenb?lang=en, Twitter for Leah Greenberg

More on Leah Greenberg – “Friends, First and Always”, Weddings, NY Times

Leha Greenberg’s LinkedIn page, https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-greenberg-30a0a439

More on Angel Padilla – NATIONAL IMMIGRATION LAW CENTER, https://www.nilc.org/about-us/nilc-staff/

“Student Protests Prevent Charles Murray From Delivering Lecture”, Will DiGravio, The Middlebury Campus, 3/2/17, https://middleburycampus.com/article/student-protests-prevent-charles-murray-from-delivering-lecture/

Youtube video – “Students Protest Lecture By Dr. Charles Murray at Middlebury College”, https://youtu.be/a6EASuhefeI

Condensed version of protest – on youtube – “Guest lecturer calls protesting students ‘seriously scary’”, https://youtu.be/U_e0ZUthSA0

“SJWs Flip Out When Ben Shapiro Destroys Social Justice, White Privilege & Safe Spaces”, 11/21/16, https://youtu.be/hLYu-BW87p0

“Congressman Tom McClintock leaves contentious town hall with police escort as protesters”, youtube.com, 2/4/17, https://youtu.be/etNQsncV9vw

“Protesters disrupt GOP gathering in Utah”, CNN, youtube.com, 2/10/17, https://youtu.be/5Kbxw41eX2Y

“Angry Citizens Shut Down Senator Bill Cassidy Town Hall”, youtube.com, https://youtu.be/QG361msBKfE

“Look Who Funds The Group Behind The Call To Arms At Milo’s Berkeley Event”, chuck Ross, The Daily Caller, 2/3/17, http://dailycaller.com/2017/02/03/look-who-funds-the-group-behind-the-call-to-arms-at-milos-berkeley-event/#ixzz4aOom2ygo

AGJ IRS form 990 (2015) – http://afgj.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/AFGJ-990-2015-Small.pdf

https://refusefascism.org/, IN THE NAME OF HUMANITY WE REFUSE TO ACCEPT A FASCIST AMERICA

“Popular Resistance”, https://popularresistance.org/

“Democratic Alliance”, wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Alliance

“Tom Perriello announces staff for gubernatorial campaign”, 2/7/17, http://augustafreepress.com/tom-perriello-announces-staff-gubernatorial-campaign/

“Alliance for Global Justice’s fundraiser: Refusefascism.org – Stop Trump/Pence”, https://www.crowdrise.com/stop-trumppence-before-they-start

“Soros, Steyer, and Democracy Alliance Work to Retake Colorado: Left-wing donor club returns to its birthplace to win back state senate for Dems”, Lachlan Markey, The Washington Free Beacon, 8/5/16, http://freebeacon.com/politics/soros-steyer-and-democracy-alliance-work-to-retake-colorado/

 

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How to Bias the Public Conversation: Secular Martyring and the Love of Diversity

The much talked-about divide in America of “blue” versus “red” is real.  The two factions conflict at the most basic cultural level.  A “blue” mind-set pervades almost everywhere by its control of and access to media, corporate America, and educational institutions.  It invades and  conflicts with the more traditional outlook of “red” America.  You can’t get away from blue-America’s weltanschauung (worldview).  It’s omnipresent.

Super Bowl LI provided no sanctuary from the onslaught.  An Audi ad has a male voice worrying about the discrimination his daughter will face: “Do I tell her that despite her education, her drive, her skills, her intelligence, she will automatically be valued as less than every man she ever meets?”  You can watch it here.

If  the commercial was targeting the NFL fan base, the probable $10 million ad buy may have missed the mark.  NFL fans  are almost two-thirds male, three-quarters white, 91% age 18 or older, and almost three-quarters earning $40k or more (as of 2013).  Was this advertising or sermonizing?

An alternative explanation follows the provocation principle of media marketing.  Just be over-the-top in some way and you’ll get looks, clicks, and tweets.  But why does outrageousness appear to overwhelmingly lean left?  I suspect sermonizing to be closer to the truth.

Pontificating wasn’t limited to a compulsive anguish over alleged gender inequities.  If the audience wasn’t pummeled with the usual pickups and beer, multiculturalism and its cousin “diversity” were thrust at viewers.  Airbnb, a marketer of vacation properties, seemed more intent on establishing its multicultural bonafides than renting a Maui condo.

Coca-cola trotted out a 2014 Super Bowl commercial with the same message.  Beauty and goodness are glued to racial and ethnic diversity, not to individual goodness, in these things.  To be in the land of the righteous, “difference” as part of group identity is the sanctifying grace.  Group “difference” alone is all that matters.  It stops there.

Once ethnic and racial diversity is conferred with the halo of goodness, where is a person to stand on the key “diversity” issue of immigration?  Quite frankly, opposition to open borders must place you somewhere between purgatory and hell.

An all-in for diversity creates a mind prejudiced against accepting  the jarring realities related to “diversity”.  Harvard’s Robert Putnam stumbled into a hornets’ nest in 2007 when he uncovered the downside.  His research discovered a decline in civic engagement and social capital in diverse communities.  People don’t care much about each other and they withdraw into the isolation of their homes.  He writes, “People living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’ — that is, to pull in like a turtle.”

Maybe the withdrawal “like a turtle” could have something to do with the ethnic youth gangs.  Nortenos and Surenos gang alliances, MS-13, etc., plague many of the poorer ethnic neighborhoods.

MS-13 gang members, Los Angeles

Granted, gangs have been evident throughout U.S. history in all slices of the poorer demographic pie.

Camorra mob, NYC – Navy St. Gang – Sicilian, Italian immigrant
Purple Gang, Detroit – Jewish immigrant gang

They are a notable feature of ethnic districts, much replenished with new arrivals during periods of high immigration.  It may be a result of a social anomie, an uprooted people without the civic controls of the old country.  Still, the prospect of declining public morality is threatening to any family having to live with it.  Perhaps, “hunkering down” and separating oneself from the immediate surroundings is an understandable reaction.

My guess is that ethnically and racially diverse neighborhoods have a better chance if residents have common values and language, and a common middle class educational, income, and occupational orientation.  That would mean some sense of assimilation.  “Assimilation”, though, is blasphemy in the church of diversity.

Many of the Super Bowl commercials were sermons from the diversity seminary.  More than that, they are a window into the modern corporate soul.  Along with the appropriate dress and manners in the corporate boardroom, part of the uniform includes a blue-America ethos.

The secular martyring of girls and immigrants and the worship of diversity are elements of the dogma. Rob Schwartz, chief executive of the marketing firm of TBWA\Chiat\Day New York (whose clients include McDonald’s, Michelin, GoDaddy, Nissan) at halftime proclaimed, “If there’s anything that’s screaming out here, it’s diversity. People are saying, ‘Is this trolling Trump?’ I don’t think it’s trolling. It’s a big smack in the face of ‘dude, this is America.”

Corporate mission statements are bland affirmations of Schwartz’s enthusiastic declaration.  “Diversity” is a mantra in Coca-cola’s self-professed mission: “The Coca-Cola Company’s global diversity mission is to mirror the rich diversity of the marketplace we serve and be recognized for our leadership in Diversity, Inclusion and Fairness in all aspects of our business …. Diversity is at the heart of our business.”

Apple proudly announces its fealty at the “diversity” altar.  It’s integral to their employee relations and hiring:

“We see diversity as everything that makes an employee who they are. We foster a diverse culture that’s inclusive of disability, religious belief, sexual orientation, and service to country …. Creating an inclusive culture takes both commitment and action. We’re helping employees identify and address unconscious racial and gender bias. We’re cultivating diverse leadership and tech talent. We’re continuing our advocacy for LGBTQ equality, investing in resources for Veterans and service members and their families, and exploring new ways to support employees with disabilities.”

Apple’s corporate scripture is a veritable laundry list of the fashionable victims’ groups.

Seattle-based Starbucks is similarly hitched to the “diversity” train.  Under the mission statement heading “Creating A Culture of Belonging, Inclusion and Diversity” we find the following bullet points,

“At the heart of our business, we seek to inspire and nurture the human spirit – understanding that each person brings a distinct life experience to the table. Our partners are diverse not only in gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, religion and age, but also in cultural backgrounds, life experiences, thoughts and ideas.”

“Embracing diversity only enhances our work culture, it also drives our business success. It is the inclusion of these diverse experiences and perspectives that create a culture of empowerment, one that fosters innovation, economic growth and new ideas.”

A Google search would uncover more of the stuff.  Corporate America is immersed in the doctrines of secular martyring and diversity.  And so are the kiddies.  The education blob is wallowing in it as much as any corporate HR department.  Nothing like spreading the faith to the next generation of soon-to-be activists.

“Diversity” has a prominent place in the curricular standards for the youngest of the blob’s clients, kindergartners.  Under California’s “Historical and Cultural Context” of the “Visual Arts Content Standards” for kindergarten, the state pays homage to “diversity” in the section titled “Understanding the Historical Contributions and Cultural Dimensions of the Visual Arts”:

“Students analyze the role and development of the visual arts in past and present cultures throughout the world, noting human diversity as it relates to the visual arts and artists.”

The “diversity” incantation is littered throughout your public school protocols.  I’ve got nearly 30 years of exposure to the hogwash as a public school teacher at the secondary and community college levels.

How does this secular doctrine enter the state’s mandates for teaching the kids?  The stuff percolates from the college ed departments, and they train the teachers and administrators.  A sample of such guidance is enlightening.

Lily Wong Fillmore of UC Berkeley, like many of her professional kin in college ed departments, lays out her view of the situation in her study, “The Common Core State Standards & Student Diversity Making them work for everyone !” .  Beware, teachers, you’re part of the problem in her estimation.  Under the heading “But is diversity the problem?”, she writes,

“The problem has never been that the kids, whatever their background, couldn’t handle the rigors of the school’s curriculum––they could, and would have––the problem has been that educators have doubted that all of their students are prepared or motivated to do the work the curriculum required.”

You see, cutting to the chase, according to Fillmore, teachers and others are not sufficiently devoted to the “diversity” mantra.  More likely, teachers face the realities that Ms. Fillmore pretends doesn’t exist.  Ms. Fillmore, et al, can’t accept the uncomfortable possibility that “diversity” puts intense stress on public institutions.  But don’t mention that, and don’t dare bring into question the false god of “diversity”.

Despite the pressures on the schools, the ed blob’s satellites fully embrace the same party line.  The ASCD (the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development), one of the blob’s guidance and lobbying arms, is a stickler for “diversity”.  In its “Introduction: Teaching in Diverse, Standards-Based Classrooms”, “diversity” is approvingly referred to as a “mosaic”.

“Factors such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, and language also contribute to the classroom mosaic and may influence the cultural characteristics that students bring.”

And what do the ASCD’s “experts” want to do about it?  “Diversity”, the abstraction, is always-and-forevermore good and the young ‘uns must be made to accept it.  Littered throughout the “Teaching in Diverse …” document is fetishization of “diversity”.  As in,

“Cultural diversity gives students a chance to learn about different languages, customs, and worldviews.”

“Through everyday activities in diverse school settings, students are challenged to find ways of interacting effectively with students who are culturally different. In so doing, they develop important skills in cross-cultural competence.”

The mind-set is buried in the psyche from a person’s earliest days all the way through adulthood.  The problem isn’t with “diversity” as such.  It’s the worship of “diversity”.  The thing absorbs so much of the attention of the school that other necessities begin to recede, like discipline.  In fact, “diversity” may be encouraging behavioral problems by giving a green light to grievance, real or imagined.  The result can be unsafe schools.  Take a look.

What is needed is to replace the overbearing “diversity” dogma with simple human kindness and respect.  Yet, simple kindness isn’t nearly as useful  in preparing young minds if your goal is the student taking one side in controversial issues … like immigration.  C.S. Lewis wrote about the mind-forming potential of a biased curriculum in Abolition of Man.

“It is not a theory they put into his [the student] mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all. The authors themselves, I suspect, hardly know what they are doing to the boy, and he cannot know what is being done to him.”

After years of “diversity” sermonizing, we have a generation much less likely to understand the counter argument to broad and nearly unfettered immigration.  Not being able to understand the argument makes it easier to dismiss as mere bigotry.  However, the real bigotry is a prejudice against other and unfamiliar arguments.  This bigotry was implanted by a tendentious abstraction from the beginning.

Everywhere we look, we find the tentacles of the exhortation to treat girls and immigrants as secular martyrs.  Alongside, the drumbeat of “diversity” plants multiculturalism as an unalloyed good.  Counterfactual realities are waved aside as nonexistent. From Super Bowl commercials to the corporate boardroom to the classroom, it’s the same mind-numbing message.   It’s as if we are expected to ignore the daily realities that brush up against us on the street and in our classrooms.

Chico Marx in Duck Soup could very well be the spokesman for the blue-America congregation when he said,  “Who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”

RogerG

Sources:

“Escapism Reigns in Super Bowl Commercials, but Politics Proves Inescapable”, Sapna Maheshwari, NYT, 2/5/17, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/05/business/super-bowl-commercials-politics.html?_r=0

“27 JAN 2013 SPORTS FAN DEMOGRAPHICS”, Danielle Eby, openddorse, http://opendorse.com/blog/2013-sports-fan-demographics/

“Challenge for Super Bowl Commercials: Not Taking Sides, Politically”, Sapna Maheshwari, NYT, 2/2/17, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/business/media/super-bowl-advertising-fox-border-wall.html

“The Common Core State Standards & Student Diversity Making them work for everyone !” Lily Wong Fillmore, University of California at Berkeley, The Common Core State Standards & Student Diversity Making them work for everyone !”

California, Kindergarten: Visual and Performing Arts: Visual Arts Content Standards, http://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/vakindergarten.asp

Coca-cola website, http://www.coca-colacompany.com/our-company/diversity

Apple website, http://www.apple.com/diversity/

Starbucks website,  https://www.starbucks.com/responsibility/community/diversity-and-inclusion

ASCD, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/109011/chapters/Introduction@_Teaching_in_Diverse,_Standards-Based_Classrooms.aspx

“The downside of diversity: A Harvard political scientist finds that diversity hurts civic life. What happens when a liberal scholar unearths an inconvenient truth?”, Michael Jonas, 8/5/2007, Boston Globe, http://archive.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/the_downside_of_diversity/