Red-Blue America – Page 4 – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

April 12, 2023April 14, 2023

Our National Decomposition Continues Apace

Union organizer and Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson speaks after being projected winner as mayor on April 4, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois. (Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images) — Teacher union organizer and Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson speaks after being projected winner as mayor on April 4, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois. (Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)

Supreme Court candidate Janet Protasiewicz reacts while speaking at her election night watch party in Milwaukee, Wis., on Tuesday, April 4, 2023. Protasiewicz, 60, defeated former Justice Dan Kelly, who previously worked for Republicans and had support from the state's leading anti-abortion groups. (Mike De Sisti /Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel via AP) — Janet Protasiewicz speaks at her election night party in Milwaukee after she defeated former Justice Dan Kelly for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat. (Mike De Sisti / Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel)

Our national decomposition shows little sign of abating. Elections in Wisconsin and Chicago indicate that there remains an appetite for decay.

Another word for decline or decomposition of a culture, civilization, or nation is degringolade. Whichever word is used, however, we are experiencing it. Nature isn’t doing it to us. We are doing it to ourselves. The precipitating factor is what is bouncing between our ears. A sizeable chunk of the electorate, without even knowing it in many cases, is sold on toxic neo-Marxism in the guise of modern progressivism. Today, progressivism and this updated Marxism are synonymous. I’m beginning to sound like a broken record since I’ve certainly mentioned it often enough but can’t get away from it. It’s constantly resurfacing in many places around the country.

This isn’t the progressivism of Woodrow Wilson. As a refresher, this current edition is a relatively modern refashioning of Karl Marx’s paradigm: the systemic oppression of the oppressed who are defined by an ever-fungible list of outgroups covering everything from XY girls to the poor to anyone with high melanin counts. To the rescue in this blinkered ideological schematic is a complete, top to bottom, inside and out, overhaul of all societal arrangements from the family to property, a thoroughgoing Marxist revolution. Sound familiar? Read BLM’s mission statement before it was scrubbed clean of too much revelatory information (see below). We’ve proven to be quite creative in defining the “oppressed”, or victim groups. For greenies, you might add the mother goddess Gaia (earth) to the list. Anyway, this latest edition fairs no better than the kind that lurked behind the Iron Curtain or Mao’s China or is lurking in North Korea and Cuba. It is a sacking of our heritage and thrusting the country into despair.

The canary passing out in the coal mine in this moment of our evisceration is urban America. Our cities are crumbling, and so are the states dominated by them. The story has been acted out before. We are historically rhyming with 4th and 5th-century AD Rome. The Roman Empire didn’t go out in a boom but a whimper. The cities became unlivable, mired in high taxes, crumbling infrastructure, a deterioration of services, lack of security, and overburdening controls. Who’d want to live there? Apparently, many didn’t by the 5th century. The population of the city nearly emptied from over a million in the 1st century AD to 30,000 by the 5th. Other similarly weakened urban places suffered. People flocked to fortified estates, monasteries, and towns with natural defenses. It’s the beginning of feudalism.

Feudalism is returning. Today, in the good ‘ol USA, people are rushing to states and places where 3-strikes laws mean something, where taxes and bureaucracies aren’t bleeding producers white, where parking your car on the street in front of your house isn’t an invitation to vandalism. In other words, where neo-Marxism/progressivism is held in disrepute.

Where boys’ and girls’ bathrooms are separated by a wall. Where nature’s chromosomal distinction hasn’t been buried by the linguistic manipulations of pronouns and “birthing person” for “woman”. It’s just the opposite in our urban neo-Marxist silos. Entirely mired in the mindset, many of our cities and urbanized states are busy advancing the revolution by eliminating other distinctions such as the one between criminal and law-abiding. Judges and local potentates treat criminals as victims and their real victims as . . . well . . . .

As if we need any more evidence, Whole Foods announced yesterday (4/10/2023) that it was “temporarily closing” its 65,000 square foot San Francisco outlet at Eighth and Market, the Trinity section, that it just opened last year. According to a company spokesman, “If we feel we can ensure the safety of our team members in the store, we will evaluate a reopening of our Trinity location.” The area has been plagued by brutal beatings, stabbings, killings, and accidents in recent weeks. Too few cops and law-unenforcement is making San Francisco look like 5th-century Rome (see below).

These arbiters of revolutionary justice in places like San Francisco have their own vocabulary to push this cultural revolution. “Decarceration” is the go-to for releasing offenders to reoffend, just call it “low-level crime”, which is another word for “inconsequential” to Soros-backed DA’s – inconsequential to everyone but the person left battered, bruised, and bleeding in the subway. Barbarian invasions aren’t doing it to us, unless barbarian refers to the urban powerful who have drunk the neo-Marxist Kool-Aid. Your progressive DA, judges, city council, mayor, governor, and state legislature are performing the role of the Visigoths and their King Alaric in laying waste to Rome in 410 AD.

No photo description available. — Visigoths sack Rome in 410 AD.

May be an image of 1 person and fire — Minneapolis in the 2020 summer of riots.

The only recourse for those not too fond of the mayhem is to vote with their feet. Get out! But these are democracies – surprise! The corruption is democratic. People are voting for mayhem. How’s that possible? It might have something to do with a little cost/benefit analysis on the run: the rewards of group largesse from the public treasury are greater than the costs of possibly losing your little girl in a drive-by. I know, it’s hard to believe. But, on the other hand, it could just be stupid people being stupid, something not unheard of in the annals of democracy.

Or it could be due to the overall social decomposition extending to our schools. People aren’t taught any better; they don’t know any better; and are easily led into believing nonsense. Yet, policy-nonsense still behaves, as it always has, whether popularly chosen or not, like a drunk behind the wheel. It’s a disaster careening down our thoroughfares. And like most drunks, all-too-often they don’t get sober till they hit bottom. Apparently, our urban electorates haven’t hit bottom. Or it could be that the voter pool has been reduced to the drunks, the sober having fled to safer climes (red states).

A sizeable majority – by ten points – of Wisconsin voters recently failed the field sobriety test but still grabbed the car keys. Some attribute the recent election of the Visigothic Janet Protasiewicz to the State Supreme Court to the abortion issue. Probably true, but Wisconsinites have now let the Visigoths through the gates with a new Visigothic majority on the Court and, as a result, will get much more than carte blanche abortion. Protasiewicz promised during the campaign to rewrite the state’s redistricting maps to the advantage of the neo-Marxists who promise more sacking into the foreseeable future. In addition, expect more teacher-union power to dictate your child’s education, backdoor racism in diversity-equity-inclusion, and higher taxes to finance the revolution. The whole litany of policies to promote the revolution against hypothetical systemic “oppressors” are about to be unleashed. And so will a run on exiting U-Hauls, proving once again that the only thing efficiently produced by Marxism is refugees.

Money is the mother’s milk of politics . . . and revolution. The donkey party neo-Marxists, in spite of their dismal record, are well-funded from a network of similarly intoxicated donors. The precedent was established by Lenin in 1917. The Bolsheviks were bankrolled by Imperial Germany. A revolution rides on more than fulminations.

Money and an election system reshaped to the advantage of their base put Protasiewicz in office, and gave Chicago another Alaric-style mayor, Brandon Johnson, to replace the Visigothic Lori Lightfoot. The guy is marinated in neo-Marxism, like his predecessor. San Francisco, Wisconsin, and Chicago are pointing the way to the future, the same future viewed by 5th-century Romans and early 20th-century Petrograd residents.

If not arrested, our condition will continue to deteriorate . . . until riveting calamities shock us back to our senses. Hopefully, by then, it won’t be too late. Hopefully, we won’t wake up to news of two aircraft carriers sunk in the western Pacific, and our response is crippled by an economy unable to meet the demands of the moment, or a population unwilling to fight after years of anti-western indoctrination in our media and schools. A pool of recruits rattled by gender dysphoria and accusations of white privilege can’t instill much confidence.

The signs of decay aren’t limited to the popularity of chic neo-Marxism among urban sophisticates. Another passed-out canary is plummeting birth rates and closing maternity wards. It’s hard to have a robust generational talent pool to face the threat with a population befuddled by pronouns and fungible sex-identity, all as the population shrinks. We’ve got a lot to worry about. And all the while, neo-Marxism, acting like the Visigoths, is busy hollowing out the nation and its civilization. At this late hour, the odor of national decomposition is beginning to overwhelm the olfactory glands.

RogerG

Read more here:

* BLM’s mission statement included the following:
“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.” It’s straight out of the writings of Karl Marx, nothing unusual for the self-professed Marxism of BLM’s founders of Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi.

From the Wayback Machine Archive, Black Lives Matter: “What We Believe”, at https://web.archive.org/web/20200408020723/https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/

* “Whole Foods closes San Francisco flagship store after one year, citing crime”, Jordan Valinsky, CNN, 4/11/2023, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/whole-foods-closes-san-francisco-flagship-store-after-one-year-citing-crime/ar-AA19IDPH

* If you’re interested, here’s a local San Francisco newscast about people getting out during the Covid shutdown: “On The Move: San Francisco residents on the move during the COVID-19 economic downturn” at

March 13, 2023March 15, 2023

The Cause of Our Discontents

May be an image of 3 people, people standing and outdoors — Trump supporter and Antifa member confront each other, 2017.

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

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

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

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

May be an image of 1 person — Antonio Gramsci

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RogerG

Read more here:

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

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

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

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

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

March 5, 2023March 6, 2023

The Cultural Commanding Heights Do Not Like the Hinterlands

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May be an image of outdoors and text — A wind project in Michigan farm area in 2013.

May be an image of outdoors — A sea of solar panels in Portugal.

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

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

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

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

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

May be an image of one or more people, people standing, the Arc de Triomphe and outdoors — The yellow vest protests in Paris, November 2018.

May be an image of standing and road — Farmers gather with their vehicles next to a Germany/Netherlands border sign during a protest on the A1 highway near Rijssen, Netherlands, June 29. They are protesting the Dutch Government’s nitrogen plans, which would eliminate a sizable number of farms. (photo: Vincent Jannink / AFP via Getty Images)

Please read Joel Klotkin’s piece below.

RogerG

Read more here:

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

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

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

February 4, 2023February 5, 2023

California, From Bright Promise to Malignancy

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

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

May be an image of 1 person and text that says 'GINAL DOCUSERIES JONI MITCHELL CROSBY, STILLS, NASH YOUNG BUFFALO SPRINGFIELD THE BYRDS THE MAMAS THE PAPAS THE DOORS ALICE COOPER THE MONKEES LOVE THE TURTLES JACKSON BROWNE LINDA RONSTADT SOUTHER EAGLES BONNIE RAITT LITTEFE LITTLE FEAT THE FLYING BURRITO BROTHERS Everything They Touched Music. LAUREL Turned to CANYON ePix'

May be an image of 1 person, beard and text

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

25 Photographs of the Murderous Manson Family That Shocked the Nation — Charles Manson in one of many photos taken during his 1970 trial.

Image result for manson family spahn ranch — Some of Manson’s “family” on the Spahn Ranch property, 1969.

//Charles manson dead crime scene photos sharon tate with sebering — The bodies of Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring, two of the five victims at the Polanski/Tate residence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RogerG

Read more here:

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

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

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

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

January 10, 2023January 12, 2023

Whew, What a Blowout! Georgia 65 – TCU 7.

As of now, the South is the king of football, with competition from the upper Midwest. It’s much more than the SEC. It’s regional dominance. There are places where physical, masculine virtues still prevail. Football thrives in a culture that has a place for such attributes.

I invite others to do a detailed analysis of the region’s productivity of top-tier football talent throughout the NCAA top 20. I’ll admit that it’s more than the South, though. California still gives the country some of the most highly recruited players in the country: C.J. Stroud (The Ohio State), Bryce Young (Alabama), Brock Bowers (Georgia), to name a few. Up and down the west coast, schools constantly dip into the state’s talent pool. Where would Oregon be without California talent?

But the state is shedding population (114,000 last year and almost 118,000 for 2021) and its reigning culture isn’t conducive to the exaltation of virility. The state is too busy becoming the Mecca of transgenderism, which says a lot about where that social eco-system is heading. Persistent pockets of male virtue exist, but the trend is increasingly inhospitable.

Texas, like the rest of the South, produces much talent that is diluted among many schools in the region. So does Florida. The performance of those states’ schools says little because of the chronic raiding.

In addition, the powerhouse schools of the South have a tendency to dominate because they are assisted by coaches who have the magic elixir to draw in much of the region’s pool of talent: Dabo Sweeney (Clemson), Nick Saban (Alabama), Kirby Smart (Georgia) for instance. There will always be exceptions, but they confirm what Cicero of ancient Rome said in Latin, exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis, which means the exception confirms the rule in cases not excepted. In my mind, the generality of the South’s preeminence rings true.

As for the Midwest, they compete with the South. The Ohio State, Michigan, and Penn State compete with the best of the South. Based on what I saw in this year’s playoff games, the real national championship game was between The Ohio State and Georgia. This region’s dominance, like the South, draws on the same residue of cultural male virtue.

This shift of football power may partially explain USC and UCLA’s move to the Big Ten in 2025. Some say that it’s all about the money. Yes, it is, and money follows success. It’s striking to realize that these big schools have to turn to red America to maintain competitiveness.

Some of my dear friends and family in California may find this assessment jarring, but it’s my judgment of the state of play circa 2023. I could be wrong, and the situation could change. There’s nothing more permanent than flux in human affairs.

RogerG

Read more here:

* On California’s precarious demographic situation:

“For Second Straight Year, California Sees a Population Decline”, Tim Arango, NY Times, May 4, 2022, at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/04/us/california-population-decline.html

“California’s shrinking population has big impacts”, Dan Walters, CalMatters, April 10, 2022, at https://calmatters.org/commentary/2022/04/california-population-decline/

“California’s population keeps shrinking”, Marc Sternfield, KTLA, Dec. 26, 2022, at https://ktla.com/news/california/californias-population-keeps-shrinking/

November 9, 2022

The Red Wave that Wasn’t. Thank You, Donald J. Trump.

Republican election night party in Washington, D.C., at 9:15 pm EST on 11/8/22. (photo: Luther Abel/National Review)

Republican election night party in Washington, D.C., at 2:45 am EST on 11/9/22. (photo: Luther Abel/National Review)

“Populist” Republican voters made Trump appear to be a winner in the 2022 primaries. Now, with the midterm election results trickling in, not so much. Trump is a millstone around the neck of the party. I once compared Trump’s antics during his term in office as the big man in a basketball starting lineup, not known for his outside shooting, miraculously making a 3-pointer at the start of the game and for the rest of the game, he’s throwing bricks from the 3-point line rather than playing strong inside. Trump actually thought his 2016 surprise victory was an endorsement of his behavior; so, he repeated it throughout his term and thereafter. Well, the same analogy applies to a significant part of the GOP’s base, and now it’s this “populist” constituency who is tossing bricks.

“Trumpian” became a popular word, a compliment, in the lexicon of some. It’s popularity, however, is only discernable in a narrow socio-political silo, places of rabid confirmation bias like all such cloisters. I’ve often complained of the blue bubbles or silos. There are also red ones. Opinions are constantly reinforced and a person quickly loses sight of the fact that not everyone sees the world like them. The implausible appears plausible, and the boorish and disgusting are distorted into the attractive. These clusters are carnival funhouses of warped mirrors.

Former President Donald Trump talks to the press on the grounds of his Mar-a-Lago resort on midterm elections night in Palm Beach, Florida, November 8, 2022. (photo: Ricardo Arduengo/Reuters)

That said, the country should be as frightened of the Democrat mantra of “Save our democracy” as many are of Trump. What democracy? What kind of “democracy” are the Democrats trying to save? We know that they are opposed to almost any accountability checks in elections: voter ID, regular and mandatory cleanup of the registration rolls, and efforts to ban the fraud-laden practice of ballot harvesting or place restrictions on open and broad mail-in voting. The Republican chant of “easy to vote, hard to cheat” is essentially countered by the Democrats’ “easy to vote, easy to cheat”. Whose voice is being recorded here? Frankly, it’s getting harder to say.

The core of the problem is the first half of both parties’ chant: “easy to vote”. No, it shouldn’t be hard, but it depends on what is meant by “hard”. Is it “hard” to expect people to be willing to break away from the Xbox to trundle down to the polling place to cast their “voice”? Is it hard to expect some civic and issue literacy before a person casts their vote? Instead, it’s just “vote, vote, vote”. The NFL during broadcasts pushed the mantra, even going so far as to turn their stadiums into repositories of ballots from God knows where and God knows who. These aren’t polling places staffed by neighbors with a list of registered voters from the neighborhood. Ballots come in from everywhere, overwhelmingly mail-in, which are the most problematic in terms of “one person, one vote”. Who knows who’s marking the things once they’re taken inside a domicile, later to be harvested by activists.

I doubt if Americans understand how freakishly unusual our voting procedures have become in a country who prides itself in being the gold standard of “democracy” . . . or how similar we’ve become to Third World kleptocracies, totalitarian “democracies”, and brutal thuggeries like Putin’s Russia. When mail-in voting replaces in-person, with many other now-legalized loosey-goosey practices, we are depressing the incentives for the serious voter, serious enough to get off their tush to go down the few blocks to a voting booth. Why vote only to have it canceled by a semi-literate blockhead?

The trends according to MIT should be considered shocking (see chart below). In 1992, 8% of ballots cast were mail-in. In 2020, it’s about half. And many of those are in states with no-excuse or universal, automatic broadcasting of ballots through the mail. And to think that most of it is from dirty registration rolls. Could it get any murkier?

May be an image of text that says 'Ballots cast by modes of voting over time 90% 75% 60% %0 aaterr 45% 30% 15% Early, person Election Day Mail/absentee 0% 1992 1996 2000 2004 2008 2012 2016 2020 Year Source: Voting and Registration Supplement the Current Population Survey (1992 2018) Survey Performance American Elections (2020) h/'

Israel restricts about 95% of its voting to in-person. Exceptions are only allowed for certain military or diplomatic personnel. We’ve gone the other way toward a government of whom?, by whom?, and for whom?

Advantage, Democrats. Why? They control the culture and the messaging to low-information, unmotivated voters. The Netflix viewership is primed for the Democrats’ childish themes of oppression and meanie white guys in suits. Low-information and unmotivated voters can be found across the spectrum, but the Democrats, I suspect, have richer veins to mine.

As of this writing, it isn’t all bleak news for Republicans. Many races are still undecided. It must be admitted, though, that the Republicans always had a cultural/media headwind to fight. Now, they must admit that have a Trumpian one to contribute to the gust.

Expect two more years of “wrong track”!

I’ll have more to say later after the dust clears.

RogerG

Read more here:

* “Voting By Mail and Absentee Voting”, MIT, March 2021, at https://electionlab.mit.edu/research/voting-mail-and-absentee-voting .

November 8, 2022November 8, 2022

A Picture Says a Thousand Words

The Great Awokening in the wake of George Floyd, and spurred on by Obama’s decade-long sermonizing, was actually The Great Disconnect for the Democratic Party. The Party is simply out of touch. No better example can be found of the Party’s separation from most people’s lives than the picture of a hard-working and dirty coal miner attending a University of Kentucky basketball game with his son (see below). This coal miner is as far removed from the funhouse/playhouse campus of Twitter as one can imagine – in ways more than geography. The picture captures the Democrats’ predicament.

The Democratic Party traded blue-collars for the pampered denizens of faculty lounges and white-collars sheltered in air-conditioned offices and free to be enraptured without consequences by gauzy ideologies. The hunt to combat climate change, an undefinable racism, and transphobia jumped to the front and center and over the concerns of people facing worsening family budgets, schools, and safety.

What do the Democrats have to offer? Nothing but misery. They’re after that guy’s job. Biden goes out on the stump and proclaims an end to drilling and the use of coal. The Party is all agog in fantasies of forests of windmills and vast expanses of solar panels replacing nuclear, coal, and natural gas. And why are they so enthusiastic about taking away that man’s livelihood? Answer: a climate-change hysteria that is as unscientific as it is illogical. It’s more religious than anything. It can only be entertained in the isolated and pleasant indoor climates made possible by the toil and sweat of people like that dirty miner in the stands with his son. The Party has become an institutional affront to most of working America.

Do you think that only he knows the dirty secret of the Party turning its back on him? To borrow from Biden, come on, man. Working America encompasses both sexes and all races and ethnicities. Work is color and gender blind. So, regardless of melanin count and genitalia, many are walking away from a party much more identified with techie billionaires, Antifa, and Sierra Club conferees. Thus, a rising GOP black and Latino vote.

For a Democrat, the picture below should hit you in the gut. What are you doing to that man and his son?

Michael McGuire covered in soot after a shift in the mines. He rushed to be with his son, Easton, for the first live basketball game together at the University of Kentucky. (photo: WKYT)

RogerG

November 7, 2022November 7, 2022

Our Politics Are a Mess. Shame on the Culprits.

President Joe Biden delivers remarks on prescription drug costs, Social Security and Medicare, during a campaign event, in Joliet, Ill., November 5, 2022. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

Election Day is nigh, and our politics are a mess. Shame on the Culprits.

Biden goes on a rant about the “idiots” who actually take the Democrats for their word: the Democrats are “socialists” if not in self-acclamation, then in deeds. But you are an “idiot” for noticing. Trump fulminates in his usual adolescent way by insulting a potential rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis, as “DeSanctimonious”. When will that 20% of the GOP electorate actually grow up? Our 2024 choices at this juncture could be between the revolutionaries’ old fart (Biden) or an old-but-narcissistic browbeater (Trump). It’s a real binary because only one of the two could be inflicted on us after 2024.

Former President Donald Trump speaks during a pre-election rally to support Republican candidates in Latrobe, Pa., November 5, 2022. (Mike Segar/Reuters)

How did we end up with two septuagenarian-to-octogenarian figures to represent our political divide? One is clearly senile and the other is an embarrassing oaf who hasn’t outgrown schoolyard bullying because it sells in our hyperactive digital age. While the two mouthpieces have an equal measure of their own version of decrepitude, the two parties are not as equivalent in their rot. The Democratic Party went off their rocker into full-blown ultra-Left fanaticism. The Republican Party is the one left to buttress the nation against the lunacy, being now the only adult left in the room, but, sadly, they are anchored down by the telegenic buffoon. He just might get a second shot at it in 2024.

The GOP’s barker, Trump, had his 4-year turn with the brass ring but ran into a buzzsaw of Left/bureaucratic hostility that dominates our increasingly putrefying culture and administrative state. The thing that attracts clicks and cameras – a dramatic persona, or BDE (look it up) in the words of Trumpkins – also stirred the entrenched Left to attempt to shred our Constitutional order, which they tried to do in short order after they were returned to power under the senescent Biden in January 2021 in calls for court packing, elimination of the Electoral College, engineering four new Senate seats for themselves, calling for an elimination of any voice for the minority in the Senate (it is said that the filibuster is a “relic” of Jim Crow), pushing a federal takeover of elections to legalize election fraud to expand their voter base and ensure dominance over the horizon, etc.

And then the wheels came off the nation under their refashioned version of Il Duce’s old slogan of “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.” No energy for you if it didn’t come from a windmill or solar panel. No car for you if it doesn’t take 2 hours to 2 days to charge, and won’t burst into flames after being inundated in a storm surge. The Green New Deal central planners are going to hogtie you into their utopian rabbit hole with or without your consent.

As for your sidewalks and parks, be careful because addiction on the streets and in the green spaces is “decriminalized”. Plus, you get the opportunity to see nihilism in practice with the rampant smash-and-grab mobs, property crime, and raging assaults – Anthony Burgess’s “A Clockwork Orange” brought to life. Heck, just keep your mayhem under $950, and even if you don’t, no-cash-bail and non-prosecution ensures that the miscreants will never get a chance to look from the wrong side of bars. It’s a huge subsidy for Hobbes’s old prediction of the “war of all against all”.

Our girls’ locker rooms have been invaded by XY “girls”. Our daughters aren’t safe, and their lifetime efforts and achievements cut short by XY “women” athletes. All of this brought to you by a party that wants to make all things a matter of human will. No obvious boys and girls, and all is subject to choice and human interventions. High school dances are now a real adventure for all concerned.

The so-called kitchen table isn’t exempt because you are increasingly unable to afford much to put on it. Your nest egg (401k, pension) has tanked. Shortages are disguised in euphemisms like “supply chain crisis”. It’s always a crisis with these central-planning folks. Central planning has its shortcomings. And, if you had a job, the highways just became useless since you can’t afford the juice to turn the wheels of your car, or the home charger was made inert by a blackout. “Sustainable” also has its shortcomings.

The ultimate in central planning – the pandemic lockdowns, closures of businesses, schools, and civil life, and the mandates, and the incessant tinkering with essential and nonessential – has contributed to much of the disruption of ordinary life that we experience today, setting back our kids for a year or two. COVID central planning is like Soviet central planning or the kind run out of Pyongyang: shortages and a stunted existence.

But what’s there to complain about? Much, oh so very much. The blathering blowhard of the GOP won’t be on the ballot till 2024, but Biden’s “idiots” – the average person that makes the country click by living and working – face an existential threat: Biden and his big-government party. Vote like your life depended on it, because it actually does.

RogerG

Read more here:

* “Biden calls anti-socialism protesters ‘idiots’ in Illinois stump speech attacking GOP”, Washington Times, Nov. 5, 2022, at https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/nov/5/biden-calls-anti-socialism-protesters-idiots-illin/ .

* “Trump hits DeSantis as ‘Ron DeSanctimonious’ at rally amid 2024 announcement rumors”, Washington Times, Nov. 5, 2022, at https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/nov/5/trump-hits-ron-desantis-ron-desanctimonious-rally-/ .

November 4, 2022November 4, 2022

Real Institutional Racism in the Boardroom

The admissions building at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A trial widely perceived to be a referendum on affirmative action is scheduled to begin Monday. (HADLEY GREEN / The New York Times, file) — The admissions building at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (HADLEY GREEN / The New York Times, file)

Benjamin Disraeli (19th century British politician, Prime Minister, and writer/philosopher) in his book “Sybil, Or the Two Nations” wrote of the deep split of a people into two camps, almost nations, each completely estranged from the other:

“Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws . . . . THE RICH AND THE POOR.”

See the source image — Benjamin Disraeli

For him, the divide was between the rich and the poor, an artifact of a time of much greater hardship. For us, it is between the blue silos of a radical Left cultural ethos and the red hinterlands of the traditions of standards, faith, the rule of law, equality before the law, and popular sovereignty under constitutional checks. The former wishes to overthrow the latter.

In these isolated little blue enclaves, overwhelmingly inner cities and college campuses, the hyper-wealthy and academics can entertain ideological fancies far afield from the lives of the vast majority of people living outside, people who are actually struggling with the daily realities of living and not secure from them by walls, money, and tenured academic freedom.

How could the corporate boardroom – in the past immune – become so enthralled by this revolutionary ethos? The answer lies in the social realities of living in a narrowly confined space of limited interactions. A homogeneous mind incubates in a scene of intermarriage, secluded social engagements in a protective cocoon, and an upbringing that transmits the same campus cultural revolution in these secluded social petri dishes.

los angeles estate — Security gate at a Beverly Hills estate

Adapting Mao’s Long March mythology, Rudy Dutschke, a leader of the German radical Left of the 1960s, advocated a long march through institutions in that 1967 time of troubles of strikes, riots, and massive protests in the West. Rather than tear the institution down, take them over, he said. Well, it happened. Yesteryear’s student radical is today’s tenured college faculty with matriculated mental offspring littered throughout the Fortune 500.

What brings this to mind? Eighty-two American companies expressed their official support for race-based college admissions, loosely referred to as affirmative action, in two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court involving the University of North Carolina and Harvard (see their briefs below). Big corporate players such as Google, Apple, JetBlue, and General Electric produced briefs utilizing the same old neo-Marxist rhetoric of group-conscious oppression. Rhetorically, the table is set for the talisman of “diversity”. Merit is redefined as being a member of the proper race or possessing the proper genitalia and calling it “diversity”. No, this isn’t diversity of opinion. It’s the diversity of immutable characteristics. Competence and a special gnosis, it is assumed, emanates from melanin count and genitalia, not from observable qualifications. It’s preposterous.

The pretzel logic required to make this scheme marketable boggles the mind. In Monday’s hearing before the Supreme Court, defense counsel emphasized the gambit of race as one among many factors but couldn’t escape withering cross examination from Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito and Barrett. The inescapable fact is that at least some admissions will be based on race, and thusly a violation of statute and the Constitutional guarantees of equal protection. Trying to hide race among the weeds doesn’t eliminate the fact that race will be determinative to award advantages to some to the detriment of others not so privileged with the right skin color and genital comportment.

How could they get away with this after a Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment, Brown v. Board of Education, and the various Civil Rights Acts in the long campaign to end the award of benefits and/or disabilities based on race or other immutable factors? The whole enterprise relies on rhetorical legerdemain and a mountain of verbiage in bastardized “studies” to the point that “studies have shown” has gained the reputation as a tipoff for ideological skullduggery. It’s a new Jim Crow favoring the radical Left’s “oppressed”.

And an afront to most people’s practical sense of fairness. There’s a reason why lady justice wears a blindfold.

Not surprisingly given their backgrounds, corporate titans have bought into it. Read the briefs and you’ll find the ritual abuse of “diversity” and “qualified”, as in “Classroom diversity is crucial to producing employable, productive, value-adding citizens in business.” Or, how about the claim that the favoritism produces “a pipeline of highly qualified future workers and business leaders”? “Highly qualified” just became an oxymoron. “Qualification” now means the right melanin count and genitalia.

The whole thing is a legal, moral, and rational trainwreck. To borrow a movie line, “Yes, Virginia, there is institutional racism”, but it’s coming from the folks who brought you The 1619 Project, CRT, the 2020 summer of BLM riots, home appliances, and annual college admission letters. Amazing, the campaign against institution racism was always about furthering institutional racism.

RogerG

Read more here:

* The corporate briefs in Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, and Harvard, can be found at https://www.naacpldf.org/wp-content/uploads/Brief-for-Major-American-Business-Enterprises-Supporting-Respondents-FINAL.pdf .

* An excellent synopsis of the case by Brittany Bernstein can be found at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/dozens-of-major-u-s-companies-urge-supreme-court-to-uphold-race-based-college-admissions/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=next-article&utm_term=first

October 29, 2022October 29, 2022

If a Red Wave Happens, What Next? More Trump?

What’s next after a red wave? If it happens – big “if” – It’ll depend on how the results will be interpreted. Will it be viewed as an endorsement of Trumpism or rejection of a radical-Left Democratic Party or both? Regardless, Trump senses a triumphal return to the White House. That’s “what next”. He shared a clip of Meghan Kelly predicting “He [DeSantis] won’t win against Trump.” Trump attached to the clip, “I agree”. See below.

This guy is running, and with his usual uncouth cockiness. What does he offer? His appeal is encapsulated in “He owns the libs”. His in-your-face style is appealing to a certain type of voter, thus a rabid following of 20-25% of the electorate. But this combative charisma repels as much as it attracts. As such, Trumpism as a political personality is not the stuff of decisive victories. Politics is about addition, not subtraction, and Trump brings both at the same time.

Michael Brandon Dougherty (in many ways a Trump admirer) in National Review Online makes the point that Trump is charisma, not policy. I agree. Trump’s term in office was characterized by management chaos and the farming out most policy initiatives to Congress. Trump is no policy wonk. Other than immigration, issues like tax cuts, deregulation (Congressional Review Act repeals of regulations), and judges were at the behest of, and impossible without, Paul Ryan (House) and Mitch McConnel (Senate). Even “energy independence” and immigration he must share with the party leadership since many of the policy aspects of these issues originated in long-established party platforms and previous Republican congressional actions. In many ways, the country benefitted not necessarily from Trump but from not having a Democrat in the Oval Office to block them.

The Trump return is predicated on an overwhelming view within the party that Trump was cheated (“screwed” in popular Trump parlance) in the 2020 election. The claim is only half right. He claims that he won, but no, no one can say that. Once the ballots entered the many registrar offices for counting, no one can say how they were marked, how they got there, nor where they came from. Indeed, the election procedures in place throughout much of the country were the ones most prone to the kind of fraud that is nearly impossible to prove in court. Tracing a ballot to a fraudulent voter is next to impossible once you bypass the controls of in-person voting with the mass-mailing of ballots. That’s the wrong half of Trump’s indictment. Trump and his backers would be on firmer ground to complain of the mass-mailing of ballots, the use of dirty registration rolls, unsupervised drop boxes, ballot harvesting, provisional ballots, same-day registration, anywhere voting, etc. The most unsecure method of voting that put an end to the secret ballot was used in 2020. That’s the right half of the Trump complaint.

So, did he win? No, because he can’t prove it, no one can. A ballot stripped of its envelope is dropped into a sea of undifferentiated ballots. He should have known, screamed to high heaven when the procedures were jerry-rigged, but saved most of his vituperation after he lost. At this point, he looks and sounds like a petulant child. You want to talk about a huge turn-off?

Trump is so yesteryear. His appeal is yesteryear – “I was cheated” and “own the libs” – and he can only offer us what he has already given us: some very good policies, like many good Republicans, and repellant behavior and mismanagement. So much for the “virtue” of having a vaunted businessman behind the Resolute desk. As the 2022 red wave and 2024 elections recede, if Trump gets the nomination and wins, the memory will quickly wane of the Democrats’ embrace of radical-Left revolution, to be replaced by, once again, X-rated presidential antics.

We – meaning Republicans – have options. Our bench is long. Romney milquetoasts are not the order of the day. A compromise with radical-Left revolution is a semi-radical-Left revolution. Socialism and neo-Marxism – agreed, they are similar – is poison no matter the dose. A spine is required. We have many backboned political leaders but without the boorishness. Republicans have a choice to salve an inflated ego or establish a winning coalition for a decade(s). Trump in his second term can only bring more subtraction than addition.

Please watch the clip. Meghan’s prediction is a warning, not a promise.

Trump just posted this pic.twitter.com/tu9SM72BOu

— Jack Poso (@JackPosobiec) October 27, 2022

RogerG

For more, read here:

* “The Coming Fight over Trumpism: Charisma or Policy?”, Michael Brendon Dougherty, National Review Online, Oct. 28, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/10/the-coming-fight-over-trumpism-charisma-or-policy/.