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No Political/Cultural Bubbles in America?

Compare the receptions received by Pres. Trump at a Washington Nationals World Series game in Washington, DC, on Oct. 28, 2019, and the college football national championship game in New Orleans between LSU and Clemson on Jan. 13, 2020, about 10 weeks later.  Watch the 2 videos for the night-and-day reactions.  He gets booed and is subjected to chants of “lock him up” in DC while he experienced sustained cheers and applause from a mostly Louisiana and South Carolina – hotbeds of Red America –  crowd in New Orleans.

Washington, DC, Oct. 28, 2019

New Orleans, La., Jan. 13, 2020

Let’s dispense with the nonsense that there is no severe politico-cultural divide in America. It exists, and boy does it exist! I attribute the phenomena to a resurgence of a semi-violent, bombastic radical left alongside the rise of a provocateur on the right, Trump. Make no mistake about it, though, this unhinged left had been around since the 1960’s and has wormed its way into the corporate boardroom, faculty lounges, all avenues of our media, academia, and is resplendent in the training of our teachers and our kids’ curriculum. Few of our kids’ schools escape its tentacles. The cities and coasts are the nests for this myopic and revolutionary collectivism, and can be dubbed “blue” America.

Outside the blue bubbles of the cities and the coasts resides the vast stretches of Red America.  Do our self-anointed cultural betters in their urban blue bubbles know how out-of-step they are in relation to the rest of the country?  Red America certainly knows about them since the “blues” control the cultural commanding heights.  If the “blues” know about their estrangement, I don’t think that they care.

RogerG

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Impeachment Forever … But Pelopsi Prays for You

I know, I know, it’s Christmas eve but I couldn’t resist commenting on the latest impeachment fracas.  Pelosi is holding impeachment hostage by refusing to deliver the articles of impeachment to the Senate.  Like the sword of Damocles, now in the hands of Pelosi, Trump will face an assembly line of impeachment articles as she demands more witnesses and documents for further expeditions into all things Trump before she turns over the already-approved articles to the Senate.  But she says that she is a good Catholic, hates no one, and prays for the target of her political jihad.  Really, how good of a Catholic is she?  Is this Christ-like behavior?

One has to wonder.  Is it Christian to endlessly hound a citizen by placing them under the perpetual gaze of inquisitors?  Is it Christian for one house of Congress to step outside its legal role of investigating possible wrongdoing and demand the other house, acting as jurors, step outside its role to do what the first house refused to do, such as produce the information that it chose not to provide as part of its duty?  Trump is no angel, and neither are Pelosi, Schumer, and the Resistance.

Is it Christian for her to proudly announce her Christian bonafides as she soils the very doctrines of her faith?  Under the euphemism “right to choose”, she crowed in 2018 that “I’m a rabid supporter of a woman’s right to choose …” Rabid indeed!  Earlier this year, rather than condemn Ralph Northam’s (D, governor of Va.) support of a live-birth abortion bill in the Virginia legislature and his description of it, she dodged the question when asked.  Not even the killing of a newborn can draw the ire of this allegedly “sincere” Catholic.

In addition, she has persistently opposed efforts to protect viable babies in the womb and those born alive in the course of an abortion.  She is absolutely grotesque when it comes to the Christian responsibility to protect life.

Former Vice President Joe Biden was rejected for Holy Communion by
a priest in South Carolina, Oct. 2019

It doesn’t stop there.  In that space where some assertions of gay rights conflict with religious freedom strides the hubristic Nancy Pelosi.  Religious freedom must give way, according to her holiness Pelosi.  Her House-passed Equality Act would strip protections for denominations with Bible-based views on sexuality and family, particularly if their Christian calling carries them beyond the sanctuary into running orphanages, hospitals, counseling services, schools, and wherever human need lies.  Pelosi wants to essentially rewrite millennia-old Christian doctrine to fit her social views.  Where’s the Christianity in this?

Here Polish World War II war orphans are being cared for at a Catholic orphange after the War in 1946.

This season to honor the birth of Christ is saddled with the preachiness of a pagan-Christian.  Yes, it’s an oxymoron and also a reality in today’s morally-confused Democratic Party.  I find it hard to take seriously Pelosi’s attempt to wrap herself in the garb of the Church.  Does the phrase “false prophet” remind you of anyone?

RogerG

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Barron Trump and the Stanford Law School Bubble

Prof. Karla testifies before House Judiciary Committee, and Barron Trump (inset).

Most Americans don’t live their lives glued to talk radio and opinionated cable news channels.  They’ve got kids and work to deal with.  Every now and then, though, they get exposed to the deep blue bubble that would like to rule over them.

Recently, a curtain was pulled back showing the type of people inhabiting the dark blue abbeys of academia when 3 left-liberal profs traipsed before the Nadler impeachment tribunal to bellow their disgust for Trump.  One of them, Pamela Karla of Stanford Law, punctuated her talk with a well-rehearsed quip dragging Trump’s 13-year-old son into her allegation of Trump’s so-called monarchical tendencies (see below).

Obnoxious, for making Trump’s young son a tag line?  Yes, to anyone outside the blue bubble; not so for people who spend their lives thinking and living within one.

The gag would be cute before the captured audiences of her classroom and faculty lounges.  It’s tone deaf to normal people.  Once again, we get another example of the strange people who are nurtured in the narrow confines of the academic Versailles (a more accurate monarchical allusion) that dot our landscape.

RogerG

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Swamp Creatures

Go Astros! I had no dog in the hunt that is called the 2019 World Series. Sunday’s rude crowd at Nationals Park changed that.  If you can’t find a good reason to root for someone, rooting against someone may just fit the bill, particularly when they behave like vulgar buffoons.  The boos and the oral flatulence of “Lock him up” were glaringly repulsive.  Go Astros!

It was fitting justice that the Astros pummeled the swamp things 7-1 on boo day.

Conversely, the chant at Trump rallies, “Drain the swamp”, has gained new relevance.  The “swamp” in this case is DC’s polyglot population of government workers, government influencers, partisan operatives, and the net of white-collared professional handlers and manipulators.  The city’s only industry is politics, or the many ways to finagle something for somebody at somebody else’s expense.  The controlling party is, of course, the Democratic Party – the party of big, and ever bigger, government.

The crowd in the stadium is a microcosm of this swamp: the assemblage of over-paid schemers who can afford the $1,000 tickets.  These folks aren’t the peanuts-and-beer bleacher bums at Wrigley or Dodger Stadium.  The Series at Nationals Park is reserved for these well-heeled destroyers of American wealth.

Now the swamp denizens have a professional baseball team to shower their affections upon.  Why the new team to replace the caput Senators in 1960?  It’s simple: the market got bigger.  DC grew into the obese metroplex that busted its lap belt of boundaries, most recently thanks to Obama.

2016 election results by county in Virginia. Note the blue counties across the Potomac from Washington DC.

Its girth flooded into the Maryland and northern Virginia ‘burbs producing one-party Democrat enclaves who’d support Nicolás Maduro if he was the nominee.  The consequence is a deeper-blue-approaching-charcoal Maryland and a Virginia about ready to take the plunge into California governance.

What’s my chant?  Shrink DC!  A depression in DC is a renaissance everywhere else.  Go Astros!

RogerG

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A “Woke” Walmart, Part III

I got a reply from “cushelp.com” at Walmart regarding my comment on the company’s new gun policies.  The company’s online respondent indicated that the comment will go up the chain of command, and included a link of the newsletter/memo from President and CEO, John McMillon, to the employees (see the first edition of “A ‘Woke’ Walmart” for the link).  This only further drew my ire.  After reading McMillon’s missive to employees, I pounded a reply.  Here is my rebuttal:

Thanks so much for your timely reply to my email which contained a link to a company circular from Doug McMillon, President and CEO, to associates about the new policy.  Apparently somebody read my detailed response to your new policy on guns and ammunition.  Again, thanks for taking the time to read it. However, rather than allay my concerns, they have been heightened.

McMIllon’s announcement to associates reads like a heated reaction to an issue-of-the-moment.  Indeed, it goes further.  It adopts wholesale the line of argument of partisan gun control activists such as the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, the Brady Campaign, etc., etc.  All in all, Walmart is gradually aligning itself with the center/left.  McMillon is confirming John O’Sullivan’s famous aphorism: “All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.”

Let me count the ways.  Surprisingly, I am not bothered so much by the company’s decision not to allow open carry in the stores.  The problem lies with joining well-publicized nationwide gun-control crusades, emblematic in the demand that “the status quo is unacceptable”.  It’s part of the usual rhetoric coming from the usual hive of gun-control groups and the Democratic Party.  Parts of the memorandum could just as easily come out of Chuck Schumer’s office (D, NY).

I’d like to remind Walmart that the Second Amendment is part of the “status quo”.  The Supreme Court defined the ownership of firearms to be an individual right, not a collective one.  It’s presence in the Constitution is not for hunting or protection from MS-13. The Amendment is an avatar for citizen control of their government.  A lesson in the English Civil War would work wonders in the corporate boardroom at Walmart.

So, what parts of the “status quo” is to be subjected to change?  Well, it’s inanimate things like guns and ammo that are to be targeted (no pun intended) for punishment.  The unstated premise is that the availability of these things constitutes a danger to the public.  You tout the the company’s previous decision not to sell “military-style rifles”.  The policy is nonsense as is the call to join a debate on resurrecting the Assault Weapon Ban.  Calling for a debate are weasel words for establishing one (Ban).  The debate on the Ban has been over for quite some time: the thing didn’t work, was allowed to lapse, and the Democrats refused to bring it back when they had the White House and majorities in both houses of Congress.

Further, the “military-style” nomenclature is silliness on stilts.  It’s all about a gun’s cosmetic qualities.  These guns are no more dangerous than any semi-automatic gun.  By the way, guns are by their nature “dangerous” … as are crossbows.  If they weren’t, they’d be no good for hunting.  The AR platform and its knock-offs are associated with the miscreants of mass shootings because they are broadly popular with the gun-buying consumer base in the general public.  They are the most highly demanded product in a gun manufacturer’s inventory.  Hopefully, you’re not suggesting that all these buyers are crazed lunatics.  If semi-auto shotguns with more compact barrels were to be all the rage in the murderous-loser class, would a call for a ban on semi-auto shotguns be next?  Strange legal principle: find out what’s popular with lunatics and prohibit it.

The ludicrous nature of the Ban can be seen in the bumbling attempts to codify the concept into law.  Is it the pistol grip?  Is it the semi-auto nature of the thing?  Is it the magazine capacity of over 4 rounds?  Is it because it looks like something in a John Wick movie?  Going from state to state examining their bans is an exercise in chaos theory.  Usually the laws are written by people with the least knowledge about firearms.  Watching them at a press conference is a real hoot.  The big problem with the ban stems from the quixotic desire to proscribe a product for its cosmetic qualities. That’s it!

Then Walmart stacks its current silliness with more silliness on the ammo front.  No handgun and .223 ammo.  What’s the logic behind that?  Clearly, the company associates those cartridges with mayhem.  Why else put them on the no-go list?  What’s next, a ban on 12 gauge?  Any cartridge’s survival on Walmart’s shelves hangs by the thread of a killer’s choices.

Astoundingly, McMillon applauds the likely decline in the company’s market share in ammo.  Now that’s a first: a company defining success as a decline in market share.  Sears and JCPenney should be popping champagne corks instead of wringing their hands.  It seems like the national Walmart is taking its cues from California Walmart.  California is a mess and hardly an example to be imitated.  I fled the state as a third generation native Californian to Montana. The state is no place to raise kids.  Are the Walmarts in Montana soon to be looking like the ones in that lefty loony bin?

As always in these kinds of circulars, there are some palatable suggestions.  Shoring up FixNICS and competently-written red flag laws are things to consider.  But the gun and ammo ideas are just warmed over goofiness in Democratic Party bullet points.  None of the ideas have a scintilla of relevance to curbing these mass shootings. Ditto for the much-vaunted “universal background checks”.  Try to enforce that idea when family heirlooms are passed down from parent to child.  The dribble is trotted out each time for the sole purpose of hammering more traditional and conservative circles in our population.

I suspect a general leftward orientation in corporate boardrooms.  Others have noticed it as well.  Walmart has not been inoculated.  I attribute the phenomena to an increasing isolation in corporate governance from the common people, particularly in flyover country.  Socio-economically, the “suits” identify with each other and the urban values of their location.  Much has been written about this.  Now these collectivist values appear to be seeping into Walmart.  O’Sullivan might be proven right once again.

For your information, I shifted my recent tire purchase from Walmart to Discount Tire.  In fact, I used your cheaper price to get a price match from them.  You are to be thanked for providing the price leverage.  But to be honest, I would have agreed to a higher price to avoid doing business with a company who appears to be lurching left.  I will be doing the same with our other consumer purchases.  Don’t look for my car in your parking lot.

……………………………………

Once again, the online receptionist indicated that my response will go up the chain of command.  I suspect the reply is boilerplate.

Roger Graf

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A “Woke” Walmart

Currently, I’m in a spat with Walmart.  No, my complaint isn’t about Walmart as an unabashed exploiter of the working poor, the complaint common among illiterate social justice warriors.  Au contraire, I’m referring to Walmart’s gradual alignment with the cultural left.  Surprise, surprise.

What drew back the curtain was the company’s new policy on guns and ammunition.  An emotive reaction to a horrible incident like the one at the El Paso Walmart is understandable, but don’t mistake “understandable” with “reasonable”.  For many reasons, much in Walmart’s new stance on guns is absurd.  More about this later.

Walmart’s approach is encapsulated in this memo to employees shortly after the El Paso shooting.  It can be found here: https://corporate.walmart.com/…/mcmillon-to-associates-our-….

John McMillon, President and CEO, of Walmart.

A Wikipedia search of the memo’s author, John McMillon, President and CEO, uncovered more.  Guns and religion are two of the most salient issues in the culture war.  And McMillon weighed into both.  In 2015, McMillon proclaimed that a “religious freedom” bill before Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson “threatens to undermine the spirit of inclusion present throughout the state of Arkansas and does not reflect the values we proudly uphold”.  Cut through the gobbledygook and we see that Walmart has joined the LGBTQ crusade to punish religious dissenters for disagreeing with them.  McMillon sounds like Pelosi.  Religious freedom laws have become a necessity as government agencies and commissions under the sway of the powerful LGBTQ lobby have targeted private individuals for taking the Bible seriously.  Talk to Jack Philips, or take a look at the Houston mayor’s attempt to subpoena pastors’ sermons, or governments’ efforts to force religious organizations to facilitate abortion.

Jack Philips of Masterpiece Cakeshop and the target of legal action by Colorado’s Human Rights Commission. Their actions against Philips were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.

But now we have the big cheese at Walmart declaring “inclusion” trumps (no pun intended) “religious freedom”.

A scan of the company’s website will find it littered with the eco-lobby’s hobby-horses.  I suspect that the “suits” in charge at Walmart chafe at those viral pics of unsightly-dressed shoppers.  They want to upscale the company’s image by showing that they too are like the swank Malibu types with fashionable views to go along with a fashionable look.

A page from the “Global Responsibility” link on walmart.com.

McMillon’s personal history, though, presents a conundrum.  He’s a born-again Christian.  He’s also a lifer Walmart employee.  On the religious angle, he’s confused in trying to mesh his haute couture views with Jesus of Nazareth.  As an employee, he’s been in management for at least 20 years, and much of that in corporate management.  Somewhere along the line he has absorbed many of the values of a university’s Sociology faculty.  It’s a familiar development in the backgrounds of many corporate execs.

Wealthy people in today’s world seem to be attracted to wokeness like a moth to light.

RogerG

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Stalking Horses

“Approaching the fowl with stalking-horse”, an 1875 illustration. (en.wikipedia.org)

Stalking horse: noun; a false pretext concealing someone’s real intentions. (Oxford Dictionary)

In the context of the verbal brawl that occurs in today’s America, the eagerness for gun control and large-scale immigration is a stalking horse for deeper and mostly urban cultural trends.  The popularity of gun control takes place in the urban womb of government services.  Think of it as mass infantilization.  Nearly unrestrained immigration is fashionable in districts whose knowledge of immigrants is limited to the domestic help of the cheap nanny, housekeeper, and landscaper.  Do you really think that they ever venture into the blighted neighborhoods that the hired help retreats into after work?  Ignorance of guns and the actual lives of immigrants plagues our cultural “betters” in our cities and their academic playgrounds, and ironically informs (“informs”, maybe a bad choice of words) their political enthusiasms.

In May of 2019, Democratic presidential candidate Cory Booker (D, NJ) called for national gun registration.
In August, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris expressed the willingness to send cops to people’s homes to confiscate banned firearms. (Washington Examiner)

What brought this personal reflection to mind was Michael Lind’s piece in American Affairs, “Classless Utopia versus Class Compromise” (Summer 2018, Vol. II, Number 2).

The article is about the large scale social, economic, and political trends mostly affecting native blue collar workers.  In it, Lind makes the point that nearly unfettered immigration has led to the evisceration of native low-skilled and blue collar workers, no matter their ethnic or racial backgrounds.  He writes, “… globalization, operating mainly through corporate-orchestrated labor arbitrage—in the form of offshoring jobs to foreign workers or importing immigrants to compete with native workers—weakened the bargaining power of immobile native workers in the developed democracies.”  Do you think that the loss of bargaining power for the native lower-skilled worker crossed the minds of upper-middle-to-upper-class urbanites?  For them, it’s simply a matter of compassion and nannies.

Victorina Morales, undocumented worker at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J.

Also, I must admit that it could be something more sinister.  For everyone else outside their pampered social circles, though, massive immigration had a devastating effect.

Think of it this way: open borders is a stalking horse for gutting the power and influence of the hoi polloi, knowingly or unknowingly.  Regarding the stalking horse of gun control, it’s a matter of everyone being forced to adopt an urban lifestyle with its norms, expectations, and requisite politically correct views, no matter its unfitness for folks outside the suburban/urban bubbles.

Stalking horses are stalking about these days.

RogerG

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Why the Dissatisfaction?

Church in Boston, Massachusetts @mattbannister via Twenty20

I’m constantly reminded of the general wrong-track numbers in opinion polls even when economic conditions have been improving.  Why does there seem to be a nagging sense that things aren’t going well?  Two books make a mighty attempt at an answer: “Dignity” by Chris Arnade (a self-described socialist) and “Alienated America” by Tim Carney (commentary editor of the Washington Examiner).  Both books elucidate the deep social ills that accompanied the absolute deterioration of civil society in areas frequently referred to as “left behind”.  The problem is far, far more than economic.  The accompanying review of the books presents the case.

     

Why the rise of Trump and a resuscitated loony left with a home in the Democratic Party?  I’ve heard some Trump supporters call for a government takeover of health care, adopting the nonsense language of turning an economic good or service, governed by scarcity, into a “right”.  The loony left is the loony left, always has been, and has an off-the-shelf answer for all that plagues us: big, centralized government; it’s the Progressive way.  The two elements have a nexus.

The roots of the current fascination with big, omnipresent government – or looking for saviors in large personalities on the public stage – may be found in the decline of something vital for personal well-being according to Arnade and Carney.  Some call it civil society.  Others, like Carney, refer to “social capital”.  Both recognize the critical role of church, an institution beleaguered by the rising tide of secularization, another by-product of Progressivism.  In so doing, the props of connection and support in the vast array of personal social networks have collapsed, leaving behind alienated folks in the vast stretches of the poorer sections of flyover country and young people facing declining opportunities.  In our time, the default answer is a savior (Trump, Bernie, the nitwit Squad), vapid sloganeering (“Make America Great Again”, “Structural Racism”, “Make the rich pay their fair share”, “Equal [fill in the blank]”, “There are no illegal immigrants”, and so on), and the elevation of government as a super daddy and mommy.  Church and family are replaced by commissars.

I support many of Trump’s initiatives, but he, like Bernie and the nitwit Squad, come to think of it, might be a sign of the times.

RogerG

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California Taxes and Gas Prices, Part II

Substitute Gavin Newsom for Brown. Gavin’s got more hair, and its gelled, but the straitjacket fits just as snugly.

I’ve previously posted about the new federal tax law’s possible effects on California and the rest of the deep blue states.  Ditto about California’s astronomical gas prices.  More has come to light, so the need for “Part II”.

I. California and Blue State Taxes.

April 15 has come and gone. Many Californios – of which I used to be one, like millions of others scattered throughout the country – and others in deep blue states are cutting checks to the IRS instead of receiving refunds.  Curtailing SALT (the federal tax subsidy to high-tax states, the Hillary electorate) and the home mortgage interest deduction (HMID), and a few other tax changes, have wreaked havoc with their expectations.  Now, they really know what it means to live in a high-tax state.

Michael Ramirez / Weekly Standard

First, lower refunds across the country are expected since withholding was reduced in each one of your paychecks.  Paychecks were bigger as the feds took less.  We could go back to the old system of the feds lopping off more from each one of your paychecks and giving a pittance back at the end of the tax year.  Let’s face it; withholding is a scam.

Second, the caterwauling from California about getting less from the feds than they send to DC has reached a fever pitch.  The only problem: it probably isn’t true. George Skelton in the LA Times raised serious doubts, as does Ann Hollingshead with the Legislative Analyst’s Office and the Tax Foundation (see here).

The old wives’ tale was born of a flawed study with gimmicky assumptions.  Among other things, not properly accounted was California’s peculiar demography.  The state’s age pyramid is distorted with a mass of the young and proportionally fewer elderly.  I suspect that’s probably due to massive foreign immigration over the past 5 decades and the hemorrhaging of retirees to other environs.  As a result, the accounting contains less federal Social Security and Medicare payments.  How much of this is due to the policies championed by the state’s ruling party?  Hmmmm, I wonder.

Also, the military draw down since the end of the Cold War didn’t help.  Still, in the end, the accounting gimmicks in the earlier study exaggerated the monies going to DC and undervalued the monies to the state.  It’s just more proof of Disraeli’s old line: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

As for the clamps on the HMID, any adverse effects can be traced to California foot-shooting.  Real estate is very pricey in the state, and getting pricier.  It’s a good bet that much of the state’s middle class have mortgages that greatly exceed the limits in the tax law.  Why is that?  You need look no further than the Leviathan of taxes and regulations smothering housing in the state.  Eco-craziness and taxaholism leaves a hangover.  It comes in the form of homeless encampments – the usefulness of human poop maps (SF, but applicable elsewhere) as a result – skyrocketing rents, and a strangulation of supply.

Aiming a cocked-and-loaded gun at your foot is an appropriate metaphor.

II. California’s Gas Prices.

Self-serve gasoline prices at Chevron in Malibu exceed $4 a gallon mark on April 15. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)

Once again, foot-shooting reigns supreme regarding the state’s astronomically high gas prices.  But the mandarins of the ruling party are looking for scapegoats.  A Berkeley prof of Business Administration, Severin Borenstein, gave the goons ammunition by apparently identifying a 24-cent “surcharge”, an amount that he couldn’t account for.  The near-socialist ruling party didn’t need much of an excuse to go on a jihad against capitalism.  Borenstein gave them one.

Prof. Severin Borenstein, UC Berkeley

Well, Severin, here’s one factor that you didn’t think of: the state has so mangled the market for fuel that supply and demand have nowhere to reach but up.  Sorry, Newsom and the other chiefs of the ruling party, you can’t suspend the laws of supply of demand like you tried with immigration law.  There’s no such thing as a sanctuary from supply and demand.  The Soviets took that route to prosperity, and discovered poverty and social collapse.

The peculiar CARBOB blend, cap-and-trade, greenie taxes, and the constant finagling of CARB (Ca. Air Resources Board) have given the state the least consumer-friendly fuel market in the country.  Such markets still have supply and demand.  It’s just that they intersect at a place above almost any red state. Call it the lefty “surcharge”.

A beleaguered California resident?

This postscript to previous posts only makes the plight of blue states bleaker.  The fact that this is democratically-chosen bleakness doesn’t alter the reality.  If you want the clowns, accept what happens when you’re ruled by clowns.

And that includes sending more money to the state, any metroplex in the state, and DC.  And add to it the high prices for almost anything, including gas.  I guess that you get what you vote for.

RogerG

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Wow! Blue America Cheats.

Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin

A few decades is more than enough time to evolve a system to game – or cheat – the rules.  With the so-called “undocumented”, it’s as simple as getting into the country by whatever means at hand and a network of fraudsters will greet you with jobs, crooked documents, sanctuary, and the open arms of sympathizers.  Maybe even before long, the right to vote.  For today’s haute couture mavens, it’s greasing the skids for their kids.  Well, they got caught.  A slew of blue-America’s finest were indicted in Boston federal district court on charges of bribery to advance their kids to the front of the line into America’s allegedly “elite” schools, ahead of any of the more meretricious hoi polloi.  Hypocrites, hypocrites, hypocrites.

(See here for more)

All the gnashing of teeth for the marginalized and oppressed is a mere pose that they mistake for virtue.  They do this as they steamroll a tiger mom’s child or a young family’s struggles with two jobs to save enough for their kids’ education.  It’s disgusting!

I understand the pull to cheat.  They want the prestige of an elite school’s piece of paper (degree), not necessarily wisdom, for their kid.  Chances are, the kid won’t get much enlightenment anyway.  The curriculums are too corrupted with ideologized nonsense.  It’s particularly true of the big-time schools with big-time sports and big-time endowments.

So, what are they cheating about?  It must be all about how to get the piece of paper.  No wonder we have kids flocking to socialism in spite of its history as a hot mess.  Go figure.

RogerG