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Mini-Maos

The “woke” on an American college campus.
Chinese students inspired by Mao for a Cultural Revolution.

Mao Zedong wrote the playbook that he cast as a Cultural Revolution: animate the young, unleash them on the seasoned and fortunate, and coopt many institutions to make the offensive appear as an irresistible force. Then watch the carnage, but refashion it as the necessary cleansing of the corruptions from the social body.

Sound familiar? If not, it should. Quiet and not so quiet censorship abounds in today’s USA in the imposition of neo-Marxist critical theory on the young in their schools, cancellation of talks and lectures under threat of youthful mobs and their adult abettors, acts of public shaming and ritual self-abasement of the recalcitrant, and media channels populated with the mob’s zealots enforcing their own bans on thought. Alan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind in 1987 warned of higher ed’s ubiquitous indoctrination that is the enemy of free inquiry. It has only gotten worse since his time. Alas, it has come to pass on our streets, campuses, in school curricula, and in the corporate boardroom and lunchroom.

Allan Bloom of the University of Chicago, etc.

We let it happen through a blind deference to the gatekeepers of degrees and our broad acceptance, in essence, of the schools as glorified babysitters. We thought that all would be well if we turned over our kids to the clutches of indoctrinated and self-interested public employees, and our young reached early adulthood with a BA, any BA. Well, no, all is not well. The paper certificates didn’t produce an informed and wise citizenry and many of our private and public institutions have become the vanguard, the enforcers, of this revolution of the closed-minded.

Examples abound. Google banned money-making on its YouTube platform if it isn’t in accord with the “scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change”. That’s right, you can only enrich your bank account if you peddle the “consensus”, no matter its dubiousness. The “consensus” is a euphemism for a departure from the scientific method and into a coerced orthodoxy. It’s an announcement from on high that such and such is proper thought, something familiar to anyone brought before Stalin’s show trials, employed in Orwell’s Ministries of Truth and Love, or the papal Inquisition of the Renaissance. Amazing, progressives – by definition a group who loudly proclaims the past is dead – look to the past for their inspiration.

Who can forget AG Garland’s new role as thought policeman extraordinaire? A political constituency – namely, the insular and comfy special interests who’ve long dominated your child’s school – feels imperiled and our AG rides to the rescue by promising to chill the rancor and speech at school board meetings with FBI investigations. No one need be arrested to send angry parents home to anxiously await the dreaded late-night knock at the door. Censorship achieved by a threat, Fidel style.

Then there’s this little tidbit. The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH, or more accurately “warpath”) protested Abigail Shrier’s interview of a clinical psychologist and vaginoplasty surgeon who question the use of puberty blockers in children in Common Sense with Bari Weiss. Such discussions according to “warpath” should be closeted in unread journals and not be exposed to a broader audience, lest we be made aware that there are many debatable contentions in transgenderism. The New York Times chimes in with its own silencing by not publishing these types of op-eds because they are “outside our coverage priorities right now”. This is how a “consensus” is built, in the dark of night.

Modern academia is a rich source of “consensus” building through censorship and thought control. Dorian Abbot of the University of Chicago, eminent professor of geophysical sciences, was invited to speak at MIT, then disinvited after protests by the Red Guards of critical theory because he criticized the new racialism and favored “Merit, Fairness, and Equality”. Unsurprisingly, the school relented to the mob. Professor Robert P. George of Princeton got wind of the fracas at MIT and extended an invitation to Abbot. The talk was held at Princeton on the same day. Thank God that the spirit of inquiry and debate still flickers in some little precincts of the lands of ivy-covered halls.

More from the college funhouse. Bright Shen of the University of Michigan, a man who lived through Mao’s original Cultural Revolution, faced our own Red Guards of denunciation when he showed Shakespeare’s Othello, Laurence Olivier starring in blackface. The hyper-politicized sensitivities of the childish goons shrieked, Shen experienced the ritual self-abasement, and he no longer teaches his music course turning Othello into an opera.

This kind of thing can only survive in the darkness of obscurity. Sunshine, after all, is a disinfectant.

Mao, sadly, is an inspiration for far too many of the young. It’s more proof that we’ve failed to transmit our civilization’s legacy to our children. We have willingly, or unwillingly, mostly by ignorance, let the minds of our children get away from us. We are reaping the consequences of the many little Maos in our midst.

RogerG

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Sunlight Is a Disinfectant

Parents protest at Loudon County school board meeting, June 2021

Most people are unaware of what’s happening in the deep and dark recesses of their most significant public institutions. If they’re informed, a good portion would hit the barricades, and for good reason. Well, here’s a couple of stories on the role of sunlight (public exposure) in the disinfectant process for public policy.

A scheme to strangle the civilian firearms industry of capital was forged in 2018 by – who else? – Cal STRS’s Christopher J. Ailman, chief investment officer, with collaboration from a few other public and private investment officers (a full list below). Basically, in typically obtuse and vague language, the declaration is an attempt to abridge a legal and Constitutionally protected activity because it affronts the sensibilities of California’s coastal elites who then try to foist their sentiments on the rest of the country.

Christopher J. Ailman of CalSTRS

Read the thing (here). Most of it was written by someone completely unfamiliar with the process of purchasing a firearm in America. Anyone buying a gun in a store goes through a federal background check. The unregulated transfers and sales – gifts, inheritances, underground sales – will always exist, with or without our many laws, in the same manner as the regulated drug market will always face a shadowy illicit version. Pass a law and an underground clone will pop up.

Further, the statement is littered with “best practices”, the “best practices” of Nancy Pelosi’s home district. It’s as scam to work-around the agencies of popular sovereignty, a people’s elected representatives, by organizing the socially and culturally insular crowd in gated and walled estates to do what an elected government refuses to do, because they were never elected to do it.

Light was beamed onto the scheme first by National Review (“Woke Capitalism: A History”, KDW, July 1, 2021) and then to the NRA (“Florida’s Pension Fund Joined a Gun-Control Compact, Until…”, LW, America’s 1st Freedom, Sept., 21, 2021). The NRA noticed the name of Michael McCauley, Senior Officer at the Florida State Board of Administration, as a signatory to the screed. Remember, Florida doesn’t suffer from the ritual identity-mongering and victimhood of the power brokers in the not-so-Golden State. Jimmy Patronis, Chief Financial Officer for the state, was informed by the NRA and Florida quickly withdrew its name from the extortion racket. Florida is growing precisely because it is not California, and now McCauley knows it too.

Jimmy Patronis, Florida Chief Financial Officer

Parents have joined the fray in shedding light on another radical ploy of longstanding. All the pandemic Zooming may have exposed the people who run your child’s classroom to be on a par with the ethos in Nancy Pelosi’s home district. I should know of what I write as a 30-year veteran of a public high school classroom. A while back, I retorted to our superintendent that we are nothing but a finishing school for “good little Democrats”. It’s only gotten worse since my retirement in 2015. What began with the multiculturalist nonsense of “diversity is our strength” quickly metastasized into the rancid racism-to-fight-racism.

Whatever you want to call it – critical theory, critical race theory, deconstructionism, anti-racism, white privilege, systemic racism, etc. – it’s still nothing but Marxism for a new revolution to overthrow our Constitutional order and civilization. The ideological seed germinated in teacher training (going back to my 1970’s), in all textbooks that I’ve used, and reviewed as a department chair, for the past three decades, in supplemental materials, as the orthodoxy in the colleges and universities, and as the pervasive and presumptive outlook in faculty lounges. It is so in the ether that one should not be surprised that we have undergrads in spittle-laced tirades at deans who’ve called for a little tolerance.

Watch this report on student treatment of Matt Walsh.

Not too many parents want their kids to join the statue-toppling brigades. And parents are beginning to show up at school board meetings. Good for them. Keep it up. And, by the way, a great deal of “throw the bums out” is more than deserved. Start local, then continue on up through the bureaucracies and the federal ladder. Clean house. Extremist partisans fiddling with our pensions funds and children should feel the heat. It begins with the white hot rays of the sun.

RogerG

* “The Principles for a Responsible Civilian Firearms Industry” authors: Christopher J. Ailman, Chief Investment Officer CalSTRS; Christianna Wood, Fellow at Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative; Michael McCauley, Senior Officer at the Florida State Board of Administration; Peter Reali, Senior Director at Nuveen; John O’Hara, Managing Director and Senior Advisor at Rockefeller Asset Management; and Rakhi Kumar, Senior Managing Director, Head of ESG Investments and Asset Stewardship at State Street Global Advisors.

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December 7, A Day in Infamy

Operation Z commenced without warning at 7:48 a.m., Sunday, December 7, 1941. After the last wave of Japanese aircraft left Pearl Harbor, 2,402 were killed and 1,178 wounded. On this day, every American should be reminded that it is one of the highest civic acts to visit the Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor at least once in their life to pay their respects. I did in 2016.

The USS Arizona as a burning hulk, Dec. 7. 1,177 sailors and Marines were killed.

Certain days provide cringing lessons. We’ve had a few since that harrowing day. The heart-wrenching scenes of the evacuation of the US embassy in Saigon in 1975 would be one. Another would be 9/11. Now, Kabul airport in August of 2021 would qualify as still another. Two of these were at the hands of others while two were the culmination of our own actions. Two rallied the nation to confront the threats. Two were disgraceful and will result in calamitous decades to follow.

Honor the sacrifices, remember the dead, and learn the lessons of history . . . if history isn’t molested in the classroom by a fashionably extremist ideology so it can’t be remembered properly. Remember, but remember well.

The Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor.

RogerG

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Virginia, Progressivism, and CRT

Glann Youngkin in his victory speech after being declared the winner of the Virginia gubernatorial race.

One of my most frequently used clips in one of my World War I lesson plans was from PBS’s first major documentary on World War I, “The Great War”. In it comes this narrated passage about Woodrow Wilson: “Above all else, Woodrow Wilson was a passionate champion of democracy.” He was not. Above all else, he was a champion of rule by credentialed technocrats, and wanted to revamped our political order to shift power to them; the Constitution be damned. Popular sovereignty comes in second to the trained “expert” in his mind. Now that’s the real progressivism in definition and spirit. Yet, today, he’s Saint Woodrow.

A similar misconception revolves around the hot-button critical race theory (CRT). Some dismiss its threat and existence in the schools. Take for instance this question from PBS’s Yamiche Alcindor at Wednesday’s Biden press conference: “What should Democrats possibly do differently to avoid similar losses in November, especially since Republicans are now successfully running on culture wars issues and false claims about critical race theory?” “False claims”? Later, in a follow-up question, she proclaimed they are lying about it. MSNBC’s Joy Reid used a segment on her program to profess it isn’t being taught. Fact is, it is being taught and has been for quite some time. The troop is lying, or they don’t know what it is.

Yamiche Alcindor

Such is the sorry state of public discourse at this time of stark division in our country. Anything requiring more then a few seconds to explain is reduced to rhetorical compression, making it easy for the facetious to sound reasonable to the gullible. CRT becomes a “ghost” and amazingly autocratic progressives become champions of democracy.

The issues rose to the surface in the weeks leading up to Virginia’s election. The uglier side of progressivism appeared in Terry McAuliffe’s famous debate quip, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” The comment may lack some context, but it can also stand on its own. For progressives like McAuliffe, everything in life is a matter of “science”. Science requires scientists, and scientists, including those pervasive “social” scientists, do it better, including the raising of your kids. So, parents, please go away. It’s progressivism in a nutshell.

McAuliffe in debate with Youngkin.

More directly, CRT was in Gov. McAuliffe’s own Department of Education 2015 directive for schools in the state to “embrace critical race theory” (original document can be seen here).

The thing that McAuliffe claims isn’t being taught, but is, was also a big part of Alcindor’s matriculation though New York University to her master’s degree in “broadcast news and documentary filmmaking”, like it is in any place with a faculty lounge. Maybe it was so foundational in its bits and pieces that she can’t identify it as a full-blown theory, as the same thing is being done to all those kids laboring behind masks and plexiglass in COVID classrooms.

In a classroom it appears as “equity” or “anti-racism” teacher training. Buzz words hide the reality. In a textbook, it shows as a greater emphasis on oppression in its varied forms and less on those white males and the glories of western civilization in such things as Christianity’s equality of souls, rule of law, natural rights, popular sovereignty, personal and economic freedom, etc., etc.

The elements of CRT, such as “equity”, are presented to teachers at training sessions such as this one.

Marx provided the paradigm. Feudalism can’t help oppressing the commoners. Capitalism can’t help oppressing the “wage slaves”. It’s in the system’s DNA. CRT takes the dialectic and places the oppressor-whites and oppressed “people of color” in the combative roles. Simple. After that, it’s all downhill to ascribing differences in socio-economic stats to, you guessed it, racism. And the whole hodgepodge will carry the aura of “science” since there’s a bunch of people with degrees after their name selling it.

Never mind the illogic of it all. When you’re on a roll to the revolution, don’t let out-of-wedlock births, higher levels of crime, and high dropout rates stand in the way of the revolutionary clamor. Just with a wave of the hand make these also part of the indictment instead of being the explanatory factors that they are. In the hands of the revolutionary, stats are like kneading dough.

Tuesday’s election exposed the flim-flam of the two abstractions. McAuliffe’s progressivism is inherently authoritarian and Alcindor’s CRT is warmed-over Marxism. I can only hope that the electorate in years to come can cut through the noise and reject the poison.

RogerG

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What has happened to USC? Is Something Deeper at Play?

Utah quarterback, Cameron Rising, from Ventura, Ca., via Texas, celebrates a touchdown in Utah’s 42-26 win over USC in the LA Coliseum Saturday night, 10/9.

My answers are, I can’t say for sure and I can’t say for sure. But hints are scattered about. My principal guess is that the breeding ground for football success lies in . . . wait for it . . . the regional culture. This is not the southern California of USC’s John McKay or the entire PAC-8 of Washington’s Warren Moon any longer. The whole west coast shifted deep blue which might prove to be the catalyst for a deemphasis of the manly arts (as Harvard Professor Harvey Mansfield would put it), like the manliest of all sports, football. Trump might have had a better chance to win California’s 52 electoral votes if the electorate was limited to the LA Coliseum’s attendance, but that isn’t the case. There’s more Bernie Bros in the state than college football fans. Socialism and love of the nanny state undermines fan and program support and player development. Again, my guess.

Hugh Hewitt last week raised an interesting point. He observed that college football is a “red” sport. The top 25 has only two slots for teams from “blue” states: Oregon (#9) and San Diego State (#24). The rest is a monotonous rendition of “red” to “purple” states, mostly “red”. In the last decade, only one “blue” team by the end of the season with any regularity has been in the running for the college football playoffs – Oregon.

Take a look at something as simple as stadium capacity. The top three are in the Big Ten – Michigan (purple, red part of the state, 107,601), Penn State (purple, red part of the state, 106,572), and The Ohio State (red, 102,780). Eleven of the top 25 are in the SEC – which should change its initials to RSC, the Red State Conference. We won’t find a blue state facility till UCLA’s Rose Bowl at #10 (91,136) and USC’s Coliseum at #20 (77,500) – both very ancient and for the most part half empty on Saturday.

The Ohio State’s “The Shoe”

Interesting anecdote: Iowa’s quarterback, Spencer Petras from Greenbrae, Ca., chose the Iowa corn fields because he wanted to play in the electric atmosphere of a Big Ten stadium, according to yesterday’s broadcast team for the Penn State/Iowa game.

Iowa’s quarterback Spencer Petras in Iowa’s 23-20 win against Penn State.
Fans swarm the field after Iowa’s victory against Penn State.
Jubilant Iowa fans on the field.

Helicopter-parent government of the blue states nurture Pajama Boys (Remember the ads for Obamacare?), not football players. The attitude spills over into athletic policy. Arizona State’s punter, Michael Turk, one of the top punters in the country, transferred to Oklahoma due to ASU’s vaccine mandate for away games. Washington State’s head coach, Nick Rolovich, is reported to have a date with the guillotine for refusing to take the vaccine.

No surprise there, college bubbles everywhere are replete with “safe spaces” and triggering hyper-sensitivities. Blue states are nothing but the college bubbles writ large. However, if the surrounding culture won’t play by the campus’s snowflake rules, COVID paranoia will play second fiddle to the gate. MSNBC anchors may go bonkers with the Chicken Little hysteria of “super-spreader events”, but many folks prefer to live in the real world of risk and are voting with their tickets to have a good time. Damn the mommy spoil-sports. Welcome to the “red” states.

Now 3-3, in USC’s losses, their opponents scored 42+ points. Swiss cheese comes to mind when talking about the team’s defense, whether in the run box or the defensive backfield. As a consequence, Utah, like Oregon State and Stanford before them, looked like Alabama when lining up across the USC defensive line. USC attracts some flashy offensive skills players but the rest of the roster looks mediocre. Since the defense can’t hold the more physical offenses, those stars get fewer opportunities to shine. By the third quarter, the team is down 24 points, the game’s tenor has been set, and the LA media darling in cardinal and gold watches his star fade.

Lapses like USC’s have been a concern up and down the west coast. The occasional good team can still be found, something unavoidable in the eight teams from LA to Puget Sound. Beyond the Coast and Cascade Ranges, the picture might look a bit different. Arizona prohibits vaccine mandates in schools, a far cry from California’s Gavin Newsom, Oregon’s Kate Brown, and Washington’s Jay Inslee – cultural socialists all. The off-putting social milieu of those states might be a huge drag on recruitment for Utah, the Arizona schools, and Colorado as they are corralled with the nanny staters. Flying from liberty zones to the lands of COVID fascism in inter-conference play creates difficulties for scheduling and compliance. A five-star recruit, young and healthy with a greater chance of serious medical problems from a frat party than COVID, has a choice between a Chernobyl-like college life or a normal experience in the SEC’s Mississippi or the Big-10’s Iowa. This might be the reason for more California talent showing up in the big schools of flyover country.

A worker at Lumen Field holds a sign stating the stadium’s mask requirement before an NFL football game between the Seattle Seahawks and the Tennessee Titans, Sunday, Sept. 19, 2021, in Seattle. (AP Photo/John Froschauer)

I hear that the Big-12 is shopping for some replacements for the defections of Oklahoma and Texas to the SEC. Hear that, Arizona, Arizona State, Utah, and Colorado? Maybe a move to the Mountain West might be an improvement.

I am prepared for a long run of mediocrity for my much-loved PAC-12 teams. Once the rot of cultural Marxism gets fully established, the malaise infects everything from the economy to the practice field.

RogerG

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Tyranny, American Style

Biden’s AG, Merrick Garland

What does American-style tyranny look like? Here’s an example of an all-too-familiar trend: Merrick Garland, Biden’s AG, sent a memo to Christopher Ray, Director of the FBI, to enunciate investigations of recent parent protests at local school board meetings . There’s a lot to unpack here, but a gradual slide into tyranny is in the offing. The tactic at play is to threaten citizens with the long arm of the central, federal government – the FBI for God’s sake – where they have no conceivable legal and Constitutional interest, to intimidate unwelcome speech and bankrupt political opposition. It’s dastardly and Garland and any of the FBI who cooperate ought to be punished forthwith before it becomes part of the operational DNA of our now unleashed Leviathan. “I was following orders” was no defense at Nuremberg; it ought not be here.

The flaunting of the Constitution is becoming too habitual. Some would like to trace it back to the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, but that was blatant, out in the open, and the feds had no FBI to make the abuse readily operational; something easily undone by an election. However, the powers of the executive branch have grown exponentially. FDR had his enemies list; LBJ had his; and Nixon had his. But it’s more than that. The 21st-century feds through the executive branch meddle, control, manipulate, and intimidate themselves into all aspects of our lives. They have the people with the guns, an army of legal eagles, and a plethora of agencies to turn on an unwary citizenry.

The federal Leviathan got a second wind at their backs under Obama. A trip down memory lane would take us past the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case and the fed’s attempted prosecution/persecution of Zimmerman. A Florida jury put the kibosh to the effort. Ferguson erupted in 2014 and the feds under Eric Holder tried all he could to hang officer Darren Wilson but even he couldn’t find anything. And then there’s the IRS making their own enemies list of conservative groups (Remember Lois Lerner?). Of course, nobody was held to account but a “chilling effect” was accomplished in the interim. That’s how they work: success isn’t measured in prosecutions or in a variety of impositions but in scaring people away. Leviathan as bogeyman.

Lois Lerner, head of the IRS unit that grants 503(C) tax-exempt status to groups, appearing before Congress in 2013.

Lest we forget, do you recall those Obama-era “Dear Colleague” letters threatening schools that they had better shred due process and common sense or face the full force of the federal wolf pack? The message was clear: expediently thump any male accused of rape and open those girls’ bathrooms to any man claiming his genitals shouldn’t distract the female occupants from him being a woman . . . or else!

It begins with the fascination to make the law mean whatever you want it to mean, including the Constitution. Unleash the agents and lawyers and we’ll discover a legal rationale later. That’s the tactic. Call an event an “insurrection”, take your time investigating, raid homes and businesses with guns drawn, let the arrested languish in solitary for unspecified periods, and voilà, any more political embarrassment from the angry Trump voter is magically reduced. The feds discovered that it’s easy to bully the law-abiding working stiffs whose interaction with the law is the occasional speeding ticket in trying to get the kids to soccer practice on time. These aren’t your seasoned manacled occupants of chairs next to defense counsel before a judge.

You see, it’s all about whose ox is being gored . . . or intimidated. Hypocrisy is rampant. Andrew C. McCarthy, former US District Attorney of the southern district of NY, recounts Garland’s fastidious efforts in Clinton’s DOJ to protect the Constitutional free speech rights of fire-breathing Islamists like Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (him of the World Trade Center bombing of ’93) and his extremist coterie. But now spit and fume before your local school board about the racist indoctrination in your kids’ classrooms and you become a “domestic terrorist” and the target of the Patriot Act. Not only is this duplicitous, it’s vile.

When the Leviathan discovers that threats are enough, then there’s nothing that they can’t do. Eventually, an active citizenry is cowed, passive and inert, which is just what they want in order to make you into something that you have every right to not be. I’m not certain that we haven’t slid past good old-fashioned authoritarian tyranny right to the totalitarian kind.

RogerG

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Brainstorming Our Way to a Medieval Life, Part II

Intentional blackouts caused widespread damage and outrage throughout California over the past couple of years. (photo: JOSH EDELSON/AFP )

Part I in this series was about hysterics over the virus driving a people to mommy-state absolutism and the consequent slide to greater poverty, and a Medieval life. Part II concerns the climate-change delirium that promises to depress much of what’s left of our generally benevolent quality of life.

I’m reminded of Eastwood’s 2019 film, “Richard Jewell”. Shortly after the 1996 bombing in Atlanta’s Olympic Park, the FBI and a big-city newsroom moved from “lone bomber” to “hero syndrome” to Richard Jewell, the man who discovered the bomb and saved hundreds by evacuating the area before the explosion. Instead, he was turned into the lead suspect, which was broadcast to the world for months. Later, after months of FBI aspersions and negative press coverage, he was finally cleared and the actual culprit convicted.

Why mention this? Simple, organizations exhibit psychoses like individuals. Call it a social psychosis. An erroneous idea enters the organization’s social bloodstream, is reinforced by the mores of the group, and is hard to shake despite little evidence. It is so entrenched that caution and humanity get tossed to the wind. It is an alternative reality for them. The effect is magnified when allied organizations, such as a big-city newsroom and the FBI in the case of Jewel, feed each other’s prejudices.

Today, instead of some organizations’ blind embrace of the “hero syndrome” to guide their judgments, we’re experiencing another socially entrenched idea, climate change, that promises to deliver much greater and longer-term harm, and not in the ways intended by Earth First.

As before, allied organizations intensify a belief’s impact. These entities are less independent of each other as they reflect more homogeneous backgrounds such as college, intermarriage, and family status. Background examinations of the membership and employment lists of the Ford Foundation, Sierra Club, Department of Energy, US Forest Service, EPA, and much of the administrative state, etc., including the desk jockeys in national security, are an excursion from campus to campus and white collar to white collar. Increasingly, social homogeneity means a greater ideological homogeneity. The same mental bugs, such as the supposedly imminent threat of climate change, has resonance and force.

EPA employees joined the People’s Climate March rallies in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, and Denver as part of the 370 events held April 29, 2017. The AFGE in the banner on the right stands for American Federation of Government Employees which is the largest federal employee union representing 700,000 federal and D.C. government workers nationwide and overseas.

We everywhere hear of climate change as a “fact”, hidden under verbal constructions like “scientific consensus”. Science isn’t about “consensus”. It’s about research, labs, and the constant testing and reformulation of hypotheses, not Gallup opinion surveys. A majority opinion is just another thing to be tested, not an end to the process so activists can rush off to write The Green New Deal.

What do these prophets of climactic doom have in store of us? Hmmm. It’s obvious they don’t like people or individuals organized in free societies. They’re utopians in the mold of Karl Marx with all the “alienation” nonsense (human alienation from nature) and the militant reflex to engineer a “better” person. Their 20th-century literary and ideological Trail of Tears goes from Rachel Carson’s fear of chemicals (’62, Silent Spring) to Paul Ehrlich’s fear of more people (’67, The Population Bomb) to Charles Reich’s greenie-Marxist totalitarianism (’70, The Greening of America) to Murray Bookchin’s open advocacy of eco-socialism (’86, The Modern Crisis) to Michael Mann’s graphic global temperature “hockey stick” (’98) to AOC’s declaration of the end of the world in 12 years. Rhetorically, they went from legitimate concern to doomsday in the span of 60 years, all in the campaign to impose their control over the most intimate details of our lives. Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot would be envious.

As in the devastations of Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot, little good and great harm will come of it. Take a look at what sits before Congress today. In the mold of “the power to tax is the power to destroy”, the Democrats’ budget monstrosity of $3.5 trillion ($5 trillion by sober analysts), the reconciliation bill, is chock full of tax increases, all excused under “fair share” rhetoric. Hikes are to occur nearly everywhere in the tax code: capital gains, inheritance, the income tax’s top rate, business taxes, retirement savings, almost anything material and immaterial. If that isn’t enough, they’ve got a carbon tax bouncing around to hike the cost of your commute, keep the lights on, and prevent you from freezing this winter.

Democrats in Congress push their massive greenie social engineering scheme in a presser at the Capitol.

The tax haul is hawked by Democrats at $3.5 trillion so they can astoundingly claim “zero cost”, or as they euphemistically say, “paid for”. Odd, how so terribly odd. Taxes aren’t about “zero cost”; they’re about making somebody pay, and pay a lot, $3.5 trillion a lot.

Do you actually think that the Dems’ math calculations are an accurate depiction of reality? Under their greedy eye shades, they make some artificial sense, but that assumes people won’t try to avoid the whip hand of the IRS, who, by the way, will be given an additional $78 billion to hunt us down. In the real world, they won’t get that much, but the money spigot will still be cranked wide open from the Treasury Department to the Fed’s open market operations to a flood of dollars chasing fewer goods. Meaning . . . i-n-f-l-a-t-i-o-n, big time.

We don’t need Milton Friedman to remind us “inflation is the cruelest tax of all”. We’ll live it. So, add this monster extraction on top of all the other abuse. You’ll wake up one morning with a phone call from your accountant frantically advising you to change your portfolio, pronto, as your wife discovers at the grocery store that the price of everything in the basket doubled.

Scratch that long-planned family vacation to Disney World.

Why are we being forced to live this way? The answer lies deep in the synapses of the Democratic Party. For them, no social problem can be addressed without more government welfare spending. Also, their inner eco-totalitarian can only be satisfied with more crony capitalism and the power to coerce the population to live according AOC’s tweets, Congress’s airhead-in-chief.


Commissar Ed Markey (D, Mass.) put it quite succinctly, “. . . the Green New Deal is in the DNA [of the reconciliation bill].” For instance, the greenies get their own version of the Young Pioneers (official USSR communist youth group), or Red Guards (of Maoist fame), called the Civilian Climate Corps, to conduct unspecified “green” actions. It could mean anything from door-to-door canvassing to pressure residents to turn down their thermostat to Portland-style “peaceful” protests.

And trillions of dollars in giveaways for electric bikes, solar panels (of course), advocacy of “environmental justice” (anything “justice” in their mouths means CRT), university grants to push the agenda, massive greenie “weatherization” campaigns, worker retraining away from the things people actually want (cars, trucks, air conditioning, single-family homes) etc., etc. Combined with the tax punishment, we’ll end up with a life of California-style energy prices, California-style capital flight, California-style welfare dependency, California-style shortages and inflation, California-style dirty commutes in gang-infested mass transit, and the rest of the social and economic miasma that is California. And our airhead-in-chief will call this Shangri-La.

Do you think that they’ll stop with the federal budget? Hogwash. Remember, they’re totalitarians, and, as such, they care just as much about what you think as what you do. The indoctrination will be pressed into the minds of the kids by curriculums and teachers. Nothing will escape the commissars’ gaze. Criticism of your diet will be part of the lesson plans: meat bad, veganism good. Just picture the teacher in her reading session with the kiddies seated around as she reads “Heather Has Two Vegan Mommies”.

The way is gradually being set for a Stalin-like war on the peasants, or actually the farmer, for producing the stuff that goes into my burger-and-a-Bud. Cattle flatulence, stockyards, farming the plains and woodlands, production of implements and fertilizer, and much more, disrupt the greenie utopia. So, expect the now-common shaming campaigns, penalties, and bountiful awards from the public treasury corrupted by gazillions of meaningless dollars. “Let them eat cake” is readjusted to “Let them eat tofu”.

Is this any way to live? Our economic and social lives are wrecked by COVID-hysterics, the public fisc of a drunken sailor that is an insult to drunken sailors, and militant social engineering based on the loony platitudes of The Squad — and the rare pleasure of a cheese burger and fries will be treated as deviant as pedophilia. My only solace lies in the fact that the Russian people managed to put up with it for 80 years and survived . . . albeit with a Putin helmsman-for-life, rampant alcoholism, a stagnant economy, and a disappearing birth rate.

Reading time for the kindergarteners might be better served by preparing the kids for a life of perpetual COVID shutdowns under an eco-Politburo. “Heather Lives with Her Mommies in a Dirt Floor Hut and Her Sisters Died in Infancy” might be a better choice for reading time. By the way, Heather cries a lot.

Ii comes down to a basic question: How many body blows can a nation endure before it is irreparably damaged? I don’t know, but these hits come from the worst possible source: our wildest imaginations put to practice absent much restraint.

RogerG

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An Institutionalized People

Red, the Morgan Freeman character, and fellow inmate from The Shawshank Redemption.

Red, the Morgan Freeman character in The Shawshank Redemption:
“These walls are funny. First you hate them, then you get used to them. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them. That’s ‘institutionalized’.”

Kyle Smith in his article, “Team Fear” (NR, June 1, 2021):
“. . . Blue America receives each nonsensical new government edict [Biden, Dr. Fauci, CDC, etc.] as reverently as if it were carved on stone tablets, then erased and recarved as necessary. These tablets, they’re a lot like Etch A Sketches.”

Mask wearing in an American subway.

Welcome to modern America, a land populated by people who’ve invented a new class of shamans; only these are in white coats. A large portion of the nation seem to treat them as if they are the new Moses attending to the burning bush. The believers show no cognizance of the fact that these soothsayers are specialists, people who can only contribute a piece of the puzzle in developing something as grand as a government response to a serious challenge like COVID – the other pieces being the social, economic, and sensible legal/Constitutional dimensions.

Particularly irksome is the slavish devotion to their every word. Red might say, “That’s ‘institutionalized’.” These new-age Linuses (of Peanuts fame) can’t let go of the security blanket of government control. So, the masking while jogging, the euthanasia of the restaurant industry, the 6-hour suffocation of children behind dirty masks in school (if they’re allowed back in the classroom), an end to grandma visits, etc. The madness, sadly, is political in nature. Or more specifically, I should say, it’s ideological in nature.

Ideological prevalence is color-coded, by state and local jurisdiction. Blue is the color of institutionalization, aka progressivism. It’s the place of big, expensive, intrusive mommy government. It’s the place of absolute faith in the government “expert”. It’s a target-rich environment for the white-coated, careerist bureaucrat. They’re the new clergy for an irreligious time. People sell their soul to this new clergy, since the old one is increasingly looking out onto empty pews.

The new secular clergy is disgracing itself like some in the old. It’s the same old story: the more fame, wealth, prestige, and exposure they get, the greater the temptation to soil themselves and not even be aware of it. The story is as familiar as Jimmy Swaggart and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.

Hans Christian Anderson provided an insightful allegory in his “The Emperor’s New Clothes”. A vain and pompous ruler, lavish in his attire, is convinced by a couple of trickster hucksters that they will make an ensemble that only the foolish and stupid can’t see. The emperor and his advisers visit the workshop, see nothing, but pretend otherwise to avoid being thought idiots. The people join in the hustle out of fear as the emperor parades in public, until a child shouts the obvious. I can’t get past the clear association with Biden and his coterie of appointees and administrative sycophants.

An illustration from the published book by Han Christian Andersen, The Emperor’s New Clothes.

The child in Anderson’s tale blurts out, “. . . he isn’t wearing anything at all!” Well, here’s a parallel: “Look, the vaccinated are wearing masks as if the vaccine doesn’t work, but it does work.” Leave it to an innocent child to make clear that masks were made irrelevant by Operation Warp Speed.

Don’t expect Biden and his people to mention it. They are espousing COVID nonsense that a child could identify. Vaccines are great. Get jabbed. But a response to an epidemic is more than taking the jab, much more. The emperor’s magical clothes are synonymous with the goal of 95% of 330 million – or the world’s 7.9 billion – getting poked. Five percent unvaccinated is worse than utopian; it’s hallucinogenic. We’re probably already near practical statistical saturation with the vaccine, taking into account the hesitant for whatever reason, those for whom the vaccine is a medical threat, and the vast numbers of the naturally immune.

Bottom line: the bug will get out and it’ll be off to the races to more lockdowns and another bank-busting moonshot vaccine discovery, unless we learn to live with it. Try as we might, try as we squirm, this thing will get out in one form or another.

Right now, the careerist, bureaucratic white coats can’t let go of their power to straitjacket the country. And there are hordes of fervent believers in those blue states waiting and wanting to be straitjacketed. They are a people, like those with a natural addiction affinity, who are prone to developing an institutionalized personality. Their ideology, filled as it is with a host of unexamined assumptions, paved the way. These people are acculturated to mommy government to such as extent that it shows in the masking in such innocuous activities as hiking the 7,000-foot Logan Pass in Glacier National Park.

This is not a population open to common sense. If the vaunted “experts” say mask, close or “hybrid” the schools, turn the private sector into Stasi hall monitors, get vaccinated or else, this crowd will jump to it. The lunacy of it all escapes them. It’s get vaccinated, get vaccinated, and nothing else. But there is something else. In addition to the wonderous vaccines, there’s therapeutics.

If you get the bug in any of its mutations, we have therapies at the ready for respiratory illnesses like this one. If we don’t have enough of them, get them. There are many on the shelf that are efficacious (Remdesivir and a variety of medicinal cocktails). Is this view understood by the institutionalized? It certainly isn’t the message that they’re getting from their secular saints in the bureaucracies.

People will get the bug no matter the success of the campaign to vaccinate. I think that our message should not be “get vaccinated or die”. If it is, not only are we showing ourselves to be gruesome believers in magical clothes, we are institutionalized to the point of dispensing with the obvious to maintain a religious devotion to a class of people whose claims of divine inspiration derived from a classroom and government board, and have only shown themselves to possess the skills at climbing the bureaucratic greasy pole.

Are we so institutionalized that gibberish suddenly becomes wisdom if it is mouthed by a government employee?

RogerG

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America’s Soul-Destroying Time

If you have 59 minutes to spare, please watch the attached video on Professor Victor Davis Hanson’s lecture before a gathering at Hillsdale College on September 8, 2021. In many ways, he captures the perils of our time. It’s a wakeup call.

One important takeaway was his dissection of the effort to remorselessly wreck America, its identity, history, institutions, founding principles, and spirit. Its a truly revolutionary endeavor, like all revolutions since at least the French Revolution.

These revolutions are top/down affairs. They are germinated by people from middle and upper backgrounds who have the wealth and time to be schooled, and therefore the luxury to conjure ruinous fantasies. They are the product of a radicalized and detached claque of demagogic public intellectuals who, once in power, recognize no restraint except the achievement of their extremist ends. They hide away in tenured faculty positions, in ngo’s, among the insulated hyper-rich and cultural elites. Before we knew it, it descended on us like a plague of locusts.

All of sudden, the prior terms of justice were replaced by revolutionary slogans like “equity”, a word made devoid of all meaning and recast to advance an assault on the foundation of the nation. Now, we’re really in for it.

Please watch the video.

RogerG

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A New Grassroots Movement to Combat the New Racism

Please watch this CBN report on the growing Loudon County, Va., parents’ protest.

CRT is the new racism and destroys any conception of timeless truths, like “all men are created equal”. In the Christian tradition, all souls are equal. Critical race theory and its grandpa, critical theory, seeks to erase these sacred truths from public memory and replace them with Marx’s dialectic with race, not class, as the catalyst.

L-R of Karl Marx: Elijah Muhammed, Nation of Islam; Derrick Bell, Critical Legal Studies theorist; James H. Cone, exponent of Black Liberation Theology.

Protect your kids from it. Challenge it at your school, school board, and take it to the state capitol. But first, know what it is so you can’t be bowled over by dimwitted teacher union mouthpieces and the far-too-numerous lefty educrats. Here’s where you go to get armored up to protect your kids and schools: https://heritageaction.com/crtbook.

Heritage Action will give you the goods on CRT so that you’ll know more than AFT president Randi Weingarden and NEA head honcho Becky Pringle. Don’t let them intimidate you with the charge of “racist” so they have a free hand to indoctrinate your kids in warmed-over Marxism.

Get Heritage Action’s e-booklet and go get ’em.

RogerG