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Systemic Falsehoods

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.

RogerG

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Virginia, Progressivism, and CRT

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

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

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

Yamiche Alcindor

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

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

McAuliffe in debate with Youngkin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RogerG

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America’s Soul-Destroying Time

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

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

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

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

Please watch the video.

RogerG

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Neurotic Nation

Neurotic (adj.), neurosis (noun): mental, emotional, or physical reactions that are drastic and irrational. At its root, a neurotic behavior is an automatic, unconscious effort to manage deep anxiety. (From WebMD)

We (wife, son, sister-in-law, myself) were in a Denny’s in Grand Junction, Colorado, and I couldn’t help but notice the greater prevalence of mask-wearing in the state. Sitting across from me while waiting for our table were two gentlemen in masks, one double-masked. At our table, looking out the window, I watched a solitary woman on her morning walk wearing a mask . . . outdoors! The scene struck me as odd since few, if any, wear masks in Idaho and Montana. Passing through my home state of Montana and Idaho on our way to Grand Junction, even at major venues like Walmart, I could count on one hand the number of people wearing masks. Not so in blue-state Colorado, at least as evident in Grand Junction. Could blue-state/red-state socio-political dynamics account for the behavior? After all, politics is downstream of culture.

Watch this scene from North Hollywood, California.

By all accounts, left-coast culture has come to dominate Denver and Aspen which has come to dominate Colorado. Blue culture equals blue state.

We were in Grand Junction for a wedding. To be honest, nobody at the night-before social, nor at the wedding and reception, could give a rip about Fauci’s pronouncements, and all were thankfully unmasked. Anyway, it wasn’t a crowd receptive to the dictates of the federal authoritarians. Beyond the perimeter of the festivities, however, life seemed to be more corseted.

Red states seem to want to get back to normal, and “normal” doesn’t mean getting used to soul-destroying mandates for us and our kids. Blue states push for the “new normal”. They follow in lock-step with blue-media, which happen to be headquartered in blue states. CNN, the flagship of blue-media, on Sunday and Monday went on a rant about maskless crowds at football stadiums after the first weekend of college football in 2021 (see below).

*PS: As an aside, take a look at this reaction to Pres. Biden by some in various stadium crowds.

Bigtime college football – the major D1A schools are in red states – is a “red” sport. The values of most folks in red states don’t coincide with government acting like our forever-helicopter parents. Perhaps those of us in the red states have had it with the micro-controls. Maybe we’ve noticed that all the masking, vaccines orders, social distancing, euthanizing the restaurant industry, and school closures didn’t make a lick of difference. The bug did what bugs do: they evolve! So, we’re back to authoritarianism – or totalitarianism if you will.

It’s not that the vaccines didn’t work. It’s that the bug became something different, and the jabs become less relevant since the bug changed the ground rules by changing. Our wannabe nannies now have the excuse to slide back into their preferred habit of authoritarianism. What was once “bend the curve” turned into COVID-forever. We’re going onto two years of ginned-up hysteria, almost to the point of generating a permanent social neurosis, particularly in blue states.

The obvious answer would be to get back to a real normal, not a “new” one. You know, life like it was before China foisted the bug on the world. Open the schools, open the restaurants, open the downtowns, open the stadiums, get back to work and church, and rely on therapeutics. Take the vaccine if you wish, but, regardless, have plenty of therapies on hand to treat the vast, vast majority of the infected who will have a bad case of the flu. Each year’s flu season doesn’t shut down society. Why should this?

We are twisting ourselves into knots to avoid what is clear as a bell. We’re going to have to gut our way through it. To me, it’s been clear for quite some time that the straitjacketing has only delayed the spread of the virus, thus leaving it to erupt again, again, and again.

We have plenty of therapeutics, something unavailable in 1918. It won’t be Fauci who’ll lead us out of this. It will be nature, and our own therapies that’ll allow us to weather the storm. It increasingly looks like natural immunity will have a bigger role to play than the jabs.

It’s better to recognize the obvious reality than to hang onto Fauci’s and Walensky’s feelings-of-the-moment. They’re only succeeding at making hordes of neurotics, and making blue the color of statewide neurosis. Is that what they mean by a “new normal”?

RogerG

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Our Punditry Is Just as Bad as Our Ruling Class

CNN anchors with Brian Williams of MSNBC (l)
MSNBC anchors
Fox News anchors

Let me be clear, I’m not tarring everyone in our punditry and governing classes. Not everyone is this stone cold stupid. But much of the chatter is hooey, and the hooey is only getting worse.

First on the list of buffoons are the folks in legacy media and all those swirling in their social circles. You know, the people at CNN, MSNBC, the networks, and the big metro newspapers and magazines. They’re hooked on soiling themselves daily, and have for quite a few years. They are the PR department of the left-wing revolution.

Next, we’re confronted by the primetime lineup on Fox News who, along with certain elements in the Republican Party, have resuscitated the Charles Lindbergh wing of foreign policy. If you’ll recall, Lindbergh was the mouth of isolationism before the Fall of France and Pearl Harbor put the kibosh to the whole smear.

Charles Lindbergh speaking at America First Rally in 1941.

Tucker Carlson is an out-and-out isolationist. In a quip during one of his recent shows, he said, “Oceans matter”, or something to that effect. Yes, they do if you have to cross them. No, they aren’t if you want to kill Americans. Why do you think North Korea and Iran want ICBM’s? Why do you think the Russians and the CCP have them? Even if you can’t get your hands on one, box cutters at the throats of airline flight attendants and flight crews will suffice. Voilà, you’ve got a mammoth cruise missile that has the range of an ICBM. Bin-Laden showed the way. Oceans only become another geographic feature on the way to killing Americans.

If the fanatics are more interested in a hands-on approach to the mass killing of Americans – and since I don’t think Tucker is willing to drive the airlines, cruise lines, and shipping companies into the ether by cutting us off from the outside world – trying to keep out the goons at passport/visa checkpoints won’t guarantee anything. More overpaid TSA government workers aren’t reassuring. We’ve already experienced the government efficiency that resulted in flight training for foreign nationals not interested in landing.

A chilling final image of Mihdhar and fellow hijacker Majed Moqed, captured on a surveillance camera at Washington, D.C.’s Dulles Airport the morning of September 11th. (© 2009 WGBH Educational Foundation)

After Tucker, Sean Hannity jumps in with his program of Trump-love. Nearly everything Biden does – agreed, most of it is horrible – is condemned with the follow-up, “Trump wouldn’t have done that.” It’s not just that Biden is dreadfully wrong. He is! It’s that Trump is a god to Hannity. Biden bad, Trump good. It’s that simple to the man from New York City, and soon to be living in a Florida seaside estate maybe next to Trump.

Batting third is Laura Ingraham. She was once a Reaganite in foreign policy but now has enlisted in the Lindbergh brigade. In her on-air confessional, she’s on the Trump train to paint “forever war” on any foreign engagement that might get sticky.

All of this buffoonery came to light in the days since our screens were awash in the abominable scenes in Kabul. Yep, this disaster is 100% Biden’s. No doubt. He carried out a Buster Keaton pullout. But don’t forget, they all wanted a pullout: Biden, Trump, and the telegenic celebrities in primetime Fox News. The left was preconditioned to be a booster of the bugout from W’s Bush-lied-people-died wars. This is something for which there is kumbaya between Code Pink and the Lindbergh wing at Fox News.

Biden concocted a dastardly bugout. Trump and his Trumpkin brigades, aping Trump’s “forever wars” lingo, wanted a nicer bugout. Either way, the timetable and the smoothness of the bugout will end in the same place: mass-casualty events.

In the end, as we’ll soon learn, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are a revolving door. Regardless of Bush’s asinine and airy rhetoric about the universal aspirations of mankind and our efforts to export wokeness, we were in Afghanistan to kill terrorists, the kind that’ll cry “Allah Akbar” as they spray bullets in a night club.

Omar Mateen, the Orlando Pulse Nightclub killer.

The mission demands 10,000 troops on the ground, bases in-country and outside, roving special forces, Afghan allies, intelligence operations par excellence, and an Afghan government that won’t stand in the way. That indigenous government doesn’t have to be Switzerland, just functioning enough to stay out of the way.

Yes, kill ‘em before they get a ticket to the Iowa State Fair. That’s a real America First strategy.

If you’re worried about our sons and daughters in harm’s way, well, any place is in “harm’s way” if these fanatics get a haven to slaughter us. If we can tolerate 35,000 troops in Germany, we sure as hell can put up with 15,000 to kill those who would kill us, and have done so.

Taliban soldiers killed in a fire fight with US troops.

How’s that for speaking truth to power, media power?

RogerG

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The Private Eye in “The Creepy Line”

“Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing video displays, let me remind you that information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all.” — Sir Arthur C. Clarke and in the prologue of the documentary film, “The Creepy Line”

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I’m of a mixed mind on whether to post this. It’s about the whole gaggle of social media biggies and Google. They might flag it for “misinformation” and I’ll end up like Dennis Praeger or Jordan Peterson taking a timeout in the mass emptiness of internet cancellation.

Today’s film recommendation: “The Creepy Line” on Amazon Prime. The trailer is below. The title refers to the red line, once coined by Eric Schmidt of Google, that demarcates truly neutral internet platforms – like Facebook, Twitter, and Google profess to be – and censorship and manipulation of the mind. Have they crossed it? What’s happened post-2016 makes me wonder . . . a lot.

The film answers the question with a resounding “Yes”. The film proclaims that the internet giants engage in monstrous abuse of their legal immunity in Section 230c of the Communications Decency Act. Are they really “neutral” platforms or do they systematically engage in censorship and mind control through their algorithms, the biases of their staffs, and so-called policies? The film is a deep dive into Google and Facebook’s surveillance of our internet use for profit and, now, the direction of our preferences.

Their snooping, or surveillance, advances them far beyond the old Pinkerton Detective Agency, whose logo was the all-seeing eye, putting the “private” in private eye.

An even more troubling occurrence is the emerging alliance between their potential regulators, the federal government with its huge administrative state, and these tech monoliths. Press Secretary Jen Psaki let the cat out of the bag in a July 16 presser. She proclaimed, “… we work to engage with them to better understand the enforcement of social media platform policies [against “misinformation” about the vaccines] . . . . and of course promoting quality information algorithms”. Combine these comments with Mark Zuckerberg’s 2018 admission before Congress that Silicon Valley is an “extremely left-leaning place”. A deep bias at the service of the federal Leviathan should send shivers down the spine of any thoughtful person.

Many of us are so wedded to our devices that we blindly accept what Google, Facebook, and Twitter are flashing before our eyes. When their algorithms and interventions work both to reinforce a left-wing bias and obedience to the state, we have crossed over the red line and past the borders into Orwell’s Oceania.

RogerG

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Losing America

Last night, I was informed that the NFL will perform “Lift Every Voice and Sing”, the so-called black national anthem, before every game next year. The newest federal holiday is Juneteenth (June 19), officially dubbed the “Juneteenth National Independence Day” – close enough in the calendar to compete with July 4. With all the kneeling and disrespect to the flag and national anthem, statue toppling, and renaming of schools to shame the once-revered, we are substituting symbols of national unity and meaning with ethnic and racial anthems and independence days. We are heading to a frightful place.

Where did all this come from? It seemed to happen nearly overnight. There was no groundswell for it. All of a sudden, we’ve got players, coaches, and team owners kneeling at the national anthem. NBA players, living the lifestyle of King Midas (think Lebron James, Stephen Curry, et al), are lecturing the rest of us on our moral failings. MLB got into the act with both feet.

That’s just professional sports. The uber-rich are now linking arms with the uber-left. The Fortune 500 are routinely running shaming and indoctrination sessions for their employees. If you’re a Republican who’ll blast Trump – think Liz Chaney (R, Wy.) – your reelection coffers will be brimming with cash. Most commonly, the money spigot from the Sorors types will be turned wide open for lefties in local DA races to the top of the political food chain, Dem candidates for the presidency. Mediocrities like “Beto” O’Rourke can quickly become a player.

Big Money, Big Sports, Big Business, Big Media, Big Entertainment, and Big Government are lining up to shove down our throats an extremist ideology, one that only yesterday was relegated to the rantings of college snowflakes. America as we knew her is quickly disappearing, to be replaced by a gaggle of warring tribes.

Don’t blame the George Floyd incident for it. There’s no evidence that Chauvin was a racist; he’s just a bad cop, an equal-opportunity abuser. Blame the ubiquitous connectivity of the ever-present cell phone and its instant feed into the digestive tract of our cultural big-everythings.

But ultimately, the culpability lies with the ignorance, perfidy, status-groveling nature, and extreme social isolation of many of our cultural heavies, ensconced as they are in their gated villas and penthouses in swank, bi-coastal bastions. They’ve abandoned America, and now they are force-feeding the hot mess to the rest of us. Sad, oh so very sad.

RogerG

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Pure Poppycock

Befuddled American voter?

Politico-speak on the stump is a crock. Not always, but it happens often enough for many to avoid politician interviews like an evasive maneuver to escape an encounter with one of the many homeless madmen wondering the streets of downtown Los Angeles. Trump prattles on about the Chinese paying “paying billions and billions of dollars” in US tariffs, apparently not knowing, or not caring, that businesses don’t pay business taxes – of which tariffs are. We do! Biden and his Democratic Party coterie babble on about the “rich paying their fair share”. It’s all just stupendous nonsense. But, apparently, a block of the public eats it up.

No more accurate indictment of the current state of journalism, the schools, and media can be found than the popular currency of pure tripe. Since Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer currently possess the lion’s share of power, their balderdash takes center stage, because they now have the reins to foist it on us. Conversely, the job of the Republicans is to stand athwart history and say “Stop!”

So, what of this “fair share” blabbering? Simply put, it ain’t true. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) numbers don’t support the popular fiction of the rich escaping the taxman while the little guy and gal gets punched in the gut by the tax code. It’s class pandering reminiscent of the kind perpetrated by Marxists – or in its newest incarnation in the race-pandering of Kendi’s or Deangelo’s Systemic Racism.

Let’s take a look at the numbers. Fact: U.S. income taxes in terms of who pays what are the most progressive in the world (Thank you, Marian Tupy of the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity). I don’t see how they can be made more progressive without the targets turning over their entire income receipts to the U.S. Treasury. The top 1 percent of wage earners account for 40.1 percent of all federal income tax receipts in 2018, and this after Trump’s so-called “gift to the rich” in the Republican tax reform bill. The Tax Foundation found that the richest of the rich – the top 1 percent – paid a greater share (40.1) than the bottom 90 percent (25.4). Average paid tax rates tell a similar story. The Dems are engaging in the old gambit of the Big Lie, and it’s that simple.

Why do they lie? Well, they share with Marxists the same hate for the rich – and like Kendi and Deangelo of CRT fame grovel in a hate of “whiteness”. The hate is tied to the Marxist flimflammery of systemic class oppression. Marx called it Scientific Socialism in the same manner of all demagogues who seek to monopolize the word “science” to magically turn their dictums into imperial truths. But if the well-to-do are in the catbird seat according to the hucksters, who are the uber-rich politically supporting? You’d be forgiven for assuming that the greater the wealth, the greater the propensity and power to bend the state to further the material interests of those who own the greatest share of the national wealth. Oh, how shocked you’d be when the reality is uncovered.

Three of the Dems’ big underwriters: Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg, George Soros

Point of fact, it was disclosed in various reports. In 2020, The eat-the-rich crowd under Biden overwhelmingly got the backing of the billionaire class. According to Forbes, Trump got 133 billionaires to throw some cash his way. Biden benefitted from 230. In raw numbers from the Federal Election Commission, Biden was drowning in $1.074 billion in his basement as Trump garnered $812 million.

What’s with the super-rich? Why invest in your own demise? Many answers are possible. Certainly, Trump is a lightning rod who instills profound love in some and manifest hate in others, in equal measure. Trump-hate played a role. Also, it could be that these people are so well-heeled that they’re insulated from the consequences of their beliefs to such an extent that fantasies can be seriously entertained. But I think that something more profound is afoot.

Somehow, it’s gotten into the heads of the Zuckerberg-to-Bloomberg crowd that to be considered well-rounded smart and sophisticated means to be a lefty. Lefty is fashionable. Esteem within the group won’t be acquired if you’re driving into the parking lot of your effete soirée in a pickup truck flying the Gadsden flag. A chauffeur-driven Jaguar and the spouting of lefty drivel will earn the necessary style points.

But in the end, it’s all pure poppycock. The Marxism-without-saying-so is still ruinous. Systematized envy, the very essence socialism, is never a path to prosperity. Similarly, the never-ending hunt for white racism will never be a path to social peace any more than it was when Jim Crow was a popular socio-political menu choice. The real Jim Crow 2.0 isn’t the Georgia election law. It’s what is arising out of the growing CRT industry.

Once again, it comes down to pure poppycock, but this poppycock isn’t some knock-off little innocent thing. This time, it’s got the backing of some very deep pockets. Watch out, America.

RogerG

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Justice Under a Cloud of Mob Rule

Defense attorney Eric Nelson, left, and defendant former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin listen as Assistant Minnesota Attorney General Matthew Frank, questions witness Christopher Martin during the Chauvin trial.

If you think that the conviction of Derek Chauvin is the end of it, you’re a fool. Winston Churchill said it best in 1942: “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” There was a ring of hope in Churchill’s words for Brits after the Battle of Britain; not so for us. Now, America, we are really going to be in for it.

This is more than about Chauvin. The Chauvin trial should have been about a police officer’s abuse of his power. Instead, it was taken along in a flood of revolutionary fervor to change America beyond recognition. The verdict only fed the beast, the beast being the organized hustle of “systemic racism”; and the beast needs more feeding. Like everything else, the Chauvin/Floyd incident was thrown into this mythical-racism maelstrom. These radicals won’t be satisfied with a single conviction. Their goal is to make America unrecognizable and, hence, unlivable for the rest of us.

BLM protesters in Minneapolis.

After reading the press reports this morning, a common reaction to the verdict is a collective “sigh of relief” with calls to “reimagine” policing and continue the fight against the spectral “systemic racism”. In both cases, we’re going to be screwed with more violent streets, an epidemic of resisting arrest, riots, and a bloated federal monster rooting around in nearly all aspects of our lives. Yes, we’re going to be in for it.

The oft-quoted “sigh” concerns the relief that the mob got what it wanted and we’re safe from them torching our cities . . . for now. That’s the ticket: public tranquility guaranteed by indulging the mob. You don’t have to look very far to see what we’re in store for. Kids will tell you what it’s like in a playground with a few bullies and no adults. Make no mistake about it, we are entering a time of public policy and justice under the gun of mob intimidation. The collective “sigh” is worrisome in the extreme.

The trial was organized at the outset to be exposed to the mob. The judge amazingly refused to grant a change of venue or even sequester the jury. The jury during the trial could have been pummeled by media stories of the mayhem 10 miles up the interstate from the courtroom (and home to one of the jurors), the Maxine Waters flame-thrower inciting more violence, the intimidation of a defense witness, the general turmoil outside the courtroom, and the year-long mayhem across blue-America. We won’t know if they were affected by the intense rancor till many moons later, but nonetheless the judge’s decisions will forever taint the trial.

The tactic of intimidation to further the ends of the revolution isn’t limited to the miscreants of Black Lives Matter on the streets of Minneapolis. The tactic of court-packing by the Jacobins of the donkey party isn’t solely meant to land four new lefties on the Supreme Court. It serves the function of intimidating the court. Justice, the cement of a civilized society, could be compromised by justices, like the institutionalist John Roberts, constantly looking over their shoulders at the threats coming from the mob soldiers running the show in Congress and the senescent Biden administration. They will have won without seating more radicals if the Court caves. Remember, in the end, back in the thirties, FDR won without successfully packing it.

Evil winds are blowing. Given all that has happened, and likely to happen, this is not a time to go into law enforcement. It’s a perilous profession that will be “reimagined” into more peril for those in its ranks. If you’re already in it, and of a ripe age, fill out the retirement papers. If you’re younger than that, you have a big decision to make: stay or leave. If you’re a young whippersnapper looking to join, consider becoming an astronaut. I hear that a mission to Mars is in the offing.

For the regular Joe and Judy six-pack, don’t expect 911 to matter anymore. We’re on our own.

RogerG

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Hemingway and the Cultural Incubators

“Curator” is commonly used today to refer to the arbiters of contemporary culture. They emanate out of our metropolises and are increasingly homogenous in outlook and taste. It’s an accurate word, but doesn’t go far enough because it doesn’t address pedigree. Where and how did this outlook originate and grow to dominate the culture? It was slow in coming, gradually birthed in the late 19th century and spread throughout the high priesthood of the high church of art and academia. A verb, “incubate”, serves this purpose better.

Ken Burns’ “Hemingway” unknowingly highlights the process of a person’s conversion (Hemingway) to the pervasive ethos of the chattering classes, the self-appointed curators who incubated “higher” culture. In Burns’ reckoning, Hemingway was a fiercely independent, small government guy in the twenties, but he obviously changed. By the time of the Great Depression, he’s covering the Spanish Civil War as a journalist puffing up the socialist-loyalist faction, the same side that became a puppet of Stalin’s Comintern (international communist organization headquartered in Moscow) and therefore an adjunct of the Soviet state, going so far as to pressure his colleagues not to include left-loyalist atrocities in their dispatches. He would repeat the error in quietly favoring Castro’s takeover of Cuba. Everywhere he looked in his artistic, literary universe were leftists.

New York University students in the Lincoln battalion (American volunteers fighting in support of socialist-loyalist side), in April, 1938. (Photograph from AP)
Ernest Hemingway (second from left) and Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens (left.) visit socialist-loyalist troops during the Spanish Civil War. Notice the loyalist officer leading the way in NKVD (Soviet secret police) uniform.

It’s easy to be of two minds in that situation since, on the one hand, he harbored deep-seated beliefs in masculine self-reliance while being pulled to the left by everyone in his social sphere, resulting in an incoherent amalgam of the head. If his mind was a car facing a fork in the road, it would rematerialize into two and take both roads at once.

Probably adding to his leftward lurch was the left-wing heft generated by the Great Depression. The Depression was more than an economic watershed; it was an intellectual one as well. An already left-leaning faculty lounge and literary world became tilted so far left that it would fall over. Sound familiar? The trend was echoed in Hemingway’s social circles. Not surprisingly, he probably was pulled along by the current.

Burns, himself, reflects the ruling zeitgeist that can be traced back to those bad times. His abbreviated rendition of the Depression in “Hemingway” repeats the unchallenged interpretative cliché: capitalism failed; big government is necessary. Burns caught the preexisting thought-virus, like so many today who accept it as a given, and so did Hemingway long before Burns.

The explanation never made any sense at the time, and still doesn’t today. Just think about it. A market correction turned into decade-long affair with seven-tenths of the time under FDR’s tutelage. For all of the New Deal’s feverish activity with its taxes, regulations, humongous bureaucracies, slaughters of “overproduction”, and a new centralized dole, the thing lingered right up to Pearl Harbor . . . and beyond.

Yes, beyond. World War II didn’t end the nightmare. It was only a timeout – unemployment was sent to boot camp and slack factories made bombers not refrigerators – and was set to resume its familiar hold after the War. Thank goodness that God called FDR home, and the appearance of the immediate post-War Republican Congresses with their loosening of the straitjacket that ultimately led to the economic monster following the forever-president to the grave, and the 50’s boom erupted.

Burns didn’t get the message, repeats the slander, and, looking back on it, the real Hemingway seems to have floated along in the same stream later occupied by our cultural arbiters.

Moving forward to the present, the bias incubated in the thirties would eventually spread to all social groups who absorbed the same cultural groupthink. Think of the occupants of today’s corporate boardrooms tripping all over themselves to condemn Georgia’s new election law. The Walmart of Sam Walton and ol’ Roy is no more. The corporate world is woke, functioning as subcommittees of the Democratic Party. They act as if they see themselves as world citizens, their companies as institutions-without-borders, and increasingly seek the affirmation of a “higher” seriousness in the manner of a Hollywood mega-star desiring accolades in lefty activism.

Patriotism? National loyalty? That’s for the ignorant rubes and not something for our sophisticates in corporate suites aspiring to a higher consciousness.

There you have it: our self-appointed cultural curators of what we ought to believe were incubated in a fiction that is evident in Burns, his “Hemingway”, and in the flesh-and-blood Hemingway. Something about repeated lies, they take on a life of their own in a public made unaware of an unreality that is sold as gospel.

(Michael Ramirez production)

RogerG