The Media – Page 2 – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

April 29, 2023April 29, 2023

The Sovietization of Science in America

October 2020 - Scientific American — October 2020 – Scientific American

Nature - 15 October 2020 » PDF Digital Magazines — Nature – 15 October 2020

The communist rulers in the old Soviet Union gradually came to believe that opposition to them was more than a different point of view but symptomatic of mental illness. Dissent from Karl Marx’s mental prism was tantamount to being emotionally disturbed. They developed a form of pseudo-scientific psychiatry to suppress disagreement, and the same thing is germinating in the United States: the distortion of science to pursue political ends.

In the USSR of the 1960’s-80’s, a pseudo-scientific jargon was invented to give The Science the sound of legitimacy. An entire fake science was cobbled together by a professor of Soviet psychiatry, Andrei Snezhnevsky of the impressive sounding USSR Academy of Medical Sciences. His diagnosis of “sluggish schizophrenia” and “delusion of reformism” was applied to anyone whose beliefs led them to renounce their atheism, attempt to immigrate, engage in protests, or practice a faith. If you think that it’s not happening here, think again.

May be an image of 1 person — Andrei Snezhnevsky of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences

Leonid Plyushch in 1976, after his release from a mental asylum where he was held for years by the Kremlin. (photo: Agence France-Presse)

Let’s be clear, “The Science” must not be confused with science. It’s an institutionalized variant of science that carries with it all the norms of organizational man/woman/whatever. People in organizations don’t behave like man/woman/whatever in their natural and private settings. A group personality coalesces around shared expectations and norms and frequently morphs into shared opinions. Once a shared attachment to collectivism takes root, for instance, the organizational politicization of science will soon follow. It’s happened, and is happening.

Our science is increasingly politicized to promote highly contentious opinions. Disagreement is persecuted as ignorance and bigotry, and maybe even attributed to a disturbed emotional comportment. Ideologically partisan journalists such as Chris Mooney in his books “The Republican War on Science” (2005) and the follow-up “The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science — and Reality” come close to imitating Andrei Snezhnevsky when they hide their glaring political opinions under the cloak of “The Science”.

VIDEO: Chris Mooney: The Republican War on Science - UCTV - University of California Television — Chris Mooney

The tactic of branding your political opponents with dementia isn’t limited to Mooney. Express some skepticism about the extravagant and ideologically tinged claims on highly debatable issues from climate change to transgenderism to systemic racism and you’ll face a fusillade of abuse and threats to your livelihood, and maybe jail time if they can get away with it. Having these forbidden thoughts isn’t a career enhancer. You’ll be erased off the ledger of respectable humanity. The word “denier” serves the same purpose as “sluggish schizophrenia”.

Zeks (gulag prisoners) in Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago” often referred to “beyond the wire” (or something like it) for the world outside the camp. In today’s politics masquerading as science, the equivalent of zeks, or “deniers”, are accused of straying “beyond the wire” of the approved mental prison – synonymous with “scientific consensus”. Straying beyond the wire is the excuse for the gatekeepers – er, mental prison guards – to put The Science at the service of a particular political party, the Democratic Party, who helps keep the fence electrified, and at the disservice of the other who questions the very existence of the camp in the first place. Political endorsements by science figureheads, organizations, and their publications have followed, and to the detriment of their reputations as they come to be viewed as just another collection of political hacks.

Politicized Science - YouTube

It hasn’t occurred to the guards that naturally non-political organizations and their participants – think professional sports: NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, etc. – alienate half, maybe more, of their clientele when they identify with one side in the country’s political divide. It’s a no-brainer: endorse Democrats, anger Republicans. At least half the public, maybe more, begins to see them as little different from a super-PAC. Buying a ticket or product of the compromised enterprise is perceived as the equivalent of a political donation. The same political self-labeling occurs when scientists step into partisan battles and the culture war.

Phil Jackson, the famous coach of the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers, doesn’t watch the NBA because it’s too political (see below). When players were allowed to festoon their jerseys with political slogans and obscuring their names, his grandkids recounted a particular play with “Justice went to the basket and Equal Opportunity knocked him down.” It’s funny if it wasn’t so tragic to the sport. And now The Science is turning off people in like manner.

NBA, gli slogan più scelti dai giocatori sulle proprie maglie: domina 'Equality' | Sky Sport

What NBA Players can do to support BLM instead of boycotting the playoffs | by Jessica Lim ...

The culture war, or revolution, has a clear partisan flavor to it. The high-stakes contest is one of revolution and counterrevolution with the D’s in the vanguard of the revolution and R’s trying to put the brakes on it. The journal “Nature” in 2020 jumped with both feet into the cultural and partisan war in a ringing endorsement of Joe Biden. In an editorial that could have come from Biden’s campaign staff – or Stalin’s chief prosecutor in the show trials, Andrei Vyshinsky – they branded the R’s candidate as “accelerating climate change, razing wilderness, fouling air and killing more wildlife — as well as people.” Trump may be a lot of things, but singlehandedly obliterating the planet is a bit of a stretch. This is the language of the zealot, not a lab scientist grappling with a hypothesis.

Not to be outdone, as if on cue, “Scientific American”, the sister magazine to “Nature” (same publisher, Springer Nature), issued a partisan clarion call in an October 2020 editorial titled “Scientific American Endorses Joe Biden” (see below). Their hyperbole descends into the same political septic tank: “The evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people—because he rejects evidence and science.” The hubris is astounding. They claim to own The Science and the zeks must be kept from straying “beyond the wire”.

U.S. Rep. Rush Holt criticizes federal approach to airline security, full-body scanners - nj.com — Eight term Democrat representative Rush Holt, Jr., was chosen to lead the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the publisher of “Science” and other prominent journals. A partisan bias in The Science?

But they don’t own the science; they own a collection of political opinions. At the root of these opinions is an affection for collectivism. It’s the one thing that unites the denizens of The Science. Somehow, in their mind, collectivism became the thinking man’s (or woman’s/whatever) ideology. They were perhaps blinkered by an academic marination in it without knowing it. It was embedded in their insular classroom instruction as undergrads. Hayek’s freedom-based spontaneous order, or anything like it, was never allowed to grace their intellects.

May be an image of 1 person and text that says 'Spontaneous Order is system which has developed not through the central direction or patronage of one or few individuals but through the unintended consequences of the decisions of myriad individuals each pursuing their own interests through voluntary exchange, cooperation, and trial and error F.A. Hayek b4 Spontaneors Order'

A constrained education is woven with an endemic apocalypse-mongering which turns all issues into calls for collectivist action: it’s existential and therefore we can’t afford free markets, freedom of conscience, capitalism, or anyone practicing real science which is based on a healthy skepticism of extravagant claims. A healthy scientific intellect would raise eyebrows at hysterical calls to eliminate an entire car fleet and transportation system in the span of twenty years. A healthy scientific intellect would raise eyebrows at burdening an already overstretched grid with electric-everything and radically shifting it to low-density energy after banning high-density. This isn’t science. It’s ideology on the march.

Not unlike The Science in the Soviet Union. The gambit is the same: make the science an adjunct of the politics and then weaponize it against your political opponents. It’s a very dangerous thing to do for a country in an increasingly perilous time. It’ll ruin us. Khruschev did say, after all, “We’ll bury you.” Well, we’ll bury ourselves.

May be an illustration of text

RogerG

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* Much thanks to the work of Christine Rosen of the American Enterprise Institute in “The Folly of Nature’s Biden Endorsement”, 3/30/2023, National Review Online, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/04/17/the-folly-of-natures-biden-endorsement/

* “NBA champion coach Phil Jackson says he doesn’t watch basketball anymore because it got too political”, Lauren Sforza, The Hill, 4/23/2023, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/other/nba-champion-coach-phil-jackson-says-he-doesn-t-watch-basketball-anymore-because-it-got-too-political/ar-AA1aeBfW

* “Scientific American Endorses Joe Biden”, Editors, The Scientific American, 10/1/2020, at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientific-american-endorses-joe-biden1/

April 12, 2023April 14, 2023

Our National Decomposition Continues Apace

Union organizer and Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson speaks after being projected winner as mayor on April 4, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois. (Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images) — Teacher union organizer and Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson speaks after being projected winner as mayor on April 4, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois. (Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)

Supreme Court candidate Janet Protasiewicz reacts while speaking at her election night watch party in Milwaukee, Wis., on Tuesday, April 4, 2023. Protasiewicz, 60, defeated former Justice Dan Kelly, who previously worked for Republicans and had support from the state's leading anti-abortion groups. (Mike De Sisti /Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel via AP) — Janet Protasiewicz speaks at her election night party in Milwaukee after she defeated former Justice Dan Kelly for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat. (Mike De Sisti / Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel)

Our national decomposition shows little sign of abating. Elections in Wisconsin and Chicago indicate that there remains an appetite for decay.

Another word for decline or decomposition of a culture, civilization, or nation is degringolade. Whichever word is used, however, we are experiencing it. Nature isn’t doing it to us. We are doing it to ourselves. The precipitating factor is what is bouncing between our ears. A sizeable chunk of the electorate, without even knowing it in many cases, is sold on toxic neo-Marxism in the guise of modern progressivism. Today, progressivism and this updated Marxism are synonymous. I’m beginning to sound like a broken record since I’ve certainly mentioned it often enough but can’t get away from it. It’s constantly resurfacing in many places around the country.

This isn’t the progressivism of Woodrow Wilson. As a refresher, this current edition is a relatively modern refashioning of Karl Marx’s paradigm: the systemic oppression of the oppressed who are defined by an ever-fungible list of outgroups covering everything from XY girls to the poor to anyone with high melanin counts. To the rescue in this blinkered ideological schematic is a complete, top to bottom, inside and out, overhaul of all societal arrangements from the family to property, a thoroughgoing Marxist revolution. Sound familiar? Read BLM’s mission statement before it was scrubbed clean of too much revelatory information (see below). We’ve proven to be quite creative in defining the “oppressed”, or victim groups. For greenies, you might add the mother goddess Gaia (earth) to the list. Anyway, this latest edition fairs no better than the kind that lurked behind the Iron Curtain or Mao’s China or is lurking in North Korea and Cuba. It is a sacking of our heritage and thrusting the country into despair.

The canary passing out in the coal mine in this moment of our evisceration is urban America. Our cities are crumbling, and so are the states dominated by them. The story has been acted out before. We are historically rhyming with 4th and 5th-century AD Rome. The Roman Empire didn’t go out in a boom but a whimper. The cities became unlivable, mired in high taxes, crumbling infrastructure, a deterioration of services, lack of security, and overburdening controls. Who’d want to live there? Apparently, many didn’t by the 5th century. The population of the city nearly emptied from over a million in the 1st century AD to 30,000 by the 5th. Other similarly weakened urban places suffered. People flocked to fortified estates, monasteries, and towns with natural defenses. It’s the beginning of feudalism.

visigoths+%281%29.jpg 1,405×1,005 pixels | Vikings | Pinterest | Roman empire and Roman legion

Feudalism is returning. Today, in the good ‘ol USA, people are rushing to states and places where 3-strikes laws mean something, where taxes and bureaucracies aren’t bleeding producers white, where parking your car on the street in front of your house isn’t an invitation to vandalism. In other words, where neo-Marxism/progressivism is held in disrepute.

Where boys’ and girls’ bathrooms are separated by a wall. Where nature’s chromosomal distinction hasn’t been buried by the linguistic manipulations of pronouns and “birthing person” for “woman”. It’s just the opposite in our urban neo-Marxist silos. Entirely mired in the mindset, many of our cities and urbanized states are busy advancing the revolution by eliminating other distinctions such as the one between criminal and law-abiding. Judges and local potentates treat criminals as victims and their real victims as . . . well . . . .

As if we need any more evidence, Whole Foods announced yesterday (4/10/2023) that it was “temporarily closing” its 65,000 square foot San Francisco outlet at Eighth and Market, the Trinity section, that it just opened last year. According to a company spokesman, “If we feel we can ensure the safety of our team members in the store, we will evaluate a reopening of our Trinity location.” The area has been plagued by brutal beatings, stabbings, killings, and accidents in recent weeks. Too few cops and law-unenforcement is making San Francisco look like 5th-century Rome (see below).

These arbiters of revolutionary justice in places like San Francisco have their own vocabulary to push this cultural revolution. “Decarceration” is the go-to for releasing offenders to reoffend, just call it “low-level crime”, which is another word for “inconsequential” to Soros-backed DA’s – inconsequential to everyone but the person left battered, bruised, and bleeding in the subway. Barbarian invasions aren’t doing it to us, unless barbarian refers to the urban powerful who have drunk the neo-Marxist Kool-Aid. Your progressive DA, judges, city council, mayor, governor, and state legislature are performing the role of the Visigoths and their King Alaric in laying waste to Rome in 410 AD.

No photo description available. — Visigoths sack Rome in 410 AD.

May be an image of 1 person and fire — Minneapolis in the 2020 summer of riots.

The only recourse for those not too fond of the mayhem is to vote with their feet. Get out! But these are democracies – surprise! The corruption is democratic. People are voting for mayhem. How’s that possible? It might have something to do with a little cost/benefit analysis on the run: the rewards of group largesse from the public treasury are greater than the costs of possibly losing your little girl in a drive-by. I know, it’s hard to believe. But, on the other hand, it could just be stupid people being stupid, something not unheard of in the annals of democracy.

Or it could be due to the overall social decomposition extending to our schools. People aren’t taught any better; they don’t know any better; and are easily led into believing nonsense. Yet, policy-nonsense still behaves, as it always has, whether popularly chosen or not, like a drunk behind the wheel. It’s a disaster careening down our thoroughfares. And like most drunks, all-too-often they don’t get sober till they hit bottom. Apparently, our urban electorates haven’t hit bottom. Or it could be that the voter pool has been reduced to the drunks, the sober having fled to safer climes (red states).

A sizeable majority – by ten points – of Wisconsin voters recently failed the field sobriety test but still grabbed the car keys. Some attribute the recent election of the Visigothic Janet Protasiewicz to the State Supreme Court to the abortion issue. Probably true, but Wisconsinites have now let the Visigoths through the gates with a new Visigothic majority on the Court and, as a result, will get much more than carte blanche abortion. Protasiewicz promised during the campaign to rewrite the state’s redistricting maps to the advantage of the neo-Marxists who promise more sacking into the foreseeable future. In addition, expect more teacher-union power to dictate your child’s education, backdoor racism in diversity-equity-inclusion, and higher taxes to finance the revolution. The whole litany of policies to promote the revolution against hypothetical systemic “oppressors” are about to be unleashed. And so will a run on exiting U-Hauls, proving once again that the only thing efficiently produced by Marxism is refugees.

Money is the mother’s milk of politics . . . and revolution. The donkey party neo-Marxists, in spite of their dismal record, are well-funded from a network of similarly intoxicated donors. The precedent was established by Lenin in 1917. The Bolsheviks were bankrolled by Imperial Germany. A revolution rides on more than fulminations.

Money and an election system reshaped to the advantage of their base put Protasiewicz in office, and gave Chicago another Alaric-style mayor, Brandon Johnson, to replace the Visigothic Lori Lightfoot. The guy is marinated in neo-Marxism, like his predecessor. San Francisco, Wisconsin, and Chicago are pointing the way to the future, the same future viewed by 5th-century Romans and early 20th-century Petrograd residents.

May be an image of 1 person

If not arrested, our condition will continue to deteriorate . . . until riveting calamities shock us back to our senses. Hopefully, by then, it won’t be too late. Hopefully, we won’t wake up to news of two aircraft carriers sunk in the western Pacific, and our response is crippled by an economy unable to meet the demands of the moment, or a population unwilling to fight after years of anti-western indoctrination in our media and schools. A pool of recruits rattled by gender dysphoria and accusations of white privilege can’t instill much confidence.

The signs of decay aren’t limited to the popularity of chic neo-Marxism among urban sophisticates. Another passed-out canary is plummeting birth rates and closing maternity wards. It’s hard to have a robust generational talent pool to face the threat with a population befuddled by pronouns and fungible sex-identity, all as the population shrinks. We’ve got a lot to worry about. And all the while, neo-Marxism, acting like the Visigoths, is busy hollowing out the nation and its civilization. At this late hour, the odor of national decomposition is beginning to overwhelm the olfactory glands.

No photo description available.

RogerG

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* BLM’s mission statement included the following:
“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.” It’s straight out of the writings of Karl Marx, nothing unusual for the self-professed Marxism of BLM’s founders of Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi.

From the Wayback Machine Archive, Black Lives Matter: “What We Believe”, at https://web.archive.org/web/20200408020723/https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/

* “Whole Foods closes San Francisco flagship store after one year, citing crime”, Jordan Valinsky, CNN, 4/11/2023, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/whole-foods-closes-san-francisco-flagship-store-after-one-year-citing-crime/ar-AA19IDPH

* If you’re interested, here’s a local San Francisco newscast about people getting out during the Covid shutdown: “On The Move: San Francisco residents on the move during the COVID-19 economic downturn” at

March 13, 2023March 15, 2023

The Cause of Our Discontents

May be an image of 3 people, people standing and outdoors — 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).

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 Shutting Down DC To Protest The Federal Government And Its "Bulls**t" — 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.

May be an image of 1 person and text that says 'SRENIEW "I have dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.' -Martin Luther King WRONG! MODNN WOKE @Ramireztoons michaelpramirez.com'

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?

May be an illustration of standing and text

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

February 17, 2023

The Sudden Crusade Against Disinformation; Drought; and the Inner Totalitarian

Lake Mead near the Hoover dam, seen from the Arizona side of the dam near Boulder City, Nev., July 19, 2022. (photo: David Becker/Reuters)

David Mikkelson, founder of Snopes, the site that tracks fakery on the web. He’s in his home office in a nearly 100-year old home in Tacoma. (Greg Gilbert / The Seattle Times, 2018) — David Mikkelson, founder of Snopes, the site that tracks fakery on the web. He’s in his home office in a nearly 100-year old home in Tacoma, Wa. (photo: Greg Gilbert / The Seattle Times, 2018)

Why the sudden crusade against “disinformation”? Is our time plagued by a singular onrush of lying and deceit? Really? According to today’s referees of language – who themselves could be mired in modern cultural/political manias – disinformation is “false information that is spread deliberately and often covertly to influence public opinion or obscure the truth” (Merriam-Webster). Slanting the truth or even outright falsehoods has been the stuff of “How to Win Friends and Influence People” (a little Dale Carnegie lingo) since people discovered other people. Moses’s biblical admonition against “bearing false witness” covers the topic quite nicely.

For years, some people insisted that taxing the rich at towering rates leads to more revenue, as if people blindly and willingly, like lemmings, lay themselves prostrate before the IRS. Does the British “brain drain” from high-tax Britain to elsewhere in the Anglosphere of the 1950’s to 1970’s remind you of anything? Tax havens in the Bahamas? For years, even today, some continue to persist in the belief that socialism leads to prosperity despite its long record of failure. Eugenics, at one time, was all the craze even as it treated people as if they were draft animals. I could go on. So, where’s the sudden crisis in bad information? Dis- and its cousin misinformation have been around as long as humans had the capacity for speech. Now the Southwest is in the midst of a harrowing drought. Watch the “disinformation” smears muddy the waters in how to deal with it.

Honestly, cut to the chase, this jihad against “disinformation” is actually a massive censorship campaign. By what standard are the Cassandras of disinformation labeling some opinions or factual claims fraudulent? As it turns out, these arbiters of truth are partisans who rely on partisans. It’s mental gunk relying on mental gunk to produce more mental gunk in order to control what people say. GIGO – garbage in, garbage out.

GIGO case in point: Valerie Wirtschafter of Brookings and her piece, “Audible reckoning: How top political podcasters spread unsubstantiated and false claims” (see below), where she proclaims that the podcast world is too free, with much too much “disinformation”. Where’s she been? The advertising industry would never have been around to launch so many successful Madison Avenue careers without exaggerations and falsehoods. Coke and Pepsi lambasted each other for years with disinformation. Watch any Superbowl’s commercial breaks for your daily diet of disinformation. Joe McCarthy (Sen, Wisc., 1950’s) and the Socialist International would be minor footnotes in history without mis- and disinformation. It’s been the motivation for wars and invasions and the rhetorical bedrock for politicians in their climb up the greasy pole . . . forever. And, all of a sudden, “Dr.” Wirtschafter discovered it’s a problem.

Summer Institute in Computational Social Science — Valerie Wirtschafter

Come on, these are biased people who don’t like what other people have to say. People like Wirtschafter hide behind the aura of other people’s credentials, their government positions, or undeserved media respectability to engineer a “study” to silence still others. To her, the government is always right, and so are the scribblers and mouths that populate the Big Media newsrooms, anyone mentally messaged in endless lecture halls like hers all the way to her “PhD”, and the millennials and Gen-Z’ers filling the cubicles of Snopes and PolitiFact.

Snopes and PolitiFact have been scandalous in their interventions in our political brawls. If it was up to them, we’d never know that there is a strong possibility that COVID-19 came out of a Communist Chinese lab. We’d continue to shutter the schools not knowing that children face a near non-existent threat while ignoring the long-term damage to their emotional and mental development. We’d still be suffocating behind masks, not knowing that masking has little effect in stopping the spread of a respiratory virus. We’d never know that the vaccines don’t stop the spread of the bug or that natural immunity is just as good (see below). Much that we now know to be true about the pandemic would have been strangled in the crib.

Thanks to the people whom Wirtschafter trusts, businesses would still be closed and a couple of adult generations would continue to be nurtured on the idea that they shouldn’t have to go to work. Snopes and PolitiFact would paste as “true” any mention of the low unemployment rate, leaving a below-average labor participation rate lying on the cutting room floor. The low unemployment rate talk is empty absent any discussion of the emaciated labor pool from which the number is calculated. The high portion of employed (and conversely the low number unemployed, hence the low unemployment rate) is drawn from a worker pool that shrunk after the federal government started bribing a good portion of current and potential worker force out of the labor pool with extended pandemic benefits. The money spigot wasn’t shut off till the damage was done. Often referred to as the Great Resignation, quiet quitting, and I Quit Movement, Gen-Z’ers and others have discovered that living in Dad’s basement and receiving a government check (er, debit card) ain’t so bad (see below). Bringing it up might incur the wrath of the self-deputized disinformation bounty hunters.

Should we pay for pajama boy’s college?

Partisan-laced industries abound in this age of institutionalized political correctness. Stifling voices is the name of the game in the anti-disinformation industry. Though, how can we see our way clearly on existential threats such as the drought in the Southwest when discussion is monitored by the disinformation police? Having long experience with the lefty tendencies of the classroom and faculty lounge, the kinds of people admired by Wirtschafter, there exists among this group a psychomotor tick for totalitarian lifestyle control. That’s the reason for the affection for the buzzword “conservation” and the knee-jerk suspicion about individual freedom. Any talk of increasing the general water supply so people can be free in their daily lives will be met with a smirk.

Let me send Wirtschafter, Snopes and PolitiFact into a tizzy by mentioning a piece by Ed Ring of the California Policy Center, “How California Can Solve the Colorado Water Deficit” (see below). He lays out the practical possibility that more than conservation is necessary to stave off disaster for states like California: the supply of water has to be increased. But don’t bring that up at the next Sierra Club confab or among the chattering classes attending a Wirtschafter soiree.

Ring points out a number of options to increase supply, even while taking into account the climate-change bugaboo. Climate change doesn’t mean that California will be the newest Sahara Desert in a century. Precipitation will still fluctuate in a wet season and over time and present opportunities to expand supply. One is the installation of French drains underneath the subsurface gravel beds of the San Joaquin/Sacramento Delta’s natural channels. It would capture a portion of the excess flows (flood waters) that flush into SF Bay. The water could then be stored in off-stream reservoirs and delivered to users and/or utilized to recharge the depleted aquifers of California’s Great Central Valley. French drains, think about it.

Expanding and upgrading wastewater reclamation could be an additional route to take. Even if only for non-potable uses such as landscaping or ag irrigation, it would free large quantities of potable sources for human consumption. Of course, that would require budgetary restraint in not wasting money on zany efforts to kill off the next generation in unbridled and subsidized abortions, or turn the state into a parent-free sanctuary for teen sexual mutilation (transgenderism), or find new ways to ladle cash to new and old “oppressed” classes, or drive businesses out of the state in hyper-regulation and -taxation, or sink more public and private money into the thankless task of making unsustainable “sustainable” energy “sustainable”. Keep it simple: just try to maintain water pressure at the faucet.

Desalination is another option if the state can keep its militant eco-utopians and NIMBY’s at bay. It’s expensive, like any of the other options, but, honestly, can you think of a wiser use of taxpayer moneys than the provision of something so important that three days without it brings death? However, I suspect that the inner totalitarian of the conservation-only legion has too great a grip on the minds in Sacramento. These busybodies are just too obsessed with telling other people how to live, and conservation fits the bill. Yep, the inner totalitarian has a grip on power in the state.

Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant protests organized by Abalone Alliance Demonstrators blockade and police arrest at the front gate Photos dated 9/-/1981 — 1981 Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant protests in California organized by Abalone Alliance Demonstrators blockade and police arrest at the front gate. (Photo: Steve Ringman/The Chronicle)

California has an aged 20-million-person water delivery system in a 39-million-person state. Granted, people are leaving so, who knows, maybe its population will eventually come to match its outdated supply. Still, if opportunities aren’t grasped, it’ll be a bumpy ride of brown lawns, metered restrictions and fines, and more of the Great Central Valley resembling the Sudan. Droughts should be anticipated in dry-summer climates but California would rather play the role of woke crusader. With the disinformation inquisition in full swing, you’ll never know that the anguish could have been avoided.

RogerG

Read more here:

* “Audible reckoning: How top political podcasters spread unsubstantiated and false claims”, Dr. Valerie Wirtschafter, Brookings Institute, 2/2023, at https://www.brookings.edu/essay/audible-reckoning-how-top-political-podcasters-spread-unsubstantiated-and-false-claims/

* A critique of the Wirtschafter study can be found here: “The ‘Disinformation Industry’ Is Only One Part of a Larger Scandal”, Jeffrey Blehar, National Review Online, 2/23/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-disinformation-industry-is-only-one-part-of-a-far-larger-media-scandal/

* Dr. Fauci admits to limited effectiveness of the vaccine in stopping the spread of respiratory viruses: “Fauci Changes His Public Tune on Covid Vaccines”, Joel Zinberg, director of Paragon Health Institute’s Public Health and American Well-being Initiative, National Review Online, 2/16/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/02/fauci-changes-his-public-tune-on-covid-vaccines/

* Excellent piece on unemployment and the labor participation rate: “Unemployment Is Low, But So Is The Labor Force Participation Rate — What’s Going On In The U.S. Labor Market?”, Q.ai, Forbes, 1/23/23, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/qai/2023/01/25/unemployment-is-low-but-so-is-the-labor-force-participation-rate—whats-going-on-in-the-us-labor-market/?sh=5ad8aff1244e

* “Inside the rise of ‘antiwork,’ a worker’s strike that wants to turn the labor shortage into a new American Dream”, Juliana Kaplan and Andy Kiersz, Insider, 11/25/21, at https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-antiwork-workers-quit-dont-work-strike-better-conditions-2021-11#:~:text=1%20The%20%22antiwork%22%20movement%20is%20rapidly%20growing%2C%20as,and%20what%20it%20means%20about%20the%20American%20Dream.

* “How California Can Solve the Colorado Water Deficit”, Ed Ring, California Policy Center, in National Review Online, 2/13/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/02/how-california-can-solve-the-colorado-water-deficit/

February 10, 2023February 14, 2023

Victor Davis Hanson, What Happened to You?

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I was an avid follower of Victor Davis Hanson’s podcast. I appreciated his astute observations on the state of play in the country. But lately, I’ve discerned derangement when it comes to Ukraine. It’s the same mania that has a grip on the loonier fringes of the right. Why did some Republican congresspeople stand in still defiance of Zelensky in his December 2022 speech to Congress? Why do some mouthpieces of the right’s chattering classes (Tucker Carlson for instance) never miss an opportunity to smear Zelensky and Ukraine? It’s so very odd given the fact that the talk emanating from this faction is chock full of complaints about Ukraine but is glaringly empty of any suggestions as to what we should do in response to one nation attempting a blatant conquest of another on a continent historically beset with near-apocalyptic conflagrations. It’s a bitch session without any practical suggestions.

Video shows Marjorie Taylor Greene 'didn't applaud' Zelensky's speech to Congress | indy100 — Marjorie Taylor Greene stands motionless as others clap during Zelensky speech to Congress in December 2022.

The behavior boggles the mind. Not since Saddam Hussein barged into Kuwait, or the Wehrmacht’s 1930’s plunge into Czechoslovakia and Poland, has the world experienced such naked aggression as this. Gauging by the reaction of neighbors and some adamantly neutral nations – Sweden and Finland – something very big had happened when Putin unleashed his military forces on Kyiv. Sweden, a country that during the Cold War had its fighter jets on the tarmac simultaneously facing east and west, is rushing to the arms of NATO. Finland, since Stalin’s time a strictly nonpartisan pacifist nation, has declared its intention to join the alliance as well. The already skittish Baltics are in a panic, and rightly so. Yet, for people like Tucker and Marjorie Taylor Greene, it’s the Alfred E. Neuman line of Mad Magazine fame, “What- Me Worry?” More than that, they seem to have stocked up on a supply of broad coarse brushes and buckets of tar to lather on Zelensky and Ukraine.

I got a full dose of VDH’s mental state in regard to Ukraine in his February 9 podcast (see below). It was full of vitriol about Ukraine and Zelensky but nary a word about what he would propose to counter a brazen act of conquest on a continent already the scene of the world’s two greatest bloodbaths that were ignited by nearly identical aggressions – Belgium/France 1914, 1930’s Austria/Czechoslovakia/Poland. The lambast included a characterization of Zelensky as an ingrate, but by a standard that would make Churchill one. Hanson’s depiction of the comparative weights (population, economy, nuclear weapons, etc.) of the two sides, while superficially correct, isn’t dispositive of the end result if history is any guide. From the battlefields of Plataea, Marathon, and Salamis of ancient Greece to the jungles of Vietnam and the mountainous uplands of Afghanistan, small forces with esprit de corps and allies can defeat a much bigger one. Hanson clearly knows this, so why does he suggest that the Ukrainian defeat is inevitable? Once again, it boggles the mind.

Ancient Greece timeline | Timetoast timelines — Greeks defeat the Persians at Marathon in 490 BC.

Mujahideen Waiting for Soviet Army | Afghan-Soviet war 1979-… | Flickr — Mujahideen fighters in position against the Soviet army in Afghanistan in the 1980’s.

Far from it, Ukraine could gain the upper hand in this thing. The question then will be: who got worn down? One French estimate puts Putin’s losses at around 250,000 since he started the invasion (see below), not to mention the hundreds of thousands of fighting-age men who have fled.

Hanson’s trump card, though, is the Russian possession of nuclear weapons. That somehow makes Putin unbeatable, which does more to explain why the Kim family of North Korea and the mullahs of Iran want them. But the problem with a nuclear arsenal was the same one during the Cold War: use them and you’re done. Mutually assured destruction either though a nuclear response, prolonged siege of sanctions and isolation, a forever red-dot bullseye on Putin’s forehead, or a Milosevich-type prosecution at the Hague awaits the Kremlin. Remember, victims and survivors of holocausts are unrelenting in their pursuit of the perps. Two names illustrate the point: Simon Wiesenthal and his pursuit of Nazis and Israel’s capture of Adolf Eichmann (and many others) in 1960. Use a nuke, tactical or otherwise, and Putin will have a life of sleepless nights. Don’t you think that he knows this? Who wants to share space in history books with Heinrich Himmler?

May be an image of text that says '7 JEURNAL 20189 CREATORS.COM This is ALL UKRAINE'S FAULT... UKRAINE RAINE @Ramireztoons RUSSIA michaelpramirez.com'

But here’s the rub with Hanson’s rant: none of his points about Ukraine make much sense outside a reference to American domestic politics. A faction of the right judges almost every issue in light of its relation to Trump. A Ukrainian energy company hired Hunter. Trump’s “perfect” phone call – which honestly wasn’t perfect, nor illegal, nor impeachable – was with Zelensky. Some Ukrainian policymakers favored Hillary, which isn’t unusual since all nations with a gun to their head – like Ukraine – nuzzle up to the likely winner of the leadership post of the big dog that can save them. Heck, everyone including Trump thought he was going to lose in 2016.

Ironically, we also play the election-interference game in places like Israel, post-Soviet Russia, and elsewhere. It’s therefore hardly surprising, even if illegal, for foreigners to interfere in our domestic politics.

Then there’s the notorious ex-Ukrainian US Colonel Vidman whose testimony at Trump’s impeachment hearing helped lead to the spurious abuse-of-power charge. See, you paint enough anti-Trump stuff on Ukraine and Trump sycophants begin to view Ukrainians as outside their tribe. Sure, it’s sophomoric, “the politics of the junior-high lunchroom” (see below), but it works as an important signifier for those who have difficulty constructing a coherent thought on their own.

Impeachment witness Alexander Vindman says in op-ed 'doing what's right matters' — Colonel Vidman in testimony in impeachment hearing of Pres. Trump in 2020.

So, we are experiencing the sophomoric thinking that goes along with the sophomoric behavior of the Trump influence on our current political scene. VDH dips his toe into this pond scum.

VDH, I’ve got your complaints. Now, what do we do? If all is so bad about Ukraine, what do you propose that we do about bald-faced, naked aggression on the continent of Europe? Are America’s other problems truly a justification for standing idly by? Do we restrain ourselves till we have solved our border problems, opened up ANWR, created more entitlements, corrected our birth dearth and declining labor participation rate, etc.? It seems strange to hold foreign policy hostage to success at solving every other internal problem. It’s essentially an argument for not having a foreign policy.

It still comes down to one question: what do we do? Do nothing? If we choose to take that route, prepare for conquest in the world’s other tinderboxes. I wonder how that will sit with Xi as he makes his preparations for swallowing Taiwan. Don’t ever bring up Biden’s Afghanistan debacle if you’re willing to create a Ukraine one.

Negotiations could end this imbroglio, but it can’t be under a prostrate Ukraine for that will only sanction subjugation with words. If the goal is to deter this kind of behavior, Putin’s forces must suffer on the battlefield. Ukrainians are proving quite adept at providing that. Keep them in the fight and give them the wherewithal in the form of tanks, fighter aircraft, Patriot batteries, whatever, to make Putin see the negotiating table as his only practical way out. Make Ukraine a too hard of a nut to crack for him.

Ukraine destroy Russian tank with drone in 'extraordinary' footage | World | News | Express.co.uk — Ukrainian soldier launches drone to destroy a Russian tank (r).

Additionally, talks at the stage of a near Ukrainian defeat after we starved them of supplies will be an inspiration for Xi. The CCP armed forces invade and take Taiwan, then negotiate a new Hong Kong style status for the island to seem moderate, which in due course will morph into full incorporation into the regime. Bye, bye Taiwan, to go along with the addition of the new Russian province of Ukraine. It’s Churchill’s world crisis of 1939 all over again.

My bet is that we’ll get every bit of that international horror after this unhinged talk runs its course, and our domestic situation will still be a mess. Reversing our decrepit culture and corrupting entitlements is a much more monumental task than shipping Abrams tanks to Ukraine. Think about it, VDH: an unsafe and wracked USA compounded by an unsafe and wracked world. That is the ultimate conclusion that we’re left drawing from your harangue on Ukraine.

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RogerG

See and read more here:

* Feb. 9 VDH podcast “Our Broken Kaleidoscope” on Spotify at https://open.spotify.com/show/5pmfHJqJDIRkbZuRqZyRIE

* “EU estimates Russian casualties in Ukraine at 250,000 killed and wounded”, Yahoo News, Jan. 4, 2023, at https://news.yahoo.com/eu-estimates-russian-casualties-ukraine-183600085.html

* “Why Progressives Can’t Quit Their Masks”, Kevin D. Williamson, Nation Review Online, Feb. 13, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/why-progressives-cant-quit-their-masks/

February 2, 2023February 5, 2023

A Culture of Lying

Reporter David Lightman | Idaho Statesman — Gov. Newsom of California makes claim that Texans pay more in taxes in recent news conference.

Mehmet Murat ildan, Turkish writer and economist, once quipped for good reason, “One of the greatest responsibilities for the people of our time is to accept everything that he hears in the pro-government media as a lie and to investigate the truth from independent sources personally!” Good advice in this age of serial falsehoods from our self-anointed “betters”.

Mehmet’s point is to keep one’s wits about them. For instance, ask a few questions. Like, what is “government” in “pro-government media”? Former representative and Democratic Party poohbah Barney Frank tried to put an anodyne spin on the term: “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.”

Is it really? Mehmet might beg to differ. Today, our western media, the other part of the Mehmet’s phrase, are more than organs of communication. They are part of an incestuous nexus of the college faculty lounge, corporate boardroom, legacy media, Hollywood, government down into its bowels, and a smattering of non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) – a class of people peering from the top of the social pyramid and overwhelmingly leaning left. Indeed, be leery enough to personally “investigate the truth from independent sources”.

In today’s news roundup are two items that touches upon our “betters” malign influence: Gavin Newsom on taxes and the chicanery of Hamilton 68. Both stories are indicative of our modern culture of lying.

In the first one, the serial prevaricator Gov. Gavin Newsom of California mangles the truth about Texas taxes. He has to do it because he’s the used car salesman trying to unload a clunker on a weary costumer, the jalopy being the state of California. Thus, he blurted out this whopper: “95% of Texans pay higher taxes than Californians.” What? Texas has no state income tax and California has the highest one in the nation and taxes everything under the sun (and within Hubbel’s expanding universe, Hubble’s Law: v = H*r). The poor folks of California are pummeled with them.

May be an image of text that says 'RAIRZ 2017 CREATORS. COM COMMON SENSE and COMPETENT GOVERNMENT The ENDANGERED SPECIES on the VERGE of EXTINCTION im CALIFORNIA. @Ramireztoons michaelpramirez.com'

It bodes well for DeMeco Ryans, 49er defensive coordinator, who looks like he’ll take the head coaching gig with the Houston Texans. He’ll get a leap in his salary and be allowed to keep more of it by simply making the move.

What is the basis for Newsom’s attempt at making the implausible plausible? Surely, there must be some grounding for the shocking claim. Well, the guy’s staff rooted through the publications of the left-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy in the not-so-illustrious state. They cited a 2018 study from the group that doesn’t support the bombast. Even more embarrassing, a spokesperson for the group refuted Newsom by saying, “We do not compute a specific percentage of Californians who pay less/more tax than Texans.” Instead, the focus of the Institute’s study was to illustrate California’s “fairer” tax system, not that it was cheaper. Newsom: liar, liar, pants on fire!

To clear the air, the more reasonable Tax Foundation went through the numbers comparing Texas and California, just looking at income, property, and sales taxes, and avoiding California’s morass of regulatory and business taxes. Here’s the results using a $100,000 income in both states: the person in Texas pays $6,335 and the poor Californio’s burden almost doubled to $11,946. The biggest reason for the gap is that Texans pay $0 in state income taxes because Texas doesn’t have one. Add a lighter tax burden to the cheaper cost of living and a sensible person can understand the attraction of Texas to a California middle-class family of four or Elon Musk.

Plus, one doesn’t have to put up with the eco-nuttery, crazed and infanticidal abortion, being locked into abysmal public schools, the widespread urban decay, and their daughters having to share with boys the girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms, and running and swimming lanes. There’s a lot to be said for loading up a U-Haul.

Newsom has to gaslight us to cover up his mounting mess. Hamilton 68 lies to maintain its death grip on power. What is it? It’s another one of those transnational groupies of the well-heeled and people accustomed to power and influence. It’s a Who’s Who of powerful insiders. It was birthed by an entity called the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD) which in turn was created by the German Marshall Fund, which is bankrolled by European and the US governments. Got that? It sounds like an old fashioned, meandering money laundering scheme, like much of today’s politics when the powerful want to hide their machinations.

Former FBI counterintelligence agent and “disinformation” expert Clint Watts, the spokesman for Hamilton

Their key obsession is “misinformation”. So, they fight so-called “misinformation” with “disinformation”. It was all uncovered by Elon Musk’s clean-up crew at Twitter. Hamilton 68 was part of the cabal to tar the 2016 election as a product of a Russian skullduggery. They stuck around to be the source for the wild claims of Russia collusion for MSNBC, legacy media, and the disreputable fact-checking operations of Snopes and Politifact.

Hamilton purported to find hundreds (644) of Russian bots actively at work since 2015-16. In reality, according to Twitter execs at the time in their Musk-released emails, the Hamilton’s hundreds shrunk to the reality of 34, most of them related to RT (Russia Times). Swept up in the tarring were conservatives such as Michael Horowitz, and others with much fewer Twitter followers, for merely expressing a point of view contrary to the center-left’s transnational zeitgeist.

Apparently, they’ve been snooping Twitter accounts, not unusual since they are joined at the hip with the “intel community” and Silicon Valley muckety-mucks. Many of Hamilton’s members are well-connected to the amorphous glob. And just think, US taxpayers are forced to bankroll an operation (the German Marshall Fund) targeting themselves. Hamilton 68 is a huge con job that besmirched the 2016 election with lies and was bent on libeling anyone aligned with the result. It’s outrageous.

With Hamilton 68 and Newsom’s falsehoods, one has to wonder about the legitimacy of those preening and peering from the top of the social pyramid. Their culture of lies is smothering us.

RogerG

Read more here:

* Mehmet Murat ildan’s quote from Goodreads, “Lies Politics Quotes” at https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/lies-politics , and more on Mehmet at https://mehmetmuratildanresmiwebsitesi.wordpress.com/

* Barney Frank quote from “The Intolerant State”, Matt Welch, Reason Magazine, Dec. 2013, at https://reason.com/2013/11/11/the-intolerant-state/#:~:text=%22Government%20is%20simply%20the%20name%20we%20give%20to,to%20opposite%20sides%20of%20America%27s%20bitter%20ideological%20divide.

* “Newsom says 95% of Texans pay more than Californians in taxes. But is he correct?”, David Lightman, The Sacramento Bee, 1/18/23, at https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article271288017.html#storylink=cpy

* “Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New King of Media Fraud”, Matt Taibbi, Racket, 1/27/23, at https://www.racket.news/p/move-over-jayson-blair-meet-hamilton

* More on Hamilton 68 at “The Right Underreacts”, Michael Brandon Dougherty, National Review Online, 1/31/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-right-underreacts/

* Also on my website at libertatevirtute.com
* Also in my Substack feed, The Golden Mean, at https://rogerlgraf.substack.com/

November 16, 2022November 17, 2022

American Elections: You Don’t Have to Win the Argument, Just Win the Vote

May be an image of 1 person and standing — Pres. Biden making his September 6, 2022, speech in Philadelphia

Margaret Thatcher once said, “First you win the argument, then you win the vote.” It’s become a cliché, but sometimes clichés are nonetheless true. Then again, we can make them no longer true. Today, it’s increasingly apparent that winning arguments aren’t necessary. You can win the vote without an argument, program, plan, defense, etc. Brand your opponents, refashion the election system to your likes, then harvest the votes. Thus, it’s possible to have a majority government of mediocrities, strident revolutionaries, nincompoops, power-seeking narcissists, and a laughingstock to the world. Welcome to America 2022.

See the source image — Margaret Thatcher

Throughout 2022, I expected, like everyone else, a red wave for the midterms. It didn’t happen. I wasn’t the only one gobsmacked. The whole conservative commentariat was left filling baskets with jaws lying on the floor, including their own. Oftentimes, shock is soon followed by scapegoating those who we already had a well-established emotional investment in disliking. It’s a way of never having to admit you’re wrong. A prime example would be the Fox News primetime lineup of entertainer-critics and their gaggle of contributors such as Mollie Hemingway. They aren’t the only ones.

For others on the right, they talk and write as if we’re still in the bygone era when going to the precinct polling place, being handed a ballot, and taking it to a privacy cubicle to mark it in the sanctity of your conscience was the default setting for elections. Today, the secret ballot is dead due to the machinations of the Democratic Party and the excuse of COVID. Pundits like National Review’s Jim Geraghty refuse to recognize how voter behavior and electioneering has been dramatically altered for the worse as a result. The character and personality of our elections has mutated beyond recognition. People adapt to new environments, sometimes grotesquely. Do we need a psychologist to remind us?

The nightly Fox News primetime lineup replaced talk radio as opinion setters on the right. They glommed onto the rising Trump phenomena and out came the jargon of the “establishment” and “RHINO“ as objects of derision, and a romantic attachment to the “outsider”. The terms are invoked like magical incantations, absent of much content. The words are ways of emoting.

Earlier this week, speaking of gobsmacked, Hemingway on Ingraham’s show jumped at the opportunity to blame the leaders of the party – the “establishment” – for the debacle. She’s right, to a point, but that’s only half the story. The other half is the fact that most everyone on the right was caught off-guard. So, they condemn others for believing what they believed. Got that? Theirs is a criticism of others for reading the tea leaves as they did. It’s rank hypocrisy.

As the French philosopher and writer Rochefoucauld pithily put it, “Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.” The vice of never having to say your sorry makes a hypocrite of us all.

Then we have the refusal to accept the fact that elections have radically changed, altering for the worse electioneering and what is expected of the voter. Jim Geraghty fell into this trap. He dismisses “conspiracies” as an explanation of the outcome, as do I. But a “conspiracy” is one thing, a revival of Tammany Hall and Chicago’s Daley Machine on a national scale is another. Bribery or a voter roll littered with the dead isn’t necessary. Just warp the system under the color of law so you don’t have to cheat. Some of the chicanery of an older time is legally permitted today. Many, many states have no-fault mail-in balloting and early voting. Ballots are shotgunned through the mail in some states from long out-of-date voter rolls. The secret ballot is dead, dead, dead, as ballots go into domiciles and get marked God-knows-how. Ballot harvesting invites highly partisan activists into the space between the voter’s conscience and its delivery into the box.

No, Hugh Hewitt, the harvesting isn’t the innocent act of collecting them. The older safeguards abounded not because everyone will violate moral norms without them. There’s a reason for the fingerprinting and background checks for school personnel. Without them, more miscreants will be quietly enabled to molest the kids. Ditto for partisan activists being kept as far away as possible from a person’s vote and its depository. The older voting safeguards were confidence-builders for the voter to be safe with his or her choice.

Geraghty cited the unevenness of the results throughout the ballot as proof of the absence of a “conspiracy”. For one, the election was not a conspiracy but exhibited the characteristics of political-machine style electioneering made possible by early voting, mail-in balloting, and ballot harvesting, etc. For instance, Laxalt loses the Nevada Senate race but the Republican captures the governorship. This line of thought ignores how a political machine might operate, particularly a national one, like stressing high-profile races, a laser-beam focus on keeping control of the House and Senate, and how closely a candidate adheres to the script. KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid – with emphasis on the “must-haves” frees up space on the ballot for disparate choices.

Hemingway dismisses candidate quality, as do I, and Geraghty thought it mattered. I think that if it was of consequence, both parties had a problem. Blake Masters was a novice and John Fetterman was unable to hold a train of thought or put a sentence or line of logic together. Katie Hobbs was a glaring millennial-uptalking/valley girl/airhead. The list is long and filled with charlatans and wastrels. Many Democrats refused to debate or only agreed to one after enough votes were locked up in early voting. Joe Biden in 2020 showed how political-machine campaigning is tailor-made for a basement strategy. This election season had few debates and very little face-to-face campaigning by the Democrats. The strategy was to hunker down, avoid any risk, and tar the other side with over-powering evil.

Was Chicago’s Richard Daley or Tammany Hall’s George Washington Plunkett ever known for their debate prowess? Their expertise was in running the machine of an army of operatives steeped in favor-peddling. Today, single potentates aren’t necessary, just have an overwhelming fundraising advantage to build a machine that facilitates a safe space/basement presence on a nonexistent campaign trail.

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Nobody was put through a wringer to make the average voter ferret out their preferences, because the wringer was absent, or reduced to irrelevance. In many places, especially in blue states, for many voters, the campaign season began and ended within a week or two after receiving their ballot in the mail. The machine went to work locking up these votes ASAP at favorable moments in a news cycle that they helped engineer with an always compliant media. Make broad, spurious charges – “a threat to democracy” or “MAGA Republicans” or “they want women to die” [abortion, Dobbs] – and contort anything to reinforce their self-created stereotype of their opponents (the Paul Pelosi incident). But, by all means, flood the bank with early votes before the public’s attention is drawn to the real issues, the ones that are hammering their daily lives.

In this election, given its structure, issues really didn’t matter – inflation, the border, the Kabul disaster, XY “girls” invading girls’ bathrooms and sports, crime, kids barred from their schools, urban barbarity, greenie authoritarianism, etc. – in order to keep the eyes trained on the meanie Republicans. That’s the reason for hunkering down and let Biden occasionally emerge from his bunker to plaster the meanies.

This style of campaigning leads to some real eye-opening results. The “they want to women to die” led to an endorsement of what can only be described as infanticide in more than a few states. Some state constitutions became festooned with carte blanche abortion. Persistent polls for decades have shown a popular rejection of late-term abortion. Did people really know that they were embracing it, and, in some cases, forcing other people to pay for them or others to perform them under criminal sanction, without parental consent? Did people really know that the “health of the mother” language is subterfuge for late-term abortion? In my own state, Montana, the voters couldn’t bring themselves to protect a baby who survived one. If there is a Judgment Day or some moment of cosmic justice, many souls are imperiled by what they were led to spuriously believe. In some not-to-distant future, will “my body, my choice” join the ranks alongside “racial purity”?

These results, grotesque as they are, are only possible if the vetting of traditional campaigning is replaced by our newly minted political-machine style. We’ll only get more of what we didn’t intend in a government filled with acolytes of the mindless talking point. Highly partisan activists and political groupies seldom make for statesmen/women.

Geraghty, Hemingway, Ingraham, and me too, would probably agree on the need for Republicans to follow suit. It’s a time of reciprocal escalation to avoid unilateral disarmament. However, Republicans should only get good at this malignant political-machine style in order to destroy it. End universal mail-in voting, make election day one day, re-enshrine the secret ballot, and secure the vote. It’s not hard, just use this bastardized system to gain power to end it.

Until we come to grips with a malignant election system that brings out the worst in all of us, anything that we do in the long run will be pointless. A government of shallow narcissists and brain-dead activists will only hasten the decline of a once mighty nation. Competing national political machines encouraging ill-considered voter behavior will guarantee it. Without correction, paste R.I.P on the once-great citizen republic called the United States of America.

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RogerG

Read or watch here for more:

* Jim Geraghty’s explanation of the midterm results: “The Magnitude of the GOP Midterm Debacle”, National Review, Nov. 14, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/the-magnitude-of-the-gop-midterm-debacle/

* Mollie Hemingway’s analysis of the midterm results on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show at https://youtu.be/cCyPdLtx844

November 7, 2022November 7, 2022

Can I Sue?

Really, can I sue California’s STRS, the state’s teacher pension system? I would think that I have standing. After all, I am receiving a CalSTRS pension. Why would I sue? They are imperiling my pension. Simple.

How are they harming the integrity of my pension? It comes in three letters – ESG – and, to no great surprise, California is all into it. The initials stand for “environment, social, governance” and the plan is to impose these political abstractions on the entire business sector including finance, which also includes pension investing. In practical terms, ESG means the grab bag of leftwing causes from transgender ideology to the crusade against “systemic racism” to climate-change apocalyptics. The purpose is to strongarm businesses into leftwing causes with the use of the mother’s milk of business – capital – capital even from pension members.

The State of Utah is suing – that is, suing Standard and Poor’s (S&P) for assessing the state’s financial stability and credit worthiness according to leftwing metrics (ESG), or how diligent the state is in furthering leftwing causes such as hostility to the firearms industry and energy companies. Since the electorate of Utah doesn’t have the political sensibilities of gun controllers, BLM, the progressive ladies of The View, or the Sierra Club, the state’s financial status and bonds get downgraded by S&P acting in the role of the Left’s hatchet man. If the state’s electorate doesn’t pay heed to the fascinations of a college Sociology faculty, their bonds get branded “B” (junk). The purpose is to jeopardize the state’s financial health if they don’t come to heel.

Public-employee pension funds are particularly prone to the sway of the zealots, especially CalPers and CalSTRS in California, already under the direct thumb of an off-the-charts progressive one-party state. Out goes the standard fiduciary rule of working in the best interests of the client, in comes a redefinition of “best interests” to involve the political inclinations of those like Gavin Newsom wanting to risk the pensioners’ contributions and ultimate payout on Solyndra-type ventures and away from investments that until yesterday were pro forma.

In the case of a public-employee pension system, “best interest” can’t be limited to managers taking dictates from powerful and ideologically pretentious politicos. Contributions come from everyone from Marxists to NRA members in general funds like CalSTRS. The only real requirement is to be a teacher of the requisite number of years. The one thing that they all have in common is being retired and spoiling their grandkids. If any of them want to fund the antics of The Squad, they can do it from their pre- or post-retirement income, not beforehand after a deterioration of potential payouts to every beneficiary by Gavin Newsom’s preferences.

Kentucky’s AG, Daniel Cameron, senses the chicanery as well. He hit the mark with a letter to the state’s pension fund managers when he warned them about ESG investing because it would “violate statutory and contractual fiduciary duties.” He continued, “There is an increasing trend among some investment management firms to use money in public and state employee pension plans — that is, other people’s money — to push their own political agendas and force social change.” Those fiduciary duties might apply to California as well.

A favorite tactic to make ESG seem legitimate is to label the opinions of the Left a matter of “science” and a product of a “consensus”, therefore irrefutable, therefore “misinformation” if challenged, therefore above and beyond the standard rules of fiduciary responsibility. This new “science” – the scientific truth (?) of Leftist opinion – is actually a “science” without the scientific method. Think about it: What scientist comes from an experimental test of his/her hypothesis with the observation that the results are wrong because they violate a “consensus”? The whole exercise is as nonsensical as handing over my pension’s investment portfolio to the screeching ministrations of Greta Thunberg or Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.

But here we are at a place where we can’t challenge the destruction of a pension because anyone who disagrees is censored as a “denier”. So, the Left gets carte blanche with the money for my old age. I don’t think so. Send lawyers, guns, and money. Oh, drop the “guns” part and let’s sue.

I identify with Warren Zevon’s predicament in his song “Lawyers, Guns, and Money”. The lyics:

“I went home with the waitress, the way I always do
How was I to know, she was with the Russians, too?

I was gambling in Havana, I took a little risk
Send lawyers, guns and money, dad, get me out of this, ha

I’m the innocent bystander
Somehow I got stuck between the rock and a hard place
And I’m down on my luck, yes I’m down on my luck
Well, I’m down on my luck

And I’m hiding in Honduras
I’m a desperate man
Send lawyers, guns, and money
The shit has hit the fan

Alright, send lawyers, guns, and money
Huh, yeah
Send lawyers, guns, and money
Uh
Send lawyers, guns, and money
Hey
Send lawyers, guns, and money
Oo, yeah
Yeah
Yeah”

Zevon’s performance of “Lawyers, Guns, and Money”:

RogerG

Read here for more:

* “Follow Daniel Cameron’s lead, purge every hint of ESG from your state’s finances”, Washington Examiner, Nov. 4, 2022, at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/faith-freedom-self-reliance/follow-daniel-camerons-lead-purge-every-hint-of-esg-from-your-states-finances .

* “Utah pushes back against pro-Putin ESG financial analysis”, Washington Examiner, May 2, 2022, at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/utah-pushes-back-against-pro-putin-esg-financial-analysis .

October 20, 2022

Amazon’s The Rings of Power: The Middle-earth Matriarchy

In Tom Wolfe’s novel, “A Man in Full”, the main protagonist is the successful Atlanta entrepreneur Charlie Croker who seems to have everything but tranquility and satisfaction. His corporation is mired in crushing debt but he has all the trappings of material success, and a new, younger trophy wife. He divorced his first wife, Martha, after decades of marriage. She begins to resume her life without him by getting back in shape. She joins a gym and quickly realizes that women have changed, particularly in body type. Gone is the hour-glass figure and everywhere she notices the absence of hips among the female fitness fanatics. A female ideal has changed. She dubs these women “boys with breasts”.

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Harvey C. Mansfield, Harvard professor of political philosophy, wrote the book “Manliness” in 2006. In it, he distinguished between masculinity and manliness. Masculinity can, but not always, stray into beastly behavior (“toxic masculinity”). By contrast, manliness in the ancient Greek is synonymous with “courage” and therefore tied to virtue. A manly person – for women can also exhibit manliness – would protect the weak. Bluster, bullying, and abuse is not the stuff of manliness.

Manliness must be differentiated from the modern slang of “BDE”, or “big d*** energy”. At a recent campaign rally, Keri Lake (Arizona gubernatorial candidate) introduced Ron DeSantis using the earthy initials. People enamored of Trump use it. Manliness should not be confused with brutish bellicosity.

Why mention “boys with breasts” and manliness in connection with Amazon’s Rings of Power? Simple, if the masterminds of the series, J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, wanted to create a Middle-earth matriarchy, they could find no better device than to turn Galadriel into an Aragorn with breasts and refocus Tolkien’s tale on one of the three queens of Númenor, a total of three among the twenty-five rulers of the land in the legendarium. The women’s characters were crafted to portray Mansfield’s manliness but lack the charisma to inspire a drug addict into an opium den. And why the decision to exercise the creative arts to distort Tolkien’s story in this manner? I suspect that something more fundamental is afoot, like the politico-cultural prejudices of a narrow social claque that gave us Jane’s Revenge (pro-abortion terrorism) and cancel culture. They are the same crowd that ate up as gospel the wild smears against Brett Kavanaugh. The bias is everywhere in our institutions and now unsurprisingly could be corrupting this rendition of Tolkien’s Middle-earth in the second age.

Or, conversely, it could be just a terrible misreading of the public’s desires from the top of the cultural pyramid above the clouds. McKay and Payne may be doing it without awareness, mistakenly thinking that’s what the public wants.

Either way, we got an incoherent mess in this the first season. The creation of Mordor was so off-the-wall that it could have been the product of an all-night LSD-laced bull session. Tolkien’s Mordor was created by the evil super-spirit Melkor to be a land of volcanic activity. Payne/McKay make it a product of the mechanical operation of turning a sword hilt like a key and voilà we have volcanic eruptions, bursting aquifers, and pyroclastic flows. By the way, this pyroclastic flow doesn’t behave like a real pyroclastic flow. Amazingly, magically, the hurricane of super-heated deadly gasses and fine ash doesn’t kill everyone in its path. Galadriel, the queen of Numenor, and many others walk away as if they were only plastered with the dust from a shaken vacuum cleaner filter. A pyroclastic flow buried Pompeii in AD 70. Talk to anyone who fled the 1980 Mt. St. Helens eruption. Fantasy is riveting if it has some relationship to the real. This falls into the category of laughingstock.

The speeches of the matriarchy are not, shall we say, awe-inspiring. It’s not because they were made by women. They are just simply stale. Compare any of them to Margaret Thatcher’s refusal to bow to the pressure to compromise at the October 1980 conference of the British Conservative Party: “The Lady’s not for turning” (see below). Or, closer to home, Peter Jackson/Fran Walsh managed the stirring words for Aragorn at the Black Gate of Mordor in “The Return of the King” (see below), or Theoden’s rallying cry before the Rohirrim’s charge into the orc ranks in the Battle of Pelennor Fields (see below). They would steel the spine of anyone facing long odds. In comparison, the words of the Payne/McKay matriarchy are an insipid string of gibberish.

Then we have the disjunction of physical prowess and the natural female musculature and skeletal fragility of, say, the Aragorn with breasts, Galadriel. There’s a reason why actors as diverse as Christian Bale to Chris Pratt to Michael B. Jordan bulk up. It’s intuitive to match in some sense the physical action of a role with the appropriate appearance. While it’s a stretch at times, it’s an easier visual sell. But take Morfydd Clark’s Galadriel and her domineering physical antics alongside her frail muscle mass. These are muscles that would have difficulty crushing a grape, let alone wielding a heavy sword to take down the mighty men of Numenor. They’d be better casting a female MMA fighter for the role. At least the gap between the action and her appearance would be lessened. But better yet, reshape Galadriel’s character to fit Tolkien’s strengths for her.

Ludicrously beefing up the female roles was evident throughout, to the point of relegating the men to subsidiary positions in the story. The Payne/McKay men are weak, petulant, or stubbornly wrongheaded. All of a sudden, Tolkien’s mighty men of Numenor become . . . ? ? ? . . . . One is left to wonder how they became so pivotal and deserving of great respect in the later trilogy. Now, in the hands of Payne/McKay, the two sagas don’t relate in a basic sense. What we have with the Rings of Power is something that appears to be an artifact of the present moment of millennials who were raised on identity politics and cultural reparations, warping everything to fit the manias of the present. Some would say that this is a “woke” LOR and in many ways they would be right.

Even for the Harfoots (proto hobbits), while they have a male leader, it’s two teenage girls in the tribe who carry the action and wisdom of the group. They dictate the clan’s thread in the story. The males are limited to being sperm donors, objects of pity, and comic relief.

Women, women, girls, girls everywhere may be alright in another context, but it isn’t Tolkien. Galadriel was strong in character, and according to Tolkien sparred with the boys, and had special gifts. She is deserving of a prominent role in any production under the byline of Tolkien. But Aragorn, or even Legolas, she is not. Tolkien’s conception for her would parallel the English history of powerful monarchs like Elizabeth I. Elizabeth was wily and shrewd, but not known for her swordplay with the Earl of Essex. An adult Galadriel would use her feminine guile, wisdom, and special powers of foresight to command a situation. Watching this production left me with the idea that this is Tolkien as the women of The View would have him.

We are not viewing Tolkien’s legendarium. In the hands of Payne/McKay, it became another exercise in the modern fixation to turn women into boys with breasts. No wonder transgenderism has gone viral and men seem to be settling into the role that Hollywood has assigned for them – as they are seemingly dropping out of the workforce, marriage, and college in substantial numbers. Will I be watching any more of it? Maybe. I’d be interested in seeing how much further this thing descends into our modern cultural rabbit hole.

RogerG

October 1, 2022October 2, 2022

Democrats Are Revolutionaries, Not Politicians

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Today, the word “politician” is considered foul language in political discourse. Well, what about “revolutionary”? If you are repelled by politicians, what do you get when uncompromising ideological activists are swept into power? These people are defined by a radical vision to transform your life. We’ve seen this before, and it isn’t pretty. And the Democratic Party is in the grip of it. Biden lied in Philadelphia, September 1, for the threat isn’t coming from “MAGA Republicans”. He needs to look at himself and those running the show in his party.

2022 is starting to resemble 1793 in more ways than one. France, in a maelstrom of revolution since 1789, was divided between those who favored a constitutional monarchy in the mode of Britain, those who wanted to rip the Ancien Régime (Old Regime) of divine right and aristocracy, root and branch, out of the country, and a mushy middle that shifted between the two. It’s the beginning of our commonplace political jargon of right/center/left.

Jacobins on the Committee of Public Safety during the Reign of Terror

Today’s Democratic Party has evolved into 1793’s The Montagnard (The Mountain) of the legislative National Convention in Paris. The Left of the revolution clustered in the seats high up in the chamber and used the Jacobin Club to gather and plot. Quickly, they succeeded in gaining control of the Convention and set the country on the path to the Reign of Terror. The similarity between the Democratic Party of today and the Montagnards isn’t in the advocacy of a bloodbath but in their radical dream of a refashioned society. The people of our modern Left, like the protégés of Robespierre, aren’t content with tinkering and adjustments – no “politicians” need apply – but in radical transformations in everything from the definition of male and female to the meaning of infanticide. Traditional institutions are to be steamrolled and constitutional checks-and-balances obliterated. Make no mistake about it. They’re advocating a revolution.

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This is a political party, if given unitary control of our federal government, that would make our country unrecognizable. Rattle off their agenda: out goes the filibuster and in comes the rule of momentary majorities to rock the country between extremes; in comes court packing and a Supreme Court to rubber stamp the revolution; the Equality Act which would pit the federal government against Bible-based Christianity and anyone who would seek its guidance on matters of marriage, faith, morals, and family; the requisition and creation of huge sums of money to fund the revolution (Build Back Better), inflation be damned; a pseudo-ecotopia to destroy our way of life; say goodbye to a border; say hello to easy to vote and easy to cheat (For the People Act); the equity crusade to indoctrinate our kids and dole out rewards by race and other politically favored identities; the unleashing of crime under “restorative justice” and equity schemes; the passage of the “Women’s Health Protection Act” to green light all abortions up to birth and force conscientious objectors out of the medical profession; the single-minded pursuit of “gender affirming care” to practice chemical infertility and sex-change surgeries on our children — without parental consent; a general disarming of the public and demonization of the firearms industry; . . . . And this is what they’ve publicly announced.

How could a suburban soccer mom endorse this kind of thing? If truth be told, she probably doesn’t, but they hear something about the Dobbs decision ending all abortions and unknowingly end up voting for our modern Montagnards’ agenda. They don’t know any better because our mainstream, legacy media is complicit in hiding the agenda’s dark side.

Take for instance the Washington Post’s fact-checking guru, Glenn Kessler. He felt compelled to correct Marco Rubio’s legitimate contention that the Democrats’ “Women’s Health Protection Act” (WHPA) would authorize abortion up to birth. In truth, Kessler doesn’t correct Rubio. The woman’s “health” provision in the Act would encompass “all factors physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age” (Supreme Court in Doe v. Bolton) to sanction abortion throughout the pregnancy. Late-term abortion would be codified. Instead, the WaPo’s intrepid reporter tried to undercut Rubio’s statement by mentioning something that Rubio never said. Kessler goes on a tangent about the rarity of such abortions. That’s not Rubio’s point! The Act grants carte blanche to any “health care provider”, whether it be a midwife, nurse, or doctor, to approve the ending of the life of a fully formed baby if they judge it to be a threat to the broadly defined “health” of the mother. The number of such abortions is irrelevant. The WHPA sanctions an act that should shock the conscience of any normal human being.

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But when you’re in a fevered pitch for revolution, “normal” is an enemy to the desired ends. Revolutionaries don’t want normal. The Montagnard of the Democratic Party want a radical change in everything about us: our self-perception, social and economic arrangements, and political institutions. This is a thoroughgoing revolution, totalitarian in scope. This is what is on the November ballot. Punching a ballot next to a Democrat candidate is an endorsement of much more than the person.

“Be careful what you wish for, lest it come true.” Whoever first coined the quip was onto something.

RogerG

Read more here:

* “The GOP claim that Democrats support abortion ‘up to moment of birth’”, Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post, Sept. 22, 2022, at https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/22/gop-claim-that-democrats-support-abortion-up-moment-birth/ .

* “Questions for Glenn Kessler on Late-Term Abortion”, John McCormack, National Reivew, Sept, 22, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/09/questions-for-glenn-kessler-on-late-term-abortion/ .

* “If the Dems Win It All”, John McCormack, National Review, Sept. 15, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/10/03/if-the-dems-win-it-all/