While ruminating on the latest thought-fad emanating from the Left, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), I was reminded of the tendency of people to hide their real intentions behind a flurry of academic jargon. Thus, the convoluted and incoherent MMT. Economists – left, right and center – have dubbed it “Calvinball” (Paul Krugman), “not ready for primetime” (Scott Summer), “sounded like lunacy” (Michael Strain), and “a political [not economic] manifesto” (report for France’s central bank). Frankly, MMT boils down to this: if the government wants to do something, go ahead and print the money and do it. No problem, the MMT priesthood would sing in chorus. Everything will be hunky-dory.
But what are they really after? Pure and simple, they want a humongous government with the power to tax, regulate, and spend at will; no restraints; socialism. MMT is just another tangled oratorical path to get there. Please, fans of socialism, cut the crap.
The same mental gymnastics are at work on the right. Events in Ukraine have exposed a segment of the right’s own rhetorical curtain. Tucker Carlson babbles on about “just asking questions”, “neocons”, “Ukrainian corruption”, “World War III”, “Americans dying”, and “America first”. Laura Ingraham joins the chorus. What are they really after?
The normally sensible Mollie Hemingway also seems to practice this form of mental subterfuge when talking about Ukraine. In a recent interview on the Hugh Hewitt show, she incessantly rambled about “knowing the risks” of US support for Ukraine, as if the thought was original to her; nobody but her is aware of it. But everybody intuitively does it when doing simple things like deciding to go to an ATM in crime-ridden LA under DA Gascon or proposing to prick the nose of the CCP with tariffs (they’ve got nukes too).
What’s up? Two motivations lie buried in the verbiage: they are paralyzed in fear of Russia and have a hankering for a “fortress America” national defense strategy. Goatherders with boxcutters (9/11) proved the latter to be foolish. On the former, I fail to understand the gripping dread of Putin’s nukes over, say, those of Chairman Xi. Tucker, Laura, and Mollie are gung-ho in respect to China and have said so ad nauseam, but can’t bring themselves to support actions to forestall a mauling by a power wishing to resuscitate the Soviet empire on a continent historically beset by world-shattering aggressors. Speaking of spent blood and treasure to put thugs back in the box, recall WWI and WWII?
Hardly does an episode go by without two straw-man choices to bolster the cognitive inanity. Tucker presents the choices as either staying out, completely out, or body bags/nuked American cities. What happened to simply arming our friends? Putin and Xi do it regularly, and American soldiers have paid the price in such disparate places as Syria, Fellujah, and the Hindu-Kush. The Tucker-to-Laura axis’s response would be “no more forever-wars” or run and hide after, as Mollie would have it, tortuously “assessing the risks”.
The thinking boggles the mind. They are quick to “assess the risks” of a bungled Afghan bugout but have no desire to “assess the risks” of a bludgeoned Ukraine, and possible defeat, as we sit idly by, safe in our “fortress America”.
Which brings to mind another hidden motive: pure cult-of-personality politics. Trump-love could be clouding their eyesight and mind. Biden, who defeated their master, did the Afghan bugout and is at the helm when Putin unleashed his doddering Wehrmacht on the Ukraine. They’re quick to blame Biden’s Afghanistan-appeasement for Putin’s invasion – and they’d be right – while at the same time they hawk appeasement in regards to Ukraine. Putin saw Kabul airport and Xi is watching Ukraine. A failure to stop Putin at the borders of the Ukraine could lead to a failure to stop Xi at the shores of Taiwan. If so, we’ll be really forced into “fortress America”. A self-fulfilled prophecy anyone, one not likely to be satisfying to most Americans?
I wish that they’d get their appeasement angles straight before they blather to us.
The modern punditry class is a disgrace. Previously, most of the sensible among us had no recourse in legacy media. The networks, CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WaPo, AP are mostly lefty propaganda organs. Now, it turns out, the primetime lineup on Fox News can’t be trusted. All of them prove that human fallibility is evident everywhere and academic degrees, party registration, ideology, race, gender, age, and telegenic qualities accord no fix. Fact.
Really, Tucker, Laura, and Mollie, tell us what actually lurks behind your wordiness. If it’s abject fear of Putin, say it. If it’s a sincere belief in the veracity of Russian propaganda, say it. If it’s a derivative of knee-jerk Trump-love, say it. If it’s an undying faith in oceans as our best defense, say it. If it’s a secret admiration of Putin as a fellow nationalist-populist, say it. If it’s the fright of “forever wars” trumping all other thoughts, say it. And, by all means, cut the crap.
My previous post (see below) contained my explanation for the devolution of the cinematic musical. The same commentary could apply to Hollywood in general. Another DC/Marvel regurgitation, rich in CGI visuals and not much else, is today’s theatrical high point. Sad.
To get a sense of the sublime that Hollywood was capable of producing, watch this scene from “My Fair Lady” of Audrey Hepburn and cast performing “I Could Have Danced All Night” (Hepburn’s voice is dubbed, but nonetheless….).
Once again, if you can, run it through a set of speakers.
Is our culture exhausted? I’m of two minds, but there are signs of fatigue, if not decline. Last night, I finished watching “My Fair Lady” on Netflix in HD and through my stereo system, as close as I can get to a theater experience for a film from 1964. It was magnificent and got me to wondering why we seem incapable of producing such cinematic grandeur today.
Not that there haven’t been attempts, but for me, they don’t measure up. Sorry, “La La Land” and “Chicago”, the two most recent endeavors to capture the magic, are poor knock-offs. The material elements are present in the physical choreography and vocalizations, and, yet, the whole package appears as a cheap imitation.
One factor for the debasement might have something to do with Hollywood’s zeal to be edgy. By edgy, I mean norm-busting: the unrelenting pressure to be a challenge to what used to be considered wholesome. It’s oft-putting and takes away from the synergistic combination of artistry, craftsmanship, and cinematography.
The zenith of the musical probably was the 1950s-60s. After that, it’s all downhill to the CGI/rapid-imagery, stale scripts, and unremarkable and uninspiring music of today. It’s so bad that the downfall of the musical coincides with the downfall of the Oscars. Who cares, except for the old stuff?
Please watch this performance of the wonderful song “On the Street Where You Live” from “My Fair Lady”. If you can, run it through a set of good speakers. Nothing from Hollywood’s current repertoire compares.
2/24/22 UPDATE: It has begun. Russia has initiated a full-scale assault on Ukraine from the east, south, and north. The following is my synopsis of the contributions of two Fox News celebrities to the broad sense of confusion and myopia in America regarding Russia and the Ukraine.
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If you haven’t noticed, Putin is at it again, and our hapless president is bewildered and stumbling toward appeasement, or maybe just plain impotence. Now, here’s the kicker: some on the right are also ambivalent and would be, quite honestly, content with the results of Biden’s passivity. Fox News’s Neville Carlson (alias Tucker Chamberlain) is exhibit #1. He’s Fox News’s #1 offering and it shows. If you turn at least a casual ear to talk radio you’ll hear the occasional caller spout the latest lines, almost word for word, from Carlson about “neocons”, Ukrainian corruption, our undefended southern border vetoing any efforts to assist our allies, Carlson’s adaptation of Code Pink’s “no blood for oil” chant, and other reformulations of old rhetorical handles.
Sadly, he’s not alone on my side of the political ledger, the right. On Tuesday (2/22/22), he was joined by Laura Ingraham in a tag-team revitalization of Lindbergh’s America First Committee, which by the way in its initial form died over the burning hulks of the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. If you’re interested, here’s a good dose of Tucker-thought on Russia-Ukraine. It’s entertaining but incoherent bombast.
Carlson repeatedly asks, “. . . how does intervening in Ukraine help the core interests of the United States?” Honestly, substitute Ukraine for any number of different countries and you’ll probably get any number of answers to his query. And prevalent answers would be different depending on the era. One answer would prevail in a time when long-distance travel was a death-defying journey, and before the harnessing of electricity and artificial power and Adam Smith’s depiction of the glories of free trade. George Washington could understandably advise the young nation “to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world.” But two-month delivery times for a letter across the Atlantic is an alien experience for today. Things move quickly – sometimes instantaneously – and their impacts travel at the same speed. Missiles, hijacked airliners turned into missiles, cyber-attacks, blue-water navies, strategic bombers, and international supply chains make the point.
Let’s ask Tucker’s question in 1931 before Japan’s invasion of China; instead of the Donbas, it’s Manchuria. Oh, what about Mussolini’s 1935 “minor incursion” into Ethiopia? Lest I forget, we could level the question at the “little corporal’s” swallowing up of Czechoslovakia, and furthermore Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. That takes up the Axis connection to Tuckers’ question. 405,000 US deaths later (75-80 million worldwide), we had peace that didn’t last long. And then we’re back to mankind’s annoyingly familiar flawed nature.
Moving forward in time, what core interest did we have in Korea? Or, for that matter, West Berlin? Cuba? Nicaragua? Grenada? Kuwait? The profusion of instances answers the question. It’s an interrelated world of multifaceted interests and impacts. A leading statesman has to pick and choose, not ignore and hide.
To remind you of what a statesman sounds like, President Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech of 1983 provides an educational contrast. Tucker no doubt would refer to him as a “neocon”.
Regarding Ukraine, is it in America’s interest to stand pat as the Soviet Union is revived? Ukraine is the vital piece in Putin’s reconstruction project. It was the breadbasket for the empire yet also distinct, so much so that Russification, the policy of transplanting millions of Russians in the country, was active for a couple of centuries or more. For Russia, if they can’t make Ukrainians Russian, they’ll make Ukraine Russian. First-language Russian speakers (14% of the population) are a product of this ethnic imperialism. They’re also the leverage for Putin to use tanks to complete the task that was interrupted by the USSR’s implosion.
The CCP is taking a page out of this dog-eared book by injecting Han Chinese into Xinjiang.
You’ll notice that I didn’t mention Vietnam in the litany of US interventions. It’s a sore spot, or embarrassment, for most Americans since we are said to have lost. But losing was a choice, not inevitable. Many decisions were made to draw out the war, allow North Vietnam to stay in the fight, and prohibit US assistance to Saigon by Congressional order at the moment Hanoi’s tanks headed south. We saw similar choices throughout the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama yanked US forces out of Iraq and we got ISIS. Biden yanked them out Afghanistan and we got Kabul airport and a descent into the 7th century and more terrorist sanctuaries. Choices, horrible choices, and not the only ones available.
ISIS mass executions in Syria, 2014.
Each time that we choose a new defeat, we’ll go through a period of national PTSD. It’s no different post-Iraq War (W’s edition) and Afghanistan. This time, it’s more than a revival of a McGovernite wing in the donkey party. The right has correspondingly rediscovered its inner-Robert Taft/Charles Lindbergh. Tucker and Ingraham speak in the manner of Lindbergh’s isolationism and Taft’s fear of internationalism. Lindbergh combined a retreat to fortress America and an extreme naivete about the character of the Reich Chancellery. Taft bristled at anything that smacked of a loss of US sovereignty, real or imagined. He found NATO troubling.
Ohio Senator Robert Taft speaks at Arlington National Cemetery in 1939. (Library of Congress)
Still, a catalyst was necessary to provoke a 180-degree turn for the mediagenic stars of Fox News who were past boosters of the War of Terror. To be fair, I’m not aware of Tucker’s stance at the time of Bush’s invasion of Iraq but we have Laura’s confession. She got a whiff of populism, Trump style, and was intoxicated. Trump had no statesmanlike competence to exhibit on the debate stage in 2016 so he resorted to insults and boilerplate attacks on Jeb Bush that drew from the worst of the Bush-lied-people-died period of Democrat demagoguery. Everyone pre-invasion assumed Saddam had WMD, including the dictator himself, or so he said. Trump refashioned the canard in the language of illicit “forever wars” as a campaign slogan and cudgel against Jeb Bush and his new bogeyman of “the establishment” (synonymous with anyone in opposition to Trump). It’s a familiar feature in the Trump Brigades’ talking points.
And the slogans thrived, going so far as to mutilate any original meaning. RHINO morphed from liberal Republican to anyone opposing Trump. Neocon changed from the architects of Reagan’s foreign policy to, again, anyone antagonistic to Trump. “Forever wars” came out of Trump’s mouth as easily as it did any Democrat sealing the doom of South Vietnam. A person’s stance on Trump became the arbiter of meaning in our political lingua franca.
From the time of Trump’s ascension, Trump and the Fox News primetime lineup trundled in unison into a fixation on getting out, and staying out. Trump, with Ingraham and Carlson in tow, tried a pullout in Iraq but he’s got an ISIS problem. The complication of ISIS extended into Syria so he’ll have to eradicate these blood-thirsty savages even as he tries to abandon the Kurds to Erdogan’s new Ottoman Empire. Trump detours and his fits and starts abound. Assad gasses his own people and Trump orders missile attacks. It’s a messy world, but he’s determined to get out of Afghanistan with nothing but cheerleading from Tucker and Laura.
Trump’s Doha Agreement (signed Feb. 29, 2020) was minted in the same manner as the previous negotiated sellouts: the victims were absent from the room. Chamberlain/Daladier cut a deal with Hitler on Czechoslovakia that excluded the Czechs. Nixon/Kissinger reached agreement with the North Vietnamese with only a perfunctory role for the South. The Kabul government was at most a wall flower to Pompeo and the Taliban. The kink in the grand diplomatic design was that Trump wouldn’t be around to see it through. Biden was elected and, true to form, he flubbed the flight out of the country.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met with Head of Taliban’s Political office in Qatar Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar on the sidelines of the opening ceremony of the Afghanistan Peace Negotiations in Doha, 2020.
Remember that Trump and Biden were united in their enthusiasm for getting out and not in the least worried about its return to terrorist sanctuary and the loss of a strategic asset.
Now it’s Ukraine’s turn. The same “forever wars” vitriol that our Fox News celebrities and Trump retroactively aimed at W and his people would be directed at anyone wanting to stop Putin. Epithets are summoned to smear the object of our sympathies. Ukraine is vilified as corrupt and not a democracy. Well, yes, Ukraine is corrupt, like the rest of the old USSR post-breakup, but is it more corrupt than, say, our politicians who enter office middle class but leave oligarch-rich? Pelosi, can we examine your account books?
Tucker is fond of saying that the country is an affront to democracy because it banned political parties and jails the opposition. He’s only half right. The other half is the existence of the country under the pall of Russian domination. After the fall of the Soviet empire, “Russian interference” was a recurring feature of the Ukrainian political scene; and before it, Stalin’s Holodomor (1932-3) was as much genocide as it was a byproduct of central planning. Ukrainian elections were continually beset by massive Russian intrusions. Ukraine’s Orange Revolution (2004) was a popular uprising to throw out a Putin puppet in the presidency. It was followed in 2013 by the Euromaidan protests to force a realignment away from Russia and toward the West. All throughout, Putin’s operatives were active with money and guidance to contort elections. Russia’s $40,000 in Facebook ads in 2016 in our country pale in significance. The country has been in a near continuous struggle to be independent of Russia. Life under nonstop foreign pressure isn’t healthy for the fragile elements of democracy.
Combatants walk in a procession as they attend the memorial service and the funeral of Aleksey Mozgovoi, a militant leader of the separatist self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic, and his subordinates in the town of Alchevsk in Luhansk region, Ukraine, May 27, 2015. (Photo: Reuters)
Anyway, Ukraine isn’t in the same league with Putin’s Russia when it comes to sheer political ghoulishness. Enterprising but critical journalists disappear at an amazing clip. Anna Politkovskaya (2006) and Natalia Estemirova (2009) are two of many of Putin’s victims. The list of the murdered for being so impetuous as to stand athwart Putin is so long that the Russian human rights group Memorial (now illegal) maintains a catalogue called “Last Address”. Political homicides aren’t limited to Russia as the spate of overseas poisonings illustrates. Exile is no refuge from the guy.
Do you think Carlson is cognizant of these realities? It’s hard to say. I certainly don’t hear any pushback on the torrent of claims coming out of the Kremlin. Putin believes that the Ukraine is an illegitimate country. Does Carlson? It has more legitimacy than Russia’s claim on it. Russia’s control over most if it didn’t happen till Peter the Great in the 18th century. Prior to that, the nation shape shifted under the control of the Duchy of Lithuania, Poland, Austria-Hungary, and the Golden Horde (Tartars), Russia arriving on the scene later. If not for Russia, the country might have joined the family of eastern European nations much earlier.
Laura’s stance was obvious when she became euphoric from the fumes of Trump’s populism. Right now, another scent is in the air. It is the whiff of 1938 Czechoslovakia and later Poland. Both were creatures of the Versailles Treaty and thusly held in ill-repute by an ascending German leader in much the same manner as Putin holds Ukraine. The two eastern European countries were just stepping stones on the way to lebensraum. In like manner, the Ukraine is an important cog on the path to reassembling the USSR, or Russian Empire, or whatever label you wish to apply to Putin’s Slavic lebensraum. Laura, is lebensraum an appropriate tool for satisfying territorial appetites?
Seriously, are a country’s borders to be decided by the ambitions of dictators? If so, say goodbye to Taiwan and South Korea. Welcome to the Palestinian Caliphate, a gift of Iran’s mullahs. So, what’s our interest in the Ukraine? It’s to prevent the resuscitation of imperial ambitions in a region critical to our well-being, Europe. If we stood up to this thug, we might have more going for us in confronting Xi than a pell-mell run for the hills in Afghanistan and the Ukraine scalp for Putin.
The next shoe to drop: Taiwan. Partially, America’s fatigue in the Middle East gave us Trump, who gave us Doha. America’s fatigue with Trump gave us Biden which led to the Afghanistan bugout, and much else that plagues us. It didn’t take Putin long (5 months) to initiate the largest land invasion in Europe since World War II. Xi’s been watching, and has a checklist with Hong Kong marked and followed by the Senkaku Islands, the South China Sea, Taiwan, and worldwide hegemony. Debacles unleash tyrants, and so will a retreat into fortress America and a handwringing paralysis every time there’s talk of a venture beyond our shores.
This (above) caught my ear. Hugh Hewitt’s conversation with Scott Lehigh, Boston Globe columnist, brought to light the habits of mind that help define what it means to live in a blue bubble. The bubble exists as an insular group of like-minded individuals in metropolitan centers – the “chattering classes” in the words of Auberon Waugh – who rarely have exposure to anyone outside their tightly-knit claque of people with the same mutually reinforcing opinions. It leans left and exudes arrogance, and tries to act as gatekeeper of “truth”.
Hugh Hewitt on his radio show, The Hugh Hewitt ShowScott Lehigh of the Boston Globe
Hewitt initiated the interview because he was rankled by Lehigh’s mischaracterization of a previous Hewitt statement about the January 6 Committee and invited Lehigh to explain. The interchange about the particulars of January 6 mattered less than Lehigh’s mode of thinking. The lack of detail and rigorous thought was clearly evident, probably a product of exclusive interaction with those of a similar mind. A person can get away with generalities and shallow thinking in this environment of no pushback. As such, the muscles of mental agility atrophy. It showed in the interview.
For example, Lehigh had trouble grasping the legal principle of due process, probably because he hadn’t confronted it in his social circle. Hewitt tried to pry out of him some recognition of the necessity of the idea in government procedures, but Lehigh was having none of it.
He kept falling back on what amounts to ends-justify-means. The simple idea that the congressional minority should have effective representation on a House committee escaped him. He even refused to accept the truth of the one-sided nature of Pelosi’s January 6 Committee and kept falling back on the vileness of Trump. In his mind, and probably in the mind of everyone around him, the ends of getting Trump justified trampling the rights of the other side in public proceedings. Hugh’s parallel of mutual representation for plaintiff and defendant in court proceedings was ignored by Lehigh without any explanation.
Similarly, the concept of legitimacy blew over his head. Legitimacy is a product of due process and has much to do with broad public acceptance of any findings. Violate the widely-accepted basics of fair play (due process) and watch rejection and turmoil intensify. Whatever “facts” are uncovered will be quickly dismissed. The possibility escaped Lehigh.
It was clear that Lehigh wasn’t prepared when he wrote his column and when he faced Hewitt. Running the column past someone who disagrees would work wonders, if such a person could be found in his regular circle of friends and acquaintances. My guess is that there are none.
Listen for yourself. The episode can be found here.
Ticker Carlson in early December when he raised the possibility of supporting Russia in its threats against the Ukraine.
Last night (1/20/22), I exploded – not literally, but emotionally. Tucker Carlson performed his now-familiar jeremiad against US overseas intervention. This time, it’s about US support for Ukraine. This guy appears to be so scarred by our recent “forever wars” that he can’t bring himself to ardently oppose naked aggression of the kind that has been abundantly on display throughout history with all their horrifying consequences. Carlson reminds me of Édouard Daladier of France and Neville Chamberlain of the United Kingdom, eager to avoid the bloodbath of World War I, hopping planes to Munich to sell out Czechoslovakia in 1938. Just replace Ukraine for Czechoslovakia.
British statesman and prime minister Neville Chamberlain (1869 – 1940) at Heston Airport on his return from Munich after meeting with Hitler, making his ‘peace in our time’ address. (photo: Central Press)
An accurate film about this disgraceful page in history appeared in 1988, “Munich: A Peace of Paper”. If you watch carefully, the parallels with events on Ukraine’s border are eye-opening. Please watch it if you have an hour to spare. It’s well worth it.
In the lead up to the invasion, Hitler infiltrated the German-speaking Czech population with his sponsorship of the Sudeten German Party (Sudetendeutsche Partei, SdP) and subsidized paramilitary and militia groups in the country. Hitler massed troops and conducted military exercises to raise tensions to incite an excuse to invade. Sound familiar, familiar to Putin’s activities along Russia’s border with Ukraine?
Daladier and Chamberlain traveled in a panic to Munich to cut a deal to desperately avoid war. They delayed war by sacrificing Czech territory to Germany, the part of Czechoslovakia with the best natural defenses against a German invasion, the so-called Sudetenland. Within seven months, Hitler took the rest of the country. Disgraceful.
From left to right: Neville Chamberlain, Daladier, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Galeazzo Ciano before signing the Munich Agreement. (Wikimedia Commons)
All of it was a prelude to the Nazi-Soviet pact and the invasion of Poland and the onset of WWII with its 60-85 million dead. Of course, our predecessors could have continued to evade war by following the Tucker Doctrine of “Why should Americans shed their blood for a group of German-speaking Czechs?” The US did and stayed on the sidelines till a much larger sacrifice was required.
The fact is, no one is calling for the introduction of the 101st Airborne into the Ukraine. Carlson’s predicate of Americans dying for the Ukraine is a straw man. The airlift of military supplies to the Ukraine doesn’t mean the US is at war with Russia. It means that we are doing what Putin and the CCP do regularly: support their foreign allies. We would be simply empowering Ukrainians to make Russians die for their country, all without US troops.
Hitler made a career of portraying Germany as a victim of Versailles and was surrounded by the “predatory” Allies. Carlson parrots Putin’s identical complaints about NATO. The Allies came together before the World Wars for the same reason that Poland, the Baltic States, and Ukraine are seeking the protective umbrella of NATO. For the former, it was fear of an aggressive and expansionistic Germany. For the latter, they have an understandable fear of the Kremlin seeking to reassemble the Soviet Empire. Their history is littered with Russian invasions, conquests, and depredations.
Russian tanks, artillery, armoured vehicles and trucks situated on the border with Ukraine at Valuyki, Belgorod Oblast. (Pictures: Google Earth)Russian tanks massed on the border with Ukraine in March 2020.The Russian paramilitary group known as the Wolves’ Hundred – “the little green men” – with their commander Evgeny Ponomaryov in the foreground, block the road near the checkpoint not far from Slavyansk, in eastern Ukraine, April 20, 2014 (photo: Maxim Dondyuk)
How calloused and duplicitous can a person be to exclaim, as Carlson did in an earlier broadcast, “Why don’t we take Russia’s side?” Indeed, why didn’t we take the Axis side? Either a moral obtuseness or outright ignorance is at work in the minds of some of our celebrities in front of a camera.
In 2021, Carlson was gung-ho about getting out of Afghanistan. We did and gave up a strategic outpost on the flank of our chief adversary, the CCP. Now, we’re worried about Red Chinese nuclear-tipped hyper-sonics and East Asia as a CCP empire. In 2019, Carlson favored a double-crossing of our Kurdish allies to the Turks who are equally enthralled by a return to Ottoman greatness. There doesn’t appear to be a US intervention that he won’t oppose. The parallels with history are too obvious to ignore.
Yet, he does. Wait for it: you’ll hear talk-radio callers parrot the line almost word-for-word. A significant segment of the right will fall for the nonsense. If Carlson has his way, Reagan’s famous dictum, “Trust but verify”, will be shoved to the side for “Get out and stay out”. This won’t end well.
The “woke” on an American college campus.Chinese students inspired by Mao for a Cultural Revolution.
Mao Zedong wrote the playbook that he cast as a Cultural Revolution: animate the young, unleash them on the seasoned and fortunate, and coopt many institutions to make the offensive appear as an irresistible force. Then watch the carnage, but refashion it as the necessary cleansing of the corruptions from the social body.
Sound familiar? If not, it should. Quiet and not so quiet censorship abounds in today’s USA in the imposition of neo-Marxist critical theory on the young in their schools, cancellation of talks and lectures under threat of youthful mobs and their adult abettors, acts of public shaming and ritual self-abasement of the recalcitrant, and media channels populated with the mob’s zealots enforcing their own bans on thought. Alan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind in 1987 warned of higher ed’s ubiquitous indoctrination that is the enemy of free inquiry. It has only gotten worse since his time. Alas, it has come to pass on our streets, campuses, in school curricula, and in the corporate boardroom and lunchroom.
Allan Bloom of the University of Chicago, etc.
We let it happen through a blind deference to the gatekeepers of degrees and our broad acceptance, in essence, of the schools as glorified babysitters. We thought that all would be well if we turned over our kids to the clutches of indoctrinated and self-interested public employees, and our young reached early adulthood with a BA, any BA. Well, no, all is not well. The paper certificates didn’t produce an informed and wise citizenry and many of our private and public institutions have become the vanguard, the enforcers, of this revolution of the closed-minded.
Examples abound. Google banned money-making on its YouTube platform if it isn’t in accord with the “scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change”. That’s right, you can only enrich your bank account if you peddle the “consensus”, no matter its dubiousness. The “consensus” is a euphemism for a departure from the scientific method and into a coerced orthodoxy. It’s an announcement from on high that such and such is proper thought, something familiar to anyone brought before Stalin’s show trials, employed in Orwell’s Ministries of Truth and Love, or the papal Inquisition of the Renaissance. Amazing, progressives – by definition a group who loudly proclaims the past is dead – look to the past for their inspiration.
Who can forget AG Garland’s new role as thought policeman extraordinaire? A political constituency – namely, the insular and comfy special interests who’ve long dominated your child’s school – feels imperiled and our AG rides to the rescue by promising to chill the rancor and speech at school board meetings with FBI investigations. No one need be arrested to send angry parents home to anxiously await the dreaded late-night knock at the door. Censorship achieved by a threat, Fidel style.
Then there’s this little tidbit. The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH, or more accurately “warpath”) protested Abigail Shrier’s interview of a clinical psychologist and vaginoplasty surgeon who question the use of puberty blockers in children in Common Sense with Bari Weiss. Such discussions according to “warpath” should be closeted in unread journals and not be exposed to a broader audience, lest we be made aware that there are many debatable contentions in transgenderism. The New York Times chimes in with its own silencing by not publishing these types of op-eds because they are “outside our coverage priorities right now”. This is how a “consensus” is built, in the dark of night.
Modern academia is a rich source of “consensus” building through censorship and thought control. Dorian Abbot of the University of Chicago, eminent professor of geophysical sciences, was invited to speak at MIT, then disinvited after protests by the Red Guards of critical theory because he criticized the new racialism and favored “Merit, Fairness, and Equality”. Unsurprisingly, the school relented to the mob. Professor Robert P. George of Princeton got wind of the fracas at MIT and extended an invitation to Abbot. The talk was held at Princeton on the same day. Thank God that the spirit of inquiry and debate still flickers in some little precincts of the lands of ivy-covered halls.
More from the college funhouse. Bright Shen of the University of Michigan, a man who lived through Mao’s original Cultural Revolution, faced our own Red Guards of denunciation when he showed Shakespeare’s Othello, Laurence Olivier starring in blackface. The hyper-politicized sensitivities of the childish goons shrieked, Shen experienced the ritual self-abasement, and he no longer teaches his music course turning Othello into an opera.
This kind of thing can only survive in the darkness of obscurity. Sunshine, after all, is a disinfectant.
Mao, sadly, is an inspiration for far too many of the young. It’s more proof that we’ve failed to transmit our civilization’s legacy to our children. We have willingly, or unwillingly, mostly by ignorance, let the minds of our children get away from us. We are reaping the consequences of the many little Maos in our midst.
Jessie Smollett (l) with Robin Roberts of ABC News on GMA in February of 2019.
After Jussie Smollett’s arrest and her on-air interview with him, Robin Roberts said, “It’s [his arest] a setback for race relations, homophobia, MAGA supporters – the fingers were pointed at them [MAGA supporters].” She added, “I cannot think of another case where there’s this anger on so many sides, and you can understand why there would be.”
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Some like to say racism is systemic. Well, so can fallacies. In fact, today, systemic falsehoods are far more real and far more dangerous than any mythical resurgence of the Klan.
Three stories tell the tale of systemic falsehoods: two in America and one in Germany, all in the 20th and 21st centuries.
The first, chronologically, occurred in October 1938 after the Nazi government ordered its initial expulsion of German Jews. One of those was the Grynszpan family who had a son living in Paris with an uncle, 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan. A week later, Herschel walked into the German embassy in Paris and shot to death German diplomat Ernst vom Rath. After it, the virulent Jew-hatred of the Nazi Party would take to the streets throughout Germany in the organized assaults on Jews on 9-10 November called Kristallnacht, thus inaugurating the Holocaust. An excuse presented itself to implement a key part of the National Socialist revolutionary program and thought. Their revolutionary racism was solely based on a systemic falsehood, and millions would end up dead.
Henry Grynszpan (l) and Ernst vom Rath
The second happened in America in 1955. It was the lynching and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till by a white mob in Mississippi in August 1955. The scurrilous racism in the minds of some Southern whites of the tarring of all Blacks with a dollop of depravity is much more than a systemic racism. It’s a systemic falsehood.
Emmett Till
But a systemic racism in the Jim Crow South of 1955 would be matched later by a systemic falsehood for today’s revolutionaries in Antifa, Black Lives Matter, Inc., and the Democratic Party. Yes, they’re revolutionaries. For them, it’s forever Jim Crow in America, the better to overturn the “system” (revolution), not just reform it or even acknowledge the improvements. Germany’s National Socialists exploited one killing to carry out millions; today’s left-wing zealots do the same (with Michael Brown, George Floyd, whoever). Yet, facts on the ground don’t match their hype, but that won’t stop the torching of America’s cities nor the falsehood’s infiltration of the classroom, the donkey party, Congress, and the Biden administration.
The third incident is Jussie Smollett. He peddled the falsehood of an alleged assault by fictitious Maga supporters in 2018. A patently false story, now proven in court, would, in the ensuing years, help perpetuate the falsehood of ever-present systemic racism as if nothing has changed since 1955. For the disciples of this false catechism, our landscape was, is, and will be forever littered with Emmett Tills and Bull Connors. The fiction penetrated all channels of news and entertainment from the classroom to 30 Rock (NBC headquarters). Our cosseted cultural elites peddled the lie and “systemic racism” entered the lexicon as a fact, when it is no such thing – not any truer than the Big Lie was for the goons torching synagogues in 1938.
Jussie’s Smollett’s booking photograph after he turned himself into Chicago police on charges of filing a false police report.
Smollett got away with it for 3 years because our cultural avatars were predisposed to believe the lie due to the monotone influences in their cultural and educational bubbles. For a couple of years, they propagated Smollett’s lie until evidence of the hoax came to light and then they went silent. Smollett’s December 9 conviction on five counts of disorderly conduct for filing a false police report puts all those in the media who helped him peddle the lie in the dock alongside him. His desire to concoct the hoax and their desire to push it exposed a systemic gullibility stemming from a deeply embedded systemic falsehood: it’s forever Jim Crow in America. For this crowd, the nation is forever guilty.
Ideas have consequences, and so does this one. Crime is spiking all over America. Amazingly, some have contorted logic to blame the cops. In their muddled minds, police lack legitimacy in the eyes of the public and so crime is transformed into a form of protest. People perceive racist cops and feel justified in performing mayhem according to this flight of fancy.
It’s nonsense. Perception is key. Views about policing are too often guided by the media’s it-leads-if-it bleeds philosophy, only tailored to fit the popular systemic racism/racist cop scenario. No wonder Americans – left, right, and center – in various polls and studies (one by the Skeptic Research Center) have an exaggerated view of police shootings of unarmed black men, by a factor of 50.
What do you expect would happen after the public is fed a steady stream of the rare but viral videos of a shooting? Part of the blame lies with a media eager to validate their prejudices, and part is attributed to millions carrying in the palms of their hands a video camera. The public is armed with the things, social media spreads them at light speed, and media mavens cull them for the confirmation of their biases. Would we be a more balanced people without the things and the instantaneous social media hookups? Interesting question.
Smollett with the Obamas
All the while, branding cops as racist isn’t exactly a booster to recruitment and retention. Who wants to join a profession that might bankrupt you in lawsuits or land you in prison, and/or tar you as a uniformed mob looking for more Emmett Tills to kill? In a great skedaddle, cops are leaving and recruits are scant. There are fewer people to man the cruisers and telephones, walk the beat, and investigate crime. Nationwide, the Police Executive Research Forum in June reported midsized departments showing a 26% drop in hiring and large ones recording a 36% fall, some with a 50% drop in applicants. The total number of sworn officers dropped from 720,000 in 2013 to 690,000 in 2018, and the slide continues.
Retirements are up, way up. Deep blue bastions are particularly feeling the pinch. The Chicago force experienced a 30% retirement increase in 2020 (560) from the previous year. Portland, that lefty playground, saw 117 (and counting) officers leave since July of 2020. The men in NYC blue, under the radical Bill de Blasio, saw 2,600 officers vacate their positions. The story is the same across the country. Amputated budgets (“defund the police”) and a dispirited force don’t make for public safety.
A little-known truth: fewer cops mean more crime. There’s a stronger correlation between these two criteria than the more popular one in elite circles of the lack of respect for cops leading to an epidemic of murders, torchings, robberies, and beatings. Using 911 calls as the metric, studies show that high-profile police killings don’t affect the number of calls (studies by Harvard’s Michael Zoorob, Tanaya Devi, and Roland Fryer in 2020), the exact opposite of what you’d expect if there was a general disgust with cops. Not surprisingly, after all the budget cuts, lambastings by media hogs, force draw-downs and stand-downs, and a disheartened rank-and-file, mayhem has returned. Everyone not enthralled by stupidity has recognized since creation of the London police force in the 19th century that more cops mean safer streets.
So, we’ve come to this pass: Can we trust any longer an elite so enraptured to systemic falsehoods? In the end, we’ll have nowhere to turn. Remember, they’re the same people who want to take your guns. Now, they want to take your cops.
Glann Youngkin in his victory speech after being declared the winner of the Virginia gubernatorial race.
One of my most frequently used clips in one of my World War I lesson plans was from PBS’s first major documentary on World War I, “The Great War”. In it comes this narrated passage about Woodrow Wilson: “Above all else, Woodrow Wilson was a passionate champion of democracy.” He was not. Above all else, he was a champion of rule by credentialed technocrats, and wanted to revamped our political order to shift power to them; the Constitution be damned. Popular sovereignty comes in second to the trained “expert” in his mind. Now that’s the real progressivism in definition and spirit. Yet, today, he’s Saint Woodrow.
A similar misconception revolves around the hot-button critical race theory (CRT). Some dismiss its threat and existence in the schools. Take for instance this question from PBS’s Yamiche Alcindor at Wednesday’s Biden press conference: “What should Democrats possibly do differently to avoid similar losses in November, especially since Republicans are now successfully running on culture wars issues and false claims about critical race theory?” “False claims”? Later, in a follow-up question, she proclaimed they are lying about it. MSNBC’s Joy Reid used a segment on her program to profess it isn’t being taught. Fact is, it is being taught and has been for quite some time. The troop is lying, or they don’t know what it is.
Yamiche Alcindor
Such is the sorry state of public discourse at this time of stark division in our country. Anything requiring more then a few seconds to explain is reduced to rhetorical compression, making it easy for the facetious to sound reasonable to the gullible. CRT becomes a “ghost” and amazingly autocratic progressives become champions of democracy.
The issues rose to the surface in the weeks leading up to Virginia’s election. The uglier side of progressivism appeared in Terry McAuliffe’s famous debate quip, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” The comment may lack some context, but it can also stand on its own. For progressives like McAuliffe, everything in life is a matter of “science”. Science requires scientists, and scientists, including those pervasive “social” scientists, do it better, including the raising of your kids. So, parents, please go away. It’s progressivism in a nutshell.
McAuliffe in debate with Youngkin.
More directly, CRT was in Gov. McAuliffe’s own Department of Education 2015 directive for schools in the state to “embrace critical race theory” (original document can be seen here).
The thing that McAuliffe claims isn’t being taught, but is, was also a big part of Alcindor’s matriculation though New York University to her master’s degree in “broadcast news and documentary filmmaking”, like it is in any place with a faculty lounge. Maybe it was so foundational in its bits and pieces that she can’t identify it as a full-blown theory, as the same thing is being done to all those kids laboring behind masks and plexiglass in COVID classrooms.
In a classroom it appears as “equity” or “anti-racism” teacher training. Buzz words hide the reality. In a textbook, it shows as a greater emphasis on oppression in its varied forms and less on those white males and the glories of western civilization in such things as Christianity’s equality of souls, rule of law, natural rights, popular sovereignty, personal and economic freedom, etc., etc.
The elements of CRT, such as “equity”, are presented to teachers at training sessions such as this one.
Marx provided the paradigm. Feudalism can’t help oppressing the commoners. Capitalism can’t help oppressing the “wage slaves”. It’s in the system’s DNA. CRT takes the dialectic and places the oppressor-whites and oppressed “people of color” in the combative roles. Simple. After that, it’s all downhill to ascribing differences in socio-economic stats to, you guessed it, racism. And the whole hodgepodge will carry the aura of “science” since there’s a bunch of people with degrees after their name selling it.
Never mind the illogic of it all. When you’re on a roll to the revolution, don’t let out-of-wedlock births, higher levels of crime, and high dropout rates stand in the way of the revolutionary clamor. Just with a wave of the hand make these also part of the indictment instead of being the explanatory factors that they are. In the hands of the revolutionary, stats are like kneading dough.
Tuesday’s election exposed the flim-flam of the two abstractions. McAuliffe’s progressivism is inherently authoritarian and Alcindor’s CRT is warmed-over Marxism. I can only hope that the electorate in years to come can cut through the noise and reject the poison.
If you have 59 minutes to spare, please watch the attached video on Professor Victor Davis Hanson’s lecture before a gathering at Hillsdale College on September 8, 2021. In many ways, he captures the perils of our time. It’s a wakeup call.
One important takeaway was his dissection of the effort to remorselessly wreck America, its identity, history, institutions, founding principles, and spirit. Its a truly revolutionary endeavor, like all revolutions since at least the French Revolution.
These revolutions are top/down affairs. They are germinated by people from middle and upper backgrounds who have the wealth and time to be schooled, and therefore the luxury to conjure ruinous fantasies. They are the product of a radicalized and detached claque of demagogic public intellectuals who, once in power, recognize no restraint except the achievement of their extremist ends. They hide away in tenured faculty positions, in ngo’s, among the insulated hyper-rich and cultural elites. Before we knew it, it descended on us like a plague of locusts.
All of sudden, the prior terms of justice were replaced by revolutionary slogans like “equity”, a word made devoid of all meaning and recast to advance an assault on the foundation of the nation. Now, we’re really in for it.
