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Warning! Don’t Box People into Corners.

Coach John Mosley of the East Los Angeles Community College basketball team, and a focus of Netflix’s “Last Chance U: Basketball” (highly recommended), stated, “Rules without relationships are rebellion.” When you think about it, he’s onto something. Rules in the absence of an interpersonal connection can easily be received as a cold and blind force, and frequently are. In a related fashion, I remember counseling young teachers against angling a troubled kid into a corner with no escape because he or she might violently lash out. When rules box people into corners without escape, expect rebellion.

Coach John Mosley of East Los Angeles Community College’s basketball team

The makings of a serious national rupture are happening as I write. The near complete monopoly by the Left in our society’s centers of power and influence is forcing an unpalatable choice upon the many dissenters. Right now, the safety valves of free speech and thought are being closed by the Big Tech oligarchy as the Democratic Party pursues a redesign of elections to keep themselves in power for generations, emasculation of our borders to chronically expand the critical mass of their supporters, redesign of our schools into their indoctrination centers, and removal of the last symbol of citizen self-reliance in the neutering of the Second Amendment. What will the loyal opposition do if this new Borg leaves the people with no recourse? My guess is that it’ll no longer be loyal. Don’t box people into corners.

In a relatively brief span of time, the hegemony of a narrow set of beliefs has descended upon us. For some, the deplatforming of Trump “for life” by the tech oligarchs was the omen of a new Dark Age of absolutist control of thought and conscience. The contradictions are glaring and instructive. Twitter bumps Trump but must be forced by a to Department of Homeland Security to take down a video of her son’s sexual assault. Amazing.

Hardly does Trump deserve much of a defense for some of his actions. I’m not in the Hannity world of Trump-worship. But neither am I in the habit of blinding myself to the first real exercise of raw power to erase a prominent figure from the world stage; though, it’s been happening for quite some time to the less notable. It’s raw power and used in a brazen manner.

Mark Zuckerberg famously stated before Congress that Silicon Valley is an “extremely left-leaning place”. He’s got that right. “Left-leaning” means a techno-utopian ideal of gauzy socialist-egalitarian, libertine, and greenie bliss brought into existence by universal techno-connectivity. It’s certainly a way for them to feel good about themselves by the self-elevation of the importance of their work. For the people who aren’t caught up in this romper room of the mind, they get cancelled.

Brandon Eich

It’s unapologetic censorship, like what happened to Brandon Eich, the brief (for 11 days in 2014) CEO of Mozilla. He was “forced” out by something loosely called the “Mozilla community” – a more accurate term would be “mob” – for daring to support traditional marriage (2008’s Prop 8 in California). Key to any mob’s “cancellation” is the recognition that there aren’t other legitimate points of view to be tolerated.

An excursion into the functioning of tech central’s totalitarian mind was provided by Forbes magazine in 2014 when it republished a Quora piece by Ian McCullough, “consumer tech”, of San Francisco, on the forced resignation of Eich. McCullough’s defense of the disposal of Eich pivoted on two claims: Eich’s opinion is beyond the pale and an extremely odd notion of freedom of speech.

Unbeknownst to McCullough, the unpopularity of opinions frequently depends on location. Eich’s opinions on marriage aren’t fashionable in Zuckerberg’s “left-leaning place”, and in McCullough’s San Francisco – thus, beyond the pale – but neither are McCullough’s and those of Zuckerberg’s left-leaning place as popular in the vast stretches of flyover country. There is a difference, though: McCullough’s support for gay marriage won’t by itself result in his forced resignation if he stated his views in Arkansas, at least as far as I can determine. If it does happen, there’d be a groundswell of opposition for making a person’s employment status contingent on rectitude with an area’s popular slant on a contentious issue. No, that kind of thing is routinely reserved for Zuckerberg’s “left-leaning place”.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, testifying before the Senate on April 10, 2018.

In that “left-leaning place”, fundamental rights such as freedom of speech is contorted out of all recognition. In McCullough’s twisted mind, the freedom of speech of a mass can be used to intimidate a single person’s exercise of free speech. In a way, ironically, he’s right. Every single person in the mob has freedom of speech individually, but the bigger question involves self-control. Ought we to practice it in that manner? Arkansas is much more into “ought” and Zuckerberg’s “left-leaning place” is all into gang-style suppression; that’s the difference.

And even more importantly, does the First Amendment have any practical relevance if an opinion is more popular in other locales but is unpopular in the little node where we find the oligarchic power of Big Tech to blot it out everywhere? By what legitimate right should one locale and their nest of opinions have the power to censor the opinions about traditional institutions in the communities that hold these traditions dear? McCullough, no one should have that power. No one, not you nor anyone like you, or me for that matter.

Today, Big Tech has the power and they use it. It does so by banning information that doesn’t comport with their socio-political prejudices. Look at what happened to The New York Post’s Biden family corruption story just before the election. In an informal, or formal (?), alliance of interest, Big Media and Big Tech shut out the story. No such forbearance was granted Trump regarding the grand smear that went by the name of “Russia collusion”. The fiction had a 3-year lease on life despite the fact that it was predicated on a demonstrably proven pack of Democrat-funded lies.

Another alliance member – the upper echelons of DC’s permanent Fed Administrative State – were giddy at the possibility of dragging Trump through the mud and only ended up with a two-year $40 million probe that was led by a doddering Robert Mueller and his band of partisan hacks who produced . . . nothing.

What did we get for $40 million? We got 3 years of hair-on-fire, a perpetuation of the smear, unsuccessful impeachments, and conservative websites hidden on page 5 of a Google search. Like the Biden corruption story, uncooperative sites go down the memory hole. Of course, initially, Google feigns that it’s due to their software “protocols” or “algorythms”. Then they dropped all pretense by calling it “misinformation”. It’s still a crock.

Big Tech’s “misinformation” campaign targeted the pesky Breitbart media operation. Breitbart News noticed clicks on Google dropped 99% from 2016 to 2020. Their entire website was given the NYPost treatment.

And if that’s not enough, complete platforms were deplatformed. Parler, the social media competitor to Twitter, was destroyed by Big Tech’s near-Gang of Eight. Like Trump and Breitbart, it was steamrolled by the big wheels of Big Tech. Read this quackery of a write-up on Wikipedia:

“Parler is an American alt-tech microblogging and social networking service. It has a significant user base of Donald Trump supporters, conservatives, conspiracy theorists, and right-wing extremists. Posts on the service often contain far-right content, antisemitism, and conspiracy theories such as QAnon.”

Not a word about the charlatanism of the Green New Deal and the buffoonery of its eco-apocalypse and the 30-something adolescent mind from New York’s 14th congressional district behind much of it. Not a word about the potential for descent into Venezuela-land from socialism’s new found popularity. Not a word about the buffoonery of “settled science” since real science means a real scientific method that is operative all the time. Not a word about the provable unsustainability of “sustainable energy”. Not a word about the scientific backlash to the “settled science” of Fauci and World Health Organization. The paradox is that the most frequent purveyors of “misinformation” are the people combatting “misinformation”. Franz Kafka looking at our time would see abundant evidence of life imitating art, his art.

What will people do if they come to conclude that there is no recourse to submission? If the Democrats have their way, elections will have the legitimacy of loan sharking and only keep the Socialist Revolutionary Party (Democratic Party) cemented in power for the foreseeable future, thereby proving the Marxist revolutionary’s maxim: one man, one vote, one time. Voices are to be silenced by a formal unity of purpose among entrenched elites at the commanding heights of our society. The kids are to receive no respite in the assault on their minds from every quarter in entertainment and the schools. Traditional institutions and the morality of self-defense are systematically upended. For those standing aghast at this turn of events, some may sadly seek redress in more violent means, no other option having been left open to them. Boxing people into corners has dangerous consequences.

Friedrich Hayek had many reasons for the failure of socialism, but one was the “knowledge problem”. Big government’s attempt to manage the many affairs of its people requires a level of knowledge that no one person or small group of individuals can possess. Crap happens and human existence enters a dark place.

Coach Mosley and his team experienced the consequences in the state whose governing elites are infatuated with government’s top-down management of its residents, but aren’t, and can’t be, as knowledgeable and wise as they think themselves to be. After completing a 29-1 season and surviving the first round of the state championship tournament, and after loading on the bus to travel to West Hills College in Lemoore for the Final Four championship round, Coach Mosley received a phone call to announce the cancellation of the tournament due to COVID. It was part of a state of California lockdown that proved to be no more efficacious than states who left their residents free to live a more normal life. A season of hard work, trials, and tribulations was ended just as the prize for going through all the trouble was near at hand. And it was all for naught.

The spirit of resistance in California, April 2020. Protesters to the lockdown blocked traffic around the state’s capitol in Sacramento.

Coach Mosley properly acceded to the state’s decision. What else could he do? But what’ll happen when the one-party state of California is transferred to DC and the one party blocks all avenues of civil opposition to the ruling ideology? The Democrats are playing with fire.

CULVER CITY, CALIFORNIA – MARCH 15: A man walks with a stroller as people stand in line outside the Martin B. Retting, Inc. guns store on March 15, 2020 in Culver City, California. The spread of Coronavirus (COVID-19) has prompted some Americans to line up for supplies in a variety of stores. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

RogerG

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At Least Someone in DC Still Believes in a First Amendment

Justice Clarence Thomas

In case you haven’t heard, Uzuegbunam v. Preczewski was just decided at the Supreme Court. Wow, in a 8-1 decision, with Justice Clarence Thomas writing for the majority, the college woke universe was dealt a blow! In a nutshell, as a result of this decision, these bastions of the left’s ministry of truth are skating on thin ice when they attempt to muzzle free speech. It’s about time!

It all started at Georgia Gwinnett College. The College, a new addition (2006) to the Georgia public university system, is modern in more than its buildings. It’s thoroughly modern in its wokeness.

An evangelical student, Chike Uzuegbunam, tried to disseminate literature and engage with fellow students but was smacked down by the school’s Politburo. Check this out: He was told that he must submit an application for a permit three days in advance and then he is to be penned in one of two “free-speech zones”. These so-called zones have a calendar and geographic dimension. The pens are only open 18 hours a week. On a Friday, the clock starts ticking at 11 a.m. and stops at 1 p.m.

Chike Uzuegbunam before the US Supreme Court

That’s not all. After he got his permit and went to the appointed spot at the appointed time, he was stopped by campus cops. They were enforcing the school’s ban on “disturb[ing] the peace and/or comfort of person(s)”. It seems that hearing about the resurrected Christ is harmful to the school’s Wicca followers and anyone else in full rebellion mode against the most prevalent faith in the country, like the majority in the faculty lounge.

He sued, and the Alliance Defending Freedom took up his cause. Here’s an organization worth contributing to. You can donate here.

My only question at this point concerns the campus cops. How can they in good conscience enforce these obviously horrendous administrative decrees? I’m reminded of the defense at the Nuremberg Tribunals in 1946: We were following orders. Are these uniformed personnel willing to commit disgusting acts for a secure job with good pay and benefits? At least for some, it must have dawned on them that this is wrong, clearly, unmistakably wrong. Yet they still carried it out. Shame on them. Shame on them.

I’d be interested in hearing their defense.

RogerG

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On Disunion

Illustration courtesy of Roman Genn, National Review.

Will we have a disunion? Yes, maybe, or somewhere in-between, with plenty of caveats. Sounds indefinite, as most sober projections of this nature should be.

Well, I’ll have to admit that some sort of disunion is taking place. All the evidence is pointing that way. Will it be a hard or soft disunion? A “hard” one would be some kind of constitutional restructure, or a complete break like the old Czechoslovakia into the Czech and Slovak Republics. The “soft” variety entails some kind of unofficial consensual agreement to live and let live. I’m of a mind to reject the former, but the latter raises some interesting possibilities.

Even more, is the talk of disunion part of a passing phase? All of this could be meaningless chatter. That’s an even more interesting possibility.

Evidence of disunion is all about, though. Some saw it coming at the dawn of the new millennium. Terry Teachout and Gertrude Himmelfarb back then wrote of it as “Republican Nation, Democratic Nation” (Teachout) or “one nation, two cultures” (Himmelfarb). Then, Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing crowned the idea four years later in their book, The Big Sort. Bishop and Cushing noticed that in-migration data showed like-minded people seek to live around other like-minded people. Are you paying attention New York and California?

The hard left turn of the Democratic Party is driving the talk. No, it’s not because the right has suddenly resuscitated Mussolini’s Black Shirts. Policies, laws, and actions in deep blue urban areas and states are forcing many people to make a choice between the comfort of their place of birth and desire to escape the one-party cultural revolution of the chic cliques that dominate their state or municipality.

At root in these havens of the ruling revolutionary thought is a set of prejudices about others not so willing to adopt the hedonism and its concomitant authoritarian rule, people who are loosely defined as traditionally inclined. The libertinism shows as a rejection of standards: traditional morality, the physical determinants of nature (DNA, chromosomes, biological limits, etc.), the elements of merit, etc. Oxymoronically, lying next to this idea of the free-floating individual is the ready submission to the aristocracy of sheepskin-wielding “experts”. Not all “experts”, mind you, just those who feed the libertines’ prejudices. It’s a terribly selective cadre of gurus.

It’s not as if the cool exponents of the philosophy actually live what they preach. The urban professional types, and the uber-rich that rose from their ranks, that dominate the ruling pack, get married and instill self-discipline in their young as Charles Murray so clearly observed in his research. They carry on like Horatio Alger even as they denounce the guy, which proves that consistency is not a readily observable human quality.

When they’re spouting “It’s good for thee but not for me”, they may be onto something. That something is the intuition that at least they and their children can’t prosper under anything goes. The public schools must keep their monopoly at all costs, as their votes and campaign donations proclaim, as long as elite prep schools are open for their young scions. The result is a descent into chaos for many inner-city schools, which matches the chaos in the surrounding neighborhoods that was engineered by bountiful entitlements and a pervasive ridicule of law and order.

It’s starting to ooze out: neither they, nor can anyone live this way. Yet, their indulged offspring fill the ranks of BLM and Antifa to make everyone else’s life a living hell. Their political activism produces permissive DA’s who won’t enforce quality-of-life crimes so the quality-of-life rots. Simple things like roads and the electrical grid crumble as their leaders pursue crusades against the chimerical “systemic racism” and for a greenie utopia. Urban landscapes each day look more like something out of Mad Max or John Carpenter’s “Escape from New York”. Indeed, many New Yorkers have already joined Snake Plissken (Russell) in the flight from hell. Florida, here we come! Life imitates art.

Where are they heading? It’s to more than Florida. The refugees are going to places where gun ownership isn’t treated as a mental illness, where churches have tendency to be full on Sunday, and where taxes are low, housing is cheap, and jobs aplenty. Sure, some may regret not having a beach nearby, but those boardwalks are beginning to take on the look of the rest of the dystopia anyway. The escapees won’t be missing much.

Some commentators have devoted much ink on extremists at the fringe of both sides. In their reading of the political landscape, the left has its Antifa/BLM to go along with the dynamic duo of Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi with their critical-race-theory/systemic racism sermonizing. The right has the ill-defined QAnon and Arian Nation look-alikes. But the two fringes aren’t anywhere near equivalent; the right deserves a 10-handicap. The DiAngelo/Kendi crowd and their Antifa and BLM militias are much more deeply entrenched in our critical institutions than the QAnon devotees and Proud Boys ever were. The lefty militias are perfumed into respectability, DiAngleo and Kendi get rich, and nearly every other large and powerful organization has their own offshoot of the ministry of propaganda. It’s an egregious false equivalence and an affront to sound reason to pretend otherwise.

No other words describe our current divide than revolution (left) and counterrevolution (right), a classic civil war. The two stances are deeply divided into mutually exclusive sets of values. A commissariat-driven holy war to impose equality of result for fashionable identities versus a legal regime of equal opportunity is only part of the story. Another angle is the vague spirituality of my “personal truth” versus the certainties of altar and hearth. Still another one is the exaltation of two n’s – narcissism and nihilism – versus self-restraint and our heritage of compassion. Still another one is the impulse to tear it all down and build anew according to someone’s fanciful conception of heaven on earth versus the inclination to build upon the glories of the past. These approaches are mutually exclusive. Where is there room for compromise if one side, the Left, is hell-bent on forcibly foisting their worldview on the other?

Don’t take solace in the natural live-and-let-live of federalism. The Left from its perch on the cultural commanding heights is feverishly trying to centralize power in DC. Centralization will bury subsidiarity. The principle of subsidiarity embraces the value of local and regional control as the most efficacious form of governance. It holds that on most matters the more local, the better. Well, that’s on the chopping block in a host of ways.

The US capitol and surrounding buildings in DC.

Will sufficient numbers of people push back? That’ll be hard to achieve once the Left’s dream of legitimizing vote fraud is rigidly imposed on the entire country. At this point, elections as the corrective will be effectively neutered. Opposition will be forced into submission or the various lanes of disobedience, civil or violent. When elections seem to have no meaning, eruptions of less palatable methods of opposition will be more frequent. History is littered with examples.

Watch that space on HR1, the Left’s grab bag of “reforms” making its way through Congress to remove vote fraud from the category of a crime and reconfigure it as a legitimate get-out-the-vote strategy. If it passes, those storm clouds from Mordor will have reached your home.

RogerG

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He Made Conservatism Cool

I was there at the beginning, the birth of a luminary. I was a grad student at California State University, Chico, about 90 miles north of Sacramento, Ca. Not a fan of talk radio, occasionally I’d pick up the AM radio signal of Sacramento’s KFBK for news and information. Serendipitously, I happened to be tuning in when the station was auditioning a guest host after their headliner had been forced to resign after making an ethnic joke. The replacement was funny, entertaining, and the style was light and beckoning. He stayed. He was Rush Limbaugh.

My wife remembers me coming home from the campus one day and laughing. I told her of the funniest radio program that I discovered from just cruising the dial. It was the beginning of Talent on Loan from God.

From where did the star of Rush arise? Limbaugh as the beneficiary of a generational rethink that was taking place in the late 1970’s. He came at the right time.

Men of the radical left raise their fists during the “Days of Rage” anti-Vietnam War demonstrations organized by the militant Weathermen in Chicago. Oct. 11, 1969.

Again, in an earlier incarnation as a grad student, this time at UC Santa Barbara in the late 1970’s – I seemed to be in perpetual grad-student mode at that time in my life – I attended a campus open-air talk in 1977 or ’78 on the state of national affairs. Hyper-inflation, the humiliation of the fall of South Vietnam and Southeast Asia, the attendant slaughters and holocausts, and the sinking mood in a seemingly impotent country were current events, not the third-to-last chapter in a high school History textbook. When questions were allowed at the end of the talk, I remember shouting a rhetorical query on the cause of our malaise, “What about our rampant consumerism?” That shows where my mind was, as it was for many of my age at that time. It was nonsense, absolute nonsense.

Open-air anti-War speeches, UC Santa Barbara, 1970
Anti-War protest, UC Santa Barbara, 1970.
The 1970 Isla Vista riots, adjacent to the UC Santa Barbara campus, with the Bank of America building burning in the background behind the line of Sheriff deputies. The campus had quieted considerably by 1977 when I arrived as a grad student.

The horrifying scenes of the fall of Saigon and the ghoulish totalitarian genocides coming out of the place that we abandoned, Southeast Asia, shocked me. My philosophical transition started. I began to discover a new counterculture, one long in existence and counterpoised to the left/liberal Ivy League hegemony, an older relative of the smothering orthodoxy that dominates our cultural commanding heights today. Milton and Rose Friedman, the Chicago School of Economics, Thomas Sowell, Arthur Laffer, George Gilder, Jean Kirkpatrick, Jean-François Revel, and National Review soon followed. The candidacy of Ronald Reagan politically encapsulated the trend. And for the average lunch-pale man and woman, there was Rush Limbaugh.

Limbaugh became a cultural event. He was the right’s SNL. His stunts offended the liberals in the newsroom at KFBK. In their stunted minds, conservatives were dour people of mundane prospects. But with this guy, they were parodied and they didn’t like it. Still don’t.

Rush standing before a Sacramento billboard that was paid by someone who obviously disliked Limbaugh. Limbaugh was at KFBK from 1983-88.

From his perch in the studio, for instance, he followed the progress of a coast-to-coast nuclear freeze march that was meant to stymie Reagan’s attempt to counter the Soviet’s buildup of nuclear missiles in Europe. Limbaugh would find their location, call someone in the town at random, and ask them about the marchers. He’d crack jokes with the resident about the lefty marchers traipsing through his or her town. It was great radio, and enough to cause you to stop what you were doing and listen.

Who can forget the Rush dictionary? There were “feminazis”, women that he characterized as not able to get a date with a man, nor wanting one. There was the story of watching a woman “farding” in her car. He took awhile to explain that “farding” meant the application of makeup. The Kennedys were a rich vein of humor, particularly Ted who had a hard time finishing a statement without blubbering. Limbaugh did to liberals what liberals have been doing to the rest of the country from their monopoly perch of their own Versailles that stretched from Manhattan to Hollywood to the Ivy League.

And then there was Dan’s Bake Sale in 1993. It started as a conversation with a caller, Dan, who said he couldn’t afford the Limbaugh Letter because his wife didn’t like Rush. Rush borrowed his idea of a bake sale to pay off the national debt and suggested the idea to Dan. The idea caught fire among “dittoheads” and before anyone knew it, 65,000 people gathered in Ft. Collins, Co. Think of it as Rushstock ’93. Rush was rockin’ fun.

Rush was fun and the Left was exposed as killjoys. The left dished it out but couldn’t take it. There’s been a role reversal: the liberal establishment and their media mandarins have become the “Church Lady” without the church. Snowflakes spitting and fuming and disrupting anyone who can’t countenance their inanities were bound to produce real time material for the lively mind of someone like Rush. In those early days, Rush could take these cranks without any self-awareness and turn them into entertainment, and the object of a little deserving ridicule as well.

The “drive-bys” still harbor resentment for receiving what they have been dishing out for half a century. Nicholas Kristof, New York Times columnist, on today’s Hugh Hewitt show couldn’t bring himself to say anything positive about Rush when given the opportunity. Crickets. Wikipedia devotes an entire section to his personal problems (divorces and addiction to pain killers) and another one trying to impose the opinions of “fact-checkers” over his. This isn’t fact-checking; it’s opinion cancellation. Julia Wick, Los Angeles Times staff writer, came out with this gem, “… he helped bring conspiracy theories and racist, misogynistic vitriol into mainstream political discourse ….” They hate him for laying bare their pretentiousness. The emperors and empresses have no clothes.

Rush, RIP. We’ll miss you.

If you’ve got time, grab a cup of coffee and take a glimpse of Talent on Loan from God: his 2009 speech to CPAC.

RogerG

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Playing with Words, Playing with Minds, Playing with Fire

Insurrection: noun; an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government. It is a violent revolt against an oppressive authority. Insurrection is different from riots and offenses connected with mob violence. (USLegal Dictionary at definitions.uslegal.com)

Miriam-Webster definition of “insurrection”: noun; an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government. Synonyms include rebellion, revolution, uprising, revolt, mutiny.

The word “insurrection” is crossing the lips and keyboards of more and more of the entrenched and telegenic punditry in the increasingly and ideologically monolithic chattering classes. Why? Why this particular word choice? One possible answer lies with the desire to expunge dissent without having to deal with the heretics to the emerging group mind. It’s happening as I write.

Add government power to monolithic control over expression and you come close to the adjective “Orwellian” (as in George Orwell, as in “1984”). Orwell’s dystopia could quickly become ours.

Speaking of “triggering”, the January 6 event is the trip wire for using “insurrection” in a form of word manipulation to enforce ideological conformity. A mob breaks into the capitol and suddenly it’s an attempted coup. A “mob” is instantly translated into “insurrectionists”; “riot” is consonant with “revolt”; and “mayhem” is converted into “treason” – and this after a summer of BLM and Antifa rioting in cities across America. None of the word pairings connote anything nice but they are useful if the goal is to advance a monopoly of power to ram an unpopular agenda down the throats of the American people.

January 6 protest on Capitol steps.

If it was anything, the January 6 episode was a brawl and not an attempted overthrow of the U.S. government. The malefactors were not anything like the Bolsheviks planning their October 1917 coup in Petrograd’s Smolny Institute. There was little if any orchestration, even though a few were clearly bent on violence. There was more coordination among BLM and Antifa hoodlums in Seattle, Portland, Kenosha, Minneapolis, New York City, and LA than the followers of chief war paint (Jake Angeli) in his buffalo headdress milling around the Senate chambers. He’ll get the book thrown at him while BLM thugs get kneeling gestures, incoherent defenses, and donations to their defense funds. It’s preposterous.

Democrats, let’s drop the preening on a contrived moral high ground. The duplicity and hypocrisy among our so-called “social betters” are rancidly resplendent for all to see. Cutting to the quick, the guilty deserve a fair punishment . . . and leave the rest of us alone.

Something more insidious is afoot. The concentration of troops in the capitol resembles Gen. Schwarzkopf’s massing of forces for his famous “left hook” to decimate the Iraqi army in Kuwait in Gulf War I. Why the show of force for an inauguration? I suspect that it’s much more than protection. It’s a visible reminder in order to paint the millions of dissenting Americans as moral outlaws. Some of the troops showing up in DC were indoctrinated with fears of “white supremacists” in scenes reminiscent of the brainwashing given to Red Chinese troops before they stormed Tiananmen Square in 1989. Will the National Guardsmen be given live ammunition also? And all this after the ruling party issued broad stand-down orders this summer in many of our major cities so they could be left to burn. The duplicity and hypocrisy among our so-called “social betters” are rancidly resplendent for all to see.

Is this appropriate in a citizen republic?

If you’ll recall, Inauguration Day 2017 was treated remarkably different by our media oligarchs. Remember the Women’s March and the cries of “Me Too”, some speakers describing dreams of blowing up the White House? The next three years treated America to disclosures of a similarly aligned administrative state conniving to deprive a candidate of the office that he fairly won, and then embroil his presidency in stonewalling and impeachment. Some donkey party mouths, like Maxine Waters, called for public abuse and incivility for officeholders of the other party. Where was the outrage back then?

The Democrats of today’s social-revolutionary Democratic Party are sitting atop a pile of kerosene-soaked kindling. Their agenda is simply too repugnant to a huge block of the American public. The situation has gone beyond a mere difference of opinion. When one side sees the other side as a threat, all bets are off. The ruling party’s platform is so extreme that a softening of the edges will placate few. I’m very fearful that an already unhinged fringe will resort to more extreme forms of opposition as an answer to an extreme agenda.

So, playing with words is playing with minds, but it also is playing with fire. Please, Biden and company, don’t stoke it. Please, the unhinged among the dissenters, don’t head to the arsenals. Find other means to express your discord. For the rest of us in the opposition party, get organized to do to Schumer/Pelosi/Biden and company what they did to McConnel/Trump and company for all of Trump’s term. And by all means, exploit the scandalous mail-in voting system to the hilt.

Come to think of it, we’d all be better off if the social-revolutionary party scrapped the revolutionary laundry list and for cooler heads to prevail. Sounds good to me. Anyway, I wonder how many people actually voted for a socialist revolution? I suspect few, very few.

RogerG

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“The Spirit of Resistance to Government”, Thomas Jefferson

Trump rally on Jan. 6, 2021
Thomas Jefferson, 1787

If you of the revolutionary-Left persuasion are not too busy trashing Thomas Jefferson, or toppling his statue, you might take time to ponder his words. In the end, he’ll drive you crazy and into uncontrollable bouts of more rage. Check out these words.

In the wake of Shays’ Rebellion of 1786-7, Jefferson saw something benign in it. In a letter to Abigail Adams, later to James Madison, he wrote, “I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere”.

A depiction of Daniel Shays
Armed farmers began appearing at courthouses shutting down proceedings to prevent foreclosures on their farms.

In a letter to John Adams’s son-in-law, “God forbid that we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion”. If the people remained quiet for too long, he claimed, “… it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty”. Jefferson wrote that if it should cost some lives it was still worth it: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure”.

Could these words be appropriated by Antifa or BLM? Well, they could if you possessed the mental sophistication of a child, which Antifa, BLM, race hustlers, and the barkers in the Democratic Party exhibit daily. Shays wasn’t fighting to create the collectivist tyranny of a Green New Deal, racial reparations, racial political exhibitionism, and a Constitutional order to keep themselves in power for a generation or more. He wanted relief from government.

There’s good reason, if you think about it, for the halfwits in The Squad, BLM, and Antifa to target Jefferson. He was a slaveholder, an identity that caused anguish for the rest of his life. He was also a proud exponent of liberty: the freedom of the individual to live a life of virtue and choose their own path of reward. The radical Left in whatever guise – socialism, communism, Antifa, BLM, the Democratic Party platform, etc. – is a movement to shackle one population through a powerful government of commissars to allegedly deliver benefits to another. The reality is a shackle for everybody. They’d be better off quoting Marx, not Jefferson.

UNSPECIFIED – CIRCA 1865: Karl Marx (1818-1883), philosopher and German politician. (Photo by Roger Viollet Collection/Getty Images)

I’m reminded of Jefferson’s words as I watched Wednesday’s mob storm the capitol. Honestly, I have as much trouble with his words pre-riot as I do post. But the event presents a clear warning for today’s power-hungry collectivists: the ghost of Daniel Shays is buried deep in the American psyche. Pushed too far, people will march on DC as they did on Springfield, Mass., in 1787.

Once again, I’m not advocating it. I’m predicting it. Pray to God that cooler heads prevail.

RogerG

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The Beginning of the End?

Events are moving fast. In the space of less than a year, the radical Left has moved from a few dark, dank alleys of American politics to the cusp of ramming their socialist wokeness down the throats of every American in every state and territory. Most frightening of all, this is coming as Red China is rising. How will this agenda sit with most sober Americans if it takes on the force of law? Accept, submit, or resist? Now, that’s hard to say, Wednesday’s events notwithstanding. The speed of it all is frightening to behold.

The dire straits that we find ourselves is unique, with the possible exception of the 1850’s. The federal legislature narrowly leans left; the Supreme Court tilts center-right; and the new executive will be the locus of much of the Left’s aggression. We’ve had these kinds of divisions before, but never before have we experienced an entire major political party leap so dramatically in the direction of the neo-revolutionary Left. This donkey party is no longer the place for a Truman, Adlai Stevenson, Eleanor Roosevelt’s originally-conceived Union for Democratic Action, Scoop Jackson, the anti-communist leaders of Big Labor (Walter Reuther, A. Philip Randolph, Philip Murray, et al), etc., if they were alive today.

Harry Truman, John Sparkman, and Adlai Stevenson August 12, 1952.
The Squad.

As it would turn out, organized socialism waned as a force in American political life not due to rejection of its beliefs, but because many of its beliefs would be resuscitated and eventually sucked into today’s Democratic Party under many guises: critical race theory, systemic racism, environmental extremism, “diversity”, and woke ideology. There’s no need for an official socialist revolutionary party. We’ve already got one in the form of the modern Democratic Party. This situation makes our divisions entirely new, much more serious, and not analogous to any previous period.

What’s coming down the pike? Already, HR 4, racial reparations, is ready to be dumped into the congressional hopper. In addition, if yesterday’s Biden/Harris press conference is any indication, a war on political opposition is in the offing. Political resistance will be branded “domestic terrorism”, a tactic remarkably similar to the Bolshevik hunts for “wreckers”, “terrorists”, and “kulaks”. The irony of all ironies is that these same people were silent as Antifa and BLM lit up cities across the country. This will be an ideological assault meant to enforce conformity.

A trial of “kulaks” during Stalin’s forced collectivization campaign, 1929.

That isn’t the end of it. The law enforcement and legal apparatus of the executive branch will be run by “diversity” zealots. That means that a campaign against nebulous “crimes” such as “hate crimes” will turn American life into a society of informers, with everyone everywhere looking over their shoulder to see if an oversensitive ear heard an innocuous but untoward remark and off they will be whisked to be questioned and fired, maybe prosecuted. Personnel is policy, so watch the names being put forward as our new commissars.

The newly empowered firebrands in Congress, and zealots under Biden and his sidekick, Harris, will be energetic in the erection of race-consciousness with force of law. It’s bad news if you’re white, male, Asian, or a “person of color” who can’t accept the Party program. If you’re young, on the margin of academic performance, and one of the disfavored, set your sights on a trade school, community college, or State U . . . if you’re lucky. The slots in the highly-prized institutions will be filled by the favored. The same will be true throughout Big Law, Big Business, Big Foundations, Big anything. Call it reverse Jim Crow.

That’s not the end of it. Central planning will migrate from the hapless and defunct Soviet Union to DC. To enforce the “diversity” decrees, a politically useful brand of “civil rights”, and to get you out of your car, job, suburban home, and live according to the dictates of the Squad, an all-encompassing state apparatus will be staffed with soulless die-hards – the hard face of utopia. The Green New Deal is Soviet central planning. Period.

And, just think, I haven’t got to the Electoral College, threats to the Supreme Court, or the neutering of the Second Amendment. With the demise of the Electoral College, red-state influence in the choice of chief executive will be shunted to the side as the presidency will come to reflect LA, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, Atlanta, Baltimore, Detroit, New York City, and the faculty lounges. An intimidated Court will not be a stopgap. FDR showed that threats can bend the Court to the president’s will. The crushing of the Second Amendment will prove that a disarmed citizenry is a very pliable one. No obstacle there. The path is laid bare for the full implementation of the revolution.

If any opposition remains to slip out into the public square, Big Media and Big Tech will be there to crush it. We’re already seeing it. “Deplatforming” is the new censorship. Young techie lefties who overwhelmingly man the monitors of Big Tech’s social media organs will be there to label disagreeable speech “violent” and thus be silenced. Google and Apple will squash any remaining outlets of free speech, as they are currently doing to Parler if it doesn’t play along. Try and get the Parler app on the Google and Apple app stores. Free speech is in the process of being flattened.

This is what happens when a monoculture dominates the cultural commanding heights of a nation. An excursion from today’s Big-anything all the way to the halls of academia is exhibiting a frightening sameness, a revolutionary-Left sameness.

It’s developing before our eyes. America is an idea nation. Other nations are for the most part ethno-national in nature. Their existence doesn’t hang from the fine thread of an idea. Once that idea is undermined – something the powerful and influential are in the process of doing – the glue of the nation is compromised. Our nation is a very delicate thing.

People will notice the threat and some will be motivated to take action. How far will they go? I hope not very, but my hopes may not be the reality. Right now, opposition to the monoculture is being boxed into a corner. Some will seek to stanch the danger by working within the system; others will seek remedies outside. Some states not so enthralled with the Party and its program may get organized to resist the monoculture’s DC behemoth. Sadly, violent eruptions and disunion may be in our future. Forces in the Democratic Party are trying to take the whole country to a place that parts of it will not and cannot accept. If the monoculture forces the issue, all bets are off.

Radical Left revolutions are ugly things. The rank and file in federal law enforcement and the armed forces may have a decision to make about whether they want to participate in the ugly thing. Do they want to be part of a radical Left revolution? Do they wish to be the secret police for a monoculture’s doctrines? Just as rapidly as a radical Left revolution is upon us, people may be forced to choose sides equally as rapid.

Democratic Party, please come to your senses. The country’s existence is at stake whether you realize it or not.

For me, my hope doesn’t lie with a change in heart of the revolutionaries. Our constitutional structure may save us. May. The revolutionary party’s hold is tenuous. Seven seats separate Kevin McCarthy from the speakership. The Senate Democrats need VP Harris and revolutionary unanimity to run roughshod. On such a narrow thread is the Court free from court-packing. The very thing that pissed off 19th and early 20th century progressives may save us: separation of powers . . . if the militants can be held at bay for two years.

The real threat comes from the zealots under Biden and his sidekick, Harris. The executive branch can do a lot of damage all by themselves. Let’s see if their actions will be enough to tear the country asunder and pave the way for Red Chinese hegemony.

I sincerely hope that my pessimism will be proven wrong.

RogerG

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The Law as an Ass (Idiot)

In Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Mr. Bumble, when informed that the law places him in charge of his wife, responded by saying, “If the law supposes that, the law is an ass–an idiot.”

While listening to yesterday’s Hugh Hewitt radio program on podcast, that thought came to mind. The whole show was rightfully focused on Wednesday’s mob assault on the capitol. Hewitt’s justified and unequivocal condemnation of the rioters is founded on a bedrock of our civilization: the rule of law. But what happens when the “’law is an ass”, like the recently contrived 2020 edicts governing our elections?

The fact is, law has not always been a bulwark against injustice. We are flawed – past and present and future – and it shows in our laws. In the 19th century, we had a Fugitive Slave Law. After federal troops withdrew from the former Confederacy in the 1870’s, we saw the imposition of other laws in the form of Jim Crow. Other laws are being proposed to advance abortion even after birth in some cases. We can have the “rule of law” and also have wholesale barbarity.

Incidentally, early 20th century Germany was fastidious about cloaking their actions in law. When their invasion of Belgium in 1914 faced scattered resistance among the Belgian population, the German general staff issued general orders to conduct reprisals. Almost 24,000 civilians were killed, many of them executed. Towns and cities were put to the torch such as the beautiful university town of Leuven. All were justified in German law. As long as there is a law, so they reasoned, all is excused as proper. It’s a concept that would reach full flower in the Holocaust.

The destruction of Leuven, Belgium, by the German army in late August 1914.
A depiction of German atrocities in Belgium in 1914, also known as the “Rape of Belgium”.

See, the law can be used to hide great evil. But that’s not the end of it.

Not all law should be lumped with those monstrosities. Laws clearly tied to the protection of life and property are absolutely required to avoid Hobbes’s warning of life outside the law being “solitary, nasty, brutish, and short”. Wednesday’s rioters should be pursued for prosecution, as should the Antifa and BLM mobs of this past summer.

Though, we must realize that there is an important difference between Wednesday’s and this past summer’s crimes. Wednesday was a singular incident; Antifa and BLM are long-running insurrectionary movements. Broad cynicism develops when powerful voices condemn one and excuse the other. Cynicism is a corrosive element for any republic, as it was for the Roman Republic of antiquity.

Portland Antifa rioter with raised clenched fist next to a dumpster fire from this past summer.

Cynicism about our basic institutions appears to be running at a fever pitch. The excuse-making for the summer’s riots, the blatant hypocrisy about them and the pandemic decrees, the wholesale destruction of many people’s futures in the lockdowns and school closures, and the pandemic being used to construct a third world-style election system contributed to the enflamed passions. Such elections engender disrespect for the results when the bulk are mail-in votes (over 60%, even more in certain states). It’s enough for an impulsive president to cry “foul” and his followers to storm the capitol building.

The election processes were an “ass”, and the “rule of law” provides cover for it. We should be able to condemn Wednesday’s thugs and admit that massive mail-in voting was a huge mistake. I suspect that the Dems will accept the former but push the latter (mail-in voting) into federal law. It’s part of their well-established campaign to nearly eliminate vote verification and election integrity. Expect more of this anger, or apathy as people drop out of the system because of a lack of faith in it. Either way, we would be in danger of repeating the demise of the Roman Republic.

Many of our laws are “asses”, and so might be the people authoring them.

RogerG

** Also on my Facebook page.

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Watch Out, America! Here It comes.

Ossoff, Warnock, and Biden from earlier in the campaign.

How responsibly will the Democrats run the central government? Big question. I’m pessimistic. They are likely to win the two Georgia Senate seats. Georgia is quickly becoming a mess. Only a mess could produce two radical-left Senators. Now, America, await the coming storm.

A few observations about the post-Georgia state of play are in order: one is an observation about America in general; two concern causes for the result last night; and one a possible awful outcome. Taken together, 2021 could well be another disastrous year for the country.

First, America is sorting itself out geographically. There’s a flight from the coasts and metropolitan areas.

Major trends are slow in developing and carry a momentum of their own for quite some time. Once begun, they only reverse themselves slowly. The most recent one, the one that is waning, is increasing urbanization. It’s the one that helped flip Georgia as urban Atlanta swamped its surrounding counties. It flipped Virginia as Soviet-style centralization in DC made the city obese enough to smother the northern parts of the state. Today, COVID and disgust over the carnage of Left-Democrat policies is acting as a repellant to stop the older trend and begin the newer one. It’ll take a while for the new social current to establish itself. In the meantime, Atlanta and the other urban cores in states like Georgia will give radical left power-seekers to the country. Politics will be a lagging indicator for some time.

More about the possible awful consequence later.

A man waves a Black Lives Matter flag atop the CNN logo during a protest in response to the police killing of George Floyd outside the CNN Center on May 29, 2020 in Atlanta, Georgia. (photo: Elijah Nouvelage)

No doubt, the growth of urban centers like Atlanta provide rich mining for chic collectivist politics. Mail-in voting is just the ticket to mine the rich veins. It’ll bring out of the woodwork the kind of voter that could be dubbed “low-information” or a host of other related-but-accurate epithets. These voters have very little buy-in in the form of the investment in time and effort. They’ll only vote if you deliver the ballot to them on a silver platter, which was done by mailing the things to the wind. There was less of a need for the Democrats to resort to their time-honored Tammany Hall antics.

So, America, get ready for more of a low-information electorate giving us a low-information officeholder. Warnock and Ossoff are typical of the genre: heavy on ideology, low on knowledge and wisdom. The type is littered throughout the California legislature.

Into these urban-rich minefields of the low-information voter struts Trump. The post-election brought out the worst in him. His loss in an election festooned with low-information voters was seen through the narrow prism of . . . himself. He lost in Georgia’s contrived election process that should never have been run in this way to begin with, but was. He then goes out to lambast the process and everyone associated with it while asking the base to do it again. I don’t think it worked. People turned off by him will be more so, and his supporters will conclude, why bother? Combine a mob election with a provocateur-in-chief and we get crazies in office. What else did you expect?

No politician cares about me!

Now, for the possible awful consequence. Red America will resist a radical left central government. The resistance will fester and intensify depending on how intent the Democrats are in trying to make the whole country look like California . . . or Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Minneapolis, Chicago, New York City, et al. The flight of middle-income demographics to safer red-state environs will heat up the divide. The fear of the migrants making red states purple is misplaced. The movers are overwhelmingly center-right. Thus, blue states become navy blue and red states become scarlet. If it happens, and it could very well, the nation will be irreconcilably split. Wait for some violent incident, or a few, over the next year or two to bring about the confrontation.

Homeless encampment, San Francisco.
Portland BLM riots from earlier 2020.

It all depends on whether the Democrats do what they said they’ll do. Even a watered-down version of their rhetoric would scare many people to the armories. The irony of it all is that the red states will be defending America and her Constitution; the Democrats will shred the country and its founding documents to get to a collectivist utopia. If the conflagration were to happen, the resisting states will be the Union in defending the country as it was conceived. The Democrats, in temporary control of the central government, will be intent on imposing their revolution. Make no mistake about it, it will be a real revolution. We’ll experience the intensity of 1850’s America but with the two sides relegated to revolution and counterrevolution.

I pray that cooler heads prevail. I pray that Trump returns to a happy retirement in Florida and leave the counterrevolution to more astute leaders. I pray for the many millions of victims across the country who will be laboring under neo-Marxist control. I pray for America. God help her.

RogerG

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A Soft Disunion?

(Artist: Roman Genn)

Are we irreparably divided? When deeply divergent cultural assumptions lie at the root, we could very well be heading for disunion. The only question is, will it be “soft” (peaceful) or “hard” (violent)? Terry Teachout, drama critic of the Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary, comes down on the side of disunion, but it’ll be a “soft” one to him. I’m not so certain, but I hope he’s right if we are to have one.

Terry Teachout

At work are two radically different notions of human nature. On one side lies the near perfectibility of us and our socio-economic-political arrangements. Indeed, a fixed nature is far from their imaginations. This leads to an endlessly meddlesome state. Space is left open in their intellectual firmament for all kinds of socialism: aggressive and velvet glove. In this social scheme, at the top of the governing pyramid is situated people like them, people whose status stems from paper credentials like college degrees and certifications. Today, this crowd increasingly comes with these ontological beliefs in tow.

Obama’s “pajama boy” from the 2010 publicity campaign to pass Obamacare.
Steelworkers on a shift change in Braddock, Pa., 2008. (photo: Damon Winter/The New York Times)

On the other side of the cultural divide, we find those more traditionally inclined and the belief that human flourishing requires self-reliance and virtue. Yet, human nature is punctuated with a dark side. Therefore, all-powerful directorates will be populated with agents of a flawed nature like the rest of us. Spending 17-19 years in classrooms won’t change our basic makeup. Lord Acton’s famous quip about the possession of great power accessing our darker side is very relevant here.

Well, some of you might minimize the disagreement as only a difference of opinion. You’d be wrong to trivialize the estrangement. It’s fundamental to the difference between gun confiscation and a Second Amendment, abortion as infanticide and limiting it to the first trimester, free college and personal responsibility for your career path, environmental totalitarianism and environmental prudence, economic growth and the “new normal” of stagnation, religious liberty and state invasions of the pulpit, education freedom and the government classroom monopoly as a lefty finishing school, identity favoritism and equal opportunity, etc. Hardly trivial, this is existential.

In October 2015, Houston’s progressive mayor, Annise Parker, ordered the city’s district attorney to subpoena the sermons of selected pastors whom she suspected of using the pulpit for political purposes.

How did we get to this impasse? I think that the growth of government and its dependencies has seriously eroded the basis for our civilization. But also state-love has seeped into the subconscious of our media-saturated metropolitan areas. It began as a pervasive ethos in our faculty lounges. From there, it was evangelized to succeeding generations. I know of its prevalence as a 30-year teaching veteran in our public schools.

Unexamined lefty assumptions in our citified blue dots have provoked the chasm. Don’t be a bit surprised when you learn that people outside the blue dots have noticed. They have, and are justifiably horrified.

RogerG