Screenshot of the Portland Police Bureau “LGBTQAI2S+ and Queer Policy – Introduction and Training” video. (photo from Portland Police/YouTube)
Portland’s cops were subjected to a characterization of life that is stranger than anything in George Orwell’s 1984 from 1949 (see below). The “Pronoun Training” was actually pure indoctrination in a set of highly contestable beliefs where self-delusion is to be treated as non-delusion. This episode is stranger than anything Winston and Julia were expected to believe by their interrogator O’Brien in Orwell’s story.
The “stranger than fiction” notion could be attributed to Lord Byron, or maybe it was Mark Twain when he wrote, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.” I guess that Twain meant that good fiction must be believable and therefore must stick to possibilities that are limited to the imagination of the author. Real truth, by contrast, isn’t so constrained.
Of course, you’d have to believe in “real truth” which many younger generations have been schooled to assume doesn’t exist. “Real truth”, after all, is a “construct” of the systemic rule of the powerful over the weak, which is the blind faith on our college campuses, and pure Marxism. The stifling dogma leaves the campus mind-censors free to make truth into whatever they claim. Their “truth” became instantly compelling after they succeeded in their long march through the institutions and into the c-suite, government, media, schools, the NGO world, etc., and it’s everywhere.
In such a world, as in Orwell’s 1984, 2+2=5. It is indeed strange for the life of today to conform in so many unexpected ways to the world of Orwell’s 1949 depiction of his fictious Oceania. Language is deformed to make 2+2=5 the “real truth”, or in our case XY people to be treated as XX (and vice versa). Thus, we have many mini-O’Briens running around as consultants getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to convince us that 2+2=5.
By the use of a rhetorical distinction between “gender” and “sex”, the now inconsequential sex-at-birth is magically replaced by the now more compelling sex-of-the-mind, all accomplished with a little word play. And cops, and everyone else, are expected to act as if the artificial reality is actual reality. Whew, the mind reels at the multiple realities like the permutations of the multiverse coming off DC/Marvel drawing boards.
The understandable reaction when confronted with gibberish is to rebel. Believe me, in the span of the 30-year career in education, I’ve been exposed to a lot of “training” in what was absolute drivel. I have an appreciation for the cops’ critical reaction to this latest blather.
“Patronizing,” “childish,” “offensive,” “garbage,” “unnecessary”, “This training is vile”, and the like were indicative of the backlash from attending cops in anonymous feedback (see below). Rather than exercise a little prudent self-criticism and reexamination, the consultants heaped abuse on the recipients by referring to the comments as examples of “racism, ableism, or white supremacy”, and therefore more “trainings” will be necessary to convert the subjects to the approved way of thinking, and a bigger tab beyond the current $440,000 consultant’s fee on the back of Portland’s taxpayers. The paid consultant Dennis Rosenbaum, the O’Brien in this real life story, stands to get richer as he works to convince others that the unbelievable is believable.
This isn’t “training”; it’s indoctrination of the kind routinely found in totalitarian regimes. One can only hope that the indoctrination remains “nice”, but “nice” frequently morphs into “compulsory” with sanctions for not conforming to the zeitgeist. For not having the approved thoughts, which will always slip out in unanticipated ways, your life may be ruined. We’ve gone way beyond accepting 2+2=5. Indeed, modern life is stranger than old fiction.
RogerG
Read more here:
* Much thanks to Ryan Mills in his article, “Portland Cops Rip ‘Hilariously Ridiculous’ Training on How to Interact with ‘LGBTQIA2S+ and Queer Communities’”, 5/2/2023, National Review Online, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/portland-cops-rip-hilariously-ridiculous-training-on-how-to-interact-with-the-lgbtqia2s-and-queer-communities/
* The actual feedback from the “Pronoun Training” can be found at https://www.nationalreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Equity_Training_Comments_Redacted-1.pdf
“Democracy dies in darkness.” — From the masthead of The Washington Post.
President Joe Biden speaks about infrastructure spending, much of it greenie, at the La Crosse Municipal Transit Authority, Tuesday, June 29, 2021, in La Crosse, Wisconsin. (photo: Evan Vucci/AP)
Yes, democracy, and civilization also, dies in darkness – the “darkness” of ignorance and foolishness. Few things today are more foolish than the EV craze and the climate-change mania that undergirds it. Even more absurd is the renewed faith in central planning to ramrod the country into the foolishness. We are reliving the failed Bolshevik experiment.
What precipitated my reaction? I ran into a Yahoo! Finance article by Rick Newman, “Hold on tight to your gas-powered car” (see below). There’s much to recommend the piece, but much of it is still predicated on slipshod, ideologically laden “science”. The people who write about climate change and most everything related to it rely on arguments from authority. That’s the lazy man’s rationale for people who never developed an understanding of science and the scientific method. They’ve got the ideology down – man is an inveterate defiler of the environment – but depend on “experts” who are similarly corrupted by ideological biases to lend a large measure of confirmation bias to the scribbler’s contentions. It’s frilly political theater until it metastasizes into central planning – the Sovietization of life – and then becomes dangerous to the health of a civilization.
At the point of Sovietization, life will spiral downward. Remember the Soviet Union? Maybe not, for anyone who reached puberty after the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Biden and his cohorts are busy resurrecting central planning on American soil. A newly announced policy issued from a DC commissariat, the EPA – much like the Bolshevik’s Gosplan (the USSR’s economic planning agency) and its Five-Year Plans – will punish owners and producers of internal combustion engines (ICE) with leaps in emissions’ standards to kill them off and herd the population into EV’s (see below). Classic central planning.
Long lines to buy shoes in 1970’s Soviet Union.Empty shelves in the government stores, 1970’s and 80’s.Waiting in line for clothes at a government clothing store.Long lines waiting to charge for electric vehicles at a California charging station, 2022.
Whether we’re talking about Stalin’s industrialization/dekulakization plans or Biden’s zero-emission schemes, they are reflections of one another and will suffocate prosperity. How? Why? Much of it has to do with Hayek’s knowledge problem: something as multitudinous and multifaceted as a society cannot be managed by a small group of centralized “experts” or “elites” (see below). No one knows and cannot know enough to do it, except God. Not surprisingly, a delusion of godliness is the companion of central planning.
When top/down controls are issued, expect the litany of unintended consequences. In prior efforts to dictate choices regarding fuel efficiency, cars became “light-weighted” and accident fatalities increased. And the gains in fuel efficiency unexpectedly led to more fuel consumption, not less – something heartily detested by the gang at the Sierra Club.
SNAFU, the refrain of WWII GI’s: situation normal all #&?%!@ up. And the prominence of snafu rises with the boldness of the plan, like forcing 330 million people in the span of a couple of decades to relinquish the second biggest investment in their adult lifetime and coerce them into an electrified and inconvenient alternative chosen by their commissars.
Biden’s EPA commissar, Michael Regan, announces new tailpipe emissions standards.
Of course, with this clique of dullards, the failures of central planning are to be met with . . . more central planning. They’ll never admit failure. Don’t underestimate the creativity of these powerful zealots to conjure more reasons to centrally plan, thus this latest round of EPA ukases. The climate-change gambit has been particularly expedient in expanding the Leviathan. A casualty of it all will be the existence of markets, if you discount the mangled kind that limply survives the administrative state’s waterboarding. Central planning and healthy markets are matter/antimatter to each other.
Markets are what happens when buyers and sellers spontaneously come together under conditions of freedom. They cannot exist without personal freedom. As with markets, freedom and central planning cannot coexist. A huge part of the sales job to accept the assault on freedom is to convince a governing chunk of the franchise that freedom is bad, even on the most mundane things. You are shamed for wanting a SUV with a v-8. You see, in repeated shouts of fevered gibberish, you’ll be browbeat into believing that buying that 5.7L Chevy Yukon will rain down on the planet extreme weather and California’s forever-drought. Hysteria works great to make people want to be controlled.
As if in a real-world experiment, watch the home base of the frenzy, California, descend into feudalism.
Biden is following California’s lead. And all for what? The political leverage afforded by politicized “science”? Physics is bastardized into the simplicity of Lego blocks or Lincoln Logs. Forget about the physics of quantum mechanics, the general theory, and energy pathways. The complex workings of nature are debauched by ignorant die-hards with a cause. In their playroom of the mind, the temperature of the multi-layered atmosphere of varying composition can be regulated like a finger pressing a touch screen on a wall thermostat. Need to lower global temperatures? Just command an x-amount reduction in fossil fuel usage for an x-amount temp decrease; it’s all so simple in the mind of a child. But both the prognosis and cure are what you’d expect from people more influenced by the unstable teenager Greta Thunberg than the lessons of real science.
The hysterical teenager Great Thunberg.
Combine the crusaders with scientists who have forsaken science for politics, and we have the makings of central planning. After all, what were the Bolsheviks, as harbingers of central planning? They were Marxists. Marxists are followers of Karl Marx as he tried to turn history into science, the “science” of his totalitarian revolution. Add a little Lenin with his “vanguard elite” to lead the revolution and direct the construction of the utopia and we’re back to central planning. And we get to relive the Soviet experience of an ossified economy of chronic food shortages and empty store shelves.
Karl Marx was right about one thing when he wrote that historical incidences occur “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”. Welcome to another one of Biden’s farces, this time through his EPA commissariat.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Hold on tight to your gas-powered car”, Rick Newman, Yahoo! Finance, 4/12/2023, at https://finance.yahoo.com/news/hold-on-tight-to-your-gas-powered-car-193629839.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall
* “Biden administration proposes toughest auto emissions standards yet: The rules, which would dramatically reshape the auto industry, could cut as much as 10 billion tons of carbon emissions by 2050, the EPA projected”, Rose Horowitch, NBC News, 4/12/2023, at https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/biden-administration-proposes-toughest-auto-emissions-standards-yet-rcna79304. —- It’s a press release that solely functions as a rah-rah statement for draconian cuts in vehicle emissions to herd the population into EV’s. You have to dig deeper to find the specific actions that drive the policy.
* “Biden-Harris Administration Proposes Strongest-Ever Pollution Standards for Cars and Trucks to Accelerate Transition to a Clean-Transportation Future”, EPA, 4/12/2023, at https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-proposes-strongest-ever-pollution-standards-cars-and
* For Hayek’s knowledge problem thesis: “The Use of Knowledge in Society”, F. A. Hayek, at https://fee.org/articles/the-use-of-knowledge-in-society
Philosopher Herbert Marcuse makes a speech at the Praxis Summer School, 1968
“Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.” —- Herbert Marcuse in “Repressive Tolerance”, 1965 (see below)
Let’s face it, the above quote from Herbert Marcuse (an acolyte of Antonio Gramsci) is emblematic of the rise of the Left’s totalitarian thought control that plagues our times. You know, you’ve seen its fruits in the neo-Marxist critical theory littered in your child’s school curriculum, our teachers’ training, and the campus anarchy spawned by “restorative justice” disciplinary policies. Even casual attention to the news during the 2020 summer of mayhem would expose you to the wholesale defacing of monuments and memorials and urban centers being set ablaze. The gray lady, The New York Times, jumped into the fray with a neo-Marxist rewrite of our history in “The 1619 Project”, which is inserted in bits and pieces in the instruction in many of our classrooms. And let’s not forget the campus mob beatdowns of contrarian voices to the zeitgeist in higher ed from Middlebury to Stanford. Speaking of repressive tolerance (?).
Herbert Marcuse in a heated exchange with a student, from the 1960’s. Practicing a little “repressive tolerance”?
Taking apart the above witticism from Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance” essay, it’s a call for intolerance by hiding it in oxymorons. Repressive tolerance? Liberation by repression? But it is convincing to minds heavily marinated in the intellectual mush.
These young minds are immersed in “woke” thought, and “woke” thought is critical theory, and critical theory is obeisance to the claim of systemic oppression. You see, the whole civilization, its society and culture, according to critical theory are oriented to oppress the “other”, or so-called outgroups as defined by characteristics such as race, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, etc. Everything about the civilization, its law, principles, institutions, are cynically appraised for their supposed malevolent impact on the “other”. The basic rights of free speech, association, conscience, religion must be reinterpreted as part of the system of oppression. The effort is a very longwinded way of saying that we, the self-appointed spokesmen of the oppressed, have the power to silence you. Welcome to the college campus of today.
Something is afoot, and it ain’t pleasant. Our culture and nearly all our institutions are being hijacked by this neo-Marxist junk-thought. And as happens with a radicalization of the Left, there is a commensurate radicalization of the Right, which oddly takes the form of a cult of personality and performance art politics. Trump and dramatic displays of bellicosity replace strategic and reasoned confrontation to the nonsense. Fringe extremes they may be, but we still are in a hell of a mess.
Neo-Marxism is now the prevailing doctrine of the Democratic Party. It comes in the form of “diversity, equity, inclusion” (DEI — or DIE if you will) and furtherance of ESG (environment, social, governance) in the c-suite. It’s a combination of a neo-Jim Crow (race/gender/sexuality-based favoritism) and a dismantlement of western civilization in private sector venues. As for the Right, they have the utterances of Fox News primetime and some talk radio hosts. These venues are deathly afraid of the personality cult in their audiences.
Hugh Hewitt on his radio show regularly declares himself to be in Switzerland (neutral) in the coming Republican presidential primary fight. All contestants will be treated as moral equivalents, probably in a bid to avoid angering the large Trumper listener base for talk radio. The fear is certainly evident at Fox News. The Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News unearthed a treasure trove of duplicity and alarm on the part of Fox News’s celebrity pundits and execs. In released emails and tweets, the channel’s stars spitefully attack the news division over its coverage of the 2020 election and aftermath. The vitriol is lathered in ample dollops of hubris – “we have the power”.
The anxiety in Fox News headquarters in the wake of the 2020 election was palpable. Execs and producers noticed the absence of evidence to support the election-was-stolen angle. Tommy Firth, Laura Ingraham’s producer, is exasperated with the storyline of Dominion rigging the vote for Biden: “This Dominion shit is going to give me an aneurysm – as many times as I’ve told Laura [sic] it’s bs, she sees shit posters and trump [sic] tweeting about it.”
The call of Arizona for Biden was particularly galling to Fox’s commentariat. Laura Ingraham blames exec Irena Briganti for the call: “She is coordinating this.” To which Tucker Carlson responds, “Without question. She hates us.” Sean Hannity chimes in, “Why would anyone defend that call [the Arizona call] [sic].” Later, Laura noticed a ratings fall after the announcement and concludes, “Friday numbers aren’t that surprising with Trump impending loss – but how much of the bleed is due to anger at the news channel [division]”. She levels her distaste for the news division: “My anger at the news channel [division] is pronounced”.
Tucker’s response is telling because he predicts ratings damage by angering the channel’s Trump-laced audience:
“It should be [sic] We devote our lives to building an audience and they [the execs] let Chris Wallace and Leland fucking Vittert [host, reporter] wreck it. Too much.”
After asking, “What can we do?”, Laura answers her own question in a series of tweets: “I think the three of us have enormous power” – “We have more power than we know or exercise” – “Together”. Hubris follows from immense power, the power to craft the story to appease an audience? I can’t say at this point, but the communications are suggestive.
Sean Hannity cuts to the chase in a tweet exchange with Steve Doocy: “You don’t piss off the base”.
So, the Left’s cancel culture joins the Right’s reluctance to aggravate its base to produce either indoctrination through censorship or information that conforms to only blatant confirmation bias. Either way, dangerous fairy tales take root to mangle the public discussion.
Both sides are pandered by only information and stories congenial to their sensibilities. The effect on the young is shocking. They are the ones who are immersed in a Marcusian cognitive hellscape. Herbert Marcuse and his colleagues at the Marxist Frankfurt School – aka Institute for Social Research at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany – scattered like rats on a sinking ship when the Nazis seized Germany. Many came to the U.S. and joined faculties at prestigious American universities such as Harvard, Columbia, UC Berkeley, etc. Therein spread the mental straitjacket of neo-Marxism for our young.
Marcuse’s “repressive tolerance” intolerance became deeply embedded in campus culture. Most recently, on March 9, it was on full display at Stanford when the school’s Federalist Society invited Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan to speak. The essence of Marcuse’s logic to stifle speech from the Right came out of the mouth of the school’s Dean of DEI, Tirien Steinbach, when she took to the lectern after students prevented Duncan from speaking and lectured him on how “hurtful” his opinions and rulings were to the “community”. She and the bullying students claimed the total power to determine what was “hurtful” and prevent any further discussion. It’s classic Marcuse; repressive tolerance in operation.
See video below. Watch Stanford’s DEI dean takeover the lectern from Judge Duncan.
Marcuse ended his academic career at UC, San Diego. For academics braying against capitalism and western civilization, they clearly flock to western civ’s most comfortable, well-paid sinecures in the most pleasant spots on earth.
Herbert Marcuse enjoying the good life at UC San Diego, the 1960’s.
Check this out: they even had a “summer school”, the Korčula (Praxis) Summer School, or camp, on Croatia’s soothing Adriatic coast from 1963 to 1974 when the Marxist Yugoslav dictator Josip Broz Tito shut it down. Some participants referred to it as “Marx on the beach”; others called it a gathering for “dionysaic socialism” (see below). Tenure, hobnobbing with similarly privileged fellow Marxists, adequate incomes, and academic freedom work to insulate them from having to live in the consequences of their detached ruminations. It makes for a very special caste of Brahmins, one that will produce a living hell for everyone not so privileged to be among the revolution’s vanguard elite.
Come to think of it, this is a time of “repressive tolerance” intolerance and a broad depravity on both the Left and a slice of the Right. The Left tries to set themselves up as commissars of daily life, allowing only what conforms to their sensibilities. Some on the Right want to be cradled only in the pronouncements of the chief priest of the Trump cult. The reality is that we need to seize back control of K-grad school from this brewing totalitarianism, and Trump-the-drama-queen should hang up the MAGA hat and enjoy retirement.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Repressive Tolerance (full text)”, Herbert Marcuse, 1969, at https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1965-repressive-tolerance-fulltext.html
* “Texts from the Dominion lawsuit reveal the real Fox News”, Bent D. Griffiths and Rebecca Zisser, Insider, 3/22/2023, at https://www.businessinsider.com/texts-from-the-dominion-lawsuit-reveal-the-real-fox-news-2023-3
* “Marx on the beach: the forgotten story of Yugoslavia’s rebel communist summer school”, Jonathan Bousfield, The Calvert Journal, 8/21/2021, at https://www.calvertjournal.com/articles/show/13038/marx-on-the-beach-the-forgotten-story-of-yugoslavias-rebel-communist-summer-school
Trump supporter and Antifa member confront each other, 2017.
“We are divorced, North from South, because we have hated each other so.” — Mary Boykin Chestnut from her diary at the onset of the American Civil War.
Today, one could substitute “urban from rural” for “North from South”. Please be cautioned, though, that some blowhards will manage to warp the nature of the divide. Marjorie Taylor Greene, that grand dame of unhinged hyperbole on the right, recently tweeted and repeated on Sean Hannity, “We need a national divorce.” She added, “We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government.” Her national divorce is incomprehensible since her blue/red dividing lines don’t neatly conform to state boundaries. It is more intrastate than anything, between a plethora of blue freckles against a sea of red across the entire national domain. That reality captures the essence of the current impasse. The root of our disjunction is cultural. A fundamental difference of ethos separates the blue dots from the red swaths.
The split consists of mutually incompatible mindsets with one being revolutionary and the other defensive of America’s founding. Both sides didn’t mutually move way from each other. One leaped from the other as if it had the plague. The key precipitating factor is the adoption of a radical cultural revolution by social, commercial and political elites in concentrated urban and academic nodes. Ronald Reagan once said, “I didn’t leave the Democratic party, the Democratic Party left me.” Well, America didn’t leave rural areas, but it certainly was kicked out of these nodes of concentrated power and influence. The separation is the logical outgrowth of the radicalization of our cultural elites.
The radicalization of the blue dots – what today makes them blue (actually red in its historical meaning) – consists in the adoption of a particular Marxist’s ideas on how to advance the revolution in spite of popular resistance to it. Antonio Gramsci in the 1930’s penciled out his grand strategy to advance the worldwide revolution. Karl Marx’s original idea was the organic development of a worker class consciousness which would culminate in the seizure of the means of production and set the world on the path to utopia. Others, including Lenin and Gramsci, noticed that it wasn’t happening as predicted. Lenin’s solution was a vanguard elite to precipitate the overthrow of the existing order. For his part, Gramsci advocated a “long march” through cultural institutions and civil society, the social elements that lie mostly between the people and government (civil society: churches, charities, social organizations, schools, businesses).
Antonio Gramsci
Lenin’s coup d’état expired with the implosion of the USSR in 1991 – speaking of internal contradictions that culminate in revolution (typical Marxist rhetoric). Gramsci, who died before he was set to be released from Mussolini’s jail in 1937, would posthumously succeed beyond his wildest dreams. He became the darling of the 1960’s New Left that would quickly morph into today’s progressivism. A hive of intertwined Gramsci acolytes dominates many of our important institutions such as the schools, the Fortune 500 c-suite, media, entertainment, foundations, charities, mainline churches, the administrative state, the Democratic Party, and of course higher ed.
The danger of this new Gramscian upper class to the rest of the country, so isolated as they are, was best expressed by Charles Murray in his book, Coming Apart:
“Many of the members of the new upper class are balkanized. Furthermore, their ignorance about other Americans is more problematic than the ignorance of other Americans about them. It is not a problem if truck drivers cannot empathize with the priorities of Yale professors. It is a problem if Yale professors, or producers of network news programs, or CEOs of great corporations, or presidential advisers cannot empathize with the priorities of truck drivers. It is inevitable that people have large areas of ignorance about how others live, but that makes it all the more important that the members of the new upper class be aware of the breadth and depth of their ignorance.”
Truckers descend on DC in 2022.
So ubiquitous are Gramsci’s ideas that you at least know them intuitively. They are everywhere. The notorious CRT is just the application of Gramsci’s Critical Theory to racial matters. It’s the same formula when considering gender, ethnicity, or mixtures of the host of identities (intersectionality) encompassed within the “other”, the so-called oppressed. Favoritism and oppression in the Gramscian hivemind are embedded in the culture, even if it has been superficially expunged from government. It’s systemic in the culture, they say. Real revolution won’t happen if the broader culture isn’t enlisted in the effort. Today, they succeeded for the most part.
The influence of the hivemind may be what John O’Sullivan had in mind in his law of organizational behavior: all organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing. The prevalent hivemind is too powerful to ignore. The evidence is all around. TV commercials are replete with representations of the “other” far beyond any reasonable relationship to their portion of the population. Those same ads are boosters for the ideology’s favorite products such as ev’s, as well as campaigns against the hated plastics and fossil fuels, alongside a push for the stakeholder corporate-management nonsense that threatens the health of my pension. MLB moved the Allstar Game; the NFL diluted the national anthem with the addition of an identity anthem; the kneelings; the black power fist thrusts. Popular entertainment and their awards extravaganzas are not without their ritual display of the putative threat of systemic racism and illusory attacks on the “other”. DEI and CRT are everywhere in curriculums, hiring, and admissions, with a baleful effect on standards and morale.
An entire industry has appeared overnight to cater and push the agenda on adults and their children. All of it is meant to bend the mind to accept the advantaging of one group at the expense of another, all of it based on race, gender, and ethnicity identity. We’re back to a new Jim Crow.
The assault on the minds of children is the most outrageous. Outright pornography is introduced to adolescents under the guise of furthering tolerance for the sexual “other” (transgendered, etc.). The distinction between mere tolerance and ideological recruitment won’t be fully appreciated on the part of the teacher-as-propagandist or obviously an impressionable high school sophomore, thereby artificially swelling the ranks of this new “other” in a social contagion. Behavior and language – if presented on radio or television, they would be eligible for a fine or loss of license – is now part of school and training curriculums, and the inventories of school libraries, for 8-year-olds in some places. Child abuse laws in states like California have been warped to shield children from parental interference in a minor’s choice to engage in essentially experimental sex-change interventions.
California has gone so far as declared itself to be the newest kind of sanctuary: a haven for a minor’s decision to break free of their parents’ influence, from any place, state, or country of origin. An underground railroad to the golden state for legally protected child sexual mutilation will soon follow.
A child’s newfound identity as a gender “other” will be reinforced by an absence of countervailing views, opposing opinions having been quashed by entrenched activists dominating society’s institutions. The struggle in the newsroom at the NY Times is instructive. Prior to 2021, the paper treated the issue of trans ideology as if there was only one side, the trans activists’ side. You know, it’s the same one given to your kids in their school: sex isn’t binary; denial of gender identity is bigotry; refusals to affirm a child’s self-diagnosis are akin to murder by suicide; a medical consensus exists in support of all things trans; the recent increase in teen trans self-identity isn’t evidence of a social contagion. Truth be told, a defensible counterpoint can be made to each one of these contentions, but it didn’t appear on the pages of the Times. Then, dissenters found other outlets like Bari Weiss’s Substack page.
After activists in the newsroom got opinion editor James Bennet to resign for approving a Tom Cotton op-ed, his replacements began to show some spine in not kowtowing to the radicals in their midst. Some opinion pieces questioning the newsroom orthodoxy began to appear. The hive was riled about having to face an opposing point of view. LGBTQ+ activist groups penned a letter to the paper condemning the openness. A group of contributors sent one railing against the simple recognition of another side in the debate. For them, there is no debate.
Their mind is closed and want to see everyone’s mind similarly clamped shut. In one of the letters, they declared, “. . . stop questioning science that is SETTLED.” Where have we heard that before? End a debate by simply issuing the fatwah of “SETTLED” without stooping so low as to prove their position.
The censorship makes the unproven and untrue seem plausible. At this point, the Gramscian “long march” sheds its cloak of tolerance to expose its true totalitarian nature. The philosopher Robert P. George has an eloquent description of the difference between an authoritarian and totalitarian:
“Ordinary authoritarians are content to forbid people from speaking truths. Totalitarians insist on forcing people to speak untruths.”
Cancel culture is forcing the gullible to speak untruths. We are running the danger of an entire generation being coaxed into believing contestable ideas are uncontestable. That’s dangerous. It’s one sure way for humaneness to disappear from humanity. People are frog-marched out of their jobs and free speech and conscience are suppressed. Public intellectuals, academics, and people of professional accomplishment who disagree are dismissed as “deniers”, “. . . phobics”, haters, and blocked from outlets.
The reigning neo-Marxists have, maybe forever, mutilated the meaning of words such as “consensus”. Their “consensus” – “the science is SETTLED” – is the wedge that is driving rural from urban. The blue nodes are the nexus of this Gramscian cultural revolution. Pardon people in the countryside for noticing this lurch into insanity. A good portion of the country doesn’t want to go where DEI consultants want to lead it.
Previously travelled routes to the socialist hyper-state have only led to misery. Now, will I be “cancelled” for saying it?
RogerG
Read more here:
* Charles Murray’s book “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010” is an excellent place to start research into our current predicament.
* “Biography of Antonio Gramsci”, Nicki Lia Cole, PHD, ThoughtCo.com, 8/14/2019, at https://www.thoughtco.com/antonio-gramsci-3026471
* An additional concise survey of the life and influence of Antonio Gramsci can be found here: “The Long March Back”, Nate Hochman, National Review Online, 2/16/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-long-march-back/
* A brief account of the philosophy of Princeton’s Robert P. George can be found here: “The Georgian Way”, Andrew T. Walker, fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, National Review Magazine, 3/6/2023
* The struggle in the NY Times newsroom is captured here: “All the News That’s Fit to Debate”, Madeine Kearns, National Review Magazine, 3/20/2023
A mural by street artist PBOY depicting yellow vest protesters inspired by Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People. (photo: Philippe Lopez/AFP)
“The green dreams of urbanites spark outrage in rural areas.” – Joel Klotkin, executive director of the Urban Reform Institute, and respectively Presidential and Washington Fellow at Chapman and Claremont Universities
Joel Klotkin’s newest piece on the urban/rural divide would be a revelation for those comfortable in their biases and lifestyle in their insulated, well-to-do urban enclaves (see below).
Joel Klotkin
They control urban-dominated states like California and are conducting a Sherman-esque scorched-earth march through the hinterlands to make them “howl” in forced conformity to a dubious enviro ideology. Their William Tecumseh Sherman flanking strategy involves the annihilation of vast stretches of flyover country in windmill forests and blankets of solar panels in conjunction with attacks on the farmers’ products and production inputs. Make no mistake about it, it’s at least a cold war, and occasionally a hot one, on those who feed the world’s hungry and provide the material backbone for the cultural commissariat’s own luxurious lifestyle.
Ironically, it’s an attack on themselves if they only thought deeper than a star-struck Davos groupie totally consumed in enviro agitprop. Anyway, they’re relaxed because it’ll bankrupt others further down the wealth pyramid first. They’re like Rome’s patricians laughing at Nero fiddling as the flames slowly approach their villas.
It’s an ideological crusade centering on climate change and should not be mistaken for real science. Leaps of faith are required to overcome huge holes in logic and fact. Here’s some “What’s” to ponder. What’s the degree of human impact on climate to ascertain urgency? What’s the level of positive effect on climate from a sudden shackling of the U.S. population to unreliable and expensive energy? What’s the influence on other countries, or will it be ignored? No amount of computer modeling can overcome these holes in the train of logic since software has always been susceptible to GIGO – garbage in, garbage out. The model is only as good as its designer. Artificial intelligence isn’t immune. On this topic, ideology trumps scientific objectivity all too often.
One fact constantly escapes the synapses of this secular faith’s upscale adherents: energy density. No amount of “we’ll innovate our way through the problem” can mask this ugly reality. Their favorite sources for energy “sustainability” are the feebly dense wind and solar – they need an awful lot of space to be practical. These contraptions require vast state-sized stretches of landscape on the order of magnitude of Tennessee to Texas, depending on how close you want to get to “net zero” in carbon emissions. What does that mean? It means the consumption of huge swaths of open space, wilderness, and land devoted to food and fiber. A dystopian future awaits in the nerve-rending and constant hum of wind turbines and a consigning of small town and rural residents to a hellish view of much of their surroundings under expansive pavements of solar panels or intimidating chorus lines of giant towers extending over the horizon. Watch real estate values and quality of life plummet for rural, small town, exurban residents.
A wind project in Michigan farm area in 2013.A sea of solar panels in Portugal.
And guess what? You still need fossil fuel backup which adds to the cost misery of the whole scheme. If batteries are to be your lifeline around the problem of blackouts and having to fire up backup gas-powered steam turbines, remember, the law of tradeoffs isn’t suspended. More resources pumped into this black hole translates into lost investment in medicine, manufacturing technology, food production and distribution, water, etc. The alternatives sacrificed are too numerous to mention.
That’s the glory of free markets, though; the voluntary choices of thousands, if not millions, sort this out. The rule of bureaucrats and pandering demagogues in elective office, when given billions and trillions of dollars to play with, are more famous for boondoggles. Remember Solyndra or California’s train to nowhere, parts languishing and graffitied like a LA Stonehenge in the Central Valley? I don’t expect Millennials, Gen Z’ers, and those following to have an inkling of life in the old USSR under a vast bureaucracy’s central planning, given the sorry state of our schools. California is chugging full speed into this fog of ignorance.
California’s upper crust may be the most visibly intoxicated by the eco-jihad but the mania is evident worldwide. Farmers and rural and small-town residents around the world are about to be engulfed in a plundering of their spaces by the half-witted infatuations of zealots with money and influence. But a counterrevolution is kicking in. In Europe, French truckdrivers and farmers rose up in the “gilets jaunes” (yellow vests) protests in November 2018 against the new greenie fuel taxes. Dutch farmers were brimming with hostility over crippling emissions and fertilizer regulations just last year. So devastating are the potential impacts of the new rules that a projected 3,000 Dutch farms may be lost in the next few decades.
Europe isn’t alone. African countries like Nigeria, Senegal, and South Africa have registered similar protests to Davos flights of fancy. The path to the ecotopia is lined with appropriated farmland, farmers, and everyone else who provide the hands, backs, and brains for the jet set to live in luxurious isolation.
Yep, ecomania among the insular well-to-do is poison to blue collars and everyone outside a country’s super zips. Joel Klotkin is right to use the world “colonize” in describing the imperial designs of cultural power brokers for the areas of the country who don’t vote and live like them. Occasionally, colonists rise up. Does Lexington and Concord remind you of anything?
The yellow vest protests in Paris, November 2018.Farmers gather with their vehicles next to a Germany/Netherlands border sign during a protest on the A1 highway near Rijssen, Netherlands, June 29. They are protesting the Dutch Government’s nitrogen plans, which would eliminate a sizable number of farms. (photo: Vincent Jannink / AFP via Getty Images)
Please read Joel Klotkin’s piece below.
RogerG
Read more here:
* Much thanks to Joel Klotkin for his research in “Energy Colonialism Will Worsen the Urban-Rural Divide”, Joel Klotkin, National Review Online, 3/3/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/03/energy-colonialism-will-worsen-the-urban-rural-divide/
* “’Yellow Vests’: The elites talk about the end of the world, when we talk about the end of the month”, Le Monde, 11/24/2018, at https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2018/11/24/gilets-jaunes-les-elites-parlent-de-fin-du-monde-quand-nous-on-parle-de-fin-du-mois_5387968_823448.html
* “Farmers’ Protest in Netherlands Reflects Rise of Popular Revolts in Europe”, National Catholic Register, 7/29/2022, at https://www.ncregister.com/news/farmers-protest-in-netherlands-reflects-rise-of-popular-revolts-in-europe
President Joe Biden delivers remarks on gun crime and his “Safer America Plan” during an event in Wilkes Barre, Pa., August 30, 2022. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
* Kabuki Theater: euphemism meaning posturing and diplomatic ritual to excess. Posturing can include effecting a stance in support of your party’s radicalism. Excessive diplomatic ritual can include today’s virtue signaling.
************
Why must science be littered with non-science and public discussions revel in incoherent banalities? Even in seemingly sensible write-ups that rely on scientific expertise, we’ll run into the occasional assertion that jumps the evidence and logic. Furthermore, public figures babble in a string of emotive, highly charged phrases without much support or reasoning that advance understanding. The drivel rears most prominently when talk strays to climate change and guns.
Science is inductive, the scientific method, evidence, empiricism, falsifiability. That isn’t true when it comes to climate change, formerly known by a host of other monikers. In an otherwise sane piece by Richard Luthy, Stanford prof of civil and environmental engineering, on how California could harness the recent storm runoff to address water needs, he polluted his sensible suggestion about using aquifers as cisterns to store the runoff with the hackneyed contention that man has made a shambles of the climate. It certainly gets the ruling donkey party off the hook for running the state into the ground . . . instead of the storm water.
Like its poorly maintained forests that erupt into historic conflagrations, rickety electricity grid, and an aging water system built for 10 million fewer people, the state’s dangerous water shortage is a consequence of a ruling ideological orthodoxy translated into policy that has run roughshod over the state for decades.
It’s not that California voters didn’t punch the ticket for billions for water projects. Prop 1 in 2014 set aside $7.1 billion, and Props 68 and 3 in 2018 added almost $13 billion. Out of the $20 billion, about a third went to “Habitat Restoration”, play money for the eco-zealots. “Water Infrastructure” and “Reservoir Storage” account for only 43% of the total.
Officials inspect Oroville Dam’s crippled spillway Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2017, in Oroville, Calif. California water authorities stopped the flow of water down the spillway, Monday, allowing workers to begin clearing out massive debris that’s blocking a hydroelectric plant from operating. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
Californians thought that they were getting more water, but obviously aren’t. Where’s the new reservoirs, aqueducts, and recharge basins? It’s been eight years. I suspect that water projects face the same fate of any big construction in the state. They get strangled in the crib by California red tape and the delaying tactics of eco-activists (lawsuits, political skullduggery, etc.). Compounding the morass is the ideological affinity between the state’s bureaucratic minions and the zealots. So, in the end, you get the eco stuff, which is unchallenged, and not an ounce of additional water for you.
Don’t lay the problem at the feet of fossil fuels. Dry years should be expected in dry-summer climates. The Mediterranean climate that hovers over most of the state, with its dry-summer regime, only produces an annual precipitation average of 6-25 inches. The drier the climate, the more erratic is the precipitation. California has experienced 11 periods of drought since 1841, some lasting as long as seven years. At the time of the Middle Ages in Europe, California was mired in two long droughts, one lasted 220 years and the other 140. Dry-summer means a short window to get moisture, and if you don’t get it in those few months, you go without. Drought is a feature, not a stranger to the area, and not an effect of our love affair with the automobile, suburbia, and indoor lighting. The phenomena happened when only hunter-gatherers were around.
Tree rings show megadrought 1,200 years ago in California.
An engineer and scientist like Luthy should know better. The mention, as he does, of dry periods since 2000 is scant reason to let the Sacramento clown car off the hook. It’s even more of a scandal to science to use the incidents since 2000 as proof of climate change being the root of our evils. It’s hooey. The simple fact of the matter is that two-thirds of the water falls over the sparsely populated one-third of the state, in a region prone to drought since the end of the last ice age. Someone should take notice rather than foolishly run interference for the dolts in Sacramento and the state’s electorate.
The national electorate fairs no better sometimes. We’ve got a guy in the oval office who would be better off in a retirement home under close medical supervision. It must be admitted that Biden has an excuse – he’s old – but the under-50’s in the party sound no more intelligible. Mention “guns” and the limbic part of their brain takes over. Images of tv/movie shootouts immediately overwhelm what little they know on the subject. For Biden, as ossified in the brain as he is, he trots out one banality after another leaving the public in a state of bewilderment.
Charles C. W. Cooke writes of Biden’s use of trite rhetorical phrases when he talks about firearms. Biden trundles them out like Bill Clinton’s stock of pickup lines for seducing the hired help. Some of Biden’s juicy ones include “You can’t buy a cannon”, “Deer don’t wear Kevlar”, and my personal favorite, “If you want to take on the federal government, you need some F-15s, not an AR-15.” When in the history of our citizen republic is it proper for government to tell you what you need? Any government that can tell you what you need is one that treats its public as a collection of wooden puppets. Government as puppet master turns the popular sovereignty thing upside down.
The late George Orwell had some interesting things to say, per Cooke, about your alleged need for “some F-15s” to take on the federal government. For Orwell, government’s possession of sophisticated weaponry in relation to the citizen was a prerequisite for despotism: “Ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance.” Rifles and grenades are inherently democratic, and F-15s, aircraft carriers, and hypersonics are not. Biden’s formulation reduces the citizen to prostrate serfs, only getting the weapons that meet the approval of Biden’s commissars.
He completely misses the point of the Second Amendment. Cooke reminds us that the Constitution was made by a bunch of “insurrectionists” – people who birthed a country in armed revolt against a tyrannical government. The act of taking up arms against their government was memorialized in the Declaration of Independence: “Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it . . . .” Thankfully, we aren’t there yet.
But lately, there’s been some extended eyebrow raising. Your government school indoctrinates your kids in neo-Marxist revolutionary dogmas; the attempt to establish censorship boards under the guise of “misinformation”; the attacks on the faithful for their refusal to violate their creeds when they refuse to kowtow to the government-approved zeitgeist; the loose talk among some of the powerful calling for gun confiscation; the refusal to enforce laws to protect people, property, and businesses; threats of taking away our gas stoves and cars and fuel under color of “saving the planet”; our children are prevented from receiving awards of excellence, such as National Merit Scholarships, because of government’s slavish devotion to neo-Marxist “equity”; our immigration laws are not enforced which tosses down the border exposing us to intensified villainy; our girls aren’t safe in their locker rooms, bathrooms, and in competitions; infanticide under the rhetorical rubric of “abortion”; child genital mutilation under “gender-affirming care” without parental knowledge and consent; and government turning a conspicuous blind eye as investment houses play revolutionary footsie (ESG) with my retirement. Did I miss anything?
Now Biden wants to tell me how many cartridges I can have in my gun. He forgets that the citizen’s right to firearms stems from a tradition that goes back to before the English Bill of Rights (1689). Those “Protestants” in the English Bill of Rights wanted their weapons to protect themselves from more than a burglar. Speaking of the limbic system of government apparatchiks, buried deep within it is the knowledge that the country’s citizens are armed thanks to the Second Amendment. American citizens aren’t prostrate serfs.
One of the key purposes of the Second Amendment is the right of the people to protect themselves not from government but the people in the government, the kind of people who would force citizens into acts that violate their faith, censor their speech, and make their life a living hell. Much of that government knavery is sanctioned carte blanche by climate change delirium. Combine the revolutionary dictums with Biden’s butchery of the country’s founding and we end up impoverished and manacled before our rulers.
It’s an insidious Kabuki Theater.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Rain finally came to California. We blew our chance to use it”, Richard G. Luthy, San Francisco Chronicle, 1/17/23, at https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Rain-came-to-California-we-blew-chance-to-use-it-17723529.php#:~:text=Rain%20finally%20came%20to%20California.%20We%20blew%20our,received.%20Patrick%20Tehan%20%2F%20Special%20to%20the%20Chronicle
* “How Much California Water Bond Money Is For Storage?”, Edward Ring, 8/9/2018, California Policy Center, at https://californiapolicycenter.org/how-much-california-water-bond-money-is-for-storage/
* “California drought: Past dry periods have lasted more than 200 years, scientists say”, The Mercury News, at https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/01/25/california-drought-past-dry-periods-have-lasted-more-than-200-years-scientists-say/
* “Severe Ancient Droughts: A Warning to California”, New York Times, 7/19/1994, at https://www.nytimes.com/1994/07/19/science/severe-ancient-droughts-a-warning-to-california.html
* “Tree-Ring Study Reveals Historical Drought Record in Southern California”, 3/12/2018, California Dept. of Water Resources, at https://water.ca.gov/News/News-Releases/2018/March-18/Tree-Ring-Study-Reveals-Historical-Drought-Record-in-Southern-California
* “Biden’s Most Grotesque Gun-Control Argument”, Charles C.W. Cooke, National Review Online, 1/17/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/01/bidens-most-grotesque-gun-control-argument/
Okay, I’ll come out and say it: The young are moonbat crazy. Not all, but stunningly large numbers are. “Moonbat”, what’s that? Crazy is the easy part. The word “moonbat” in this context has been attributed to conservative commentator Howie Carr in referring to California governor Jerry Brown, Jr., who was caricatured in an online poster, “Before Moonbats, there was Jerry ‘Moonbeam’ Brown”.
It appears to be getting worse – the moonbat craziness, that is.
I know about youthful kookiness because “Been there, done that”, as any child of the 60’s should know. “Drugs, sex, and rock ‘n roll” isn’t exactly a clarion call for mature judgment. The nutty stuff is rooted in the young’s unappreciation for the arduous path that was trod by others to get to the present. It stems from the young’s newness to the world. All they really know is what’s around them.
They can be taught history, but they have no experience with prior struggles, and telling and showing them won’t be enough, even if someone lectured them. My WWII-generation parents experienced life before air conditioning, and when capable of acquiring it, they did in a heartbeat. Today, large percentages of the young, pampered by modern conveniences, prefer to end a/c in a holy war to defeat climate change. Yet, they wouldn’t last long without it, along with their trendy ev’s and obsession with connectivity. There’s only so much room on the coastal plain to accommodate the added millions fleeing the oppressive heat everywhere else. And the attendant blackouts and spiking utility bills won’t be good for streaming and the apps on their cellphones that direct them to the nearest Starbucks and car charger that won’t charge, the cell towers and relay centers absent the juice to run.
The moonbat in our young came out in all its glory in the last few elections. No, this conclusion isn’t ageist prejudice. Once again, “Been there, done that.” Epidemics of STD’s and drug abuse, riots, and mass displays of self-righteous posturing were as characteristic of my youth as flower power. The peace movement’s catastrophic demand to withdraw from South Vietnam led to the fall of Southeast Asia and millions exterminated and millions more shoved into tortuous reeducation camps. Not quite a Dark Age – for us, that is, a Dark Age for SE Asia – but certainly the quality-of-life lights were dimmed.
Well, the young are at it again. Kristen Soltis Anderson, pollster and partner of Echelon Insights, unknowingly lays out the evidence for moonbat craziness in the under-40’s. Large portions of youthful voters are committed to social and economic suicide. On the social side, they aren’t marrying and having kids at levels of previous generations, support sexual unions that can’t produce them, and want to treat pregnancy as a disease. I guess to make it all go down easier, they favor legal and social approval of THC intoxication in today’s highly potent, selectively cultivated pot (5 to 6 times more lusty than the kind passed around in the smoking circles of my youth).
The economic side of the self-abasement is a toxic embrace of socialism and eco-madness. Unknowingly for them, the socialist paradise of North Korea didn’t invent the microchip. No socialist Shangri-la had a hand in that. It’s a product of free-enterprise entrepreneurialism, capitalism. You know, private property and profits, all that “evil” stuff. Socialism is an assault on private property, profits, and the rich who got rich because they brought all that stuff to the Antifa zealots so they could virally coordinate to close down Portland.
The eco-madness is their poorly thought out but loudly espoused mitigations of “climate change”. Well, prove it. Prove that “climate change” is a man-caused apocalypse. Prove that your chic measures – ev’s, a grid reliant on windmills and solar panels, and chicken-coop housing in today’s urban hellscapes – will make more than a dimple of improvement on the hypothetical crisis. Convince me that it won’t lead to central planning, the ideological cousin of totalitarianism. Convince me that it won’t lead to the iron fist of totalitarianism to socially engineer the Sierra Club’s ideal person. History shows a link between moonbat utopianism in power and thuggery. What makes the young so confident in thinking that the historically evident travel from an imposed fantasy to full-throated coercion can be successfully suspended? History isn’t encouraging.
Here’s Soltis’s scoop on the political status of the young: they are strong Democrats, stronger than earlier renditions of youthfulness. The upper end of millennials has reached 40 and they punched the Democrat ticket by nine points in 2022. The bulk of them, though, are in their 30’s, and combined with the twenty-somethings, they favored the Democrats by 28 points! The Republicans are in a world of hurt with them. It’s been particularly true in the last three election cycles.
Long lines of students waiting to vote at a Michigan college.
What animates these young folks to ignore the urban filth and crime, inflation, a looming recession, the wildlands as open-air combustion chambers, the blackouts, the crippling national debt, the invasion of boys into girls’ sports and bathrooms, and schools that function more as lefty finishing schools than places of learning? The affection for the donkey party can’t solely be laid at the feet of Trump. The young obviously care more about other things. Among those under 30, 53% want abortion to be legal “under any circumstance”. That could unthinkingly include late term/partial birth abortions, ending the life of babies who survive the procedure, sex-selection abortions, and excusing those mothers who see a baby as an obstacle in the climb up the greasy corporate pole.
“Under any circumstance” is an awfully grizzly affair. Many of the young seem to be fully onboard with the “right” to abortion translating into the “right” of the mother and doctor to be executioners. Or do they? “Under any circumstance” precludes any consideration of viability. Pardon me, but I can’t accept the claim that 53% of the young are so inhuman. For many in the polling, I speculate, the response was a visceral reaction to Dobbs, which was caricatured by a similarly ill-informed press as a ban on abortion. But explaining the decision as a return to federalism would require an understanding of federalism. The trillions of dollars spent on the schools has yet to succeed at reading, writing, and math (NAEP scores). What makes you think that they will be any better at conveying the meaning of federalism?
Trillions more and dismal results (NAEP scores). Dismal results and political illiteracy. Political illiteracy and hitching a ride on the Democrats’ train of affection for government as super daddy.
Economic illiteracy too. Young people support labor unions because they supposedly have a “positive impact on the country”, more so than the church and the military. As long as we keep the discussion out of reality, America’s adversarial unions are seen in poorly developed young minds as fighting the battle against the exploitation of innocent workers by robber barons. But it isn’t that simple. A strong historical case can be made that industrial labor unions killed Detroit and sent American steel into a tailspin. Unionization was contorted into corporate and job euthanasia. Their extravagant demands, wrapped in a promiscuous right to strike and lavish collective bargaining agreements, paved the way for the rise of Toyota and the other Asian and European automakers. The industrial heartland became deindustrialized to a great extent by their workers.
Abandoned office/industrial building in Detroit.
The Rust Belt became as rusty as its unions. Who wants to invest in a dive into the jaws of our labor unions, so long as we still have the freedom to decide where to put our money? Better to avoid the Upper Midwest Rust Belt and go to friendlier places, like the American South, who are without laws that grant power to unions to force everyone into their clutches. “Right to work” laws in the South weren’t a ban on labor unions, but merely made them voluntary. Such nuances aren’t the stuff of K-to-grad school curriculums. We’ve trained a generation in AFL-CIO urban myths.
It doesn’t end there. More immediately, our young folks seem to be okay with not getting the latest edition of the I-phone, or even underwear. Those container ships anchored over the horizon at San Pedro were a gift of the Pacific Maritime Association (an affiliate of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union) representing dock workers. As of October 2022, 77 ships remain anchored outside the port. Our supply chain is dependent on the featherbedding of $171,000/year dock workers (2019 numbers). Monopolies of labor have the funny tendency of behaving like any other monopoly.
Even “the most pro-union president” (Biden) is feeling the heat of another possible disruption from a rail strike. Once the containers get off the ship, the most congested docks face the most congested railyard in the country. Its expansion faces the usual suspects: organized eco-zealots and California’s exhaustive eco-regulations. The state’s EIR’s (environmental impact reports), to go along with the fed’s EIS’s (environmental impact statements), to go along with multiple layers of bureaucratic meddling, prompted endless delays and lawsuits. We may get the expansion, but not without a taxpayer breaking and company busting and bloated price tag, not an unusual experience in the Democrats’ Mecca and Medina of California. Remember the state’s high-speed rail monolith to nowhere?
Unfinished California high-speed elevated rail line outside Fresno, Ca.
Such episodes don’t register with the young. I think that too many of the young are into the excitement and drama normally found in their personal diversions and aren’t attracted to the boring and tedious work of reading and contemplation. They won’t read a magazine of substance but will glance at Twitter burps and anything on their Instagram feed.
Why bother to vote If that is the case? Has anyone ever pondered the possibility that voting could be an immoral act? Think about it. An uninformed vote is the equal of an informed one, a frivolous one equal to a serious one. As in a fraudulent vote, one cancels the other. If you don’t know, don’t care, and won’t inform yourself, don’t you have a moral responsibility to stay away from the ballot . . . and power tools? Such an ethic of responsibility cannot be encapsulated in a law, but it should be implanted in our minds – to go along with honesty, charity, and love – from a young age. Before you do something, do it responsibly.
Today’s young are less inclined to be responsible because some parents and most of our schools have failed to prepare them to face the issues of their time. Take marriage as an example, same-zex marriage in particular. The young favor it by upwards to three-quarters in recent polling.
But is same-sex marriage an oxymoron? Has the thought ever graced their mind? Same-sex marriage might be sensible if marriage is construed as nothing but assuaging the interests of adults. In history, however, marriage has always been tied to civilization’s stake in procreation. For that to happen, heterosexual behavior is required. Not every married couple of a heterosexual complexion can or chooses to have children. That’s not the point. The long nurturing process of our young requires the tight bond of the people who brought them into being. The state and its disconnected operatives are no stand-in.
That tight bond is marriage, and it should be reserved for heterosexual pairings. Whether they have children or not is a personal matter. Other conceptions (civil unions, etc.) with many of the privileges and protections of marriage can be made available for same-sex couples. But heterosexuality is a privileged coupling because without it, there is no next generation. A society of the incontinent and gray-haired, because we have elevated everything else but childbearing and childrearing, doesn’t bode well for survival. Heterosexuality must be privileged. Marriage is the way, born of necessity, to do it.
The reservation of marriage for complimentary sexual pairings isn’t a prudish ban on “loving who you want”. That’s pure sophistry. Marriage is society’s minimal requirement for there to be a next generation.
Has this argument ever been presented to the three-quarters who think that same-sex marriage is a great idea? The overwhelming numbers in support of something is not proof of the thing’s validity. More accurately, it’s evidence of a lack of exposure to the history of our institutions, and to a real debate. Like much else involving the young, they don’t know any better and nobody told them.
It comes back to maturity. One element of maturity is tied up in the economic concept of tradeoffs: you can’t have it all. No one can. We give up one thing to obtain another. So, for our fulminating statue-topplers and Antifa zealots, and our twenty-somethings whose education didn’t educate, you can’t simultaneously have your socialism and 5G and the next generation of connectivity. That stuff is born of freedom, the freedom to live a life, to think anew, to acquire, without undermining the prerequisites for their being generations to come. It’s not the freedom of bureaucrats to meddle.
The young are just moonbat crazy. Is this what degringolade (downfall) looks like?
RogerG
Read here for more:
* “Republicans’ Lost Youth”, Kristen Soltis Anderson, National Review, Dec. 1, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/12/19/republicans-lost-youth/
* “NAEP national test scores fall to lowest levels in decades!”, Anthony Picciano of CUNY, Sept, 2, 2022, at https://apicciano.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2022/09/02/naep-national-test-scores-fall-to-lowest-levels-in-decades/#:~:text=Driving%20the%20news%3A%20The%20results%20on%20the%20NAEP%2C,in%20learning%20outcomes%20were%20starkest%20among%20lower-performing%20students.
* “77 box vessels waiting outside San Pedro Bay ports”, World Cargo News, Oct. 25, 2022, at https://www.worldcargonews.com/news/news/77-box-vessels-waiting-outside-san-pedro-bay-ports-67501#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20Marine%20Exchange%20of%20Southern%20California%2C,Los%20Angeles%20are%20due%20to%20arrive%20at%20anchor.
Screenshot from CNN report: ‘It’s like living in an igloo.’ People are turning off their heat as prices surge.
Referring to her home, “It’s like living in an igloo”; so says Charmaine Johnson of Philadelphia this weekend (Nov. 19-20, 2022) who works as an operator at a non-profit call center assisting low-income people heating their homes, and also personally experiencing the awful tradeoff of eat or freeze.
Here we go again. We have another government-sponsored trainwreck to add to history’s ever-lengthening ribbon list of failure. Yes, today, many people have a choice between eating or hypothermia. We never seem to learn that meddlesome ideologues with power screw things up. It makes no different if they’re commissars of the Soviet central planning agency, Gosplan, or Biden’s climate-change zealots. The consequences were famine in the Donbas, or massive shortages and waste and mismanagement in Soviet factories, or today’s sky-high heating bills dropped in American mailboxes. The misery has the same source: government with too much power.
The French word for the culprit is dirigisme, or an economic doctrine in which the state exercises a strong directive over a capitalist market economy.
Charmaine recently spent $1,000 to fill her fuel oil tank. Tim Wisely of Philadelphia, completely reliant on his Social Security benefits, will pay $1,500 to fill his. Wiseley said that he won’t raise the thermostat till his “teeth chatter”. He says, “It’s 50 or 55 degrees in here. To me that’s not unbearable yet.” He adds, “You can’t go food shopping and get oil. It’s one or the other.”
Tim Wisley’s thermostat settingScreenshot from CNN report: “It’s like living in an igloo.”
Nationwide, the cost of heating your home jumped 17% last year with another 18% for this year. The numbers are statistical abstractions until you run into people like Charmaine and Tim.
What’s amazing is that the source of the story, CNN’s Gabe Cohen, can’t bring himself to mention that the looney policies of Biden and his people are a principal cause of the misery. Anything but government is the go-to in our lefty newsrooms. Citing another government agency, the Energy Information Agency (EIA), Cohen repeats the agency’s desultory list of suspects which includes the Ukraine War (of course), OPEC+, increase energy exports, reduced energy inventories, and a higher demand for natural gas for electricity generation. Wait a minute, take a breath, isn’t this the all-too-common evidentiary slime trail of government-empowered zealots run amok?
It’s hard to blame Putin and the Ukraine War since heating bills began to spike in 2021 (17%), long before the thrust to Kiev in February 2022. A stronger correlation aligns with January 20, 2021 (Biden’s inauguration). The best that can be said to hide the donkey party’s full culpability is that Putin made worse what Biden triggered.
Suspect #2, the decision of OPEC+ to cut production, like Putin’s Ukraine adventure, is another after-the-fact that magnifies the fallout of Biden’s well-established ambition to lower the sea levels around Obama’s Martha’s Vineyard estate. Biden and his people accuse OPEC+ of doing what he intended to do: lower production — to assist a “transition” to a California-style Shangri-la. Everything from denying permits on federal lands, increasing the regulatory hoops to explore and produce, starving producers access to capital with new and demonizing SEC regulations, and vetoing pipelines works in the same manner as OPEC’s announcement of a 2,000-bpd cut. Do you believe for a moment that in this atmosphere anyone with capital to spare would spend it on a new refinery? I’m sure that the Sierra Club’s c-suite is dancing a jig over $7-pg diesel.
Los Angeles in a blackout?
Higher demand for natural gas? This is winter. Has anyone checked with Buffalo? Do ya think that Exxon isn’t aware of the seasons? This excuse makes farce look like a compliment.
Then there’s the “increase in energy exports”. What “energy exports”? It’s natural gas, liquified natural gas to Europe, the thing that Biden is trying to transition us from. You see, Biden is attempting to copy Europe in “net-zero” buffoonery. Germany did it . . . and became dependent on Putin. Hitching your wagon to Putin’s ambitions is a scarry energy strategy. But they did it, along with all the vast landscapes devoted to windmills and solar panels. The erratic production must be supplemented by something, and a hugely expensive infrastructure to make the erratic more stable. All for what? A hypothetical 1.5-degree Celsius increase in a century? We’ve had warming periods in the past. Heck, Britain once had vineyards. And cooling periods aren’t great for the food supply and public health (the Black Death). Europe and Biden adopted a “transition” to anguish.
The 2022 midterms were a referendum on . . .? I can’t believe it was a preference for this. Surely, people don’t desire vulnerability. Besides the retort “Don’t call me Shirley”, people must realize that they are exposed to bankruptcy and increased threats to their health. Biden’s “transition” is only a nice sounding word for vulnerability to misery. In the annals of state-sponsored misery, Biden’s greenie die-hards join the ranks of Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety, Lenin’s politburo, Soviet Gosplan, Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward, and the North Korean Kim dynasty’s “Juche”, the dirigisme of “self-sufficiency” and “self-isolation”.
Biden has ample company, and now, we get to experience the same results as the rest of the world’s hoi polloi. I can’t help but be reminded of the definition of insanity. You know, doing the same thing but . . . .
RogerG
Read more here:
* “‘It’s like living in an igloo.’ People are turning off their heat as prices surge”, Gabe Cohen, CNN, Nov. 20, 2022, at https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/18/success/home-heating-prices
* “OPEC announces the biggest cut to oil production since the start of the pandemic”, Hanna Ziady, CNN, Oct. 5, 2022, at https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/05/energy/opec-production-cuts/index.html
* “Heating costs forecast to soar this winter”, Chris Isidore, CNN, Oct. 12, 2022, at https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/12/energy/heating-costs/index.html
* “Biden Has Bungled Fossil-Fuel Policy”, Casey B. Mulligan, National Review Online, Nov. 2, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/11/biden-has-bungled-fossil-fuel-policy/
Biden’s a liar, but the Republicans have to contend with Trump. What a pickle for the American people. Trump makes it possible for Biden to rule and make a hash of our lives. It’s hard for Republicans to make the case when they’re constantly trying to live down one of the most repugnant characters on the political scene campaigning under their banner.
There is a chunk of the GOP base that remains enthralled by Trump. They are stuck in 2016. Back then, Trump was the fresh face with an outsized personality and no political track record to excoriate. He won and we quickly learned that it wasn’t an act. He gave us four years of repellant behavior and hasn’t stopped. Like it or not, he became the easily caricatured face of the party, and the necessary distraction for the Democratic Party to avoid accountability for their descent of the country into “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Thomas Hobbes, 17th century). The embrace of Trump has allowed the Democrats to get away with it.
Smath-and-grab in a high-end store in Los Angeles, November 2021
Trump is a big turn-off, and he’s turning off more. The act is getting old. He has a vendetta against people who have no vendetta against him, but against whom he might play second fiddle. Governor Ron DeSantis was insulted with “DeSanctimonious”. Governor Youngkin was pasted with an anti-Asian slur on Truth Social: “Young Kin (now that’s an interesting take. Sounds Chinese, doesn’t it?) in Virginia couldn’t have won without me.” What a narcissist. Because National Review isn’t sufficiently worshipful, he blasts them “as being led by lightweights that couldn’t shine the shoes of Bill Buckley.” Speaking of Buckley, he laid out the common-sense approach to choosing a candidate by advising conservatives to vote for the most conservative ELECTABLE contender. After three losing election cycles – 2018, 2020, and 2022 – Trumpkins are showing themselves to be a kamikaze brigade, and willing to take down the party with them. He isn’t the most conservative and he’s far from the most electable. Need more proof?
Republicans need to excise Trump’s influence from the party before we can hold Biden and the Democrats accountable for their engineered misery. No mistake about it, Biden gave us a 360-degree world of hurt. Energy is at the root of all that we do, especially economically. It’s hard to imagine prosperity with a Biden-imposed recession in the energy industry. Biden chose to take the advice of the teenage Greta Thunberg and lead us into a greenie fantasyland. And he’s lying about it.
Biden trotted out Energy Secretary Granholm in June 2022 to perpetuate the don’t-blame-me and the gaslight-the-public PR strategies. Granholm: “We are now at close to record levels of [domestic] oil production here in the U.S. . . . .” Lie. See chart below. Biden in October 2022: “Today, the most common price of gas in America is $3.39 – down from over $5 when I took office.” Lie. What other word qualifies when it’s as demonstrable as my current runny nose?
Energy Sec. Granholm at a press conference
There’s more where those came from. It’s as if Orwell’s Ministry of Truth leapt off the pages of “1984” and landed in D.C. Economist Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago puts it plainly when he wrote in October of 2022, “. . . we are well short of the production levels and trends that were occurring just three to four years ago.” The pandemic crushed everything, and we haven’t bounced back. Keep in mind that fracking made us into the Saudi Arabia of the western hemisphere. We have the abundant capacity so why haven’t we upped our game? Why hasn’t the supply side of the market responded as it always had before to price increases? The answer is found in the fact that the Thunberg-influenced Biden is signing executive orders to turn America’s grid into California’s. No big pipelines for you, America. Oh, let’s tax and EPA-regulate production on federal lands and offshore into near oblivion. Of course, let’s lie about it. While we’re at it, let’s herd the population into ev’s so we all can experience “range anxiety” together. If that isn’t enough, let’s strangle producers’ access to capital with new lefty ESG regulations from the SEC.
A capped oil well in the US.
Former Fed chairman Greenspan spoke of “animal spirits” in the market. Fear is an animal spirit. So is hostility. You’d have to be in a cryogenic state not to get the clues that the federal Leviathan hates you if you’re a supplier of the stuff that keeps people from freezing in the winter. Better to play along with algae, corn, tides, or anything that pops into the heads of the yoga-room minions on the Meta campus. Forget about more refineries and more exploration. Pardon an oil company CEO for not seeing the guillotine as the Welcome Wagon.
The concept of supply elasticity clearly stretches the mental capacity of the eco-fantasists around Biden. The responsiveness of supply to price changes has inexplicably taken a hiatus under Biden. Take my memory of the Kern River oilfields outside Bakersfield, Ca. Price goes up, wells are uncapped and the secondary-recovery generators turned on. Price goes down, there’s no justification for the expenses. It’s topsy-turvy if you’re Jimmy Carter of the 1970’s and put your foot on the neck of producers with a cap on domestic crude oil prices. Biden of 2021 put his foot back on the neck of producers to the point that the law of supply elasticity disappeared. Then he lambasts them for responding to his hostility by restraining their capital investments. It’s a replay of Stalin’s hunt for “wreckers” or “kulaks” after the blunders of his Five Year Plans in the 1930’s.
Lesson: Don’t expect the equivalent of the DMV to beneficially determine what to produce, how much of it to produce, and who’s to get it for everyone, everywhere, always. It’s a cluster*#&@. Welcome to Biden world.
Biden’s escape from the real world can be seen in his October price boast. Gas wasn’t $5 per gallon when he took office. It was $2.39. Is this old age infirmity at work or prevarication? Remember, this guy has a long history of wild exaggerations and untruths. Going back to his college days, blatant plagiarism and embellishment of his record were standard for him. Today, I’m not certain if it’s pure senility or the serial untruths of his youth ossifying into imaginary truths in a decaying brain. Is this a difference without a difference? Can’t say.
Fuel prices in Los Angeles, March 2022
Fuel prices normally gyrate through the year. It’s not month-to-month changes that are most relevant. It’s year-to-year, or June 2022 compared to June 2021. Biden is responsible for the elevated gyration plateau of 2021/2022 when compared to the gyration valley of 2019/2020 or 2020/2021 and before. For me, Biden’s falsehoods are true to form with a kicker of infirmity.
The lie reduced to one line has more appeal in this age of the internet attention span of a five-year-old than a reasoned analysis in a three-thousand-word essay. People can’t sit still long enough when Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, and YouTube are beckoning. Biden ritually does it. Trump too, but he’s brazenly repugnant as he does it. Republicans would do the country a great service by putting Trump out to pasture. With him out of the way, the country might be in a mood to open up space in the same field for Biden and his lefty coterie. Something to ponder.
Then-VP Joe Biden finds two quarters on the sidewalk in Burlington, Vt., 2016. “I found two quarters.”Biden’s inauguration
RogerG
Read more here:
* The administration lying to the press at a June 2022 press briefing: “Press Briefing by Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm”, The White House, June 22, 2022, at https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/2022/06/22/press-briefing-by-press-secretary-karine-jean-pierre-and-secretary-of-energy-jennifer-granholm/
* Biden’s false claim of cheaper gas prices: “Fact check: Biden falsely claims the most common gas price was over $5 when he took office”, CNN, Oct. 28, 2022, at https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/28/politics/fact-check-biden-gas-prices/index.html
* Casey Mulligan’s piece: “Biden Has Bungled Fossil-Fuel Policy”, National Review Online, Nov. 2, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/11/biden-has-bungled-fossil-fuel-policy/
The Democrats know how to play political hardball. After all, they are the party of government. They want it, worship it, and are highly motivated to take it over. They need it because they have so much to accomplish, like make all of us into them. Not surprisingly, they’re socialists, the American edition of Europe’s many Social Democratic Parties. No name-calling here. They just are, despite their face-saving protestations to the contrary. The 2022 midterm was their template for dominating the government. It illustrated how to make people ignore their lyin’ eyes.
The fly in the ointment is that this socialism doesn’t work, never will. Government’s control of the means of production, using a little Marxist lingo, is simply turning over nearly all the important stuff to an entity that operates like the DMV. Government is a sloth and can never be a cheetah no matter the volume of synthetic hormones or gender reassignment surgeries. The Squad and the self-deluded Bernie Sanders keep harkening to a Scandinavia that no longer exists, the region having long since eschewed the poison. Yet, the dream never died, notwithstanding its long record of failure. To avoid a shellacking, the Democrats discovered the recipe to electorally prosper despite their socialism’s inherent fiascos.
The Michigander and auto critic Henry Payne recently performed an interesting autopsy on Michigan’s election. Whitmer and the rest of the authoritarian gang overwhelmed the party of government restraint (GOP). Amazingly, the donkey party found a campaign strategy to make it possible for people to prefer the sewer that the Democrats made of their lives.
First, the party of government used their control of Michigan state government to choose their opponents. This sounds like Xi Jinping at work – by the way, another socialist. Credible opposition was ordered off the Michigan ballot, much like Xi commanding the removal of ex-CCP president Hu Jintao from the recent Party Congress. The Michigan Board of State Canvassers was convened under the overseership of the Soros-backed Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and on a pure party line vote of 2-2 disqualified the Republican front-runner James Craig, the former Detroit police chief with a huge following, and four other Republicans allegedly for fraudulent signatures on their petitions. The tie means that they’re gone. No Democrats were ever affected, just Republicans. It’s fishy as you get into the weeds of the case. In the end, the Republican primary ballot was amputated to include only the weak with Tudor Dixon winning the primary.
Michigan Board of State Canvassers earlier in 2022
That’s not all by a long shot. The party knows how to exploit and champion the cultural barbarity that is now resplendent in certain demographics: the young, single women, mostly professional, and the quasi-educated with degrees. Of course, I’m speaking of some groups’ love affair with terminating pregnancies. Abortion has moved from trauma to a personal state of ecstasy in the psyche of some. We shouldn’t be surprised since the sex act has lost its procreational purpose and has become purely recreational in the minds of some. Humans being human, we get lazy and sloppy and babies unintentionally result. We can disagree on the starting line for human life, and compromise is possible between a complete ban and carte blanche to the moment of exit from the birth canal. All that is lost in the hubbub once the fear of losing power is on the table. Dobbs was mangled by the donkey party to fit the purpose of stampeding the base to quickly mark their mailed ballot.
Speaking of those mailed ballots, previously (2018), Michigan voters exhibited the now common and strange attraction for Rube Goldberg changes to their government through ballot initiatives. It’s an interstate phenomenon. For instance, the superficial glow of term limits in deeply blue California merely ended up replacing seasoned leftists with immature ones. The state’s adoption of the jungle primary means the routine choice between leftists in the general. Alaskans chose to mutilate their elections with ranked voting. For Michiganders, they chose in 2018 to grease the skids for the donkey party’s base, heavily populated as it is with low-information and low-motivated voters. Adult expectations of reasonable civic effort and responsibility has been reduced to nil with election-day registration and voting thereby complicating the tasks of verification for a government that can barely count them. Additionally, the no-fault absentee ballot – a device that makes mockery of the secret ballot – means that a person can remain in their pajamas and pause their Xbox hand controller for a short interval to vote their state into California-style chaos.
Shredded boxes and packages are seen at a section of the Union Pacific train tracks in downtown Los Angeles Friday, Jan. 14, 2022. Thieves have been raiding cargo containers aboard trains nearing downtown Los Angeles for months. (AP Photo/Ringo H.W. Chiu)
With the election system duly lubricated, the ginned-up hysteria about Dobbs can be exploited by another contraption in the form of a state proposition: Proposition 3 to place in the Michigan state constitution alongside the usual Bill of Rights the “reproductive freedom” to end the existence of a fully formed baby in utero. The “protect the life or physical or mental health of the pregnant individual” language is pure jargon for infanticide. Notice that they can’t say “woman”; it’s “individual”. This whole thing is a monstrous theater of the absurd.
But it does work to get the sex-as-recreation crowd to vote early and often. Remember, this is a demographic at the start not too keen on the Dobbs’s federalism rationale. For them, federalism, what’s federalism? Anyway, the polyamorous are energized to show up and vote the state into oblivion.
Like chain immigration, chain-propositions bring in tow the scandalously authoritarian politicos. It’s a strange authoritarianism though. Freedom is the mantra, but freedom isn’t the result. There’s no freedom for in utero babies. What about the “freedom froms”? There’s certainly no freedom from car thieves, smash-and-grabs, killers, burglaries, muggings, drive-bys, and the mentally unstable and addicts turning our sidewalks and parks into open sewers. Watch where you step.
The use of hysteria-propositions to elect and reelect people who ignore what they should be doing in order to pursue what they ought not to do is folly on stilts. Whitmer garroted life in Michigan from closing the schools to pronouncing an end to gardening and boating without a scintilla of “science”. And election 2022 showed how you can get away with it. Gauging by the returns, terminating pregnancies mattered more than the kids’ lost education and the decline into barbarity. The kids experienced a double whammy in the election. Was this the most anti-child electorate ever from womb to classroom? One has to wonder.
I will not try to absolve the electorate’s responsibility for this descent into dégringolade (rapid decline or deterioration). Don’t pretend that democracy always translates into wisdom. A majority vote is not proof of righteousness. It is only evidence that certain campaign tactics work: construct a well-funded political machine; rearrange the election system to enhance the operation of the political machine; incite the base with fabrications; and with initiatives, distract the people from the politicos’ manifest failures.
It worked. Expect to see more of it. As in the fable of Nero, election 2022 showed how to pass out fiddles to the electorate as Rome (Michigan) burned.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “The Lessons for Republicans from Michigan’s Midterm Disaster”, Henry Payne, National Review, November 17, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/11/the-lessons-for-republicans-from-michigans-midterm-disaster/
* “Five Michigan GOP gubernatorial candidates booted from primary ballot”, Washington Examiner, May 26, 2022, at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/five-michigan-gop-gubernatorial-candidates-booted-from-primary-ballot
* “Gretchen Whitmer Can’t Hide Her Track Record Of Shutting Michigan Children Out Of School”, Shawn Fleetwood, The Federalist, Nov. 1, 2022, at https://thefederalist.com/2022/11/01/gretchen-whitmer-cant-hide-her-track-record-of-shutting-michigan-children-out-of-school/
* An analysis of how strategically timed ballot initiatives can enhance a campaign’s electoral chances: “How ballot initiatives will impact voter turnout in the 2018 midterms”, John Hudack, Brookings, Oct. 22, 2018, at https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brookings-now/2018/10/22/how-ballot-initiatives-will-impact-voter-turnout-in-the-2018-midterms/
![Laura Ingraham: Trump voters didn't riot, they rallied [Video]](https://i0.wp.com/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fda3ffc1e-7aeb-4409-bcc9-d7b84391ed60_1280x720.jpeg?resize=493%2C277&ssl=1)
