I maintain that we aren’t the same people who can preserve a civilization, let alone build one. We don’t realize that we resemble less the 19th-century’s mighty entrepreneurs, or the men who stormed the beaches of Iwo Jima, and more the residents of a floundering 5th or 6th century Rome. Here’s why, and why my posts will not cater to a troubling trend.
What happens when a mental disorder becomes a society-wide trait? In this case, it’s adult attention deficit disorder (ADD) which is characterized by lack of focus, impulsiveness, an inability to maintain sustained attention for an extended period. Sound familiar? It should. It’s definitely true of the kids, because their parents model the quirk. The foible surrounds all of us, and our kids, in our appetite for graphic, rapid-fire audio/visual entertainments and the spasmodic hiccups and burps of the smartphone world of social media, tweets, texts. It’s incapable of challenging us or expanding our horizons. It keeps us comfortable in our preformed prejudices. It manifests in our kids who are uninterested in reading much of anything of substance from cover to cover.
Look at the young entering college, even in our so-called elite institutions. The mental acuity and appetite to read cover to cover Crime and Punishment or Darkness at Noon, and understand them, is broadly diminishing. That desire for quiet interludes of sustained, concentrated reading is rapidly disappearing.
*I encourage all of you to read Ian Tuttle’s piece “Why Elite Students Can’t Read Books” in National Review at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/10/why-elite-students-cant-read-books/. It’s a real eye-opener.
Our predicament shows in the bifurcation of the digital world. On the one hand lies podcast long-form interviews and discussions, blogs, Substack; on the other we find Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and X. Many of my posts in Facebook are actually produced for my Substack newsletter “The Golden Mean” (https://rogerlgraf.substack.com/publish/home) and my blog, “Libertate Virtute” (https://www.libertatevirtute.com/). They are thrown onto Facebook only as an aside.
The topics can’t and shouldn’t be addressed in short spasms. The issues demand something more than a digital burp. If you have an adult appetite for long-form treatments of serious matters, then grab a cup of coffee and . . . read.
Join the revolution against society-wide ADD. Tolle, leges (Latin): “Take up and read”.
(Schmuck: a foolish or contemptable person; origin in the Yiddish schmok, i.e. penis)
NIMBYs, schmucks
The chant “Save our democracy”, it’s flung like so many shotgun pellets at anyone viewed as an opponent. What about the people, the people doing the flinging? The reality is that we have more “democracy” than ever before, and the dissatisfaction with our plight has never been greater. How does that compute: more democracy equals more discontent? Can the collective, also known as “the people”, act in the manner of schmucks, harming themselves? Democracy, schmuckocracy?
The level of discontent is palpable in polls. Here’s one: Gallup’s recent survey of public confidence in major institutions ranging from the governmental to the social and economic, public and private (see #1 and #2 below). 11 of the 16 measured entities experienced declines; not one turned in a sterling performance. Much of the public’s lackluster assessment of our institutions can be attributed to their current conduct. Biden’s infirmity, an engineered chaos at the border, the embarrassing bugout from Kabul, the highly destructive endeavor to shut down nearly all human activity during a viral episode, inflation, the unaffordability of shelter, the unaffordability of energy, crime, nothing seems to work, boys in girls’ locker rooms and bathrooms, etc., goes a long way to heaping scorn on government, on “our democracy”, on any of our institutions that had a hand in the degeneracy.
eople running alongside a U.S. Air Force C-17 transport plane as it moved down a runway of the international airport, in Kabul, Afghanistan, in August, in 2021. (photo: Associated Press)An alleged transgender boxer consoles Italian boxer who quit after 46 seconds in Olympic female boxing match.
It doesn’t end there. Many private ones – “big business”, big tech, the media – get slammed, and maybe deservedly so.
The Supreme Court takes a hit as well. That might be due to another feature of a democracy: the people’s tendency to be acclimated to bunk. Since 1973 when the Court imperiously invented a provision in the Constitution that established a national right to take unborn life, “the people” grew accustomed to it. A 51-year odyssey ensued to do it. So, by today, people crave their newly minted national license to end the life of people who haven’t exited the womb. The Court’s Dobbs decision just struck the word “national” from the license, not the license itself. But don’t expect “the people” to understand such subtlety.
Combine this with the habit of the public to be persuaded by jargon, such as “assault rifle”, and therefore unwittingly consign the Second Amendment to the mercy of demagogues, and we have another journey down Alice’s rabbit hole. The Constitution stands in the way of the passion of the moment so “the people” turn on it and the Court in demanding a shortcut around the cumbersome task of properly amending it. Understanding isn’t a feature of the mob, which sadly is another trait of democracy.
We’ve injected so much unrestrained democracy into our system that our founders’ original design seems strange to anyone born after the Great Depression. Reading the Constitution must seem like a bizarre experience for a population raised on a steady diet of democracy this and democracy that. An example would be the abuse heaped on the Electoral College. Once a powerful faction loses the presidency by it, but wins the popular vote, they agitate to dismantle it and make the head of the executive branch conform to the wishes of the crowds on the two coasts and every urban center with a college campus. It’s not enough that a form of direct democracy is the operative principle of the lower house of Congress in the Constitution. The will of the mob must be made to dominate throughout.
Lest we forget, checking democracy and its mobs was an important goal of the founders. Here’s a sampling of their views:
“Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death.” – James Madison
“It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.” – Alexander Hamilton
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” – John Adams
“It is one of the evils of democratical governments, that the people, not always seeing and frequently misled, must often feel before they can act.” – George Washington
There was never a more searing indictment of democracy than that of Ambrose Bierce when he wrote toward the end of the 19th century, “Democracy is four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.”
“The people” aren’t cognizant of our already mammoth strides away from the founders’ restraints on the lustful will of “the people”. Even for the House of Representatives, that bastion of the popular will in the original framing, a state’s representation became determined by single-district direct elections and not by the state legislatures by the late 19th to early 20th centuries. That was only the beginning of the state legislatures’ attempt to neuter themselves in a mad dash away the founders’ wisdom.
The state legislatures were further taken out of the picture with the 17th Amendment: the direct election of senators. They would no longer have any say in the selection of the state’s two senators. Then came the initiative, referendum, and recall – “the people” make law, reject law, and reverse elections. These ideas were championed by 19th century progressives who were more intent on removing the obstacles to their rise to power. Smoke-filled back rooms were replaced by the big-government, neo-Marxist lunatics of the faculty lounge, the so-called “experts”, the constituency of our modern progressive gang, the people mostly responsible for our discontents when you think about it.
In the irony of all ironies, like the state legislatures, “the people” chose people who then took strides to remove “the people” from self-government, and thus enunciated the rise of the massive and unaccountable administrative state. This new Leviathan can make law (regulations), execute their law, and adjudicate on their law without much input of an electorate. Where’s the democracy? It’s here: “the people” elect progressives, and continue to elect progressives particularly in the populous blue jurisdictions, who then heap more layers on the mountainous administrative state like the many bands piling upward in a mature stratovolcano.
No wonder we’re in a hell of a mess. Pressure will build, and it’ll blow like a proverbial Vesuvius, but make sure that you’re not in the path of the political pyroclastic flow that follows. In 2020, a cop-beating video clip went viral and progressives seized the opportunity to dismantle law enforcement, elect DAs who won’t prosecute, decriminalize criminality, riots erupted, people and property were torched, and many cities descend into the dysfunction and lawlessness where they lie today. The only real export of LA and New York City are people as they flee the pyroclastic flow.
Seattle police at scene of riots in 2020 (photo: KOMO News, Seattle)Seattle the day after the occupation by so-called anarchists and Antifa, 2020 (photo: KTTH 770, Seattle)
One word describes the hidden potential of the “our democracy” chant: California. The taxes, the crime, the sordidness, the inner-city dysfunction, and the pervading sense of overall decay envelop the state and its “democracy”. “The people” in the state chose it, and continue to choose it. California’s “our democracy” is a Democratic one-party state.
Unfortunately, the state’s Democratic Party dominates the national Democratic Party. The socialism of the state’s ruling Dems is the guiding philosophy of the national Dems. The state’s Dems wreck the state’s economy and the national Dems work to imitate the wreckage everywhere else. Quite a tag-team duo.
The state’s Dems lay waste to social life in making a mockery of nature’s male and female. Boys rhetorically become girls and the next thing we see is that they’re in the girls’ locker rooms, bathrooms, and on their swim, track, volleyball teams, etc. The state’s public schools are required to disseminate the gender confusion in the curriculum. Taking his cues from California, Biden announces changes to Title IX of the Civil Rights Act to include the transgendered as a protected class thereby codifying rhetorical girls and boys into everywhere (see #3 below).
The not-so-golden state’s administrative state is imperial thanks to the ruling party’s zeal for upending an entire way of life in a senseless and manic effort to modulate the earth’s atmosphere. That’s right, one state of 39 million people (and declining) is gung-ho about sacrificing its people’s standard of living on the altar of climate-change ideology, acting like they hold the thermostat to the global atmosphere. They’d like to take the suicide attempt national, and Biden is accommodating. In May of this year, the EPA issued new power plant regulations that’ll function as a death warrant to reliable, affordable electricity by mandating expensive efforts (carbon capture, etc.) to reduce emissions in fossil fuel plants (see #4-6 below). It’s death by regulation, parroting California’s lunacy, and Europe’s. However, Europe backed away, not so for the zealots in California and D.C.
Do “the people’s” government in America care? Do “the people” even have enough of a pulse to care? As for the first question, no, they don’t care a lick about your plight. As for the second, no sé. These activists in power are true-believers, with all the heart of a Bergen-Belsen commandant. They are coming to get more than your sedan. They sneer at your air conditioner, which is a lifesaver for anyone not living in Malibu (see #7 below). This is totalitarianism pure and simple. Like a rabid Marxist, their ultimate goal is to reengineer humanity, making the new man, woman, whatever. You’ll be forced to live in the world that they have created for you. And, like previous crusades for heaven on earth, it’ll be the opposite.
Watch as we relive the travel from hubris to nemesis in Greek tragedy. The hubris hides ignorance and arrogance which leads to the disaster of nemesis. Welcome to the base of the Democratic Party and the EPA.
We are living the nemesis that arose out of the hubristic arrogance and ignorance of a clan of firebrands, firebrands that we elected. Don’t like Trump, voted for Biden, maybe vote for Harris in 2024? Reality sets in: you avoid the ogre but get the greenie neo-Marxists and ruination.
Both sides decry the escalating cost of housing, the loss of the “American dream”. The problem can’t be laid at the feet of high interest rates or inflation since it predated Biden’s spiking of the money supply in trillions of new spending. No, speaking of supply, it’s a supply problem. It’s been building for decades. Look around you and you’ll hear hostility to housing construction: “The new people crowd my streets and schools”; “I’ve lost my small town”; “The new developments spoiled the scenery; they’re ugly”; “It’s destroying my property values”; “My property taxes have jumped to pay for their infrastructure and public services.” Who’s there to speak for the young’s access to the “American dream”? Nobody. The only ones filling the hearing rooms and filing the lawsuits are NIMBYs galore and eco-revolutionaries.
This method of governance was pioneered by California. Growth control incubated in northern California (Petaluma, 1961). In that instance, “the people” elected county and city officials to freeze in amber the “character” of the place. What do you think happened to the housing supply? Regulations and delays only added to the cost of whatever survives the local gauntlet.
In fact, the brutal gauntlet was extended. “The people” of California gave to the world the California Coastal Commission (CCC) in approving Prop 20 in 1972, providing more avenues to block, impede, and knock out new housing, or make it so expensive that nobody in their right mind would want to pour a foundation in the “coastal zone”, which is another one of those politically fungible concepts that prove useful to all eco-utopians and would-be social engineers statewide.
The CCC is one of many regulatory behemoths that “the people” of the state have created with their own hand in propositions or through their elected representatives to make it difficult to get the nod to nail two studs together. Eco-obsessions reign supreme. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) is the mother of all hoops to jump. It empowers the California Department of Fish and Game, the various Air Quality Management Districts, anything conservation oriented, anything eco-utopian, who can only be pacified by project defeat, endless delays, and burdensome costs. It’s a veritable goat rope.
In a microcosm of the state’s protracted assault on housing, a small 4-lot housing development in Los Osos, San Louis Obispo County, was approved as per the state and the CCC-ratified Local Coastal Program (LCP) of the county. Later, the CCC discovered a sand dune on the property, declared it to be in an Environmentally Sensitive Habitat Area (ESHA), and repealed the permits (see #8 below). The developers are fighting back in the California Supreme Court. I’m pessimistic because the state’s courts reflect the longstanding and overweening one-party state.
Gauntlets bedevil the entire state. It’s so prevalent, according to the California Association of Realtor’s (C.A.R.) Housing Affordability Index, only one in five home buyers can afford a median-priced house in the state (see #9 below). According to Zillow, of those prospective home buyers, 70% are married and 44% have children (see #10 below). Where do the underhoused with kids go instead of just another rental in a cramped apartment complex? Good question. Possibly, a U-Haul barreling east on Interstate 10 might be their best option.
But do the powerful really care? Do they understand supply and demand or possess even a rudimentary grasp of trade-offs? Eco-purity is expensive, very expensive. So-called saving the coastal zone or preserving the habitat of the blunt-nosed leopard lizard, the gnat catcher, kangaroo rat, mountain lion, or whatever happens to dance across the screen of the hawkers of biodiversity, comes at the price of more than a house or rent. The price tag shows as lost opportunities for the young and generations to come. Their “American dream” will be stillborn. But who shows up at the hearings or has an army of “public interest” law firms ready to file suit in court? It’s the current homeowner who already has their slice of the dream and the eco-zealot who doesn’t care about the dream and would be quite happy with a repeal of the Industrial Revolution and upward mobility. They’d be overjoyed with the return of the Middle Ages.
All of this can be traced back to “the people”, to “our democracy”, to the four wolves deciding the fate of the lamb. The people chose societal collapse. It didn’t magically appear out of the ether. And it shows in the names on the ballot. The parties gave them to us, or, more accurately, the party bases. The political parties are more democratic than ever before, and their choices are miserable for anyone outside the “bases”. For that is what democracy led to: the rise of the “base”. Think of the “base” as a mob, an assemblage animated by jive. For the Democrats, they’re enraptured by Marx and his ideological cousins in the Frankfurt School and faculty lounges everywhere. All of this is unstated, mostly unknown to them since their beliefs never came with source footnotes. They deny it while implementing it. Anybody reaching the top of their slimy pole must sacrifice their good sense at the altar of the base’s groupthink.
Prominent Marxists – “critical theorists” (CRT, being woke) – of the Frankfurt School, who would be influential in the West. From top-left; Oskar Negt, Jurgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Claus Offe
The Republicans have discovered their own inner mob, or “base”. It’s a cult around Donald J. Trump. People were right to admire his policy successes but they were a product of Reaganism and not anything that might be construed as Trumpism. Social conservatives and free marketeers populated his administration giving the country border control, tax cuts, deterrence, a burgeoning economy, and a Supreme Court that acts like a court and not a legislature – the very essence of Reaganism.
The socialist Bernie Sanders in 2020AOC and powerful Dems announcing their Green New DealMAGA from 2023 (?)
What would a second Trump term bring? I suspect that it’ll be more like Trump and less like Reagan. In economic policy, he’ll pursue his own form of central planning which is called industrial policy with a flurry of tariffs and taxpayer-funded benefits to his own favorites. Right-to-work – freedom from coerced unionization – may take a back seat in a bid for the union vote. Trade protectionism will be combined with a new isolationism, which is nothing more than America alone. We might even see an abandonment of Ukraine. Would any of this be popular among the general public? It’s hard to say, but it sells with the “base”.
How did we get saddled with an inevitable neo-Marxist and Donald Trump when both are detested? Trump in a good week never rises above the upper 40’s in his favorability. The popularity of the Dems’ neo-Marxism is hard to gauge since it’s never exposed as such. People probably wouldn’t embrace the public pronouncements of Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party platform if saw the line-by-line plagiarism from the writings of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School or the eugenics of Margaret Sanger.
As of today (8/3/2024), Trump’s favorability stands at 43.3% and is viewed unfavorably by a whopping 51.7% (according to FiveThirtyEight, see #10 below). He’s a consistent stinker. In the same poll aggregation, Kamala Harris’s standing isn’t much better with 42.4 favorable and 49.1% unfavorable. She’s about the same in the pungency factor, even with a honeymoon of media praise, near worship, after her rise to donkey-party heir apparent.
The Dems’ neo-Marxism and its espousal by its candidates is joined by the GOP’s transformation into a personality cult. For both parties, it’s the culmination of a century and a half of the democratization of their operations, and like the injection of direct democracy into more of our politics, dissatisfaction increases with the results.
Political extremists love the democracy rhetoric, aiming to recreate the Paris mob of the French Revolution. Late 19th century progressives – many of whom were socialists (ex.: John Dewey) – pushed for the direct primary to replace party caucuses. Primaries to choose delegates became routine starting in the 1970s for the Democrats and 1980s for the GOP. It resulted in mass fealty to a person or to a groupthink among the base, thus the rise of the Dems’ Bernie Bros and the woke and the Republicans’ MAGA (see #11 below), with a corresponding rise in public disillusionment.
Democratization means rule by the base, not by the franchise. Interparty rivalries get stamped out by a normally radical groupthink that captures the imagination of the party’s activist base. For Dems, the groupthink is an enthusiasm for a campaign to ferret out white/heteronormative/male privilege, to expand the unacknowledged footprint of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School’s principal creed. They’ll hide it because they have to. The stench of the “socialist” label still pervades.
It’s so widespread that party big wheels – long-in-the-tooth politicos and big donors – had to step into the breech in 2020 to sidestep the frenzy for the Bernie Bros by resurrecting the doddering Biden, and later to swap the infirmed Biden for the younger-but-babbling Kamala Harris. At least the Democrats have some adult guardrails which is a backhanded admission that too much democracy can get you into trouble.
Guardrails don’t seem evident in the GOP. Trump romped from primary to primary despite the fact that he’s the weakest candidate in a general election matchup. Trump is popular with the base, unpopular to the those outside of it. An infirm Biden managed to keep it close with Trump, and now the dullard Kamala Harris has drawn even with the man from Mar-a-Lago. Ironically, with Trump in the picture, execrable socialism is still in play, thanks to mob rule in both parties and a broad apathy compounded by ignorance.
It must be hard to admit that schmucks exist in more places than among elites. Look around you, maybe take a long hard look in the mirror. Me too! More direct democracy exposed the likelihood that schmucks have a broader presence than we’ve been willing to admit. Party bases can be full of them. The general public too. “The people” can desire things that they ought not get. The demands of half-witted utopians and adults who’ve already got theirs trample the prospects of the young and those yet to be born. The adults of today confiscate the opportunities of those too young to vote and future generations.
It’s disgusting, and brought to you by . . . democracy. Democracy, schmuckocracy.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Historically Low Faith in U.S. Institutions Continues”, Lydia Saad, Gallup, 7/6/2024, at https://news.gallup.com/poll/508169/historically-low-faith-institutions-continues.aspx
2. “Confidence in U.S. Institutions Down; Average at New Low”, Jeffrey M. Jones, Gallup, 7/5/2024, at https://news.gallup.com/poll/394283/confidence-institutions-down-average-new-low.aspx
3. “Biden Administration: Title IX Protections Extend to Transgender Students”, Lauren Camera, US News and World Report, 6/16/2021, at https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2021-06-16/biden-administration-title-ix-protections-extend-to-transgender-students
4. “Greenhouse Gas Standards and Guidelines for Fossil Fuel-Fired Power Plants”, EPA, at https://www.epa.gov/stationary-sources-air-pollution/greenhouse-gas-standards-and-guidelines-fossil-fuel-fired-power
5. “4 Things to Know About US EPA’s New Power Plant Rules”, Dan Lashof, Lori Bird, and Jennifer Rennicks, World Resources Institute, 5/3/2024, at https://www.wri.org/insights/epa-power-plant-rules-explained
6. Much thanks to Gordon Hughes of the National Center for Energy Analytics in “The EPA’s Proposals for Power Plants Satisfy the Definition of Insanity”, National Review, 5/13/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/the-epas-proposals-for-power-plants-satisfy-the-definition-of-insanity/
7. “It’s time to rethink air conditioning”, Rebecca Leber, Vox, 8/26/2021, at https://www.vox.com/22638093/air-conditioning-worsens-climate-change-ac
8. “California Coastal Commission unlawfully blocks home construction”, Pacific Legal Foundation, describing their lawsuit against the CCC in Shear Development Co., LLC v. California Coastal Commission, at https://pacificlegal.org/case/shear-california-coastal-commission/
9. “2nd Quarter California housing affordability”, California Association of Realtors, 8/11/2023, at https://www.car.org/en/aboutus/mediacenter/newsreleases/2023-News-Releases/2qtr2023hai#:~:text=Fewer%20than%20one%20in%20five%20%2816%20percent%29%20home,according%20to%20C.A.R.%E2%80%99s%20Traditional%20Housing%20Affordability%20Index%20%28HAI%29.
10. FiveThirtyEight’s Aug. 3, 2024 poll aggregation at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump/
11. “10.1 History of American Political Parties”, Open Library, at https://open.lib.umn.edu/americangovernment/chapter/10-1-history-of-american-political-parties/
California Governor Gavin NewsomA big crowd was on hand when the Murrieta Valley Unified School District board voted last August to mandate that parents be told if their child shows any indication at school of being transgender. (photo: Mallika Seshadri / EdSource)
*Please tune into the recent Radio Free California podcast, “Least Mode” (available on Spotify), particularly the second half which is a discussion between Lance Christensen of the California Policy Center (CPC), and past candidate for Superintendent of Public Instruction, and Julie Hamill, CPC attorney and parent. It should scare your socks off. It should be required listening for anyone with children or grandchildren in the state’s schools.
*************
The popularly elected governor, Gavin Newsome, and the popularly elected Democrat super majority in the state legislature passed and the governor signed AB 1955, maliciously misnamed the “The Safety Act” (see #1 below). It would require student “privacy” protections against their parents. The law requires school officials and teachers to hide gender identity issues from parents at the behest of minors. Call it a right to lie to parents. Combined with the curricular California Healthy Youth Act (CHYA), which inducts your kids into gender ideology (see #2 below), you will be in for a hell of a ride. And after indoctrination, you will know nothing about it if it produces the likely effect of gender confusion in tweens and teens already going through the tumult of puberty.
These kids are the most vulnerable, and the state of California is the chief abettor, or maybe chief molester is more appropriate. The ruling party will cast the issue in a number of humanitarian ways, but the result is the same. You are frozen out when you drop your kid off at the bus stop or school. A U-Haul may be your only way out of the grip of the public employee unions, LGBTQ+ brigades, and the popular infatuation with lefty ideology which actually runs the state. A spine to stand up to these miscreants is in short supply in the state.
Get out, get out now! Voting is inconsequential. Your only hope is to escape your popularly elected officials by appealing to someone with greater sense, someone beyond the state’s electorate – say, the federal courts. Good luck with that, with the Biden claque running interference for the state-sponsored mutilators. So much for the beauties of democracy.
What beauty is there in scarred chests and genitalia?
If you care about your kids, if you don’t relish a lifetime of surgeries, pharmaceuticals, and medical interventions for your kids, get out, get out now! I don’t know what else to say.
Please watch the report below.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Newsom signs bill banning schools from notifying parents about student gender identity”, Mackenzie Mays, LA Times, 7/15/2024, at https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-07-15/newsom-bans-schools-from-requiring-that-parents-are-notified-about-student-gender-identity
2. “Comprehensive Sexual Health & HIV/AIDS Instruction: California Healthy Youth Act”, California Department of Education, at https://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/he/se/
Homeschoolers be warned that a politicized science in politicized journals like Scientific American is gunning for you.
If you believe that science hasn’t been corrupted by a political ideology, that it is value-neutral, you are naïve and grossly ill-informed. I invite anyone to go over to the Scientific American website (www.scientificamerican.com) and peruse their links to “Pressroom” for editor bios and “The Editors” for their stories (see #1 and #2 below). The bios read like missionaries of the progressive blob. The editors’ stories aren’t pure science but a monotonous drumbeat for greater central government power, the poker tell of progressivism. These are people who are impertinent enough to claim to represent science in America. Whew, what a mess.
Managing editor Jeanne Bryner encapsulates progressivism’s pretensions in her bio which includes the line “. . . just about everything can be viewed through the lens of science.” “Just about everything” might be the escape hatch from her half-witted flight of fancy. It should be clear to anyone with an ounce of adult-level awareness that moral judgments frequently evade the calculus of the lab. Science could devise an effective means to terminate unborn life, and has (for instance, the abortion pill of mifepristone and misoprostol), but it can’t say squat about whether we ought to. These people hitch “science” to their ideological commitments, such as the charge that we have too many people, and even add numbers, but that’s just quantifying an unquantifiable belief and calling it science.
Politicized science in Scientific American, June 2022 issue
The editors of Scientific American exude progressive conceit. Read their backgrounds; it’s something that they’ve been imbibing since their formative years, whose lifestyle reinforces. Degrees in fields that are hotbeds of left-wing activism are common. Environmentalism appears to be a substitute religion. Many have degreed specialties in journalism. Typical of ideological zealots, no serious consideration of trade-offs plays a prominent role in their thinking. How much of their production is real science, and how much of their “science” is curated through experiences in certain ideologically infected college disciplines, lifestyle preferences, and the prevalent proclivities of their demography (female, college, many single, urban white collar)? Mull over that for awhile.
Editor in Chief Laura Helmuth is straight from liberal-left central casting. Rummaging through her background discloses a propensity for hijacking “the science” for progressive, left-wing causes. The magazine endorsed Joe Biden in 2020 in a decision that was “both unanimous and quick”, citing the sins of the Trump administration to her brand of “science”.
Laura Helmuth, Editor in Chief
Her “science” is the science of the progressive zealot. Her mind is as closed as a steel trap. I doubt that the writings of researchers in design theory (evidence of a Designer in the cosmos and nature), like the work of the Discovery Institute, would ever be allowed to grace the pages of the magazine. If you’re cool to climate-change jeremiads, don’t expect a call to be a contributor. Under her leadership, Scientific American is in competition with Mother Jones for the same audience. See Helmuth’s Wikipedia page.
Progressivism lies at the foundation of editorial decisions. So, what is it? Progressivism is a ticket to power for people like Helmuth. Going back to the late 19th century, progressives fell in love with “experts”, people like them, people of the appropriate cultural accoutrements like years spent inside classrooms. They worship at the altar of credentials, degrees, and what not. And these college matriculants are said to be deserving of power to lead the population to the promised land. Little things like the Constitution, separation of powers, federalism, the subsidiary principle (localism), rule of law, and popular sovereignty shouldn’t be allowed to spoil the march to the rule of the administrative state.
That’s where we find the editors of Scientific American in their progressive jihad against homeschooling (see #3 below). They complain about the absence of uniform standards for such independent practitioners (parents) and their charges (their children), who are the rebels to their leadership. Of course, the “expert’s” uniform standards will be those that emanate out of the left-infected schools of education and the vile teachers’ unions and into the commissariat of the federal Department of Education and its policies and regulations. Once announced, they become the excuse for a power grab away from parents.
Nothing is worse for the progressive than a bunch of parents making their own choices independent of the “expert’s” set of coercible rules. They treat the population as cattle to be herded.
For example, these “experts” in the editors’ piece lamented the “pushback” of parents in Michigan against the experts’ much-loved registry of homeschooling parents and their children. Sounds like the registry of Jews of a bygone era. Their contempt for the “pushback” is actually a disdain for citizen involvement, something de Tocqueville praised but upsetting to the gurus of Scientific American. They stooped so low as to resort to child abuse to rationalize a diminishment of parental rights. It’s disgusting. If abuse occurred in one home, it is assumed to be characteristic of all parents who teach their own children, or why else bring it up?
Jews in Nazi concentration camps were tattooed with serial numbers for registration.
Here we have “experts” wallowing in the logical fallacy of composition – “if something is true for the part then that is true for the whole or the group too” (see #7 below). An abusing parent who isolates their kid is transformed into being a defining characteristic of homeschooling. This isn’t “science”. It’s something out of the Joseph Goebbels playbook.
The same stance of this we-know-what’s-best-for-your-kids crowd is the pretext for sidelining parents regarding “Transgender and Gender-Nonconforming” children as soon as the kids are dropped into the clutches of school employees. California is the Valhalla of this political sect masquerading behind a mask of “science”.
A huge leap in deplatforming California parents in the upbringing of their own children was promulgated in 2017 in the California Department of Education’s notorious Administrative Regulation 5145.3 (see #5 below). Under the guise of “Nondiscrimination/Harassment”, the young “gender-nonconforming” are accorded unique privacy rights not granted to any other student. The policy puts the child in the parental seat. If the child wishes it so, school employees are obligated to lie or withhold information from parents on their child’s condition. The kid may be transitioning with the assistance of school employees and the parents are kept in the dark. Needless to say, some locally elected school boards are resisting (Chino and Rocklin for instance) while the jackbooted California AG, Rob Bonta, responds with lawsuits to compel compliance.
Up to now, Bonta has succeeded. He even managed to sideline a parent initiative to codify the right of parents to be informed by using his power to title and summarize the proposition as “anti-gay” (all described in a prior post). A California judge bowed to Bonta when the parents sued. That put a stop to signature gathering. Parents of California, this, combined with the strangulation of other educational avenues in the state (charters, private and religious schools, homeschooling) may leave you with no other option but to leave the state to save your kids from permanent mental and physical scarring.
Detransitioner. Charlie Evans has set-up a charity to help people in the transgender community who want to stop or reverse their decision (photo: Stuart Nicol)Helena Kerschner before detransitioning and after
The only child abuse may be choosing to remain in the state.
It is heartening to know that the Supreme Court is putting a break on this stampede to the rule of the unelected “expert” – the kind of person utterly adored by the editors of Scientific American. At the federal level, the decision of the Court majority in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo put to rest the power grab of administrative agencies in areas not supported by law. See, such agencies can only operate within the clear parameters of an underwriting law, if one still considers the Constitution operative. If the law is silent or vague, they can’t freewheel it. Congress must clarify or not. If not, regulators aren’t free to legislate. They’re stuck, not us.
Since the 1920s, the Court has upheld parental rights under the 14th Amendment (with a muddled modification in Troxel v. Granville of 2000, see #6 below). Loper Bright drew a bold line for federal authorities, but has little impact on states whose electorates are infatuated with regulators, even if it means making the kids the sovereigns of their own upbringing under the guidance of empowered “experts”, even if it results in a compelled recognition of your daughter as now your son.
The people running Scientific American are typical of the educated “idle hands” class (in the words of philosopher Roger Scruton). In other words, people imprisoned in the Disneyland of their own mind. Don’t trouble them with reality. They have idled away their time in fantasizing about the many ways to be ludicrous.
As with children, so it is true with many of the college educated: idle hands are the devil’s playthings (Benjamin Franklin). The devil is playing around in the “science” of Scientific American.
RogerG
Sources:
1. The Editors of Scientific American in “Pressroom” at https://www.scientificamerican.com/pressroom/
2. Scientific American editors’ stories in “Stories of the Editors” at https://www.scientificamerican.com/author/the-editors/
3. “Children Deserve Uniform Standards in Homeschooling”, The Editors, Scientific American, 5/14/2024, at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/children-deserve-uniform-standards-in-homeschooling/
4. Thanks to James Mason of the Home School Legal Defense Association in “Why Is Scientific American Going After Homeschooling?”, National Review, 7/5/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/07/why-is-scientific-american-going-after-homeschooling/
5. California AR 5145.3, imposed on all school districts in the state, can be read at https://simivalley.granicus.com/MetaViewer.php?view_id=7&clip_id=1953&meta_id=123825. This is Simi Valley USD’s version of it. Scroll down to page 8 and the section “Transgender and Gender-Nonconforming”.
6. “The Supreme Court’s Parental Rights Doctrine”, parentalrigts.org, at https://parentalrights.org/understand_the_issue/supreme-court/
7. “Fallacy of Composition – Definition and Examples” in Logical Fallacy at https://www.logical-fallacy.com/articles/fallacy-of-composition/
Illustration from Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes”
Biden’s decline is part of a massive swindle, at once intentional and in other ways stupefyingly unintentional, and involves much more than a single person’s descent into senility. We are constantly confronted with demands to believe in the unbelievable. Many of us do. It’s as if we want to be swindled. It’s become routine, and we are shocked when the list of unbelievabilities turns out to be, just that, falsehoods and fiascos.
Of course, the story begins with the revelation of the not-so-revelatory story of Biden’s mental deterioration. It should have been clear to anyone observing Biden’s 2020 “basement” campaign. It succeeded. We elected a basement president. In that protracted war room of the left, which is composed of the natural alliance of the legacy media and the Democratic Party, all of a sudden it’s now safe to say that the president is a cognitive mess.
President Biden from the 6/27 debateMore of our president
They even admit that they buried the story and knew for quite some time. The leader of Biden’s praetorian guard, Ron Klain, only feeds the news in the President’s Daily Briefing that won’t trigger explosions of anger in the president. According to Politico, dealing with Biden is like coping with an unstable mental patient (see #1 and #2 below):
“It’s like, ‘You can’t include that, that will set him off,’ or ‘Put that in, he likes that,’” said one senior administration official. “It’s a Rorschach test, not a briefing. Because he is not a pleasant person to be around when he’s being briefed. It’s very difficult, and people are scared s***less of him.”
The dean of the left’s war room, the Washington Post’s Carl Bernstein, spilled the beans. On CNN he divulged (see #3 below),
“[Thursday’s debate] is not a one off, that there have been 15, 20 occasions in the last year and a half when the president has appeared somewhat as he did in that horror show that we witnessed [the debate].”
Those around Biden knew and the media’s co-conspirators knew. They gaslighted us, till 50 million people tuned in last Thursday night (6/27) and saw the glaring reality. Shame on them, and shame on many of us for our willingness to keep Biden in the game. Actually, get real, they’re torturing the poor guy.
It doesn’t end there. There’s a popular belief in the government’s ability to rescue us from all of life’s travails. Speaking of the belief in the unbelievable. Why is it that no one will mention the looming catastrophes of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid? Not Trump, not anybody. If you do, the left’s war room will descend on you like a flock of buzzards. The programs were built with a design flaw: demographics. Increasing numbers of old folks will clash with proportionally fewer working young folks. Taxes going in don’t cover benefits going out, and the national debt continues to balloon. This won’t end well. It never does. The root of it is our preference for the unbelievable.
Let’s move on to the pandemic and our misplaced faith in government employees in the administrative state. Doctors all, and, as it turned out, not to be trusted.
Look at what they gave us. You’ll still see people masking themselves in public when before the triumvirate of Fauci/Collins/Birx rose to prominence, they wouldn’t dream of it. The new paralyzing fear of the simplest public engagement is combined with children still trying to cognitively and developmentally recover from the isolation of Zoomed screens and closed playgrounds. The rush to forcibly vaccinate all of humanity came with a suffocation of the production of therapeutics even as the virus mutated and continued to spread. They even tried to blot out the ingrained human tendency to produce for oneself and family. It was an assault on our very nature. The waterboarding of society lasted longer in blue states, those places with a particularly gripping faith in government “experts”. We’re still living with the consequences in endemic inflation and a stubbornly low labor participation rate.
Who would have thought that they could destroy what makes us human? They tried really hard.
Our stunted nature is evident in a whole line of other unbelievabilities. How did we ever get to the point of assassinating our standard of living in the eco-fantasies of “sustainability” in the span of a decade? Somehow, energy density no longer mattered. Physics no longer matters. Extensive forests of windmills and floodplains of solar panels wrecking the landscape are billed as the salvation from the left’s wet dream of an apocalypse. Suddenly, our finely honed sedan is to be junked in favor of an obese array of batteries, or something else that doesn’t even exist. The already strained grid is to be burdened further. All the while, we’re chained to a chronological escalator to a new world order that resembles something conjured from the imagination of Salvador Dali or Hieronymus Bosch.
XY-people get to pretend that they are XX-people, and vice versa, and the rest of us are ordered to play along. The insecurities of tween and teen girls and boys are used as proof to herd them into the same pretend world.
It’s astounding, our willingness to believe in the unbelievable. Hans Christian Andersen meant more than he intended in his story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” (see #4 below). In the tale, two shyster weavers convince the emperor that they will produce raiment that only a fool cannot see. Fearful of being thought stupid, the emperor and his ministers see nothing but go along and pays them for their services. Then, with his new “clothes”, the emperor parades out in public to greet his subjects. No one in the crowd wants to be thought a fool till a child blurts out the obvious. See the parallel?
Fear of being thought a fool makes dunces of us all. People of the left believed in Biden’s sharpness so as not to be called MAGA. A challenge to Fauci/Collins/Birx was said to be proof of the existence of neanderthals among us. Ibram X. Kendi and the rest of the CRT cabal were made into geniuses to avoid the epithet of being called a closet racist. Fear of being labeled an implicit bigot in the c-suite has led to a rush call for the “marginalized” and quasi-obese in advertising campaigns. Anything less is a demand for more shaming sessions in the corporate world. Having an EV in the garage is proof that you’re not a denier, that you’re “smart”, despite the fact that you are afraid to venture 40 miles from your home charger. You’ll have to hide the essential internal combustion engine vehicle parked next to your four-wheeled symbol of virtue. We’re made to pretend that we’re not fools, as we prove that we are.
From Biden to California’s eco-nuttery, we are encouraged to pretend that we’re not making fools of ourselves. Ironically, our enemies are the child in the crowd who isn’t afraid to laugh.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Thanks to Jim Geraghty of National Review for the analysis and sources in “So Now It’s Okay to Talk about Biden’s ‘Cognitive Decline’”, 7/2/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/so-now-its-okay-to-talk-about-bidens-cognitive-decline/
2. “‘We’ve all enabled the situation’: Dems turn on Biden’s inner sanctum post debate”, Eli Stokols, et al, Politico, 7/2/2024, at https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/02/biden-campaign-debate-inner-circle-00166160
3. “‘Not a one-off’: Bernstein’s sources say concerns about Biden have been growing for a year”, Anderson Cooper interview of Carl Bernstein, CNN, video on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhFmaAMC1_Q
4. “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, complete story by Hans Christian Andersen, at https://americanliterature.com/author/hans-christian-andersen/short-story/the-emperors-new-clothes/
Gibberish has penetrated the doctor’s office and operating room. In a field exclusively reliant on science – in other words, on accurate depictions of what is – medical administrators turned their backs on it and instead became practitioners of voodoo, sorcery. If you’re a doctor and find yourself now in the equivalent of a coven, you might get fired for publicly expressing your amazement. It happened to Dr. Kendall Conger of Duke University Health.
Dr. Kendall Conger
Here’s the upshot. Duke University Health president Dr. Barbara Griffith sits atop an organization that magically discovered a “public health crisis” of racism in 2021, a racism so prevalent that we must drop common sense, reason, logic, and verifiable evidence to jump onboard the frenzy. Dr. Conger in the hospital’s emergency room noticed it, said so, and was fired.
Dr. Barbara Griffith, Duke University Health president
Duke’s “antiracism pledge” was purported to be “guided by science”. Dr. Conger asked, what science? In fact, they couldn’t produce any, just more gibberish. The zealots’ sensory response when caught off-guard is to wondrously make the racism “implicit racism”. Make it shadowy, vague, and thus unscientific, that’s how. When responding to Dr. Conger’s query, one Duke official admitted, “I concede that I cannot find a [clinical] trial that proves implicit bias is the cause of worse health outcomes for African Americans. Believe me. I have looked.”
It’s more than that. The “implicit bias” is unprovable by nature; it’s “implicit”. You must resort to racial bean counting of providers and patients and then leap to worse health outcomes, skipping over a vast ocean of other variables. Gibberish, absolute gibberish, and by people who might have to remove your infected spleen. What’s next, scapulimancy (divination from an examination of an animal’s shoulder blades)? Jump off the gurney and run for the exits if you view the slitting of a cow’s throat in an adjacent room. What’s the difference?
Dr. Conger was fired for publicly drawing into question a partisan pledge of dubious validity. A taxpayer subsidized organization takes a partisan position in a contentious public debate and suddenly all its employees must clamp their mouths shut? All this proves that bureaucracies are more sensitive to public embarrassment than in their commitment to science. Dr. Barbara Griffith and her coterie stepped on a rake, but you could get fired for warning them.
Oh, the times that we live.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Thanks to Mike Markham at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal in “Duke Health Fires Conservative Doctor”, 7/1/2024, at https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2024/07/duke-health-fires-conservative-doctor/
2. Thanks to George Leef of National Review for drawing my attention to Markham’s piece in “Doctors Must Not Dissent”, 7/1/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/doctors-must-not-dissent/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=second
Bryan and Rebecca Gantt have adopted three children through Vermont’s system. (photo: Alliance Defending Freedom)
This is a revolution, a “gender” mutiny, make no mistake about it. It’s a revolution into our brain, in how we think and on our elemental outlook on the world. “Men” and “women”, “male” and “female” no longer make sense in this fantasy world. Any distinction has been turned into a floating oil slick at the mercy of the unstable currents of a person’s emotional state. This is a completely new and radical notion. Biology is relegated to a secondary circumstance. People who can’t accept the rootlessness of this rebellion are now deemed “unfit”. A recent series of lawsuits puts a spotlight on this latest phase in our ongoing cultural revolution.
At issue is whether a traditional Christian can help rescue children from situations of despair and abandonment. You see, the revolution is at war with the faith of generations and millennia for its refusal to bend a knee to the idol of gender fluidity. However, if you’re of an approved version of the faith, one that follows the fickle winds of fashion, you will be accorded full membership in the civil order. And you too might be granted the opportunity to adopt or be a foster parent.
Blue states are the Paris Commune of this revolution. From Vermont to the west coast, an additional criterion was put into the list of qualities to be eligible for adoption or provide foster care. In a recent email from Vermont’s Department of Children and Families (DCF) to foster-care applicants:
“[a foster-care license] is dependent on foster parents and applicants being able to support youth who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, or another diverse identity (LGBTQI+) even if the foster parents hold divergent personal opinions or beliefs.” (see #1 below)
Cutting to the chase, traditional Bible-believing Christians must promise to check their beliefs at the door, in their own home, before the state will allow them to touch a kid. A faithful Christian joins the ranks of pedophile and spouse-abuser in the eyes of the state.
It happened to Bryan and Rebecca Gantt of Vermont (see #1 and #2 below). He’s a pastor of a nondenominational church and the Gantts have been prior foster-parents and adoptive parents multiple times, and called “amazing” by child-welfare agents in previous foster and adoption situations. The only difference now is the mandatory acceptance of the ideology of gender fluidity to qualify. For them, where’s that in the Bible?
It isn’t. It’s contra-biblical. But one doesn’t have to be a fundamentalist to reach a similar conclusion. Pop-psyche can’t explain away biology, or chromosomes. Fashionable ideologies try to carve out a niche in the foggy bottom of psychology, but the whole scheme is reliant on the certitude of an adolescent’s emotional state. Talk about building a house – er, ideology – on sand.
The more that we’ve been forced to live with this thought-fashion, the more problematic it has become. Like master ideologies of the past, when people were judged for their race-fitness or propensity for class exploitation, it too is found to be extremely wanting. On grounds of pure reason, it’s bunk. The zealots attribute suicide and emotional trauma to the ideology’s chief culprit of gender dysphoria, like the rich or the Jews in past frenzies. It never appears to have occurred to the proponents that the dysphoria itself is a symptom of something deeper than disenchantment with genitalia. After removing the offending genitalia and ingesting pharmaceuticals, the thoughts of suicide will probably remain. Then, what have we achieved, nothing but another batch of scarred children who paid a little too much attention to social media?
Dr. Hillary Cass of the Cass Report to the NHS England
Other nations are putting the brakes on the institutional malformation of children. On the heels of the UK’s Cass Report (see #3 and #4 below), Europe is pulling back from the brink. Not so in America. We’ve become the loudest advocates of this generation’s version of eugenics and forced sterilizations. From the Biden administration to states like Washington, Massachusetts, Oregon, California, and Vermont, it’s full speed ahead (see #5 – #8 below). These people are making our nation grotesque.
Folks are suing in these bastions of revolution. They are the counter-revolution.
Erin Friday, leader of Our Duty, a group of parents supporting policies protecting the right of parent to be notified of gender issues affecting their children, speaks in Sacramento, 8/28/2023.
For the Bible-believing in these states, you have a choice to make: stay and resist (like Alexei Navalny, now deceased in Putin’s gulag) or leave. Bear in mind that your ability to resist will be effectively curtailed by the ruling politburos. Look at California AG Rob Bonta’s successful effort to kill the Protect Kids Initiative (see #9 below). The State of California can’t bring itself to protect children and the right of parents to parent their children. It’s surprising that they haven’t impeded your right to gather for worship.
California’s radical AG, Rob Bonta
Even more troubling, if you have children or grandchildren, what of them? Remember, the revolutionaries control the schools.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Thanks to Ryan Mills in “Blue States Are Barring Americans with Traditional Views on Gender from Adopting. This Christian Couple Is Fighting Back”, in National Review, 6/19/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/vermont-bars-christian-couple-from-adopting-due-to-traditional-beliefs-about-gender/
2. The lawsuit in US District Court in Vermont: Brian Wuoti; Kaitlyn Wuoti; Michael Gantt; and Rebecca Gantt v. Vermont, et al, Case No.: 2:24-cv-614, at https://www.nationalreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/WuotiComplaint.pdf
3. “NHS Report Finds ‘Remarkably Weak Evidence’ to Support Medical Gender Transition for Minors”, Abigail Anthony, National Review, 4/10/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/nhs-report-finds-remarkably-weak-evidence-to-support-medical-gender-transition-for-minors/
4. The Final Report of Dr. Hillary Cass on transgender services for children for the NHS England at https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/
5. “Oregon Woman Sues State for Rejecting Adoption Application over Opposition to Child Gender Transition”, Ryan M ills, 4/3/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/oregon-woman-sues-state-for-rejecting-adoption-application-over-opposition-to-child-gender-transition/
6. “‘Their Faith Is Not Supportive’: Massachusetts Bars Catholic Couple from Fostering Children”, Ari Blaff, National Review, 8/9/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/their-faith-is-not-supportive-massachusetts-bars-catholic-couple-from-fostering-children/
7. “How ‘Inclusion’ Excludes Christians: WA couple denied foster care license because of religious beliefs”, Family Policy Institute of Washington, 4/15/2024, at https://fpiw.org/how-inclusion-excludes-christians-wa-couple-denied-foster-care-license-because-of-religious-beliefs/
8. “Religious Discrimination Hurts Kids Waiting to Be Adopted”, Johannes Widmalm-Delphonse, Alliance Defending Freedom, 9/13/2023, at https://adflegal.org/article/religious-discrimination-hurts-kids-waiting-be-adopted
9. “Judge tentatively sides with California AG in fight over ballot measure on students’ gender ID”, Sophie Austin, AP, 4/19/2024, at https://apnews.com/article/california-transgender-parental-notification-schools-372ad55c99a17e19ce8f3f66c4963faf
We don’t have to look very far for the cause of our discontents. California is the template for what ails us. It’s the Vatican of new wave progressivism, a movement with the mental genetics of Robespierre, Lenin, and every visionary with the ambition to make an entire population’s thoughts, actions, and way of life conform to their dream. Woe be to you if you refuse to fit in. Nothing is allowed to stand in the way, not our institutions, standards of decency, or principles of fair play. Yep, California is our future . . . if we let it.
This progressivism is monstrous. It’s an agent of desolation. Watch them as they go after Trump, or Steve Bannon, or your kids which, in their clutches, are radicalized or placed under the care of the transgender coven. Watch them as they lay waste to prosperity, your prosperity. It’s a ticket to Sheol (Hell).
All of us are living it. The Trump trial and verdict is a hot mess. As for the Bannon conviction and sentence, it’s technically correct, but also a clear example of politically advantageous prosecution. Forget about equal treatment before the law, treating like cases alike. The progressive’s Lady Justice lifts the blindfold from one eye. If you’re Bannon, you get a broadside. If you’re Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, sail on.
Pres. Obama’s AG, Eric Holder, testifying before Congress at the time of the Fast and Furious scandalSteve Bannon sits during his appearance at New York Supreme Court after a hearing in New York City, January 12, 2023. (photo: Steve Hirsch/Pool via Reuters)
Compare the two. Eric Holder in 2011 falsely testified before Congress that he had been aware of Fast and Furious for only few weeks prior to his testimony. He’s contradicted by the facts. Justice Department emails to Holder from underlings discussing Fast and Furious date back to July of the previous year. Holder slow-walks congressional subpoenas for more information and President Obama puts the kibosh to any more cooperation, shielding his AG from congressional oversight under a blanket of executive immunity. Shortly thereafter, tired of all the nonsense, the House Oversight Committee voted to hold Holder in contempt of Congress. What happened to Holder’s contempt charge? Nothing. It fell into the abyss (see #1-3 below).
Not true for Bannon. For Biden’s DOJ under AG Merick Garland, it’s full speed ahead. Bannon is accused of obstructing a congressional investigation, like Holder, because he falsely believed that he was covered by President Trump’s claim of executive immunity. I say falsely because Bannon wasn’t a presidential aide to be covered by executive immunity, nor was the information in the subpoena probably protected by presidential immunity. Technically, in accordance with law, Bannon is guilty. So, don’t blame the judge for sentencing him to jail time. But Holder should also be wearing an orange jumpsuit if America is still a nation that adheres to basic principles of fair play.
We aren’t that kind of nation any longer. Thanks, progressives.
Progressives rabidly wanted to get their man, Trump and any person around him, by creating in 2021 a bogus committee, the J6 Committee, to target Trump and his people. The committee was not legitimate since the minority party (Republicans) weren’t allowed their choices to be on it. Instead, the thing was stacked with zealous Democrats and a couple of carefully selected Republicans with a publicly announced hatred of Trump. Any legal actions taken by it were tainted by over-the-top partisanship.
It parallels the Democrats’ other shambolic distortions of justice in the Democrat Jim Crow South.
A Ku Klux Klan rally in Frederick, Maryland, in 1980. They’re the Democrats’ version of civil society in the old Jim Crow South.
Hanging judges and juries and jury nullification were the stock and trade of Democrat white southerners in charge of the deep South. It’s in the Democrats’ DNA. Like the couple of whites accused in the torture and murder of Emmitt Till standing before a bigotedly sympathetic jury, Trump and Bannon were similarly hauled before a stacked hearing. No apologies, just convictions.
Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie, weeps as the body of her slain son arrives at a Chicago Rail Station, Sep. 1955
The sad saga doesn’t end there. Desolation is the consequence of progressivism. Look at the poster child of progressivism, California, its cities, combustible wildlands, teetering grid, collapsing infrastructure, broad assault on the retail trade, fleeing middle class and businesses, overall sense of ugliness and lawlessness, burgeoning public indebtedness, failing schools, eco-fanaticism, etc. It’s a mess, and some of the progressively minded are beginning to notice it to their chagrin. They didn’t sign up for this. Who would?
A mom is still a mom without regard to her party registration. The progressive agenda is well and good . . . until it places her child in its maw. It happened to Erin Friday whose daughter was gender transitioned behind her back by public school authorities. A progressive, Democrat, and supporter of much of the LGBTQ agenda, she was so incensed by this affront to her basic parental authority that she helped organize the Protect Kids Initiative to prevent this from happening to another mother and child in the state (see #6-7 below).
Erin Friday testifying before the California State Assembly
Then she ran into another maw, the new wave progressives who run the state of California. Their shenanigans killed the Protect Kids Initiative. How? Simply make it difficult to collect the required number of signatures. The antics of state Attorney General Rob Bonta was a dagger to its heart. State law gives power to the AG to provide a title and summary for the initiative. The “Protect Kids Initiative” became “Restricts Rights of Transgender Youth”. The attached summary asserted that the initiative “prohibits gender-affirming health care for transgender patients under 18, even if parents [sic] consent or treatment is medically recommended”. It’s hard to gain support from an ill-informed California electorate when having to face frowns after reading “Restricts rights” and “prohibits … health care”. The AG’s hostile language was upheld by a California court. The thing is dead, dead.
Rob Bonta, the radical left-wing attorney general of California
On top of everything else that the popularly elected progressive ruling class is doing to the state, parents can’t protect their kids from mental and medical interventions that will scar them for life. This state is just hostile to children from aborting them up to and including their passage down the birth canal to mutilating them for life, all at public expense. It’s a malevolent state that has become an Auschwitz for children.
Electing progressives is an invitation to disaster. For some, they think that their only recourse is Trump, or some such acolyte, which they find distasteful. Well, how distasteful is our ruined constitutional order or our kids scarred beyond belief? If California is our national future, flee, flee now to some lonely and isolated outpost in Australia’s outback. Get out, or vote against any Democrat before they get a chance to bring California to your town.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Steve Bannon’s Remand Is Consistent with the Law”, Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review, 6/8/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/06/steve-bannons-remand-is-consistent-with-the-law/
2. “Why Eric Holder Will Regret His Recklessness”, John Yoo, National Review, 9/25/2014, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/why-eric-holder-will-regret-his-recklessness-john-yoo/
3. “Fast, Furious, and Loose with the Facts”, The Editors, National Review, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2011/10/fast-furious-and-loose-facts-editors/
4. “Eric Holder, Once Cited for Contempt in Fast and Furious Probe, Criticizes Barr for ‘Protecting the President’”, Matt Naham, Law and Crime, 5/1/2019, at https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/eric-holder-once-cited-for-contempt-in-fast-and-furious-probe-criticizes-barr-for-protecting-the-president/
5. “Eric Holder’s Contempt Case Trends Amid Bannon Sentence ‘Double Standards’”, Newsweek, 10/21/2022, at https://www.newsweek.com/eric-holder-contempt-case-steve-bannon-sentence-double-standards-1753963
6. “California Parents Are Afraid of Losing Their Kids | Erin Friday”, California Insider (video), with Siyamak Khorrami, at https://californiainsider.com/california-news/videos/california-insider-show/california-parents-are-afraid-of-losing-their-kids-erin-friday-5608600
7. “Parent Group to Sue California Official Over Alleged Misleading Ballot Title, Summary”, Brad Jones, California Insider, 1/9/2024, at https://californiainsider.com/california-news/parent-group-to-sue-california-official-over-alleged-misleading-ballot-title-summary-5560682
The state’s elite medical schools, such as UCLA’s Geffen School of Medicine, aren’t immune from the broad carnage that has swept K-12 in California. Let’s start off, though, with the lower grades, then move to the current ravaging of UCLA’s med school.
Overall primary and secondary education in California is miserable. In no educational measure is the state an exemplar. From Wallet Hub to the Nation’s Report Card, it’s a trail of tears for the state’s K-12 schools (see #1 below). Quoting one source (see #2 below):
“A new study by Wallet Hub [2015], a financial advice company, puts California schools at the bottom of the pack. California school systems are the ninth worse in the nation.”
The above report was from 9 years ago, and it hasn’t gotten any better; though, teacher salaries have, with a top-ranked annual average of over $95,000 (see #3 below). But that is eaten up by the humungous cost of living (see #4 below). It’s big money when compared to other states, but that number relegates a California teacher in their prime to tenement life in LA or the Bay Area. Forget about a coastal bungalow.
So, why the stratospheric cost of living? It’s more than the attraction of the climate driving up demand, if that’s what you’re thinking. The state is all into central planning, copying Lenin’s economic playbook – the state dominating the “commanding heights” kind of thing. “Transitioning the economy” is central planning. DEI is central planning. Official sanctification and propagation of transgenderism is central planning. What isn’t central planning on the progressive’s wish list?
And central planning is expensive, always has been, in more ways than one. It’s expensive because it’ll come out of your hide in more than prices, like shortages, blackouts, and declining opportunities. It’s a replay of the Soviet Union.
California is centrally planned into a housing crisis. Look at your centrally planned utility bills. The high cost of fuel extends beyond the pump and into sticker prices on everything on store shelves. The centrally planned jump in the state’s minimum wage is driving up fast food prices and driving out jobs. Wait for the centrally planned EV mandates to slap you in the face. Try to build anything in the state as you face the daunting gauntlet of layers of litigation and fees and approvals and disapprovals, and the state’s burgeoning activist groups. They’ve even managed to centrally plan homelessness into a catastrophe. The crime problem is centrally planned with “restorative justice” and “equity”. Filth and crime join unaffordability in the state’s reputation. For a teacher, $95,000 is as meaningful as 95,000 Weimar Reichsmarks in 1922 (50,000 marks for a pound of potatoes).
Now, what the state’s central planners have done to the cost of living and K-12, they’re excited to bring to the med schools. UCLA is the epicenter of more than antisemitic encampments and mobs. The med school’s newly minted admissions approach magically turned the unqualified into qualified by reliance on melanin count, genitalia, home language, and other such markers of medical excellence, sarcastically speaking (see #5 below). No GPA in the hard sciences or MCAT for these DEI grand viziers. But it’s one thing to have the unqualified in sociology, quite another to have one in the operating room. Do you think I’m kidding?
Some federal judges are refusing to offer clerkships to Ivy League law students, the law being replaced by revolutionary doctrines in these law schools. The same reaction might soon be true of hospitals and patients for graduates of the UCLA Medical School. A big framed UCLA diploma on the wall behind the newly licensed doctor might be your cue to bolt for the door. The alarm is sounding. The Washington Free Beacon is working the story, as are many other outlets (see #5 and #6 below).
They are finding sources in the med school willing to speak up. The Free Beacon writes,
“In interviews with the Free Beacon and complaints to UCLA officials, including investigators in the university’s Discrimination Prevention Office, faculty members with firsthand knowledge of the admissions process say it has prioritized diversity over merit, resulting in progressively less qualified classes that are now struggling to succeed.”
At the tip of the spear in debasing medical education at UCLA is Jennifer Lucero, Associate Dean for Admissions at UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine (DGSOM), and the Vice Chair for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) for the Department of Anesthesiology.
She has openly berated med school admissions committee members for raising questions about the poor qualifications of some matriculants if they happen to fall into one of her “protected” identities, this after she has stacked the committee with fellow believers. From The Free Beacon: “Speaking on the condition of anonymity, six people who’ve worked with her described a pattern of racially charged incidents that has dispirited officials and pushed some of them to resign from the committee.”
She’s a mess creating a mess. Staff and faculty complaints about her have been lodged with the school’s Discrimination Prevention Office. They have much to complain about, and it goes beyond personal treatment. Each year since her elevation to power, the danger increases that the unqualified and unmerited will slip through the school and into medical practice to the detriment of patients and the school’s reputation. One admissions committee member recounted,
“I have students on their rotation who don’t know anything. People get in and they struggle.”
One student assisting in an operation couldn’t identify the major artery when asked. She then verbally attacked her professor for putting her on the spot. One professor confessed, “Faculty are seeing a shocking decline in knowledge of medical students.”
Anecdotes abound. And it shows in shelf tests, the examinations administered at the end of each clinical rotation. The failure rate increased ten-fold under her stewardship. Almost a quarter of the school’s students in the class of 2025 have failed 3 or 4 such tests. Another professor admitted, “… a third to a half of the medical school is incredibly unqualified.” If one of these practitioners should be supervising your medical treatment after a car accident, when you come to, demand to see their resume’ and look for an escape.
Major airlines promise to adopt the same approach for pilots. I may not fly again. Merit has a place, and it really has a place for 150 passengers at 30,000 feet.
The problems with California run deeper than its so-called ruling elites. It’s more than governors, legislators, mayors, or even college deans. All of them, directly or indirectly, owe their positions to popular choices in elections. People vote for this stuff by electing the people who bring this stuff. A dean of admissions couldn’t declare war on merit if she wasn’t protected by the nest of an agreed-upon agenda that can be traced back to the elected. The war on merit is a popular choice, whether understood by the electorate or not.
I refer to H.L. Mencken once again,
“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”
Yes, the great masses of the plain people of California.
It’s the difference between government and regime. Think of “government” as the outward signs of rule: offices, constitutions, its structure and institutions. In contrast, “regime” runs much deeper. Often used to identify authoritarian systems, it nonetheless has application to democracies. A particular approach to governance becomes a pattern – red and blue states for instance – due to pervasive and endemic cultural and social norms. Elections occur within this social matrix, and the “regime” rears its head.
You can’t have an official nod to teenage genital mutilation without at least a vaguely popular toleration of the ideology of transgenderism. You can’t have a broad war on merit without at least a vaguely popular toleration of the assault. What else accounts for the ritual pattern of choosing people who bring these policies? California’s regime, which originates with the state’s people and their tendencies, is responsible. If anyone is to blame, blame the people of the state.
Those people are a huge part of a socio-political eco-system favoring the advancement of the unqualified. But who has the time and resources to investigate their doctor to uncover whether they emanated out of this cauldron? California schools are proving that they don’t come with the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. We are left with a rule of thumb. If your doctor came out of California, and especially its med schools, play it safe by shopping around. You’ve got at least 30 or more states to choose from. A state’s reputation now matters, and matters a lot.
RogerG
Sources:
1. The Nation’s Report Card at https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?sfj=NP&chort=1&sub=MAT&sj=&st=MN&year=2022R3
2. “How Do California Schools Rank Compare to the Rest of the Nation?”, Patch, 8/1/2015, ahttps://patch.com/california/santamonica/how-do-california-schools-rank-compare-rest-nationt
3. “California teachers struggle despite having the highest salaries in the nation”, Malekka Seshardi, EdSource, 5/13/2024, at https://edsource.org/updates/california-teachers-struggle-despite-having-the-highest-salaries-in-the-nation
4. “California ranks last in opportunity due to cost living: U.S. News”, Kenneth Schrupp, The Central Square: California, 5/16/2024, at https://www.thecentersquare.com/california/article_f06f4eec-13c9-11ef-a68c-6f1b9d775308.html
5. “’ A Failed Medical School’: How Racial Preferences, Supposedly Outlawed in California, Have Persisted at UCLA”, Aaron Sibarium, Washington Free Beacon, 5/23/2024, at https://freebeacon.com/campus/a-failed-medical-school-how-racial-preferences-supposedly-outlawed-in-california-have-persisted-at-ucla/
6. “‘Shocking decline’: UCLA med school prioritized racial diversity, leading to decline, report says”, The College Fix, staff, 5/23/2024, at https://www.thecollegefix.com/shocking-decline-ucla-med-school-prioritized-racial-diversity-leading-to-decline-report-says/
7. Special thanks to Jeffrey Blehar in “DEI Will Destroy Our Trust in Doctors”, National Review, 5/23/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/dei-will-destroy-our-trust-in-doctors/
The song – “We’re in the Money” – immediately came to mind after learning of the money trail for the misnamed Jewish Voices for Peace. They’ve been active with anti-Israel malcontents since the October 7 massacre. Radicalism on the Left is an ecumenical ideology not restricted to the fashionable identities. Your physical characteristics, background, and choice of bed partner says little about what is rolling around in your head. There are Jews who are all into self-negation as there are in any group in or out of the “protected classes”. And a Daddy War Bucks can always be found to fund your efforts at self-negation.
Take the aforementioned Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP). Here’s a list of the fat cats who dug deep to bankroll the extremist group (and the fellow-travelling IfNotNow) from 2019 to 2021 (see Sources below). The Daddies War Bucks include the $650,000 from Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Kaphan Foundation’s $441,510, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s $340,000, the Schwab Charitable Fund’s $654,233, the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund’s $260,705, $175,600 from Morgan Stanley Global Impact, the Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program’s $98,650, and the Tides Foundation’s $75,000. No mere chump change, lefty revolution is expensive.
No wonder the encampments seemed so well provisioned and coached. It’s because they could sing along, “We’re in the money, we’re in the money . . . “. Enjoy the rendition in the clip below as you view the campus chaos.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “George Soros Funds Groups Behind DNC Riot Where Protesters Assaulted Cops”, Chuck Ross, The Washington Free Beacon, 11/16/23, at https://freebeacon.com/democrats/george-soros-funds-groups-behind-dnc-riot-where-protesters-assaulted-cops/
2. “Jewish Voice for Peace’s Funding Network”, NGO Monitor, 11/13/23, at https://www.ngo-monitor.org/reports/jewish-voice-for-peaces-funding-network/
3. A special thanks to Brittany Bernstein in “Activist Groups behind Violent DNC Protest Have Long History of Defending Terrorism, Receive Funding from Major Corporations”, National Review, 11/17/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/activist-groups-behind-violent-dnc-protest-have-long-history-of-defending-terrorism-receive-funding-from-major-corporations/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=more-in-tag&utm_term=second
